I believe that a fundamental requirement for any rational agent is the motivation to act maximally intelligently and correctly. That requirement seems even more obvious if we are talking about a conjectured artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is able to improve itself to the point where it is substantially better at most activities than humans. Since if it wouldn't want to be maximally correct then it wouldn't become superhuman intelligent in the first place.
The standard counterargument is along the lines of: it won't care about getting things right per se, it will only employ rationality as a means to other goals.(Or: instrumental rationality is the only kind, because that's how we define rationality).
What justifies the "will", the claim of necessity, or at least high probability, brings us back to the title of the original posting: evidence for the Orthogonality Thesis. Is non-instrumental rationality, rationality-as-a-goal impossible? Is no-one trying to build it? Why try to build single minded Artificial Obsessive Compulsives if it is dangerous? Isn't rationality-as-a-goal a safer architecture?
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.