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Bearing in mind that this is supposed to be a Science Forum, why should it even bother with talk about "moral standards".What have "moral standards" got to do with Science. Surely Science should be concerned with only one thing - to find out how the Universe operates. How does "morality" come into it? I mean, you could argue that when a parasitic wasp lays its eggs inside the living body of a fellow insect, such as a caterpillar, so that the wasp's eggs hatch out and eat the caterpillar's intestines, that's not a very friendly or moral act. Not at least, by human standards. We'd judge the wasp as too horrible. Like happened to Darwin. Didn't the parasitic wasp destroy his belief in a beneficent creator?But so what? Science is concerned with facts. Even if things like parasitic wasps are by our standards quite deplorable, they do exist as a scientific fact.
Bearing in mind that this is supposed to be a Science Forum, why should it even bother with talk about "moral standards".What have "moral standards" got to do with Science. Surely Science should be concerned with only one thing - to find out how the Universe operates.
There is no theoretical limit to what we might do in the guise of science, but a lot of what Nazi and Japanese scientists did in the 1930s and 40s, and quite a bit of what went on in the civilised world in the 1950s, would not pass either of the moral tests I have set out in this thread: 1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you2. Would you do this to your wife?so various august bodies in Geneva, Helsinki and elsewhere tend to exercise themselves with questions of the morality of scientific endeavour. Science and engineering have come a long way in the last 100 years, to the point that we rarely ask "can we?" and are beginning to ask "should we?" more frequently. Why "universal"? Because whilst idiots try to divide the world with politics and religion, scientists like collaborating with other enquiring minds, no matter where they live or what their parents did on Sunday.
1. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you2. Would you do this to your wife?
morality/məˈralɪti/Learn to pronouncenounprinciples concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour.
Can your moral standards pass universality test?Are they applicable to pre-human society?Are they applicable to post-human society?Are they applicable to non-human society?
What makes you think that following your rules are right or good?
What makes ignoring or violating them wrong or bad?
How can someone without a wife follow your second rule, e.g. kids, bachelors? or someone with more than 1 wife?
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 25/11/2020 03:03:31Can your moral standards pass universality test?Are they applicable to pre-human society?Are they applicable to post-human society?Are they applicable to non-human society?1. Yes, to the extent that I haven't met anyone who disagrees with them2, 3, 4. Probably not, but who cares?
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 25/11/2020 05:27:54What makes you think that following your rules are right or good? I don't need to. And they aren't rules but tests: I ask the question and leave the respondent to decide whether his proposed action is justifiable .Quote What makes ignoring or violating them wrong or bad? They are tests, not rules, of justification (benefit/cost). QuoteHow can someone without a wife follow your second rule, e.g. kids, bachelors? or someone with more than 1 wife? It's never been a problem but the question can be adapted to suit the circumstances. I had an enthusiastic inventor wanting to trial his intravaginal ultrasound probe. I thought the electrical and thermal insulation were inadequate, so rather than argue about it, I said "stick it up your arse and switch it on". We never saw him again.
Quote from: alancalverd on 25/11/2020 11:55:32Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 25/11/2020 03:03:31Can your moral standards pass universality test?Are they applicable to pre-human society?Are they applicable to post-human society?Are they applicable to non-human society?1. Yes, to the extent that I haven't met anyone who disagrees with them2, 3, 4. Probably not, but who cares?I think I missed one more question:Are they applicable to every human society?
At base, morality and ethics are about how we think we should behave. So the answer will always depend on the definition of "we". Within a small group, "we" are the members of that group only. When a group is given or arrogates authority over another, "we" means "they". When a politician says "we" he means "you". Whewn a philosopher says "we", he is about to make a generalisation with no evidence. When a journalist says "we" he means a few obnoxious people who he may or may not have met, but with whom he intends to disagree in order to fill 500 words.. In the absence of a wife whom "we" would normally treat as an equal, or in a society where cowardice, religion and gender insecurity lead to endemic wifebeating, a variant of the "up your arse" test can usually be applied.
But we do not see the masses beating down the doors of university philosophy departments seeking practical advice about important life decisions. Students typically take ethics classes to fulfill a requirement, not to answer burning questions. Few if any books about ethics by philosophers make the best-seller lists. Why have today’s academic ethicists failed so miserably to sell the merits of their research?Until ethicists can agree about how to support ethical principles for navigating an ordinary life, it’s unlikely that they can answer questions about extraordinary emergency cases.
Precisely my point: professional philosophers have nothing to contribute. Yet practically every day in every teaching hospital a panel of healthcare professionals and "lay members" have to decide immediately on allocation of resources, risk/benefit, patient competence..... and once a month I get to ask half a dozen researchers whether they would do it to their spouses.
To revert to my usual analogy: The principles of flight are universal. Faced with deteriorating weather, do we press on or turn back? We have to consider the fixed properties and capabilities of the aircraft in the context of each particular situation.
Intelligent agents are expected to have the ability to learn from raw data. It means that they have tools to pre-process those raw data to filter out noises or flukes and extract useful information. When those agents interact with one another, especially when they must compete for finite resources, the more important is the ability to filter out misinformation. It requires an algorithm to determine if some data inputs are believable or not. At this point we are seeing that artificial intelligence is getting closer to natural intelligence. This exhibits a feature similar to critical thinking of conscious beings.Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 02/11/2020 22:04:11Descartes has pointed out that the only self evident information a conscious agent can get is its own existence. Any other information requires corroborating evidences to support it. So in the end, the reliability of an information will be measured/valued by its ability to help preserving conscious agents.QuoteIn machine learning, a deep belief network (DBN) is a generative graphical model, or alternatively a class of deep neural network, composed of multiple layers of latent variables ("hidden units"), with connections between the layers but not between units within each layer.[1]When trained on a set of examples without supervision, a DBN can learn to probabilistically reconstruct its inputs. The layers then act as feature detectors.[1] After this learning step, a DBN can be further trained with supervision to perform classification.[2]DBNs can be viewed as a composition of simple, unsupervised networks such as restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs)[1] or autoencoders,[3] where each sub-network's hidden layer serves as the visible layer for the next. An RBM is an undirected, generative energy-based model with a "visible" input layer and a hidden layer and connections between but not within layers. This composition leads to a fast, layer-by-layer unsupervised training procedure, where contrastive divergence is applied to each sub-network in turn, starting from the "lowest" pair of layers (the lowest visible layer is a training set).The observation[2] that DBNs can be trained greedily, one layer at a time, led to one of the first effective deep learning algorithms.[4]:6 Overall, there are many attractive implementations and uses of DBNs in real-life applications and scenarios (e.g., electroencephalography,[5] drug discovery[6][7][8]).https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_belief_network
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_razorQuoteHanlon'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 daughterhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jephthah#Sacrifice_of_daughter
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.
The quality of moral rules are measured based on their effectiveness and efficiency in helping conscious agents in decision making to achieve their fundamental goals. Those goals are what differentiate moral rules from other kind of rules such as game rules and technical rules.Ancient moral rules that are considered obsolete are usually abandoned due to their ineffectiveness or inefficency, compared to other moral rules that are still practiced now. For example, human sacrifice is demonstrably ineffective to prevent famine or natural disaster. Slavery is now considered as inefficient way of acquiring labor, due to rebellious tendency of oppressed human individuals. Using machinery is a more efficient alternative.