They already changed those ethics ONCE.
I agree they are not fun, especially sicne we now have HIVEMIND, which si the ultimate Authoritarian :O
I was wondering how long it would take before somebody brought that up...
The problem is, when they got rid of Collectivist vs. Individualist, they
broke something that the game had really benefited from.
There just isn't, at present, any way whatsoever to represent a highly individualist society. There's no libertarians, much less anarchists. You can have corporations, but you can't have
capitalists whose society is structured entirely around property rights and contract law, because the megacorp holds all the power and admits no competition and rules by oligarchy. You can have people who are all about fighting, and who even say you aren't a citizen if you won't fight, but you can't have people who would
fight their own society rather than let it infringe on their freedoms.
Of course, part of the reason for the last thing is that internal politics in Stellaris basically don't exist right now, but even if they did, the militarists go to the
Imperialist faction and the egalitarians to the
Progressive faction; there straight up isn't any
Libertarian faction to counter the
Totalitarian faction! The closest might actually be the
Prosperity faction, which is at least very non-interventionist, but again that's only external non-intervention; you can still force them all to get gene-mods or implants or work in factories or enslave any xenos you happen to somehow acquire and nobody of that faction will care at all. Meanwhile, those egalitarians will rightly put their foot down about slavery but then turn right around and argue for redistribution and a state-provided standard of living!
You can't even get an actual "Democracy" option; it's basically an elective dictatorship (citation: you can effect nearly whatever policies you like, and and most edicts, no matter their impact on happiness) and the voters have no power except once every 10 years they can pick a new puppet with a meaningless "mandate". Large-scale true democracies are an occasional trope of sci-fi that I'd love to see the game evoke.
Yes, "Authoritarian" makes more sense than "Collectivist" to describe a society that practices classic chattel slavery, but "Collectivist" makes more sense than either "Authoritarian" or "Egalitarian" to describe communism. Individualism is compatible with pretty much anything except authoritarianism but not properly represented by any of the others, egalitarianism included. It's a shame. Stellaris will let you have your luxury space communism and your gritty space despotism and your cyberpunk space corporate hellscape... but you can't have your rugged space frontiersmen or your federated space micronations or your radical space anarcho-*ists.
(Possibly-obligatory disclaimer: I doubt I'd want to live in any of those worlds, and I doubt they'd actually work very well, but this is a game with both chattel slavery (and even "livestock") and communist utopias; why should any well-discussed future society concept be left out? It'd be fun to game, regardless of how well it would work in reality.)