[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Note that a system's copies are accounted for as its environment, hence can influence the results of its activities. A conscious being can be harmful to other conscious beings, and morality is a method to prevent that.

Apparently,  spending all available resources for creating copies is not the best strategy to achieve the goal.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Being a meme, the universal moral standard shares space in memetic pool with other memes.   They will have higher chance to survive if they could optimize distribution of resources to preserve conscious beings.
There also should be a mechanism to eradicate or suppress lethal or detrimental memes. The memes for this particular purpose is the moral rules.

[David Cooper]

Does it have any exceptions? Show me one.

Imagine a genius who want to minimize suffering by creating a virus that makes people sterile. He prevents sufferings from countless number of people from the next generation.
Or the virus makes people don't want to have kids.
Or replace the virus with a meme.

That is not a genius, but a selfish bastard who wants less enjoyment for others and more for himself (because he will feel happier if they don't exist). The reality is that people overwhelmingly enjoy existing, and the minority who don't enjoy it (usually because of difficult circumstances) live in the hope of better times to come. There is no valid excuse for eliminating them. They generally want to have children and can be deeply depressed if they are unable to do so. Modifying people not to want to have children is a monumental assault unless they willingly agree to it. You cannot simply convert an immoral action into a moral one by partially killing someone (by changing them to be less than they were before). If you kill someone, they don't mind being dead once their dead, but that's not an argument that painless murder is acceptable. Modifying people by force not to care about loss of capability is immoral in the extreme (except in extreme cases where it isn't, such as where a population needs to be reduced for environmental reasons, and even then it would need to be a case where some people need to stop breeding altogether in order to keep within sustainable limits - in such a case, you would have to do this to the people of lowest quality, and those should ideally be the ones with the lowest moral standards - there are a lot of rape-and-pillage genes which could do with eradication).

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

That is not a genius, but a selfish bastard who wants less enjoyment for others and more for himself (because he will feel happier if they don't exist). The reality is that people overwhelmingly enjoy existing, and the minority who don't enjoy it (usually because of difficult circumstances) live in the hope of better times to come. There is no valid excuse for eliminating them. They generally want to have children and can be deeply depressed if they are unable to do so. Modifying people not to want to have children is a monumental assault unless they willingly agree to it. You cannot simply convert an immoral action into a moral one by partially killing someone (by changing them to be less than they were before). If you kill someone, they don't mind being dead once their dead, but that's not an argument that painless murder is acceptable. Modifying people by force not to care about loss of capability is immoral in the extreme (except in extreme cases where it isn't, such as where a population needs to be reduced for environmental reasons, and even then it would need to be a case where some people need to stop breeding altogether in order to keep within sustainable limits - in such a case, you would have to do this to the people of lowest quality, and those should ideally be the ones with the lowest moral standards - there are a lot of rape-and-pillage genes which could do with eradication).

There must be a reason why people want to reproduce, to feel joy and happiness, avoid pain, but also willing to conserve resources, make sacrifices, be altruistic, feeling empathy, eradicate unwanted things, create laws, etc. They seem to be unrelated scattered pieces of puzzle. Here I want to assemble them into one big picture using a universal moral standard.

[guest45734]

There must be a reason why people want to reproduce, to feel joy and happiness, avoid pain, but also willing to conserve resources, make sacrifices, be altruistic, feeling empathy, eradicate unwanted things, create laws, etc. They seem to be unrelated scattered pieces of puzzle. Here I want to assemble them into one big picture using a universal moral standard.

This sounds like basic animal instincts without laws or religion, both of which evolve. It may be at some point in the future science becomes religion, and the laws protect all animals equally. This would of course involve irradicating all religious belief and accepting that all life forms were equal and food for the other. ??

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

There must be a reason why people want to reproduce, to feel joy and happiness, avoid pain, but also willing to conserve resources, make sacrifices, be altruistic, feeling empathy, eradicate unwanted things, create laws, etc. They seem to be unrelated scattered pieces of puzzle. Here I want to assemble them into one big picture using a universal moral standard.

This sounds like basic animal instincts without laws or religion, both of which evolve. It may be at some point in the future science becomes religion, and the laws protect all animals equally. This would of course involve irradicating all religious belief and accepting that all life forms were equal and food for the other. ??

Science is a useful tool to achieve universal goals by improving accuracy and precision of models of reality,  hence conscious being can make better plans and reduce unexpected results.
Religious belief will still exist in history books as a reminder for future generations about gullibility of their predecessors.
Some form of life have better chance to survive than the others, hence resources should be distributed wisely to maximize chance for the survival of conscious beings.
The risk of common mode failure prevents us to focus on only one form of consciousness.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Finally we get to the last question: how. There are some basic strategies to preserve information which I borrow from IT business:
Choosing robust media.
Creating multilayer protection.
Creating backups.
Create diversity to avoid common mode failures.

Now I'll try to explain each of those strategies. For choosing robust media, biological evolution has provide brainy organisms. As far as I know, human species is the most successful one. In conjunction with other strategies, human developed written language,  books, computer with various physical media such as magnetic and optical disks,  also solid state memories.
For multilayer protection, there have been skull, clothes, caves,  tents,  houses,  bunker,  boat,  submarine, spaceships, ISS. Constitution, laws, morality, standards, and even religion are also some forms of this strategy, especially protecting consciousness from conscious beings themselves.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Reproduction is a way to create backup. Other ways include books,  DNA sequence, internet sites, backup drives. Mars or moon colonies can be seen as backup plans.
Those colonies can also play a role in diversity strategy, as an extension of human colonies on earth. This strategy protects existence of consciousness from natural disasters such as asteroid impact,  flood,  hurricane, earthquake, volcano, avalanche, drought, famine, disease.
If you know other useful strategies that I might have overlooked, please share them here.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

In previous post I've answered when and where questions by simply anytime and anywhere. But since the applicability of moral rules are limited to conscious beings,  the answers can be narrowed down to when and where conscious beings exist.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Now that foundations for universal moral standard are generally complete, I'll demonstrate how to use them in real life case. Let's start with the famous trolley problem.

You see a runaway trolley moving toward five tied-up (or otherwise incapacitated) people lying on the tracks. You are standing next to a lever that controls a switch. If you pull the lever, the trolley will be redirected onto a side track and the five people on the main track will be saved. However, there is a single person lying on the side track. You have two options:

Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.
Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.
Which is the more ethical option?

Let's start with the most basic version, with following assumptions:
1. There's no uncertainty about the statements describing the situation.
2. The outcome solely depends on the choice made by the subject. Nothing else can interfere the course of the events.
3. All of those six people have equal positive contributions to the society.
4. The switching action requires negligible amount of resources.

Here the math shows that you should pull the lever.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The calculations might be different if one of those assumptions changes.
4. If the switching consumes a lot of resources which could be used to save even more people.
3. If the five people have negative impact on the society, eg. terrorists.
2. If you have a way to stop the trolley, or to tell those people to get away from the track.
1. If there's a significant uncertainty about the cause and effect relationship describing the situation, or about the assessment of the other assumptions.

[David Cooper]

It all comes down to how you handle the data to be as right as you can be for the available information. Add another fact and the answer can change - it can switch every time another piece of information is provided. Some of the information is prior knowledge of previous situations and the kinds of guesses that might be appropriate as a substitute for hard information. For example, if the only previous case involved a terrorist tying five old people to one line and a child to the other, that could affect the calculations a bit. Might it be a copycat terrorist? Was the previous case widely publicised or was it kept quiet? If the former, then the terrorist this time might have tied five children to one line and one old person to the other, hoping that the person by the lever will think, "I'm not falling for that trick - it'll be five old people and one child again, so I'll save the child," thereby leading to five children being killed.

The moral decision itself isn't hard - it's crunching the data to try to get the best outcome when there are lots of unknown factors that can make it close to random luck whether the less damaging outcome occurs, and if there's enough trickery involved, the best calculation could be guaranteed to result in the worse outcome simply because all the available data has been carefully selected to mislead the person (or machine) making the decision.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

It all comes down to how you handle the data to be as right as you can be for the available information. Add another fact and the answer can change - it can switch every time another piece of information is provided. Some of the information is prior knowledge of previous situations and the kinds of guesses that might be appropriate as a substitute for hard information. For example, if the only previous case involved a terrorist tying five old people to one line and a child to the other, that could affect the calculations a bit. Might it be a copycat terrorist? Was the previous case widely publicised or was it kept quiet? If the former, then the terrorist this time might have tied five children to one line and one old person to the other, hoping that the person by the lever will think, "I'm not falling for that trick - it'll be five old people and one child again, so I'll save the child," thereby leading to five children being killed.

The moral decision itself isn't hard - it's crunching the data to try to get the best outcome when there are lots of unknown factors that can make it close to random luck whether the less damaging outcome occurs, and if there's enough trickery involved, the best calculation could be guaranteed to result in the worse outcome simply because all the available data has been carefully selected to mislead the person (or machine) making the decision.

That's right. That's why we need moral rules in the first place,  and we need a moral standard that we all can agree on. And we need to educate people about that, as young as possible to minimize damage they could do and maximize their contribution to the society.
We also need to educate people about how the world works through science. This can prevent moral people from doing immoral actions. For example,  human sacrifice of the Aztecs.
Trickery by other conscious beings is not the only thing that can mislead a conscious being to make decisions with unintended results. It can also come from false understanding of reality. Some alternative medicines based on pseudoscience are the examples.

[jimbobghost]

morality is a standard established by a ruling class; primarily to benefit themselves.
i concieve of, and establish my own morality...i am a one man ruling class; and my morality benefits myself and any others i choose to protect.

all others concept of morality can kiss my ass.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The preference to save child over old people is based on following assumptions:
1. The old people will die soon anyway,  while the child still have a long life to go.
2. Social and physical enviroment is conducive to raise children.
3. The child can be raised well so he/she can contribute positively to the society.
Again,  if those assumptions can be proven false, the preference may change.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

morality is a standard established by a ruling class; primarily to benefit themselves.
i concieve of, and establish my own morality...i am a one man ruling class; and my morality benefits myself and any others i choose to protect.

all others concept of morality can kiss my ass.

Your moral rule cannot be a universal standard.  Because they're limited in time and space. It doesn't apply when and where you don't have influence, such us before you born, after you die, or in other countries.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I'll show another variation of trolley problem, where the one sacrificed for the five was a relative or romantic partner. Survey data shows that respondents are much less likely to be willing to sacrifice their life.
IMO the respondents change their decision due to following assumptions:
1. The relative is known to have positive value for them, while the five people are stranger with unknown values. They might even be dangerous.
2. The loss of their relative will make them sad, which might hinder them to contribute positively to the society.

From the examples above I want to show that to prevent dispute or confusion in the decision making of moral cases, we need to state explicitly all the assumptions being made, including (especially) the hidden ones.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here is an alternative case, due to Judith Jarvis Thomson,[3] containing similar numbers and results, but without a trolley:
A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor. Do you support the morality of the doctor to kill that tourist and provide his healthy organs to those five dying persons and save their lives?

Here are explicit assumptions:
1. The transplant surgeon is brilliant, which means he/she can perform the operation with (almost) 100% success rate.
2. The five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ.
3. There are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations in the time limit before they die.
4. Traveler's organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients.
5. The traveler is a stranger, so if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor.

Here are the implicit assumptions:
1. Apart from the failing organs, all of those people have the same life expectancy.
2. Each of them can make equal positive contribution to the society. Of course if each of them has equally negative contribution, the decision might be changed.

Let's assume that there are no uncertainty about all of those assumptions. At a glance, it seems to be obvious that the doctor should kill that tourist and provide his healthy organs to those five dying persons and save their lives.
In the study, people are less likely to choose the sacrifice, compared to the trolley problem. The author thinks that it 's due to involvement. But there's also another possible reason. I think it's likely that the respondents aren't convinced by the assumptions,  especially about the success rate of th operation, which is unrealistic.

But we need to be open minded to seek for the existence of better options and don't fall into false dilemma ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma ).
For example, instead of killing the healthy traveler, the doctor could just kill one of the patients. This can reduce possibility of loss due to the risk operation's success rate. This also conserve resource since the doctor only need to perform transplantation 4 times instead of five, with the same end result, which is one dead person and 5 living ones. Most importantly, no one ends up worse than if the doctor do nothing instead. The sacrificed patient would lose 4 organs,  but he/she is gonna be dead anyway.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The universal rule should concern about the existence of consciousness in the eventual results, which is required by the timelessness of the rule.

Since universal moral standard concerns about long term results, it would take a lot of factor to calculate, which might not make it practical. Bad results might come before the decision is made due to long duration of the calculation, and the factors influencing the calculation might have change before the calculation is complete.
Hence we need to create shortcut, rule of thumb, or hash table to deal with frequently occurring situations. They must be reasonably easy to calculate and work in most cases. Their applications should align with the spirit of universal moral standard. This comparison might be made retrospectively when the decision has already been made before the calculation based on universal moral standard is finished. When they are in conflict, some exception should be made to the application of those shortcut rules.
For analogy, in chess game we have "Chess piece relative value".

In chess, the chess piece relative value system conventionally assigns a point value to each piece when assessing its relative strength in potential exchanges. These values help determine how valuable a piece is strategically. They play no formal role in the game but are useful to players and are also used in computer chess to help the computer evaluate positions.

Calculations of the value of pieces provide only a rough idea of the state of play. The exact piece values will depend on the game situation, and can differ considerably from those given here. In some positions, a well-placed piece might be much more valuable than indicated by heuristics, while a badly placed piece may be completely trapped and, thus, almost worthless.

Valuations almost always assign the value 1 point to pawns (typically as the average value of a pawn in the starting position). Computer programs often represent the values of pieces and positions in terms of 'centipawns' (cp), where 100 cp = 1 pawn, which allows strategic features of the position, worth less than a single pawn, to be evaluated without requiring fractions.

Edward Lasker said "It is difficult to compare the relative value of different pieces, as so much depends on the peculiarities of the position...". Nevertheless, he said that bishops and knights (minor pieces) were equal, rooks are worth a minor piece plus one or two pawns, and a queen is worth three minor pieces or two rooks (Lasker 1915:11).

.
In real chess game, we often see exceptions to this rule. A queen might be exchanged for a pawn to get better position to eventually win the game.

[David Cooper]

The preference to save child over old people is based on following assumptions:
1. The old people will die soon anyway,  while the child still have a long life to go.
2. Social and physical enviroment is conducive to raise children.
3. The child can be raised well so he/she can contribute positively to the society.
Again,  if those assumptions can be proven false, the preference may change.

Most old people tied to the track would choose to save the child if they had any say in the matter, unless they knew that the child is a bully/thug/vandal. They are well placed to judge the value of what's left of their lives compared with the child's potential future, but they also recognise that they're still more valuable than any bad child who will spend a lifetime doing harm to others.