Larry_D'Anna comments on Ethics Notes - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 October 2008 09:57PM

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Comment author: Larry_D'Anna 22 October 2008 04:56:26AM 0 points [-]

> Moral questions are terminal. Ethical questions are instrumental.

I would argue that ethics are values that are instrumental, but treated as if they were terminal for almost all real object-level decisions. Ethics are a human cognitive shortcut. We need ethics because we can't really compute the expected cost of a black swan bet. An AI without our limitations might not need ethics. It might be able to keep all it's instrumental values in it's head *as* instrumental, without getting confused like we would.