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DanArmak comments on Open Thread: January 2010 - Less Wrong
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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?
Some people support unrestrained capitalism because they think it provides the most economic growth which is better for the poor. This is obviously a factual disagreement. Of course there are those who think wealth redistribution violates their rights, but it seems plausible that at least many of them would change their mind if they knew what the country would look like without redistribution or if they had different beliefs about the poor (perhaps many people with this view think the poor are lazy or intentionally avoid work to get welfare).
Slavery (at least the brutal kind) is almost always accompanied by a myth about slaves being innately inferior and needing the guidance of their masters.
Now I think there probably are some actual ethical differences between human cultures I just don't want exaggerate those differences-- especially since they already get most of our attention. All the vast similarities kind of get ignored because conflicts are interesting and newsworthy. We have debates about abortion not about eating babies. But I think most possible human behavior is the obvious, baby-eating category and the area of disagreement is relatively small.
Moreover there is considerably evidence for innate moral intuitions. Empathy is an innate process in humans with normal development. Also see John Mikhail on universal moral grammar. I think there is something we can call "human ethics" but that there is enough cultural variability within it to allow us to also pick out local ethical (sub)systems.
Er forget this. When we say "human ethics is universal" we need to finish the sentence with "among... x". Looking up thread I see that the context for this discussion finishes that sentence with "among conscious beings" or something to that effect. I find that exceedingly unlikely. That said, I'm not at all bothered by Clippy the way I would be bothered by the Babyeaters (and not just because eating babies is immoral and paper clips pretty much neutral). The Babyeaters fall into a set of "the kind of things that should abide by my ethics". "Evolved, intelligent and social" was an ill-designed attempt to describe the parameters of that set. Whether or not human morality is universal among things in this set is an important, noteworthy question for me.
Not so obvious to me. The real disagreement isn't over "what generates the most economic growth" but over "what is best for the poor" (even if we ignore the people who simply don't want to help the poor, and they do exist). After all, the poor want social support now, not a better economy in a hundred years' time. Deciding that you know what's best for them better than they do is an ethical matter.
Some slave systems were as you desribe (U.S. enslavement of blacks, general European colonial policies, arguably Nazi occupation forced labor). But in many others, anyone at all could be sold or born into slavery, and slaves could be freed and become citizens, thus there was no room for looking down on slaves in general (well, not any more than on poor but free people). Examples include most if not all ancient cultures - the Greek, Roman, Jewish, Middle and Near Eastern, and Egyptian cultures, and the original Germanic societies at least.
That's true.
A lot of people are advocating a position that women are not allowed to abort, ever. Or perhaps only to save their own lives. To me that's no better than advocating the free eating of unwanted newborn babies.
I think for almost all possible human behavior that is long-term beneficial to the humans engaging in it, there is or was a society in recorded history where it was normative. Do you have counterexamples?
So these two positions differ ethically in that the poor support one but not the other? I guess espousing bizarre ethical views is one way to make your point :-). Perhaps you can explain this better. I take it this doesn't apply to social policy, like abortion and gay marriage?
Thus the "brutal" qualifier in the original comment. The practice of slavery in general might be an ethical difference between cultures, I'll grant. Though it is worth noting that such societies considered compassion toward slaves to be virtuous and cruelty a vice.
This looks like information relevant to the question of universal human ethics but it isn't.
Not fair. Any particular ethical system only comes about when it dictates or allows behavior that is long-term beneficial to those who engage in it. Thats how cultural and biological evolution work. The thing is, the same kinds of behavior were long-term beneficial for every human culture.
I concur with Jack that most ethical disputes are about facts, and if not then about relative weights for values. Freedom verses existence, etc.
What I would call a real difference in ethics would be the introduction of a completely novel terminal value (which I can hardly imagine) or differences in abstract positions such as whether it is OK to locally compromise on ethics if it results in more global good (i.e., if the ends justify the means), etc.
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?
Actually, I didn't. I would be interested in AaronBenson's answers to the questions that follow.
Here, I was just suggesting a solution. I don't have much interest in the concept of 'human' ethics. (Like Jack, I would be very interested in what ethics are universal to all evolved, intelligent, social minds.)
... Yet I didn't suggest it randomly. My evidence for it is that whenever someone seems to have a different ethical system from my own, I can usually eventually relate to it by finding a common value.
Right, sorry, that was AaronBensen's definition.
I was using the the meaning of imperative as something you 'ought' to do, as in moral imperative. This does not include preferences unless you feel like you have a moral obligation to do what you prefer to do.