Does a best or most optimized system exist?

Question

People have diverse views about what they think is moral, what economic policy is the best, what legislation is good, etc. But all of these views are opinions. By sharing our opinions, (most) people are advocating for ideas that they believe is better - one that will create the most benefit and cause the least amount of suffering for people, overall.

Through experience, experiments, and discourse, we learn about how we can improve the system that we live in. For example, I think most would agree that humans (overall) suffered more 500 years ago when compared to today, because we've learned and changed our views over those years.

Given this, does a "best" system exist out there that humans just haven't figured out yet (one that produces the most social, moral, and economic, environmental, etc. benefit, with the least amount of harm)?

It is likely that a perfect system (one that has no harm and suffering) doesn't exist. But when I think about this mathematically, it makes sense to me that there does does exist a best system that maximizes benefit and minimizes suffering/harm. If so, with time and experience (like how we've changed over the past 500 years), will humans ever figure out this "best system" and reach an equilibrium where things overall are already the best they could be, and nothing can be improved anymore?

Please note that I'm not trying to ask a subjective question; I'm thinking of this as a mathematics optimization problem, where there exists a point that is the most optimized and things (overall) can't get "better".

Answer 1

The problem with this question is that you can not think of this as an objective mathematics optimization problem, because quantifying "benefit" and "suffering" is a completely subjective thing. So before you can answer the question what political system is the most optimized, you first have to agree on a consensus about what metrics to optimize for.

Different political ideologies have completely different ideas what those metrics should be. For example:

• A capitalist wants to optimize for average prosperity, while a socialist wants to optimize the lower bound of personal prosperity.
• A libertarian wants to optimize for personal freedom while an authoritarian will want to optimize for more tangible benefits.
• A cosmopolitan wants to optimize for the happiness of all humans, while a nationalist only wants to optimize for the happiness of the members of their nation.
• A radical environmentalists wants to optimize for the happiness for all living beings, while others only want to optimize the happiness of humans.
• A radical fundamentalist wants to optimize for adherence to religious doctrine.

Who is right and who is wrong? You can have opinions about that matter, but you can not objectively prove which one is the "right" value-system.

So no, a best or most optimized system can not exist before humanity agrees on what to optimize for.

Answer 2

As a question on this stack, this seems to assume that the "best" system will be political in nature. That's not necessarily so. Many of the improvements from five hundred years ago are technological in nature. For example, indoor plumbing provides a wide array of benefits in terms of convenience and health. But that is a technology that didn't exist five hundred years ago. Even the best political system wouldn't maximize benefit if it couldn't have indoor plumbing.

You may feel that indoor plumbing is a mature technology and every political system can include it. But what about the internet? That's less than fifty years old. And is the internet the last such discovery?

Some political systems would be hard to implement. For example, a pacifist democracy two thousand years ago would have been overrun by hostile neighbors. But a country might manage that now. Perhaps Germany might be described that way. A whole world of pacifist democracies might work, although even one holdout might break it. Political systems are heavily influenced by the situations in which they occur.

In technology, there is the concept of singularity. Basically the idea is that there is a certain point in technology where we can do everything that we currently want to do trivially and there is only the question of the new things that we'll want to do. And since we don't know what those are, the post-singularity world is opaque to us. This is similar to how things on the other side of a black hole's event horizon are opaque to us, thus the name. A black hole is a singularity in space.

It is reasonable to think that all our current systems will be made obsolete by the technological singularity. But since we don't know what the new world will be like, we don't know what its concerns will be.

TL;DR: we won't even be able to make a good guess until we are on the other side of the technological singularity. Now we don't even know all the areas where we need to know more.

Answer 3

Additional to Brythan's answer, which points out the uncertainty about futures technological process, there is a similar additional problem. Many decisions now affect future generations. A "best" system would surely also include the wishes of the future generations, the wishes of every yet unborn human. But this is not known in advance.

If anything it's rather the other way around. We are pretty certain that history will look unfavorably down on us, but we get away with it for now.

Answer 4

Answer is no, for multiple reasons.

1) Society is a complex (not in sense of complex numbers, though imaginary entities like various gods are considered relevant by some subsets of population) system which would be described with trilliards of parameters. It's impossible to optimise system for every parameter, only for function that is some combination of those parameters, effectively a compromise between parameters. Unlike in, say, physics where system has well defined function to be optimised for, like energy or entropy, your function to be optimised does not even exist. You need to first "optimise" for what function you want to optimise. Writing such function would be extremely non-trivial, even if we could perfectly quantify things like happiness of every living person. In fact finding aforementioned "function" has in practice been main focus of philosophy for at last 3 thousand of years.

As mentioned in other answers, ideas what to optimise vary from obedience to god (theocracies), obedience to leadership (authoritarianism), devotion to nation (fascism), wealth of those in power (oligarchy), through wealth of lucky and ruthless (capitalism, economic liberalism), freedom to do whatever you want (libertarianism), freedom from having others do whatever they want to you (social liberalism) to representation (democracy), self fulfilment (eudaimonia), equality of opportunity (socialism), happiness (utilitarianism) and many others. And even then, related systems will have vastly different ideas, there are many flavours of virtue ethics or utilitarianisms out there.

2) Unless mathematical function is concave (or convex) in entire phase space, or unless you can find optimum analytically, you ALMOST NEVER know if what you found is a global optimum. Depending on starting points, you can descend into local optimum from which you will never leave, unless you start over from different starting point. You could never know if starting your optimisation from different set of taxes or political principles wouldn't result in more optimal conditions. Considering sheer size of phase space, probing it all is impossible, as such even if optimal (ignoring caveat of point 1.) system could exist, you will never find it, you can only make do with "best we can find".

Now, all that does not mean that search of perfection if futile, because it's not. Even if perfect system can't be found or doesn't even exist does not mean current system(s) can not be improved for the benefit of all, which however traces back to point 1. of defining what benefits should be aimed at.

Answer 5

Yes, given any stable set of criteria. What's interesting is that often enough some have argued that humanity had already found just such a best system. Not perfect, but the best we could do, so it's pointless to try to do better.

But it's like engineering. Once some perfect or best thing has been devised, it opens new doors, causing new problems, and then people want new features, (the set of criteria expands, or on occasion replaces one desired feature with another), and the hunt goes on, albeit a new and revised hunt. This cycle can continue as for as long as our sets of criteria can be modified, i.e. always...