Genocide is always fine for those who perpetrate them.
That solves the whole problem , if relativism is true. Otherwise, it is an uninteresting psychlogical observation.
, I think it gets complex only when we try to take more than one viewpoint at a time. If we avoid that, morality then becomes relative: the same event looks good for some people, and bad for others. This way, there is no absolute morality as David seems to think
You have an opinion, he has another opinion. Neither of you has a proof. Taking one viewpoint at a time is hopeless for practical ethics, because in practical ethics things like punishment eithe happen or don’t—they can’t happen for one person but not another.
I don’t agree with any killing, but most of us do otherwise it would stop.
“You have an opinion, he has another opinion. Neither of you has a proof.”
If suffering is real, it provides a need for the management of suffering, and that is morality. To deny that is to assert that suffering doesn’t matter and that, by extension, torture on innocent people is not wrong.
The kind of management required is minimisation (attempted elimination) of harm, though not any component of harm that unlocks the way to enjoyment that cancels out that harm. If minimising harm doesn’t matter, there is nothing wrong with torturing innocent people. If enjoyment doesn’t cancel out some suffering, no one would consider their life to be worth living.
All of this is reasoned and correct.
The remaining issue is how the management should be done to measure pleasure against suffering for different players, and what I’ve found is a whole lot of different approaches attempting to do the same thing, some by naive methods that fail in a multitude of situations, and others which appear to do well in most or all situations if they’re applied correctly (by weighing up all the harm and pleasure involved instead of ignoring some of it).
It looks as if my method for computing morality produces the same results as utilitarianism, and it likely does the job well enough to govern safe AGI. Because we’re going to be up against people who will be releasing bad (biased) AGI, we will be forced to go ahead with installing our AGI into devices and setting them loose fairly soon after we have achieved full AGI. For this reason, it would be useful if there was a serious place where the issues could be discussed now so that we can systematically home in on the best system of moral governance and throw out all the junk, but I still don’t see it happening anywhere (and it certainly isn’t happening here). We need a dynamic league table of proposed solutions, each with its own league table of objections to it so that we can focus on the urgent task of identifying the junk and reducing the clutter down to something clear. It is likely that AGI will do this job itself, but it would be better if humans could get their first using the power of their own wits. Time is short.
My own attempt to do this job has led to me identifying three systems which appear to work better than the rest, all producing the same results in most situations, but with one producing slightly different results in cases where the number of players in a scenario is variable and where the variation depends on whether they exist or not—where the results differ, it looks as if we have a range or answers that are all moral. That is something I need to explore and test further, but I no longer expect to get any help with this from other humans because they’re simply not awake. “I can tear your proposed method to pieces and show that it’s wrong,” they promise, and that gets my interest because it’s exactly what I’m looking for—sharp, analytical minds that can cut through to the errors and show them up. But no—they completely fail to deliver. Instead, I find that they are the guardians of a mountain of garbage with a few gems hidden in it which they can’t sort into two piles: junk and jewels. “Utilitarianism is a pile of pants!” they say, because of the Mere Addition Paradox. I resolve that “paradox” for them, and what happens: denial of mathematics and lots of down-voting of my comments and up-votes for the irrational ones. Sadly, that disqualifies this site from serious discussion—it’s clear that if any other intelligence has visited here before me, it didn’t hang around. I will follow its lead and look elsewhere.
Genocide is always fine for those who perpetrate them.
That solves the whole problem , if relativism is true. Otherwise, it is an uninteresting psychological observation.
To me, the interesting observation is : “How did we get here if genocide looks that fine?”
And my answer is: “Because for most of us and most of the time, we expected more profit while making friends than making enemies, which is nevertheless a selfish behavior.”
Making friends is simply being part of the same group, and making enemies is being part of two different groups. No need for killings for two such groups to be enemies though, just to express a different viewpoint on the same observation.
......................
I don’t agree with any killing, but most of us do otherwise it would stop.
Or co-ordination problems exist.
Of course that they exist. Democracy is incidentally better at that kind of coordination than dictatorship, but it has not succeeded yet to stop killings, and again, I think it is because most of us still think that killings are unavoidable. Without that thinking, people would vote for politicians that think the same, and they would progressively cut the funds for defense instead of increasing them. If all the countries would do that, there would be no more armies after a while, and no more guns either. There would nevertheless still be countries, because without groups, thus without selfishness, I don’t think that we could make any progress. The idea that selfishness is bad comes from religions, but it is contradictory: praying god for help is evidently selfish. Recognizing that point might have prevented them to kill miscreants, so it might also actually prevent groups from killing other groups. When you know that whatever you do is for yourself while still feeling altruistic all the time, you think twice before harming people.
I think you are missing that tribes/nations/governments are how we solve co-ordination problems, which automatically means that inter-tribal problems like war don’t have a solution.
We solve inter-individual problems with laws, so we might be able to solve inter-tribal problems the same way providing that tribes accept to be governed by a superior level of government. Do you think your tribe would accept to be governed this way? How come we can accept that as individuals and not as a nation? How come some nations still have a veto at the UN?
That solves the whole problem , if relativism is true. Otherwise, it is an uninteresting psychlogical observation.
You have an opinion, he has another opinion. Neither of you has a proof. Taking one viewpoint at a time is hopeless for practical ethics, because in practical ethics things like punishment eithe happen or don’t—they can’t happen for one person but not another.
Or co-ordination problems exist.
“You have an opinion, he has another opinion. Neither of you has a proof.”
If suffering is real, it provides a need for the management of suffering, and that is morality. To deny that is to assert that suffering doesn’t matter and that, by extension, torture on innocent people is not wrong.
The kind of management required is minimisation (attempted elimination) of harm, though not any component of harm that unlocks the way to enjoyment that cancels out that harm. If minimising harm doesn’t matter, there is nothing wrong with torturing innocent people. If enjoyment doesn’t cancel out some suffering, no one would consider their life to be worth living.
All of this is reasoned and correct.
The remaining issue is how the management should be done to measure pleasure against suffering for different players, and what I’ve found is a whole lot of different approaches attempting to do the same thing, some by naive methods that fail in a multitude of situations, and others which appear to do well in most or all situations if they’re applied correctly (by weighing up all the harm and pleasure involved instead of ignoring some of it).
It looks as if my method for computing morality produces the same results as utilitarianism, and it likely does the job well enough to govern safe AGI. Because we’re going to be up against people who will be releasing bad (biased) AGI, we will be forced to go ahead with installing our AGI into devices and setting them loose fairly soon after we have achieved full AGI. For this reason, it would be useful if there was a serious place where the issues could be discussed now so that we can systematically home in on the best system of moral governance and throw out all the junk, but I still don’t see it happening anywhere (and it certainly isn’t happening here). We need a dynamic league table of proposed solutions, each with its own league table of objections to it so that we can focus on the urgent task of identifying the junk and reducing the clutter down to something clear. It is likely that AGI will do this job itself, but it would be better if humans could get their first using the power of their own wits. Time is short.
My own attempt to do this job has led to me identifying three systems which appear to work better than the rest, all producing the same results in most situations, but with one producing slightly different results in cases where the number of players in a scenario is variable and where the variation depends on whether they exist or not—where the results differ, it looks as if we have a range or answers that are all moral. That is something I need to explore and test further, but I no longer expect to get any help with this from other humans because they’re simply not awake. “I can tear your proposed method to pieces and show that it’s wrong,” they promise, and that gets my interest because it’s exactly what I’m looking for—sharp, analytical minds that can cut through to the errors and show them up. But no—they completely fail to deliver. Instead, I find that they are the guardians of a mountain of garbage with a few gems hidden in it which they can’t sort into two piles: junk and jewels. “Utilitarianism is a pile of pants!” they say, because of the Mere Addition Paradox. I resolve that “paradox” for them, and what happens: denial of mathematics and lots of down-voting of my comments and up-votes for the irrational ones. Sadly, that disqualifies this site from serious discussion—it’s clear that if any other intelligence has visited here before me, it didn’t hang around. I will follow its lead and look elsewhere.
Genocide is always fine for those who perpetrate them.
To me, the interesting observation is : “How did we get here if genocide looks that fine?”
And my answer is: “Because for most of us and most of the time, we expected more profit while making friends than making enemies, which is nevertheless a selfish behavior.”
Making friends is simply being part of the same group, and making enemies is being part of two different groups. No need for killings for two such groups to be enemies though, just to express a different viewpoint on the same observation.
......................
I don’t agree with any killing, but most of us do otherwise it would stop.
Of course that they exist. Democracy is incidentally better at that kind of coordination than dictatorship, but it has not succeeded yet to stop killings, and again, I think it is because most of us still think that killings are unavoidable. Without that thinking, people would vote for politicians that think the same, and they would progressively cut the funds for defense instead of increasing them. If all the countries would do that, there would be no more armies after a while, and no more guns either. There would nevertheless still be countries, because without groups, thus without selfishness, I don’t think that we could make any progress. The idea that selfishness is bad comes from religions, but it is contradictory: praying god for help is evidently selfish. Recognizing that point might have prevented them to kill miscreants, so it might also actually prevent groups from killing other groups. When you know that whatever you do is for yourself while still feeling altruistic all the time, you think twice before harming people.
I think you are missing that tribes/nations/governments are how we solve co-ordination problems, which automatically means that inter-tribal problems like war don’t have a solution.
We solve inter-individual problems with laws, so we might be able to solve inter-tribal problems the same way providing that tribes accept to be governed by a superior level of government. Do you think your tribe would accept to be governed this way? How come we can accept that as individuals and not as a nation? How come some nations still have a veto at the UN?