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I was brung up as a technician and find designing bombs more interesting than pondering moral questions
Here is some examples to demonstrate that moral judgment is closely related to knowledge and uncertainty.You are in a tall and large building, and find a massive time bomb which makes it impossible to move before disarming it first. You can see red and blue wires on the detonator, and a counting down clock showing that there is only 2 minutes left before it explodes. You are an expert in explosives, sou you know for certain the following premises:- if you cut the red wire, the bomb will be disarmed.- If you cut the blue wire, the bomb will explode immediately, destroying the entire building and killing thousands inside.- If you do nothing about the bomb, the timer will eventually trigger the bomb.Which is the most moral decision you can take, which is the least moral, and why?
Yes it is about universal morals. And yes, the situation was designed to show that moral judgement is closely related to knowledge and uncertainty.Unfortunately, cuteness is not a universal value. Something cute to someone might be not cute for someone else.
To determine what's the universally most moral action in a particular situation, we need first to determine what's the universal goal we want to achieve, and then calculate and compare the expected results we would get by taking available actions. We should take actions expected to get us closest to the universal goal.
Someone might have good intention when making a moral decision, but their decision may produce undesired result if it's based on false information, such as swapped wire of the time bomb.
Here is some possible scenarios which can bring you to above situation.- You are hired by a building contractor to destroy an old building so they can build a new one. You just get the date/month wrong, perhaps you and your client used the different format.- You are a national secret service agent ordered to destroy their enemy's headquarter. You are discovered by enemy guard when you tried to sneak out.- You are a mercenary hired by a terrorist organization to destroy their enemy's economic center. You are waiting to get payment confirmation.- You are a voluntary member of a terrorist organization to destroy their enemy's economic center. You are willing to die to execute the job.
If the building is full of Nazis who are attending a conference, that could well happen.
Agree with this if a universal goal can be found, but I don't think there are objective goals. I absolutely agree that the goals should be considered first. What's good for one goal is not so good for others.
That's why I prefer the term universal instead of objective, which means that the ultimate goal we should use to evaluate morality is restricted to the point of view of conscious beings, but still applicable for any conscious beings that might exist in the universe. This restriction give us a reason to reject nihilism, which can make us struggle to answer the question "why don't you just kill yourself if you think that nothing really matters?"
Quote from: David Cooper on 09/09/2019 18:45:45If the building is full of Nazis who are attending a conference, that could well happen.You assumed that the decision maker has the information that Nazis are bad and decide that the universe would be better off without them. Could you show how we could arrive to that conclusion?
Perhaps the term objective morality is a bit oxymoron because the word objective implies independence from point of view, while morality can only apply to conscious beings who has exceeded certain consciousness level or mental capacity.
An action can not be judged to be morally wrong when the subject doesn't have the adequate mental capacity to differentiate between right and wrong things
You can pee and show your genital in public without being judged as immoral if you are a baby.
That's why I prefer the term universal instead of objective, which means that the ultimate goal we should use to evaluate morality is restricted to the point of view of conscious beings, but still applicable for any conscious beings that might exist in the universe.
This restriction give us a reason to reject nihilism, which can make us struggle to answer the question "why don't you just kill yourself if you think that nothing really matters?"
nounthe rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.synonyms: negativity, cynicism, pessimism; MorePHILOSOPHYextreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence.HISTORICALthe doctrine of an extreme Russian revolutionary party c. 1900 which found nothing to approve of in the established social order.
Nazis are people who approve of killing others who are of an "impure race". Such people are so highly immoral that it is arguably immoral not to kill them: tolerating them leads to a lot of good people being killed. That's a hard one to weigh up though without a lot of careful checking and statistical analysis, and of course, the Nazis could claim that they were trying to do exactly the same thing by killing people they regarded as dangerous bigots. This is not something that people are fit to judge: it needs to be investigated by AGI which can crunch all the available data instead of small subsets of it which may be greatly biased.
Morality is completely resolved though: we know how it works. Blowing up a building with 1 good person in it will do magnitudes more harm than blowing up a building with a billion spiders in it. To work out what's moral, all you have to do is reduce a multi-participant system to a single-participant system, and then it's all just a harm:benefit calculation. Let's have two buildings: one with a billion spiders in it and one with one good person in it. Both of them will blow up unless we choose which one to sacrifice and press a button to select that. We treat this system in such a way that we imagine there is only one participant in it who will have to live the lives of all the participants in turn, so he will be the one that experiences all the suffering involved. He is not only the person in one building and the billion spiders in the other, but he is all the spiders on the planet and all the people. If we choose to blow up the building with the spiders in it, none of the other spiders on the planet care at all, and the ones that were fried hardly even noticed. They had no idea how long they could have lived, and they would have died anyway in ways that would likely have involved more suffering, not least because spiders "eat" each other (by paralysing them and then sucking them dry). If we choose to blow up the building with the person in it instead, there's no great gain from saving all those spiders, but we'll have a lot of devastated people about who knew and cared about that person who was blown up instead. Our single participant in this system would experience all that suffering because he will live the lives of all of them, and living longer lives as a billion spiders isn't much compensation.
That's David's quote, not mine. I would not have said that.
Then I don't know what you're asking in this topic if not for a standard that is independent of any particular point of view.As for conscious beings, I'm not sure how you define that, or how its relevant. The usual definition is 'just like me', meaning it isn't immoral to mistreat the aliens when they show up because they're not just like us.
As for conscious beings, I'm not sure how you define that, or how its relevant. The usual definition is 'just like me', meaning it isn't immoral to mistreat the aliens when they show up because they're not just like us.
An example of moral beings (without requirement of having consciousness or mental capacity) is the individual cells of any creature's body, which work selflessly as a team for the benefit of the group. There isn't a code that even begins to resemble the usual 10 commandments, but it does resemble the whole 'love thy brother like thyself' going on. Humans, for all their supposed intelligence, cannot see beyond themselves and work for a greater goal, or even name the goal for that matter. I'm just saying that if the aliens come, they'll notice that fact before they notice all our toys.
I'll recap my assertion into following points:1. There exists law of causality. Otherwise everything happens randomly, hence there's no point in making plans or responding to anything. In making a plan, a goal must be set, and some rules must be defined to respond to expected situations while executing it, so the goal can be achieved effectively.2. Moral rules only apply to conscious beings. Hence keeping the existence of conscious being is one of the highest priority moral rules, if not the highest. If someone can propose another moral rule with even higher priority, it is necessary to have at least one conscious being to follow it. Hence keeping the existence of conscious being gets back as the highest priority.3. We should evaluate action/decision based on their effect to the fulfillment of the ultimate goal. Due to imperfect information that we have and uncertainty of the far future, we may not be able to finish complete calculation in time. That's why we need rule of thumb, shortcut or simplified calculation to speed up the result while mostly produce correct answers. Hence the calculation output will take the form of probability or likelyhood.4. The moral calculation should be done using scientific method, which is objective, reliable, and self correcting when new information is available. Good intentions when done in the wrong way will give us unintended results.
Quote from: HalcAs for conscious beings, I'm not sure how you define that, or how its relevant. As I said in the post, I restricted the use of moral rules to conscious being. You can not judge some action as immoral from the point of view of viruses, for instance.
As for conscious beings, I'm not sure how you define that, or how its relevant.
Without a universal terminal goal, we cannot set up universal moral rules.
This will lead us to moral relativism. In its most extreme form, you cannot judge any action as immoral, because they are always right, at least from the stand point of the actor.
Quote from: Halc on 12/09/2019 04:53:06As for conscious beings, I'm not sure how you define that. The usual definition is 'just like me'...I have answered that question [in post 38]. I think that your mentioned definition is not as usual as you think.
As for conscious beings, I'm not sure how you define that. The usual definition is 'just like me'...
IMO, [cells of a body] are just automaton which lack the capability to estimate the consequence of their action.
They act/react that way just because it helps them to survive. They don't follow moral rules, hence they are not moral actions.
I beg to differ. I've done things I know are not right, even from my own standpoint. I feel free to judge myself and my peers, but not according to universal rules, because I am not aware of any, just as I am not aware of any universal terminal goals.