The Question Nobody Asks: Can Ethics Be Derived from Physics?

For three thousand years, moral philosophy has asked what we should value. This episode asks a different question: what does physics require for complex systems to persist?The distinction matters. Physics cannot tell you whether to prefer chocolate or vanilla, or what private ends to want. But it can tell you what must be true if any goal-directed system is to survive entropy, maintain order, allocate energy, model reality, coordinate its parts, and continue existing.The episode introduces telic systems: bacteria, minds, civilizations, corporations, and future artificial intelligences that process information to preserve and transform themselves. Any such system faces four unavoidable dilemmas: energy allocation, boundary definition, information strategy, and coordination structure.From those constraints come four operational virtues: Integrity, Fecundity, Harmony, and Synergy. These are not arbitrary moral preferences. They are survival requirements for systems that want to persist.The core claim: ethics becomes engineering when the question changes from “what should we value?” to “what must be true for valued things to survive?”https://kunnas.com/articles/the-question-nobody-asks