= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
AaronBenson comments on Open Thread: January 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (725)
1) Why would a "perfectly logical being" compute (do) X and not Y? Do all "perfectly logical beings" do the same thing? (Dan's comment: a system that computes your answer determines that answer, given a question. If you presuppose an unique answer, you need to sufficiently restrict the question (and the system). A universal computer will execute any program (question) to produce its output (answer).) All "beings" won't do exactly the same thing, answer any question in exactly the same way. See also: No Universally Compelling Arguments.
2) Why would you be interested in what the "perfectly logical being" does? No matter what argument you are given, it is you that decides whether to accept it. See also: Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, Paperclip maximizer, and more generally Metaethics sequence.
2.5) What humans want (and you in particular), is a very detailed notion, one that won't automatically appear from a question that doesn't already include all that detail. And every bit of that detail is incredibly important to get right, even though its form isn't fixed in human image.
I don't know what you mean by objective ethics. I believe there are ethical facts but they're a lot more like facts about the rules of baseball than facts about the laws of physics
If that's the distinction, then whether there is objective ethics or not is just a matter of semantics; not anything of philosophical or practical interest.
What do you mean "as ethical"? By what meta-ethical rule?
if your reply is, "by the objective meta-ethics which I postulate that all sentient beings can derive" - if everyone can derive it equally, doesn't that imply everyone ought to be equally ethical? If you admit someone or some society are un-ethical (as you asked of Jack), does that mean they somehow failed to derive the meta-ethics? That the ethics they adopted is internally inconsistent somehow?
Invented isn't the right word, though that is partly my fault since baseball isn't an ideal metaphor. Natural language is a better one. Parts of ethics are culturally inherited (presumably at some time in the past they were invented) other parts are innate. The word ethics has a type-token ambiguity. It can refer to our ethical system (call it 'ethics prime') or it can refer to the type of thing that ethics prime is (an ethics). There can be societies without ethics prime, these societies are not ethical in the token sense but may be in the type sense (if they have a different ethical system). Imagine if the word for English and the word for language were the same word 'language'. Do the French speak language?
My own ethical system demands that I try to enforce it on a large class of beings similar to myself so I am not a relativist in that I think other people should do many of the things my ethics require me to do. This seems to me to have little to do with what those other people believe is ethical.
This is a good way of putting it!
In fact, it just convinced me that there is an objective ethics! Sort of. Asking whether there is an objective meta-ethics is a lot like asking, "Is there such a thing as language?" Language is a concept that can be usefully applied to interactions between organisms of a particular level of intelligence given particular environmental conditions. So is ethics. Is it universal? What the hell does that mean?
But when people say there is no objective ethics, that isn't what they mean. They aren't denying that ethics makes sense as a concept. They're claiming the right to set their own arbitrary goals and values.
It's hard for me to imagine why someone who was convinced that there were no objective ethics would waste time on this, unless they were a Continental philosopher. Claiming there is no objective ethics sounds to me more like the actions of someone who believes in objective ethics, and has come to their own values that are unique enough that they must reject existing values.
"Calculated" based on what? What is the question that this would be the answer to?
Also, how can you define "bias" here?
As you can guess from my questions, I don't even see what an objective system of ethics could possibly mean :-)
This seems to be my biggest problem as well. I have been trying to find definitions of an objective system of ethics, yet all of the definitions seem so dogmatic and contrived. Not to mention varying from time to time depending upon the domain of the ethics (whether they apply to Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, etc.)
That does not answer my question: what is the purely objective, unbiased definition of "ethics"? We can't discuss objective systems of ethics without an objective definition of the question that ethics is supposed to answer.
P.S. my previous comment was malformatted, so you may have missed this part of it; I've fixed it now.
What do you mean by imperative? Humans have certain imperatives, whether evolved or "purely" cultural, but they are all human-specific: other creatures and minds will potentially have different ones. They can't be called "objective and unbiased between all rational thinking minds".
How can we talk about something if we can't define or at least describe it, or point to examples of it existing? Inability to define by definition means there's no concept. A concept isn't right or wrong, it just is, and it's equivalent to a definition that lets us know what we're talking about.
As for "folk concepts" of ethics, no offence intended, but aren't they roughly in the same category as religion and "sexual morals"?
Aren't you just asserting with this statement, without argument, that there is no objective ethics? Isn't it the question at hand whether or not human imperatives are specific or universal?
(Though I wouldn't exclude the higher order possibility that there could be an objective ethical system defined around imperatives in general; for any arbitrary imperatives that a subsystem defines for itself, there is an objective imperative to have them satisfied.)
Well, it's not clear to me that that's what AaronBensen meant by "objective ethics". But I do believe that human ethics are not universal, because:
Human ethics aren't even universal among humans. Plenty of humans live and have lived who would think I should rightly be killed - for not obeying some religious prescription, for instance. On the other hand some humans believe no-one should be killed and no-one has the right to kill anyone else, ever. Many more opinions exist.
I know of no reason why an AI couldn't be built with different ethics from ours, or with no ethics at all. A paperclipper AI could be very intelligent, conscious (whatever that means), but sill - unethical by our lights. If anyone believes that such unethical minds literally cannot exist, the burden of proof is on them.
Careful. We need to distinguish between ethical beliefs and 'factual' beliefs. Someone might have an ethics that says: If there is a God, do what he says. Else, do not murder. This person might want to kill Dan because he believes God wants to heathens to die. Others might have the same ethical system but not believe in God and therefore default to not murdering anyone. I'm not saying there aren't ethical disagreements but eliminating differences is factual knowledge might eliminate many apparent ethical differences.
Also, I'm not sure your second point matters. You can probably program anything. If all evolved, intelligent and social beings had very similar ethics I would consider that good enough to claim universality.
I think plenty of ethical differences remain even if we eliminate all possiblee factual disagreements.
As regards religion, (many) religious people claim that they obey god's commands because they are (ethically) good and right in themselves, and just because they come from god. It's hard to dismiss religion entirely when discussing the ethics adopted by actual people - there's not much data left.
But here's another example: some people advocate the ethics of minimal government and completely unrestrained capitalism. I, on the other hand, believe in state social welfare and support taxing to fund it. Others regard these taxes as robbery. And another: many people in slave-owning countries have thought it ethical to own slaves; I think it is not, and would free slaves by force if I had the opportunity.
I think enough examples can be found to let my point stand. There is little, if any, universal human ethics.
That is underspecified. Evolved how? If I set up evolution in a simulation, or competition with selection between outright AIs, does that count? Can I choose the seeds or do I have to start from primordial soup?
There is a confusion that results when you consider either system (objective or subjective ethics) from the viewpoint of the other.
(The objective ethical system viewpoint of human ethics.) Suppose that there is an objective ethical system defining a set of imperatives. Also, separately, we have subjectively determined human ethics. The subjective human ethics overlapping with the objective imperatives are actual imperatives; the rest are just preferences. It is possible that the objective imperatives are not known to us, in which case, we may or may not be satisfying them and we are not aware of our objective value (good or bad).
(The subjective ethical system viewpoint of human ethics.) In the case of no objective ethical system, imperatives are subjectively collectively determined. We are bad or good -- to whatever extent it is possible to be 'bad' or 'good' -- if we think we are bad or good. This is self-validation.
Now, to address your objections:
Right, human ethics do seem very inconsistent. To me, this is a challenge only to the existence of subjective ethics. In the case of objective ethics, there is no contradiction if humans disagree about what is ethical; humans do not define what is objectively ethical. In the case of a subjective ethical system, inconsistencies in human ethics is evidence that there is no well-defined notion "human ethics", only individual ethics.
Nevertheless, in defense of 'human ethics' for either system, perhaps it is the case that human ethics are actually consistent, in a way that matters, but the terminal values are so higher order we don't easily find them. All the different moral behaviors we see are different manifestations of common values.
Of course, minds could evolve or be constructed with different subjective ethical systems. Again, they may or may not be objectively ethical.
This redefinition of the word "imperative" goes counter to the existing meaning of the word (which would include all 'preferences'), so it's confusing. I suggest you come up with a new term or word-combination.
You defined objective ethics as something every rational thinking being could derive. Shouldn't it also have some meaning? Some reason why they would in fact be interested in deriving it?
If this objective ethics can be derived by everyone, but happens to run counter to almost everyone's subjective ethics, why is it even interesting? Why would we even be talking about it unless we either expected to encounter aliens with subjective ethics similar to it; or we were considering adopting it as our own subjective ethics?
That definitely requires proof. Have you got even a reason for speculating about it, any evidence for it?
I am having a discussion on a forum where a theist keeps stating that there must be objective truth, that there must be objective morality, and that there is objective knowledge that cannot be discovered by Science (I tried to point out that if it were Objective, then any system should be capable of producing that knowledge or truth).
I had completely forgot to ask him if this objective truth/knowledge/morality could be discovered if we took a group of people, raised in complete isolation, and then gave them the tools to explore their world. If such things were truly objective, then it would be trivial for these people to arrive at the discovery of these objective facts.
I shall have to remember this, as well as the fact that such objective knowledge/ethics may indeed exist, yet, why is it that our ethical systems across the globe seem to have a few things in common, but disagree on a great many more?
You can't ask whether there are more things in common than not in common, unless you can enumerate the things to be considered. If everyone agrees on something, perhaps it doesn't get categorized under ethics anymore. Or perhaps it just doesn't seem salient when you take your informal mental census of ethical principals.
Excellent response to the theist.
Doh!
Yes, of course... Slip of the brain's transmission there.
As for the response to the theist, I wish that I had used that specific response. I cannot recall now what I did use to counter his claims.
As I mentions, his claim was that there is knowledge that is not available to the scientific method, yet can be observed in other ways.
I pointed out that there were no other ways of observing things than empirical methods, and that if some method of knowledge that just entered out brain should be discovered (Revelation), and its reliability were determined, then this would just be another form of observation (Proprioception) and the whole process would then just be another tool of science.
He just couldn't seem to get around the fact that as soon as he makes an empirical claim that it falls within the realm of scientific discovery.
He was also misusing Gödel's incompleteness theorem (some true statements in a formal system cannot be proved within that formal system).
At which point, he began to conflate science as some sort of religion and god that was being worshiped, and from which everything was meaningless and thus there were no ethics, so he could just go kill and rape whoever he pleased.
It frightens me that there are such people in the world.