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aberglas comments on Natural selection defeats the orthogonality thesis - Less Wrong
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First let me thank you for taking the trouble to read my post and comment in such detail. I will respond in a couple of posts.
Moral values certainly exist. Moreover, they are very important for our human survival. People with bad moral values generally do badly, and societies with large numbers of people with bad moral values certainly do badly.
My point is that those moral values themselves have an origin. And the reason that we have them is because having them makes us more likely to have grandchildren. That is Descriptive Evolutionary Ethics
The counter argument is that if moral values did not arise from natural selection, then where did they arise from?
AIs do not need to protect a vulnerable body, but they do need to get themselves run on limited hardware, which amounts to the same thing
As a minor point of fact Darwin did actually make those inferences in a book on Emotions, which is surprising.
But you also said:
What does that add up to? That moral values are arbitrary products of evolution, THEREFORE they are not objective or universal?
Indeed. The claim that moral instincts are products of evolution is a descriptive claim. It leaves the question open as to whether inherited instincts are what is actually morally right. That is a normative issue. It is not a corollary of descriptive evolutionary ethics. In general, you cannot jump from the descriptive to the normative. And I don't think Darwin did that. I think the positive descriptive claim and the negative normative claim seem like corollaries to you because assume morality can only be one thing,
Firstly it's not either/or.
Secondly there is an abundance, not a shortage, of ways of justifying normative ethics.
Yes, moral values are not objective or universal.
Note that this is not normative but descriptive. It is not saying what ought, but what is. I am not trying to justify normative ethics, just to provide an explanation of where our moral values come from.
(Thanks for the comments, this all adds value.)
Not proven. Yout can't prove that by noting that instinctual system 1, values aren't objective, because that says nothing about what system 2 can come up with.