[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!

[alancalverd]

What do you think would happen if they didn't stop sacrificing humans? Would it prevent them from being wiped out by the Christians?

They obviously thought so, but were persuaded otherwise by the Christian invaders, who then killed them. QED.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

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

I have described consciousness in this thread as well as my other threads discussing about universal terminal goal.
Since they haven't seem enough, here is a simplified description by stating absolute minimum requirements for a system to be called conscious.
- It has internal structures which represent states of itself and its environment.
- That internal structures can change according to the change of the environment.

In biological organisms, that internal structures can be found in the form of neural networks which can function as memory storage. In computers, that internal structures are computer memory which may take various forms, such as mechanical, magnetic, optic, and electronic media.
If that internal structures can not change according to the change of the environment, the system can not be conscious. For example, a human specimen in coma or recently died, and unpowered computer.

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

It's a circular reference which is unhelpful and reveal no information. It cannot tell if an action or behavior is moral or immoral.

[alancalverd]

You are treading on dangerous ground here.

All living things have "internal structures which represent states of itself and its environment..... that.....can change according to the change of the environment". So a tree that undermines my house is a conscious being and I need to take its life goals into account when deciding whether to poison it. After all, it is older than me and represents an even older species, so it surely has some rights that surpass mine?

Memory storage and neural networks are not the same, but let's ignore the distinction for the moment.  My satnav responds to changes in the environment much more quickly than a human navigator. Does it have any moral rights or duties? The GPS in my plane does even better: it updates itself with danger areas and prohibited areas, and if I press the "go home" button it will take me there by the quickest safe permitted route from anywhere in the world - but is it making a moral decision?

The concept of morality has no value unless it helps us make an optimum choice, but apart from the Golden Rule, I can see no other universally valid description of optimal.   

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

My statements above put the absolute minimum requirements for something to be called conscious, they don't reject additional requirements.

[alancalverd]

So my GPS meets the minimum requirements of a conscious being. Is that helpful in making moral decisions?

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

Solution to the problem of universal morality can be approached from two sides. First is by deductive reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning

Deductive reasoning, also deductive logic, is the process of reasoning from one or more statements (premises) to reach a logical conclusion.[1]

Deductive reasoning goes in the same direction as that of the conditionals, and links premises with conclusions. If all premises are true, the terms are clear, and the rules of deductive logic are followed, then the conclusion reached is necessarily true.

Deductive reasoning ("top-down logic") contrasts with inductive reasoning ("bottom-up logic") in the following way; in deductive reasoning, a conclusion is reached reductively by applying general rules which hold over the entirety of a closed domain of discourse, narrowing the range under consideration until only the conclusion(s) is left (there is no epistemic uncertainty; i.e. unrecognized parts of the currently available set; all parts of the currently available set are available and recognized).[2] In inductive reasoning, the conclusion is reached by generalizing or extrapolating from specific cases to general rules, i.e., there is epistemic uncertainty (unrecognized parts of the currently available set).[3] However, the inductive reasoning mentioned here is not the same as induction used in mathematical proofs – mathematical induction is actually a form of deductive reasoning.

Here we need to utilize Rand's razor, which simply states, "Name your primaries," which means "name your irreducible axioms." It holds the basic axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity as the standards by which to ponder or to reject any assertion. https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=71347.msg588164#msg588164
We can start by clearly state the definitions of key terms, which are morality and universal. Those lead us to universal terminal goal which I discuss in separate thread. Definition of those terms lead us to clarify the terms of consciousness and individuality/identity. We need to avoid as far as possible making unnecessary/baseless assumptions, as per Occam's razor.
 
Second approach is by inductive reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning

Inductive reasoning is a method of reasoning in which the premises are viewed as supplying some evidence, but not full assurance, for the truth of the conclusion.[1] It is also described as a method where one's experiences and observations, including what are learned from others, are synthesized to come up with a general truth.[2] Many dictionaries define inductive reasoning as the derivation of general principles from specific observations (arguing from specific to general), although there are many inductive arguments that do not have that form.

Here we start from many specific cases or examples of observed moral rules, and then derive general principles from them. We need to describe similarities as well as difference among them. We also need to state our underlying assumptions as explicitly as possible to avoid unnecessary informal fallacies in the discussion.

[alancalverd]

Your problem now is a rapid reductio ad absurdam. Having defined a GPS box as conscious, since it fulfils the minimum requirements for consciousness, we now have to decide whether I have a moral duty to keep it switched on (i.e. conscious) and updated, and whether to repair it or throw it away if it's broken.  And this may be in conflict with my statutory duty to ignore it from time to time.

There is a serious point  lurking in the distance. We have discussed the liability of a driverless vehicle  causing an accident, and there is an emerging debate about the use of AI in medical diagnosis. If a surgeon removed the wrong kidney under a faulty instruction from a machine, where is the moral and hence legal liability?

The law seems to be reasonably consistent: humans use machines, not the other way around, and humans make decisions. The decision to engage autopilot or rely on an AI diagnosis, immediately confers liability on the person who made that decision, not on the machine or the machine designer, unless the  machine is explicitly sold as "life critical". So for all practical purposes we can ignore the consciousness, whatever that is, of any person or thing other than the primary agent, in deciding whether an action is moral. Thus the Golden Rule is all you need.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The advantage of deductive reasoning is that your answer would be a logical necessity, as long as you provide correct premises and proceed with valid procedures. To guarantee correctness of the premises, we need to list them down in detail with unambiguous definitions, and compare them with known observation result of objective reality. Hence in order to refute the conclusion, all you need to do is point out which premise is incorrect. You would then can fix it to get the correct answer.

For inductive reasoning, we can start from many specific cases or examples of observed moral rules, and then derive general principles from them. We need to describe similarities as well as difference among them. So far, we can find some proposed rules in this thread: Golden rule, utilitarianism, and nihilism.

[hamdani yusuf (OP)]

The law seems to be reasonably consistent: humans use machines, not the other way around, and humans make decisions. The decision to engage autopilot or rely on an AI diagnosis, immediately confers liability on the person who made that decision, not on the machine or the machine designer, unless the  machine is explicitly sold as "life critical". So for all practical purposes we can ignore the consciousness, whatever that is, of any person or thing other than the primary agent, in deciding whether an action is moral. Thus the Golden Rule is all you need.

Let's scrutinize your proposal using Rand's razor. What's your irreducible axioms?
Why it's important to follow the golden rule? What would happen if it's not obeyed? Why would it be bad?

[alancalverd]

No axioms apart from the Golden Rule itself. Humans being intellectually strong but physically weak, we survive and prosper by collaboration. If we generally treat others as we would wish to be treated, we get along and achieve stuff because our collaboration lacks resentment.