This is the publication where essayist Saul Zimet explores the moral philosophy of knowledge maximalism and its implications throughout history, politics, and society.
About Saul Zimet
I’m an essayist and artist whose work focuses on the long-term growth of scientific and technological knowledge. My articles have been published by Quillette, the American Institute for Economic Research, the Foundation for Economic Education, the American Spectator, the Daily Caller, HumanProgress.org, Libertarianism.org, Cato at Liberty, The Objective Standard, and other publications.
I received a bachelor’s degree in sequential art with a minor in art history from the Savannah College of Art and Design. I am the Website and Data Coordinator for HumanProgress.org at the Cato Institute‘s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and I have previously worked as a Research Intern at Cato, a Research Assistant at the SCAD Museum of Art, and a Henry Hazlitt Educational Journalism Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
About Knowledge Maximalism
Knowledge Maximalism is the moral and practical idea that, however much or little progress we have made on moral philosophy as individuals or societies thus far, we can and should improve our expected access to moral truth (“expected” in the mathematical sense, not the colloquial sense) by gaining more knowledge.
Given the epistemological bedrock of fallibilism, nihilism is refuted by the above-zero possibility of moral discovery, and therefore the above-zero potential for moral progress. Indeed, the pursuit of knowledge is morally mandated by the possibility of moral discovery.
Blaise Pascal was onto something with his famous wager. He correctly showed that moral imperatives can follow from infinitesimal possibilities of moral truths existing, but he arbitrarily viewed Christian morality as the sole alternative to nihilism. According to critics of Pascal, the wager is irrelevant to moral action because infinite possible moral truths exist, each with their theoretical opposite, and thus attempting to wager on the landscape of possible moral truth is merely paralyzing. But the true implication of the possibility of moral discovery (a possibility that follows from fallibilism) is the moral imperative to seek more knowledge. In this way we can improve our odds in the inevitable Pascalian wager of moral life.
These ideas about fallibilism, the attainability of useful knowledge, and the positive expected value of the pursuit of truth are necessary for the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, and even the salutary exponential technological and industrial advancement that progresses into the 21st century. But they have too often remained implicit and deprioritized in the face of ascendant moral dogmas that undermine knowledge seeking.
Karl Popper, David Deutsch (a physicist by training), and William MacAskill (although they have never adopted knowledge maximalism explicitly to my knowledge) are among the philosophers whose work I think demonstrate the knowledge-maximalist implications of fallibilism. For example, in his 2022 book What We Owe the Future, the University of Oxford professor of philosophy William MacAskill writes:
I think we should accept that we don’t know what the ideal state would be; the primary question is how we can build a society such that, over time, our moral views improve…
What we want to do is build a morally exploratory world: one structured so that, over time, the norms and institutions that are morally better are more likely to win out, leading us, over time, to converge on the best possible society.
In Karl Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume 2, he writes that, “I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth.” This realization, when applied to moral disagreement (even that between the nihilist and the moralist broadly), results in a moral mandate: the obligation to seek the truth.
I am working on a longer document to flesh out all the details of Knowledge Maximalism, but in the meantime, I have explored many of the implications of this way of thinking in my over thirty published essays, and countless unpublished ones. Please subscribe for eventual updates.
