[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

This video shows that economic policy is closely related to moral decision.

[alancalverd]

It's what I have been saying for years! Time to invest in something solid and productive.

The basic concept of money as "virtual work" is too useful to abandon: you get money by working and you give it to other people to work for you, thus the builder doesn't have to make his own bricks or grow his own food, and civilisation ( = specialisation) evolves because cash transactions are simpler than barter.

So where does it all go wrong? I think the video makes a sound point. As long as banks take in spare cash and lend it with interest, an expanding economy or even a static economy with some built-in inflation makes sense - the banks just provide security for depositors and make large transactions easier . The question nowadays is why would anyone deposit money in a bank if interest is negligible, and why would bankers lend sensibly if (a) they don't need to have the assets on deposit and (b) they can print more money if the debt isn't repaid?   

I think the moral question is why governments bailed out private banks instead of nationalising them. In any other business, if you lose money  the shareholders have to stump up more or lose their investment. If you really are providing a national strategic asset, you must expect the government to take at least a compulsory controlling share and sack a few directors if you can't pay your debts.

So the sensible thing to do with money is to spend it, or invest directly in other folks' businesses. My financial hero is Dave Fishwick - google "Bank of Dave".

[gravitymall]

I don't think so, I believe morality is entirely a human concept due to evolutionary pressures

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I don't think so, I believe morality is entirely a human concept due to evolutionary pressures

Can non-human organisms come up with a concept similar to morality?
What makes human special?

[OliVDB]

If I'm not mistaken, some highly advanced primates as well as some individual parrots have begun displaying signs of a moral code. Add to that the fact that some chimpanzee tribes have been seen using stone tools and "visiting" the place where relatives died (as in, going to the place where they died and spending a little time there for no survival-related reason) and you'll agree with me that what's happening in the animal realm these days is fascinating!

Now, what makes humans special is a set of tools: a language that's capable of abstraction, the ability to understand and use the notions of future and past (which includes funeral rites, for example), and the conscience of our own mortality. We're less special now that it's been proved that other species are displaying some of these traits (some biologists argue that dolphins do have an actual language, and there's solid evidence that some species of squid transmit to their offspring knowledge from past experiences without having the kids go through these same experiences), but having the whole "toolbox" is what allowed the human species to become what it has become.

And when it comes to the universal moral standard, there's a "golden rule" that's present in all religions of the world, even in highly unrelated ones such as native pre-Colombian American religions and Buddhism that can be summed up as "don't do to others what you don't want done to you". In Abrahamic religions, that's the Ten Commandments. Sure, it's often disregarded, twisted or straight out rejected, but it's the closest thing to an universal rule we have. I mean, as soon as a semblant of society appears, it's not difficult to understand that if you don't go and hit your neighbour, that neighbour won't hit you back, and everyone will be happier.

The thing that muddles up the situation is that every culture embeds it in a set of values that are not always compatible with what's present in other cultures. For example, Protestant morale considers material wealth as a gift from God because you're a true believer and hard worker, so if you own a Bugatti or live in a gigantic villa, you're good. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Christian faith looks down on material wealth, and will consider as "moral" a person who suffers and keeps their faith strong as they're mending for their sins. And that's already a key difference between two branches of Christianity, if you compare it with Hindu or traditional Inuit morale, it's going to be even more difficult to see that there is a common point in these seemingly incompatible moral codes; yet, there is one: "don't do to others what you don't want done to you". 

[alancalverd]

Agreed about the universal principle - it's almost a Darwinian imperative because human society advances through collaboration, which demands trust and an ethic of mutual support.

But none of this is specific to humans. Most animals and many birds mourn their dead, but have the intelligence not to waste their time imagining life after death or turning grief into a ritual. Visiting the place of death may be prompted by a more rational investigation: is he really not functioning anymore? is it sensible to leave him and move on?   

There is no  doubt that all animals and birds have a language: careful analysis shows subtle and consistent variations in their utterances that clearly mean something to the listener. It now turns out that many if not all fish  communicate by sound.

[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.

The protection of information is not limited to physical protection. It should also be protected from illegitimate access which can lead to lost of data integrity.
The moral rules can be classified into this strategy. They protect the bigger systems from detrimental effects caused by conscious agents who become part of them.

[alancalverd]

The universal standard still fits.

Would you like your personal information shared with people you have not authorised to see it? If not, you have a moral and statutory duty to keep other people's data  secret.

Would you like your personal financial records, laboratory notes, or whatever, modified without your knowledge or consent? If not, you  have a moral and statutory duty to protect whatever comes your way by virtue of corporate data or trade secrets.

How you keep such secrets is a technical matter, not a moral one, though the test of "reasonable best practice" can be applied to any form of lock and key.

The dilemma arises when you become privy to a secret that you believe to be illegal or contrary to the public interest. Fortunately the UK state has seen fit not to prosecute under the Official Secrets Act where there would be evidence of illegitimacy in that secret, and at a lower level, no contract is enforceable if it involves illegal action or payment.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I consider this topic as a spinoff of my previous subject
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=71347.0
It is split up because morality itself is quite complex and can generate a discussion too long to be covered there. 
Before we start the discussion, it might be useful to have some background information to save our time and energy to prevent unnecessary debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality

Morality (from Latin: moralis, lit. 'manner, character, proper behavior') is the differentiation of intentions, decisions and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper.[1] Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that a person believes should be universal.[2] Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness" or "rightness".

I hope this topic can start a discussion which can eventually produce satisfactory answer to the question .

I started this thread with definition in the hope to prevent unnecessary debates due to informal fallacies which makes it inefficient.

This is from Google.

noun: morality
principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.
a particular system of values and principles of conduct.
the extent to which an action is right or wrong.

Finding a universal morality requires that we don't add arbitrary restrictions into our definition of morality, such as:
It's only applicable to certain tribe, culture, nationality, species, molecular structure.
How good or how bad a behaviour of an agent is is evaluated by its effect to the achievement of the terminal goal of the agent. A behaviour is good if it helps achieving the terminal goal, and bad if it prevents/hinders the achievement of the terminal goal. Hence a universal morality is closely related to the universal terminal goal.

[alancalverd]

There you go again, presuming the validity of a terminal goal concept and not specifying what the TG might be.

You can't require morality to span across species. What is good for homo sapiens is not good for malarial plasmodia. I doubt that lions and wildebeeste would agree on a definition of a terminal goal, though they might concur, for different reasons, on the desirability of a clean kill.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

There you go again, presuming the validity of a terminal goal concept and not specifying what the TG might be.

I have started a whole thread specifically dedicated to address that.

This thread is dedicated to discuss about universal terminal goal and try to answer the what and why questions on it. Related to this thread, I also started another threads to discuss some consequences and necessary instrumental goals to help achieving that universal terminal goal. But course of discussion led me to answer the what question there too, which makes them overlap.

Please remind me, in one paragraph, of your universal terminal goal, and whether we agreed on it!

Keeping the existence of the last conscious being.
Any conscious being can be considered as a modified copy of it, hence there is some value in keeping their existence.

In other word, the universal terminal goal is to protect conscious being from existential threats. The death of the last conscious being means that there could be no goals anymore and everything becomes indifferent.

You can't require morality to span across species. What is good for homo sapiens is not good for malarial plasmodia. I doubt that lions and wildebeeste would agree on a definition of a terminal goal, though they might concur, for different reasons, on the desirability of a clean kill.

As long as you can still find the answer why something has to be so, that something is not the terminal goal. To eat, as well as to not being eaten are just instrumental goals.
Competition, such as evolutionary arms race can be viewed as a tool to achieve better systems faster. That's why NASA doesn't want to have single supplier, even when there was a clear winner.

[alancalverd]

Competition, such as evolutionary arms race can be viewed as a tool to achieve better systems faster. That's why NASA doesn't want to have single supplier, even when there was a clear winner.

Astronaut Alan Shepard was asked what he thought about in the moments before launch. His reply: "The four million moving parts, each built by the lowest bidder".

It isn't a simple matter of competition anyway. Quite often the lowest bidder is clearing old stock or making a last-ditch bid to stay solvent, so you need backup. Not sure if it still applies, but in the 1970s small Japanese enterprises used to form redundant networks where every component was sourced from suppliers who were also customers for other companies in the network. This meant that the failure of a new product did not inevitably result in the failure of any member of the network or the network itself, reducing the risk of innovation. An interesting comparison of collaboration versus competition.   

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

I started this thread with definition in the hope to prevent unnecessary debates due to informal fallacies which makes it inefficient.

This is from Google.

noun: morality
principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.
a particular system of values and principles of conduct.
the extent to which an action is right or wrong.

Finding a universal morality requires that we don't add arbitrary restrictions into our definition of morality, such as:
It's only applicable to certain tribe, culture, nationality, species, molecular structure.
How good or how bad a behaviour of an agent is is evaluated by its effect to the achievement of the terminal goal of the agent. A behaviour is good if it helps achieving the terminal goal, and bad if it prevents/hinders the achievement of the terminal goal. Hence a universal morality is closely related to the universal terminal goal.

Universal morality is a tool to achieve the universal terminal goal. It can protect conscious beings from harms caused by other conscious beings. It is comparable with administrative controls in the hierarchy of risk control.

Describing universal morality can be viewed as one of instrumental goals among many others to help achieving the universal terminal goal.
Other terminologies essential in discussing universal morality are consciousness itself, which I discussed here
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=71347.msg606314#msg606314
and individuality, which I discussed here.
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=71347.msg608885#msg608885

The problem of individuality is very important to clarify if we want to build argumentation about morality. People often limit their scope of individuality to commonly found cases, which are biological human individuals. Some have expanded its definition to include other biological animal. But very few seem to be willing to expand it further to other systems, such as non-biological entities.
Even if we restrict individuality to only include biological entities, we still face problems, e.g:
- people with multiple personality disorder.
- conjoined twins
- double headed animals
- half brained person (e.g. the other half has been removed due to a disease)
- biological colony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(biology)#Modular_organisms  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
- symbionts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichen
- parasites
- cancer cells
- organelles
How should we count the number of individus when being presented with those things? The problem arise if we treat individuality as a discrete thing. Using the concept of individuality as mentioned in my previous post can help solve this problem.
If we look back to biological evolutionary process, multicellular organisms are products of cells letting go some of their individuality to form a bigger system which gains some individuality. Those cells lose some basic functionalities so they can no longer survive when set free in an open environment. But they can develop special functionalities which are useful for the bigger system they are being part of, such as photosensitivity, nervous system, circulatory system, armor for protection, food digestion, chemical weaponry. Similar story also happened when ancestor of mitochondria were engulfed by archaea to form eukaryotic organisms. Another similar story is the formation of ant or bee colonies.
The case of modern human has similarity too. Many of them have very specialised skill set which make no longer capable to survive in the wilderness for long duration. They depend on their society. How many people still grow/hunt their own food, build their own house, knit their own clothes, or heal their own wound?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

At last, I've finished necessary posts in my other related threads which I think quite important to continue our discussion about universal morality.

IMO, any actions can be classified morally into 3 categories :
- moral actions lead to desired conditions. The desired result can be achieved more reliably with better information.
- immoral actions lead to undesired conditions. The undesired result can be achieved more reliably with better information.
- amoral actions are indefferent to resulting conditions. The reliability of result isn't affected by any amount of information.

At a glance, they seem to be applicable for consequentialist ethics only, and not rule based ethics. But that's not the case, since rule based ethics merely elevate "obedience to some arbitrary rules" as the desired conditions. Those rules in turn need justification from a more fundamental principle.

The desired condition to be achieved from following universal moral rules is the universal terminal goal, which I discuss deeper in another thread.

A universal utopia, if there is one, would be classified as a meme. And just like any other memes, it will compete for its existence in memory space, whether in people's minds or computer's storage devices.

In the link below I tried to scrutinize my idea using philosophical razors to test its feasibility.
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=71347.msg588164#msg588164

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Discussion about morality won't be complete without describing its opposite, namely immorality into detail. For a start, how can we define immorality? We can get an insight from following razor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Hanlon's razor is an aphorism expressed in various ways, including:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."[1]
Probably named after a Robert J. Hanlon, it is a philosophical razor which suggests a way of eliminating unlikely explanations for human behavior.

Some examples I can recall are:
- Human sacrifice of the Aztech to appease Gods and prevent natural disaster and give humanity life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture
- Jephthah's sacrifice of his daughter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jephthah#Sacrifice_of_daughter
 

[alancalverd]

And what happened when the Aztecs stopped sacrificing humans? They were wiped out by the Christians.

Jephthah is referenced once in the Epistle to the Hebrews 11:32 where he is commended for his faith.

Thus demonstrating that Paul was even more stupid than Jephthah.

Christianity continues to baffle me.

Anyway James Bond's empirical formula is a consequence of Hanlon's Principle: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action."

[alancalverd]

- moral actions lead to desired conditions. The desired result can be achieved more reliably with better information.

desired by whom? We both fancy the same woman. I know enough about her to start a conversation that leads to marriage, wherein I treat her badly. You are a good bloke who would treat her well but don't know where to begin.
 

- immoral actions lead to undesired conditions. The undesired result can be achieved more reliably with better information.

Nevertheless, life goes on and you find the girl of your next-best dream. We both cheat on our wives. One of us, being ill-informed, ends up with an undesired disease and an expensive divorce, the other takes precautions and lives happily ever after.

- amoral actions are indefferent to resulting conditions. The reliability of result isn't affected by any amount of information.

Flying from A to B is an amoral action, but the reliability of the result depends on a huge amount of prior information, beginning with the precise location of B....

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

And what happened when the Aztecs stopped sacrificing humans? They were wiped out by the Christians.

What do you think would happen if they didn't stop sacrificing humans? Would it prevent them from being wiped out by the Christians?
Actions and information may have various significance to the issue that we are dealing with.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

desired by whom? We both fancy the same woman. I know enough about her to start a conversation that leads to marriage, wherein I treat her badly. You are a good bloke who would treat her well but don't know where to begin.

Desired by a conscious system. Besides the universal morality that we are trying to find in this thread, we can find many non-universal moralities. Here are some examples: human individu, family, tribal societies, companies, national governments, international organizations, companies.
We need to extend our understanding of conscious systems beyond arbitrary boundaries placed by historical/evolutionary accidents, such as the fact that homo sapiens are the only known extant naturally occuring species that currently have adequate mental capacity to understand how the world is working, relatively speaking. The rising of AGI may change that pretty soon.

[alancalverd]

desired by whom? We both fancy the same woman. I know enough about her to start a conversation that leads to marriage, wherein I treat her badly. You are a good bloke who would treat her well but don't know where to begin.

Desired by a conscious system.

And in this example, both you and I are presumed to be conscious, whatever that means.

If you aren't very careful, you will end up defining a moral action as an action that is moral!