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thomblake comments on Quantifying ethicality of human actions - Less Wrong
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Why would you assume that? If you're willing to reject the principle of bivalence (and thus "logic" as ordinarily understood), you're free to take some "core" of morality as axiomatic and use "fuzzy" reasoning to reach formal conclusions. Admittedly, feminist economics probably doesn't do that, at least not yet. But an AI built to follow feminist or Islamic principles could.
You're clearly thinking about "moral philosophy" as practiced by Western academic philosophers, not "ethics", "morals" and "rules" as most people actually understand these terms. Yes, Kant was trying to define a rule-based morality, and he stated as much. But the Categorical Imperative is not more of a rule than the Utilitarian Imperative is--"choose actions which maximize world Gross National Happiness (or some other index of total well-being)". It is actually closer to "ethics" as a form of dispute resolution between conflicting rights (or "principles of rational agency" as Kant would say), rather than "morality" as understood by most people, i.e. divine command theory/moral absolutism: "I am right and you are wrong and you should do what I say".
Nobody cares about what Kant wrote or thought about his theories, unless they're a scholar who's specifically interested in that. Besides, most LWers know that a lot of Western philosophy is hopelessly garbled and should be reanalyzed from scratch if it is to be practically useful.
I don't think most people here think that. I'm pretty sure that you'll find the following two opinions much more prevalent:
Western philosophy is to some extent useful and to that extent it should be taken at face value
Western philosophy is to some extent hopelessly garbled and to that extent it should be thrown out entirely, not "reanalyzed".
False dichotomy. But that's par for the course for Aristotelian philosophers.
Besides, throwing out Western moral philosophy entirely without further comment would not be making it "practically useful". And it would be distinctly unhelpful to its current practitioners, many of whom have a legitimate interest in the questions it seeks to address.
Indeed. I see no profit in making something hopelessly garbled into something practically useful, rather than inventing something new to serve that purpose. For similar reasons we're mostly atheists, rather than saying we're Christians and then redefining "God" and various metaphysical 'beliefs' to mean something coherent.
And yet we mostly recognize the usefulness of various forms of religion. So, perhaps we should describe ourselves as "religious" as much as Confucians do, or at least as following some moral code and practicing a form of ethics.