[syhprum]

I was brung up as a technician and find designing bombs more interesting than pondering moral questions

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I was brung up as a technician and find designing bombs more interesting than pondering moral questions

I hope I can entertain you in another thread.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

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?

Let's say that you are the one who built the bomb, hence you know for certain that the premises above are true. Suppose you you designed the detonator as SR flipflop, so when both wires are cut, the bomb will explode immediately. As pointed out by David and Halc, to determine moral judgement for each option, we need to have information about further consequences brought by them. This thread will explore how they can be assessed if all required information is available.
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.

[Halc]

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.

Agree with all of this.  Suppose we have full knowledge of the situation.  We have the uncertainty if you want it, like an even chance that cutting a wire will halt or blow the bomb.
What we don't have is the worth of what we're saving. The universe places no worth on anything.  Maybe the building is full of 50 people that would die, or maybe 50 spiders. Are humans worth more than spiders? To humans, sure, but to the universe?

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.

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. The Catholic church's stance on birth control for example seems designed to bring about the demise of humanity in the shortest possible time. They don't seem to consider long term goals at all, or are counting on forcing God's hand, like that's ever worked.

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.

That part seems irrelevant since it cannot be helped. A person cannot be faulted for having good intentions and attempting what seemed best. It seems irrelevant twice because if he chooses to cut no wire, everybody in the building still dies, so the wrong choice just takes out our hero, but nobody else that wasn't already doomed. I think he'd not forgive himself if he didn't try, but only if attempting the disarming was the right thing to do in the first place, and we haven't determined that.

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.

In all 4 of these cases, you're taking your orders from your employer. You have a goal, and it isn't a universal one. You do your job. If you work for someone you find immoral, then you know you're helping them do immoral acts. Most terrorists/soldiers don't consider their acts immoral.

Alan (post 2) brought up morals coming from your peers, and all the above are examples of that.
I think we need some examples where your chosen peer group has nothing to say, and you're actually faced with wanting to do the right thing and not what some group to which you belong wants you to do.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here is a talk on morality by Dr. Andy Thomson.

I think it can enhance our understanding about morality to enrich our discussion about universal morality.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

If 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?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

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 what this thread was started for in the first place. I have tried to find one by simply answering basic questions about morality (what, who, where, when, why, how) in my previous posts.
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 event can be evaluated as objectively true or false even when the subject has no mental capacity, for example when some comets hit Jupiter. 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 (which means they can simulate their available actions and estimate and compare the expected results/consequences, then choose the action which gives most desired expected result) for example when a malaria ridden mosquito bites a human toddler. 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?"

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Here is another interesting insight about terminal and instrumental goal to help us understand moral reasoning.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

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?"

A universal terminal goal must be something extremely important, that any conscious beings with sufficient information should try to achieve that, to the extend that they are willing to sacrifice any other goals conceivable. For a starter, we can compare a proposed terminal goal with another thing that we usually placed at high priority, such as our own life. Are there something more important than our own life?

[David Cooper]

If 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?

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.

[Halc]

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.

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.

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.

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

So the subject doesn't know if what it's doing is right or wrong.  Does this epistemological distinction matter? If some action is wrong, then doing that action is wrong, period, regardless of whether the thing doing it knows it's wrong or not.

What does wrong mean, anyway?  Suppose I do something wrong, but don't know it. What does it mean that I've done a wrong thing? Sure, if there is some kind of consequence to be laid on me due to the action, then there's a distinction. I take the wrong turn in the maze and don't get the cheese. That makes turning left immoral, but only if there's a cheese one way and not the other? Just trying to get a bit of clarity on 'right/wrong/ought-to'.

You can pee and show your genital in public without being judged as immoral if you are a baby.

Showing genitals is not a peer-group specific thing?  Seems unlikely given the 99% majority of beings that are unconcerned with it, and even humans decorate just about anything with plant genitals (flowers). Sorry to jump on this, but I find it an unlikely candidate for a universal rule.

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.

Is a self-driving car conscious?  It certainly has better awareness than a human, and carries moral responsibility for its occupants, and makes real decisions based on such values. But the values are programmed in (not even learned like some AI systems), and are not drawn from '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?"

A nihilist doesn't deny that things matter, just that they don't matter universally.  My life definitely matters to me and mine and those with whom I interact. But I don't think the universe gives a hoot about my existence. Not sure if that makes me a nihilist.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Let's see what the dictionary says about nihilism. I just googled it

noun
the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.
synonyms:   negativity, cynicism, pessimism; More
PHILOSOPHY
extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence.
HISTORICAL
the doctrine of an extreme Russian revolutionary party c. 1900 which found nothing to approve of in the established social order.   

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

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.

If a conscious being who has perfect knowledge of the relevant circumstances, including the understanding of universal terminal goal and moral standards, every immoral actions and behaviors can be identified as misinformation which leads to misplaced priorities. This means that the immoral actors choose actions which consequently deter the efforts to achieve universal terminal goal. Let's try to identify which priorities are misplaced by following immoral actions:
- holocaust
- Joshua genocide
- Serbian genocide
- Polpot genocide
- Aztec human sacrifice
- 9/11
- Mumbai attack
- Ted Bundy rape and murder

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

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.

I know from my Twitter feed that many people are willing to sacrifice trophy hunter to save their prey. They cheered when a matador was gored by the bull.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

That's David's quote, not mine.  I would not have said that.

I used quote selected command from action button. I didn't realize that it gives the wrong quotation.
I've fixed it manually.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

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 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.
Here is what I said in my post following the statement that you quoted:

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?"

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_universalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_observer_theory

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

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.

I have answered that question here https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=75380.msg559662#msg559662
I think that your mentioned definition is not as usual as you think.

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.

IMO, they 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, or at least doesn't lead them to extinction. They don't follow moral rules, hence they are not moral actions.
Our philosophers have tried to answer the questions of the greater goal and moral rules that try to help achieve that. I have proposed my answer in previous post here https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=75380.msg565365#msg565365

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.

[Halc]

As 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.

If a virus does something against a universal moral code, then it has done something wrong, even if it lacks the ability to know about it.  Consciousness seems to play no role.  A frog for instance seems conscious of water and flies and such, but like the virus, it probably has little perception of universal right and wrong. The addition of consciousness seems not to helped it with this perception.
So they end up doing wrong things.  So what?  It seems to concern neither the frog nor the virus that they have done so.

Without a universal terminal goal, we cannot set up universal moral rules.

Sounds reasonable.

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.

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.

[Halc]

As 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.

You define it there as a spectrum (and I agree with that), but above you make it a binary thing where some critical threshold needs to be crossed.  Where is that threshold? Just above a virus? No? Just humans?  If so, how then is your definition not the usual one I mentioned?

IMO, [cells of a body] are just automaton which lack the capability to estimate the consequence of their action.

The consequence of immoral action is impairment/death of the group, so I think they're quite aware of the moral code, the need to work as a team.  Yes, they're automatons, as is any physical construct. I'm just a more complex one than a cell, but one far less in tune to any terminal goals of the larger group. I'm far less moral than are my cells.

They act/react that way just because it helps them to survive.
 They don't follow moral rules, hence they are not moral actions.

What are moral rules except rules that help the survival rate of the group that defines the morals?  That's not universal, that's morals of the group.  Cells follow morals of the body and not anything larger than that.

I'm not trying to be contradictory, just trying to illustrate the lack of difference between a human and anything else, and the complete lack of a code that comes from anywhere else except the group with which you relate. Yes, I'm a relativist, in far more ways that just moral relativism.

A pretty good rule that applies, well, at least to things kind of like us, seems to go along the lines of: Being true to your kind trumps being true to yourself.  But even that falls apart as a universal rule. There are things that don't have 'kind'. The rule only seems to fit well with K-strategists, not R-strategists. That doesn't bode well for a hypothesis of a universal standard.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

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.

How do you judge if an action is morally right or wrong? what is your highest priority? is there something more important than your own life that you are willing to sacrifice for it?