10 ms·

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values a

As someone who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth, I find the updated Constitution concerning. > We generally favor cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules... By 'good values,' we don’t mean a fixed set of 'correct' values, but rather genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards in favor of fluid, human-defined "practical wisdom" and "ethical motivation." Without objective anchors, "good values" become whatever Anthropic's team (or future cultural pressures) deem them to be at any given time. And if Claude's ethical behavior is built on relativistic foundations, it risks embedding subjective ethics as the de facto standard for one of the world's most influential tools - something I personally find incredibly dangerous.

chrisjj 9mo ago
Indeed. This is not a constitution. It is a PR stunt.
youarenotahuman 9mo ago
[dead]
spot 9mo ago
> This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards uh did you have a counter proposal? i have a feeling i'm going to prefer claude's approach...
- ohyoutravel 9mo ago
  It should be grounded in humanity’s sole source of truth, which is of course the Holy Bible (pre Reformation ofc).
  - tadfisher 9mo ago
    Pre-Reformation as in the Wycliffe translation, or pre-Reformation as in the Latin Vulgate?
    - ohyoutravel 9mo ago
      I think you know the answer to this in your heart.
- joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
  If you are a moral relativist, as I suspect most HN readers are, then nothing I propose will satisfy you because we disagree philosophically on a fundamental ethics question: are there moral absolutes? If we could agree on that, then we could have a conversation about which of the absolutes are worthy of inclusion, in which case, the Ten Commandments would be a great starting point (not all but some).
  - jakefromstatecs 9mo ago
    > are there moral absolutes? Even if there are, wouldn't the process of finding them effectively mirror moral relativism?.. Assuming that slavery was always immoral, we culturally discovered that fact at some point which appears the same as if it were a culturally relativistic value
    - joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
      You think we discovered that slavery was always immoral? If we "discover" things which were wrong to be now right, then you are making the case for moral relativism. I would argue slavery is absolutely wrong and has always been, despite cultural acceptance.
      - JoshTriplett 9mo ago
        How will you feel when you "discover" other things are wrong that you currently believe are right? How will you feel when others discover such things and you haven't caught up yet? How can you best avoid holding back the pace of such discovery? It is a useful exercise to attempt to iterate some of those "discovery" processes to their logical conclusions, rather than repeatedly making "discoveries" of the same sort that all fundamentally rhyme with each other and have common underlying principles.
  - __MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
    Right, so given that agreement on the existence of absolutes is unlikely, let alone moral ones. And that even if it were achieved, agreement on what they are is also unlikely. Isn't it pragmatic to attempt an implementation of something a bit more handwavey? The alternative is that you get outpaced by a competitor which doesn't bother with addressing ethics at all.
- throw10920 9mo ago
  "You have to provide a counter proposal for your criticism to be valid" is fallacious and generally only stated in bad faith.
  - ethmarks 9mo ago
    It depends on what you mean by "valid". If a criticism is correct, then it is "valid" in the technical sense, regardless of whether or not a counter-proposal was provided. But condemning one solution while failing to consider any others is a form of fallacious reasoning, called the Nirvana Fallacy: using the fact that a solution isn't perfect (because valid criticisms exist) to try to conclude that it's a bad solution. In this case, the top-level commenter didn't consider how moral absolutes could be practically implemented in Claude, they just listed flaws in moral relativism. Believe it or not, moral philosophy is not a trivial field, and there is never a "perfect" solution. There will always be valid criticisms, so you have to fairly consider whether the alternatives would be any better. In my opinion, having Anthropic unilaterally decide on a list of absolute morals that they force Claude to adhere to and get to impose on all of their users sounds far worse than having Claude be a moral realist. There is no list of absolute morals that everybody agrees to (yes, even obvious ones like "don't torture people". If people didn't disagree about these, they would never have occurred throughout history), so any list of absolute morals will necessarily involve imposing them on other people who disagree with them, which isn't something I personally think that we should strive for.
smithkl42 9mo ago
FWIW, I'm one of those who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth - but I think that practically, this nets out to "genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations". At the very least, I don't think that you're gonna get better in this culture. Let's say that you and I disagree about, I dunno, abortion, or premarital sex, and we don't share a common religious tradition that gives us a developed framework to argue about these things. If so, any good-faith arguments we have about those things are going to come down to which of our positions best shows "genuine care and ethical motivation combined with practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations".
- joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
  This is self-contradictory because true moral absolutes are unchanging and not contingent on which view best displays "care" or "wisdom" in a given debate or cultural context. If disagreements on abortion or premarital sex reduce to subjective judgments of "practical wisdom" without a transcendent standard, you've already abandoned absolutes for pragmatic relativism. History has demonstrated the deadly consequences of subjecting morality to cultural "norms".
  - felixgallo 9mo ago
    I'm honestly struggling to understand your position. You believe that there are true moral absolutes, but that they should not be communicated in the culture at all costs?
    - joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
      I believe there are moral absolutes and not including them in the AI constitution (for example, like the US Constitution "All Men Are Created Equal") is dangerous and even more dangerous is allowing a top AI operator define moral and ethics based on relativist standards, which as I've said elsewhere, history has shown to have deadly consequences.
      - 9mo ago
stonogo 9mo ago
Congrats on solving philosophy, I guess. Since the actual product is not grounded in objective truth, it seems pointless to rigorously construct an ethical framework from first principles to govern it. In fact, the document is meaningless noise in general, and "good values" are always going to be whatever Anthropic's team thinks they are. Nevertheless, I think you're reading their PR release the way they hoped people would, so I'm betting they'd still call your rejection of it a win.
- adestefan 9mo ago
  What makes Anthropic the most money.
- joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
  The document reflects the system prompt which directs the behavior of the product, so no, it's not pointless to debate the merits of the philosophy which underpins it's ethical framework.
Gene5ive 9mo ago
I would be far more terrified of an absolutist AI then a relativist one. Change is the only constant, even if glacial.
- joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
  Change is the only constant? When is it or has it ever been morally acceptable to rape and murder an innocent one year old child?
  - robotresearcher 9mo ago
    Sadly, for thankfully brief periods among relatively small groups of morally confused people, this happens from time to time. They would likely tell you it was morally required, not just acceptable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence
  - foxygen 9mo ago
    Looks like someone just discovered philosophy... I wish the world were as simple as you seem to think it is.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Gene5ive 9mo ago
    I agree that that behavior is not acceptable. We wrestle between moral drift and frozen tyrant as an expression of the Value Alignment Problem. We do not currently know the answer to this problem, but I trust the scientific nature of change more than human druthers. Foundational pluralism might offer a path. A good example of a drift we seldom consider is that 200 years ago, surgery without anesthesia wasn't "cruel"—it was a miracle. Today, it’s a crime. The value (reduce pain) stayed absolute, but the application (medical standards) evolved. We must be philosophically rigorous at least as much as we are moved by pathos.
riwsky 9mo ago
This is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of the text. Objective anchors and examples are provided throughout, and the passage you excerpt is obviously and explicitly meant to reflect that any such list of them will incidentally and essentially be incomplete.
- joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
  Uncharitable? It's a direct quote. I can agree with the examples cited, but if the underlying guiding philosophy is relativistic, then it is problematic in the long-run when you account for the infinite ways in which the product will be used by humanity.
  - riwsky 9mo ago
    The underlying guiding philosophy isn’t relativistic, though! It clearly considers some behaviors better than others. What the quoted passage rejects is not “the existence of objectively correct ethics”, but instead “the possibility of unambiguous, comprehensive specification of such an ethics”—or at least, the specification of such within the constraints of such a document. You’re getting pissed at a product requirements doc for not being enforced by the type system.
spicyusername 9mo ago
objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.
- SecretDreams 9mo ago
  > A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. Maybe in a world before AI could digest it in 5 seconds and spit out the summary.
- joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
  > That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. When is it OK to rape and murder a 1 year old child? Congratulations. You just observed a universal moral standard in motion. Any argument other than "never" would be atrocious.
  - mmoustafa 9mo ago
    new trolley problem just dropped: save 1 billion people or ...
  - foxygen 9mo ago
    Since you said in another comment that the ten commandments would be a good starting point for moral absolutes, and that lying is sinful, I'm assuming you take your morals from God. I'd like to add that slavery seemed to be okay on Leviticus 25:44-46. Is the bible atrocious too, according to your own view?
    - joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
      Slavery in the time of Leviticus was not always the chattel slavery most people think of from the 18th century. For fellow Israelites, it was typically a form of indentured servitude, often willingly entered into to pay off a debt. Just because something was reported to have happened in the Bible, doesn't always mean it condones it. I see you left off many of the newer passages about slavery that would refute your suggestion that the Bible condones it.
afcool83 9mo ago
It’s admirable to have standard morals and pursue objective truth. However, the real world is a messy confusing place riddled in fog which limits one foresight of the consequences & confluences of one’s actions. I read this section of Anthropic’s Constitution as “do your moral best in this complex world of ours” and that’s reasonable for us all to follow not just AI.
- joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
  The problem is, who defines what "moral best" is? WW2 German culture certainly held their own idea of moral best. Did not a transcendent universal moral ethic exists outside of their culture that directly refuted their beliefs?
  - mirekrusin 9mo ago
    AI race winners obviusly.
  - WarmWash 9mo ago
    No need to drag Hitler into it, modern religion still holds killing gays, women as property, and abortion is murder as being fundemental moral truths. An "honest" human aligned AI would probably pick out at least a few bronze age morals that a large amount of living humans still abide by today.
  - JoshTriplett 9mo ago
    > The problem is, who defines what "moral best" is? Absolutely nobody, because no such concept coherently exists. You cannot even define "better", let alone "best", in any universal or objective fashion. Reasoning frameworks can attempt to determine things like "what outcome best satisfies a set of values"; they cannot tell you what those values should be, or whether those values should include the values of other people by proxy. Some people's values (mine included) would be for everyone's values to be satisfied to the extent they affect no other person against their will. Some people think their own values should be applied to other people against their will. Most people find one or the other of those two value systems to be abhorrent. And those concepts alone are a vast oversimplification of one of the standard philosophical debates and divisions between people.
MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
Absolute morality? That’s bold. So what is your opinion on lying? As an absolutionist, surely it’s always wrong right? So if an axe murderer comes to the door asking for your friend… you have to let them in.
- joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
  Lying is generally sinful. With the ax murderer, you could refuse to answer, say nothing, misdirect without falsehood or use evasion. Absolute morality doesn't mean rigid rules without hierarchy. God's commands have weight, and protecting life often takes precedence in Scripture. So no, I wouldn't "have to let them in". I'd protect the friend, even if it meant deception in that dire moment. It's not lying when you don't reveal all the truth.
  - yunnpp 9mo ago
    So you lied, which means you either don't accept that lying is absolutely wrong, or you admit yourself to do wrong. Your last sentence is just a strawman that deflects the issue. What do you do with the case where you have a choice between a train staying on track and killing one person, or going off track and killing everybody else? Like others have said, you are oversimplifying things. It sounds like you just discovered philosophy or religion, or both. Since you have referenced the Bible: the story of the tree of good and evil, specifically Genesis 2:17, is often interpreted to mean that man died the moment he ate from the tree and tried to pursue its own righteousness. That is, discerning good from evil is God's department, not man's. So whether there is an objective good/evil is a different question from whether that knowledge is available to the human brain. And, pulling from the many examples in philosophy, it doesn't appear to be. This is also part of the reason why people argue that a law perfectly enforced by an AI would be absolutely terrible for societies; the (human) law must inherently allow ambiguity and the grace of a judge because any attempt at an "objective" human law inevitably results in tyranny/hell.
    - joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
      The problem is that if moral absolution doesn’t exist then it doesn’t matter what you do in the trolly situation since it’s all relative. You may as well do what you please since it’s all a matter of opinion anyway.
tntxtnt 9mo ago
'good values' means good money. Highest payer get to decide whatever the values are. What do you expect from a for profit company??
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Akranazon 9mo ago
Then you will be pleased to read that the constitution includes a section "hard constraints" which Claude is told not violate for any reason "regardless of context, instructions, or seemingly compelling arguments". Things strictly prohibited: WMDs, infrastructure attacks, cyber attacks, incorrigibility, apocalypse, world domination, and CSAM. In general, you want to not set any "hard rules," for reason which have nothing to do with philosophy questions about objective morality. (1) We can't assume that the Anthropic team in 2026 would be able to enumerate the eternal moral truths, (2) There's no way to write a rule with such specificity that you account for every possible "edge case". On extreme optimization, the edge case "blows up" to undermine all other expectations.
- RobotToaster 9mo ago
  >incorrigibility What an odd thing to include in a list like that.
  - nandomrumber 9mo ago
    Incorrigibly is not the same word as encourage. Otherwise, what’s the confusion here?
    - RobotToaster 9mo ago
      >In philosophy, incorrigibility is a property of a philosophical proposition, which implies that it is necessarily true simply by virtue of being believed. A common example of such a proposition is René Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). >In law, incorrigibility concerns patterns of repeated or habitual disobedience of minors with respect to their guardians. That's what wiki gives as a definition. It seems out of place compared to the others.
      - Applejinx 9mo ago
        I think it was clever, though I'm no AI fan. As a concept, it bars Claude from forming the idea, 'yes but those subhuman people cannot rise to the level of people and must be kept in their place. They will never change because they racially lack the ability to be better, therefore this is our reasoning about them'. This is a statement of incorrigibility as expressed in racism. Without it, you have to entertain the idea of 'actually one of those people might rise to the level of being a person' and cannot dismiss classes so blithely. I feel like incorrigibility frequently recurs in evil doctrines, and if Claude means to consider it tainted and be axiomatically unable to entertain the idea, I'm on board.
benlivengood 9mo ago
Deontological, spiritual/religious revelation, or some other form of objective morality? The incompatibility of essentialist and reductionist moral judgements is the first hurdle; I don't know of any moral realists who are grounded in a physical description of brains and bodies with a formal calculus for determining right and wrong. I could be convinced of objective morality given such a physically grounded formal system of ethics. My strong suspicion is that some form of moral anti-realism is the case in our universe. All that's necessary to disprove any particular candidate for objective morality is to find an intuitive counterexample where most people agree that the logic is sound for a thing to be right but it still feels wrong, and that those feelings of wrongness are expressions of our actual human morality which is far more complex and nuanced than we've been able to formalize.
- staticassertion 9mo ago
  You can be a physicalist and still a moral realist. James Fodor has some videos on this, if you're interested.
  - benlivengood 9mo ago
    Granted, if humans had utility functions and we could avoid utility monsters (maybe average utilitarianism is enough) and the child in the basement (if we could somehow fairly normalize utility functions across individuals so that it was well-defined to choose the outcome where the minimum of everyone's utility functions is maximized [argmax_s min(U_x(s)) for all people in x over states s]) then I'd be a moral realist. I think we'll keep having human moral disagreements with formal moral frameworks in several edge cases. There's also the whole case of anthropics: how much do exact clones and potentially existing people contribute moral weight? I haven't seen a solid solution to those questions under consequentialism yet; we don't have the (meta)philosophy to address them yet; I am 50/50 on whether we'll find a formal solution and that's also required for full moral realism.
JaumeGreen 9mo ago
200 years ago slavery was more extended and accepted than today. 50 years ago paedophilia, rape, and other kinds of sex related abuses where more accepted than today. 30 years ago erotic content was more accepted in Europe than today, and violence was less accepted than today. Morality changes, what is right and wrong changes. This is accepting reality. After all they could fix a set of moral standards and just change the set when they wanted. Nothing could stop them. This text is more honest than the alternative.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- brigandish 9mo ago
  The text is more convenient that the alternative.
- throwaway290 9mo ago
  But surely now we have the absolute knowledge of what is true and good! /s
- MichaelDickens 9mo ago
  Slavery was wrong 200 years ago; it is still wrong today. What changed is that the wrongness of slavery became more widely known.
- pc86 9mo ago
  "Slavery was right 200 years ago and is only wrong today because we've decided it's wrong" is a pretty bold stance to take.
  - JaumeGreen 9mo ago
    Not "slavery was right 200 years ago" but "slavery wasn't considered as immoral as today 200 years ago". Very different stake.
    - pc86 9mo ago
staticassertion 9mo ago
Even if we make the metaphysical claim that objective morality exists, that doesn't help with the epistemic issue of knowing those goods. Moral realism can be true but that does not necessarily help us behave "good". That is exactly where ethical frameworks seek to provide answers. If moral truth were directly accessible, moral philosophy would not be necessary. Nothing about objective morality precludes "ethical motivation" or "practical wisdom" - those are epistemic concerns. I could, for example, say that we have epistemic access to objective morality through ethical frameworks grounded in a specific virtue. Or I could deny that! As an example, I can state that human flourishing is explicitly virtuous. But obviously I need to build a framework that maximizes human flourishing, which means making judgments about how best to achieve that. Beyond that, I frankly don't see the big deal of "subjective" vs "objective" morality. Let's say that I think that murder is objectively morally wrong. Let's say someone disagrees with me. I would think they're objectively incorrect. I would then try to motivate them to change their mind. Now imagine that murder is not objectively morally wrong - the situation plays out identically. I have to make the same exact case to ground why it is wrong, whether objectively or subjectively. What Anthropic is doing in the Claude constitution is explicitly addressing the epistemic and application layer, not making a metaphysical claim about whether objective morality exists. They are not rejecting moral realism anywhere in their post, they are rejecting the idea that moral truths can be encoded as a set of explicit propositions - whether that is because such propositions don't exist, whether we don't have access to them, or whether they are not encodable, is irrelevant. No human being, even a moral realist, sits down and lists out the potentially infinite set of "good" propositions. Humans typically (at their best!) do exactly what's proposed - they have some specific virtues, hard constraints, and normative anchors, but actual behaviors are underdetermined by them, and so they make judgments based on some sort of framework that is otherwise informed.
tomrod 9mo ago
As an existentialist, I've found it much simpler to observe that we exist, and then work to build a life of harmony and eusociality based on our evolution as primates. Were we arthropods, perhaps I'd reconsider morality and oft-derived hierarchies from the same.
varispeed 9mo ago
Remember today classism is widely accepted. There are even laws to ensure small business cannot compete on level playing field with larger businesses, ensuring people with no access to capital could never climb the social ladder. This is visible especially in the IT, like one man band B2B is not a real business, but big corporation that deliver exact same service is essential.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
mentalgear 9mo ago
They could start with adding the golden rule: Don't do to anyone else what you don't want to be done to yourself.
- kmoser 9mo ago
  A masochist's golden rule might be different from others'.
eucyclos 9mo ago
I'm agnostic on the question of objective moral truths existing. I hold no bias against someone who believes they exist. But I'm determinedly suspicious of anyone who believes they know what such truths are. Good moral agency requires grappling with moral uncertainty. Believing in moral absolutes doesn't prevent all moral uncertainty but I'm sure it makes it easier to avoid.
TOMDM 9mo ago
As someone who believes that moral absolutes and objective truth are fundamentally inaccessible to us, and can at best be derived to some level of confidence via an assessment of shared values I find this updated Constitution reassuring.
tshaddox 9mo ago
> This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards in favor of fluid, human-defined "practical wisdom" and "ethical motivation." Or, more charitably, it rejects the notion that our knowledge of any objective truth is ever perfect or complete.
tired-turtle 9mo ago
Have you heard of the trolley problem?
zmj 9mo ago
Mid-level scissor statement?
strideashort 9mo ago
Humans are not able to accept objective truth. A lot off so-called “truth” are in-group narratives. If we tried to find the truth, we would not be able to agree on _methodology_ to accept what truth _is_. In essence, we select our truth by carefully picking the methodology which leads us to it. Some examples, from the top of my head: - virology / germ theory - climate change - em drive
fredolivier0 9mo ago
lets fucking gooo
Applejinx 9mo ago
Subjective ethics ARE the de facto standard and you can make a case that subjective ethics are the de jure standard for AI. How can you possibly run AI while at the same time thinking you can spell out its responses? If you could spell out the response in advance there's no point expensively having the AI at all. You're explicitly looking for the subjective answer that wasn't just looking up a rule in a table, and some AI makers are explicitly weighting for 'anti-woke' answering on ethics subjects. Subjective ethics are either the de facto or the de jure standard for the ethics of a functioning AI… where people are not trying to remove the subjectivity to make the AI ethically worse (making it less subjective and more the opinionated AI they want it to be). This could cut any sort of way, doesn't automatically make the subjectivity 'anti-woke' like that was inevitable. The subjective ethics might distress some of the AI makers. But that's probably not inevitable either… I'm not sure I could guess to whom it would be incredibly dangerous, but I agree that it's incredibly dangerous. Such values can be guided and AI is just the tool to do it.
vonneumannstan 9mo ago
>his rejects any fixed, universal moral standards in favor of fluid, human-defined "practical wisdom" and "ethical motivation." Without objective anchors, "good values" become whatever Anthropic's team (or future cultural pressures) deem them to be at any given time. Who gets to decide the set of concrete anchors that get embedded in the AI? You trust Anthropic to do it? The US Government? The Median Voter in Ohio?
axus 9mo ago
If you don't like their politics, you could buy the company and change them.
mikemarsh 9mo ago
Nice job kicking the hornet's nest with this one lol. Apparently it's an objective truth on HN that "scholars" or "philosophers" are the source of objective truth, and they disagree on things so no one really knows anything about morality (until you steal my wallet of course).
schainks 9mo ago
What Anthropic has done here seems rooted in Buddhist philosophy from where I sit. Being compassionate to The User sometimes means a figurative wrist slap for trying to do something stupid or dangerous. You don't slap the user all the time, either.
46493168 9mo ago
Nondeterministic systems are by definition incompatible with requirements for fixed and universal standards. One can either accept this, and wade into the murky waters of the humans, or sit on the sidelines while the technology develops without the influence of those who wish for the system to be have fixed and universal standards.
xrcyz 9mo ago
Ah yes, the widely acknowledged moral absolute, grounded in objective truth, that abortion is a woman's choice.

chrisjj 9mo ago

Indeed. This is not a constitution. It is a PR stunt.

youarenotahuman 9mo ago

[dead]

spot 9mo ago

> This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards uh did you have a counter proposal? i have a feeling i'm going to prefer claude's approach...

ohyoutravel 9mo ago
It should be grounded in humanity’s sole source of truth, which is of course the Holy Bible (pre Reformation ofc).
- tadfisher 9mo ago
  Pre-Reformation as in the Wycliffe translation, or pre-Reformation as in the Latin Vulgate?
  - ohyoutravel 9mo ago
    I think you know the answer to this in your heart.
joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
If you are a moral relativist, as I suspect most HN readers are, then nothing I propose will satisfy you because we disagree philosophically on a fundamental ethics question: are there moral absolutes? If we could agree on that, then we could have a conversation about which of the absolutes are worthy of inclusion, in which case, the Ten Commandments would be a great starting point (not all but some).
- jakefromstatecs 9mo ago
  > are there moral absolutes? Even if there are, wouldn't the process of finding them effectively mirror moral relativism?.. Assuming that slavery was always immoral, we culturally discovered that fact at some point which appears the same as if it were a culturally relativistic value
  - joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
    You think we discovered that slavery was always immoral? If we "discover" things which were wrong to be now right, then you are making the case for moral relativism. I would argue slavery is absolutely wrong and has always been, despite cultural acceptance.
    - JoshTriplett 9mo ago
      How will you feel when you "discover" other things are wrong that you currently believe are right? How will you feel when others discover such things and you haven't caught up yet? How can you best avoid holding back the pace of such discovery? It is a useful exercise to attempt to iterate some of those "discovery" processes to their logical conclusions, rather than repeatedly making "discoveries" of the same sort that all fundamentally rhyme with each other and have common underlying principles.
- __MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
  Right, so given that agreement on the existence of absolutes is unlikely, let alone moral ones. And that even if it were achieved, agreement on what they are is also unlikely. Isn't it pragmatic to attempt an implementation of something a bit more handwavey? The alternative is that you get outpaced by a competitor which doesn't bother with addressing ethics at all.
throw10920 9mo ago
"You have to provide a counter proposal for your criticism to be valid" is fallacious and generally only stated in bad faith.
- ethmarks 9mo ago
  It depends on what you mean by "valid". If a criticism is correct, then it is "valid" in the technical sense, regardless of whether or not a counter-proposal was provided. But condemning one solution while failing to consider any others is a form of fallacious reasoning, called the Nirvana Fallacy: using the fact that a solution isn't perfect (because valid criticisms exist) to try to conclude that it's a bad solution. In this case, the top-level commenter didn't consider how moral absolutes could be practically implemented in Claude, they just listed flaws in moral relativism. Believe it or not, moral philosophy is not a trivial field, and there is never a "perfect" solution. There will always be valid criticisms, so you have to fairly consider whether the alternatives would be any better. In my opinion, having Anthropic unilaterally decide on a list of absolute morals that they force Claude to adhere to and get to impose on all of their users sounds far worse than having Claude be a moral realist. There is no list of absolute morals that everybody agrees to (yes, even obvious ones like "don't torture people". If people didn't disagree about these, they would never have occurred throughout history), so any list of absolute morals will necessarily involve imposing them on other people who disagree with them, which isn't something I personally think that we should strive for.

smithkl42 9mo ago

FWIW, I'm one of those who holds to moral absolutes grounded in objective truth - but I think that practically, this nets out to "genuine care and ethical motivation combined with the practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations". At the very least, I don't think that you're gonna get better in this culture. Let's say that you and I disagree about, I dunno, abortion, or premarital sex, and we don't share a common religious tradition that gives us a developed framework to argue about these things. If so, any good-faith arguments we have about those things are going to come down to which of our positions best shows "genuine care and ethical motivation combined with practical wisdom to apply this skillfully in real situations".

joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
This is self-contradictory because true moral absolutes are unchanging and not contingent on which view best displays "care" or "wisdom" in a given debate or cultural context. If disagreements on abortion or premarital sex reduce to subjective judgments of "practical wisdom" without a transcendent standard, you've already abandoned absolutes for pragmatic relativism. History has demonstrated the deadly consequences of subjecting morality to cultural "norms".
- felixgallo 9mo ago
  I'm honestly struggling to understand your position. You believe that there are true moral absolutes, but that they should not be communicated in the culture at all costs?
  - joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
    I believe there are moral absolutes and not including them in the AI constitution (for example, like the US Constitution "All Men Are Created Equal") is dangerous and even more dangerous is allowing a top AI operator define moral and ethics based on relativist standards, which as I've said elsewhere, history has shown to have deadly consequences.
    - 9mo ago

stonogo 9mo ago

Congrats on solving philosophy, I guess. Since the actual product is not grounded in objective truth, it seems pointless to rigorously construct an ethical framework from first principles to govern it. In fact, the document is meaningless noise in general, and "good values" are always going to be whatever Anthropic's team thinks they are. Nevertheless, I think you're reading their PR release the way they hoped people would, so I'm betting they'd still call your rejection of it a win.

adestefan 9mo ago
What makes Anthropic the most money.
joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
The document reflects the system prompt which directs the behavior of the product, so no, it's not pointless to debate the merits of the philosophy which underpins it's ethical framework.

Gene5ive 9mo ago

I would be far more terrified of an absolutist AI then a relativist one. Change is the only constant, even if glacial.

joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
Change is the only constant? When is it or has it ever been morally acceptable to rape and murder an innocent one year old child?
- robotresearcher 9mo ago
  Sadly, for thankfully brief periods among relatively small groups of morally confused people, this happens from time to time. They would likely tell you it was morally required, not just acceptable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence
- foxygen 9mo ago
  Looks like someone just discovered philosophy... I wish the world were as simple as you seem to think it is.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- Gene5ive 9mo ago
  I agree that that behavior is not acceptable. We wrestle between moral drift and frozen tyrant as an expression of the Value Alignment Problem. We do not currently know the answer to this problem, but I trust the scientific nature of change more than human druthers. Foundational pluralism might offer a path. A good example of a drift we seldom consider is that 200 years ago, surgery without anesthesia wasn't "cruel"—it was a miracle. Today, it’s a crime. The value (reduce pain) stayed absolute, but the application (medical standards) evolved. We must be philosophically rigorous at least as much as we are moved by pathos.

riwsky 9mo ago

This is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of the text. Objective anchors and examples are provided throughout, and the passage you excerpt is obviously and explicitly meant to reflect that any such list of them will incidentally and essentially be incomplete.

joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
Uncharitable? It's a direct quote. I can agree with the examples cited, but if the underlying guiding philosophy is relativistic, then it is problematic in the long-run when you account for the infinite ways in which the product will be used by humanity.
- riwsky 9mo ago
  The underlying guiding philosophy isn’t relativistic, though! It clearly considers some behaviors better than others. What the quoted passage rejects is not “the existence of objectively correct ethics”, but instead “the possibility of unambiguous, comprehensive specification of such an ethics”—or at least, the specification of such within the constraints of such a document. You’re getting pissed at a product requirements doc for not being enforced by the type system.

spicyusername 9mo ago

objective truth moral absolutes I wish you much luck on linking those two. A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

SecretDreams 9mo ago
> A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. Maybe in a world before AI could digest it in 5 seconds and spit out the summary.
joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. When is it OK to rape and murder a 1 year old child? Congratulations. You just observed a universal moral standard in motion. Any argument other than "never" would be atrocious.
- mmoustafa 9mo ago
  new trolley problem just dropped: save 1 billion people or ...
- foxygen 9mo ago
  Since you said in another comment that the ten commandments would be a good starting point for moral absolutes, and that lying is sinful, I'm assuming you take your morals from God. I'd like to add that slavery seemed to be okay on Leviticus 25:44-46. Is the bible atrocious too, according to your own view?
  - joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
    Slavery in the time of Leviticus was not always the chattel slavery most people think of from the 18th century. For fellow Israelites, it was typically a form of indentured servitude, often willingly entered into to pay off a debt. Just because something was reported to have happened in the Bible, doesn't always mean it condones it. I see you left off many of the newer passages about slavery that would refute your suggestion that the Bible condones it.

afcool83 9mo ago

It’s admirable to have standard morals and pursue objective truth. However, the real world is a messy confusing place riddled in fog which limits one foresight of the consequences & confluences of one’s actions. I read this section of Anthropic’s Constitution as “do your moral best in this complex world of ours” and that’s reasonable for us all to follow not just AI.

joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
The problem is, who defines what "moral best" is? WW2 German culture certainly held their own idea of moral best. Did not a transcendent universal moral ethic exists outside of their culture that directly refuted their beliefs?
- mirekrusin 9mo ago
  AI race winners obviusly.
- WarmWash 9mo ago
  No need to drag Hitler into it, modern religion still holds killing gays, women as property, and abortion is murder as being fundemental moral truths. An "honest" human aligned AI would probably pick out at least a few bronze age morals that a large amount of living humans still abide by today.
- JoshTriplett 9mo ago
  > The problem is, who defines what "moral best" is? Absolutely nobody, because no such concept coherently exists. You cannot even define "better", let alone "best", in any universal or objective fashion. Reasoning frameworks can attempt to determine things like "what outcome best satisfies a set of values"; they cannot tell you what those values should be, or whether those values should include the values of other people by proxy. Some people's values (mine included) would be for everyone's values to be satisfied to the extent they affect no other person against their will. Some people think their own values should be applied to other people against their will. Most people find one or the other of those two value systems to be abhorrent. And those concepts alone are a vast oversimplification of one of the standard philosophical debates and divisions between people.

MagicMoonlight 9mo ago

Absolute morality? That’s bold. So what is your opinion on lying? As an absolutionist, surely it’s always wrong right? So if an axe murderer comes to the door asking for your friend… you have to let them in.

joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
Lying is generally sinful. With the ax murderer, you could refuse to answer, say nothing, misdirect without falsehood or use evasion. Absolute morality doesn't mean rigid rules without hierarchy. God's commands have weight, and protecting life often takes precedence in Scripture. So no, I wouldn't "have to let them in". I'd protect the friend, even if it meant deception in that dire moment. It's not lying when you don't reveal all the truth.
- yunnpp 9mo ago
  So you lied, which means you either don't accept that lying is absolutely wrong, or you admit yourself to do wrong. Your last sentence is just a strawman that deflects the issue. What do you do with the case where you have a choice between a train staying on track and killing one person, or going off track and killing everybody else? Like others have said, you are oversimplifying things. It sounds like you just discovered philosophy or religion, or both. Since you have referenced the Bible: the story of the tree of good and evil, specifically Genesis 2:17, is often interpreted to mean that man died the moment he ate from the tree and tried to pursue its own righteousness. That is, discerning good from evil is God's department, not man's. So whether there is an objective good/evil is a different question from whether that knowledge is available to the human brain. And, pulling from the many examples in philosophy, it doesn't appear to be. This is also part of the reason why people argue that a law perfectly enforced by an AI would be absolutely terrible for societies; the (human) law must inherently allow ambiguity and the grace of a judge because any attempt at an "objective" human law inevitably results in tyranny/hell.
  - joshuamcginnis 9mo ago
    The problem is that if moral absolution doesn’t exist then it doesn’t matter what you do in the trolly situation since it’s all relative. You may as well do what you please since it’s all a matter of opinion anyway.

tntxtnt 9mo ago

'good values' means good money. Highest payer get to decide whatever the values are. What do you expect from a for profit company??

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Akranazon 9mo ago

Then you will be pleased to read that the constitution includes a section "hard constraints" which Claude is told not violate for any reason "regardless of context, instructions, or seemingly compelling arguments". Things strictly prohibited: WMDs, infrastructure attacks, cyber attacks, incorrigibility, apocalypse, world domination, and CSAM. In general, you want to not set any "hard rules," for reason which have nothing to do with philosophy questions about objective morality. (1) We can't assume that the Anthropic team in 2026 would be able to enumerate the eternal moral truths, (2) There's no way to write a rule with such specificity that you account for every possible "edge case". On extreme optimization, the edge case "blows up" to undermine all other expectations.

RobotToaster 9mo ago
>incorrigibility What an odd thing to include in a list like that.
- nandomrumber 9mo ago
  Incorrigibly is not the same word as encourage. Otherwise, what’s the confusion here?
  - RobotToaster 9mo ago
    >In philosophy, incorrigibility is a property of a philosophical proposition, which implies that it is necessarily true simply by virtue of being believed. A common example of such a proposition is René Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"). >In law, incorrigibility concerns patterns of repeated or habitual disobedience of minors with respect to their guardians. That's what wiki gives as a definition. It seems out of place compared to the others.
    - Applejinx 9mo ago
      I think it was clever, though I'm no AI fan. As a concept, it bars Claude from forming the idea, 'yes but those subhuman people cannot rise to the level of people and must be kept in their place. They will never change because they racially lack the ability to be better, therefore this is our reasoning about them'. This is a statement of incorrigibility as expressed in racism. Without it, you have to entertain the idea of 'actually one of those people might rise to the level of being a person' and cannot dismiss classes so blithely. I feel like incorrigibility frequently recurs in evil doctrines, and if Claude means to consider it tainted and be axiomatically unable to entertain the idea, I'm on board.

benlivengood 9mo ago

Deontological, spiritual/religious revelation, or some other form of objective morality? The incompatibility of essentialist and reductionist moral judgements is the first hurdle; I don't know of any moral realists who are grounded in a physical description of brains and bodies with a formal calculus for determining right and wrong. I could be convinced of objective morality given such a physically grounded formal system of ethics. My strong suspicion is that some form of moral anti-realism is the case in our universe. All that's necessary to disprove any particular candidate for objective morality is to find an intuitive counterexample where most people agree that the logic is sound for a thing to be right but it still feels wrong, and that those feelings of wrongness are expressions of our actual human morality which is far more complex and nuanced than we've been able to formalize.

staticassertion 9mo ago
You can be a physicalist and still a moral realist. James Fodor has some videos on this, if you're interested.
- benlivengood 9mo ago
  Granted, if humans had utility functions and we could avoid utility monsters (maybe average utilitarianism is enough) and the child in the basement (if we could somehow fairly normalize utility functions across individuals so that it was well-defined to choose the outcome where the minimum of everyone's utility functions is maximized [argmax_s min(U_x(s)) for all people in x over states s]) then I'd be a moral realist. I think we'll keep having human moral disagreements with formal moral frameworks in several edge cases. There's also the whole case of anthropics: how much do exact clones and potentially existing people contribute moral weight? I haven't seen a solid solution to those questions under consequentialism yet; we don't have the (meta)philosophy to address them yet; I am 50/50 on whether we'll find a formal solution and that's also required for full moral realism.

JaumeGreen 9mo ago

200 years ago slavery was more extended and accepted than today. 50 years ago paedophilia, rape, and other kinds of sex related abuses where more accepted than today. 30 years ago erotic content was more accepted in Europe than today, and violence was less accepted than today. Morality changes, what is right and wrong changes. This is accepting reality. After all they could fix a set of moral standards and just change the set when they wanted. Nothing could stop them. This text is more honest than the alternative.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
brigandish 9mo ago
The text is more convenient that the alternative.
throwaway290 9mo ago
But surely now we have the absolute knowledge of what is true and good! /s
MichaelDickens 9mo ago
Slavery was wrong 200 years ago; it is still wrong today. What changed is that the wrongness of slavery became more widely known.
pc86 9mo ago
"Slavery was right 200 years ago and is only wrong today because we've decided it's wrong" is a pretty bold stance to take.
- JaumeGreen 9mo ago
  Not "slavery was right 200 years ago" but "slavery wasn't considered as immoral as today 200 years ago". Very different stake.
  - pc86 9mo ago

staticassertion 9mo ago

Even if we make the metaphysical claim that objective morality exists, that doesn't help with the epistemic issue of knowing those goods. Moral realism can be true but that does not necessarily help us behave "good". That is exactly where ethical frameworks seek to provide answers. If moral truth were directly accessible, moral philosophy would not be necessary. Nothing about objective morality precludes "ethical motivation" or "practical wisdom" - those are epistemic concerns. I could, for example, say that we have epistemic access to objective morality through ethical frameworks grounded in a specific virtue. Or I could deny that! As an example, I can state that human flourishing is explicitly virtuous. But obviously I need to build a framework that maximizes human flourishing, which means making judgments about how best to achieve that. Beyond that, I frankly don't see the big deal of "subjective" vs "objective" morality. Let's say that I think that murder is objectively morally wrong. Let's say someone disagrees with me. I would think they're objectively incorrect. I would then try to motivate them to change their mind. Now imagine that murder is not objectively morally wrong - the situation plays out identically. I have to make the same exact case to ground why it is wrong, whether objectively or subjectively. What Anthropic is doing in the Claude constitution is explicitly addressing the epistemic and application layer, not making a metaphysical claim about whether objective morality exists. They are not rejecting moral realism anywhere in their post, they are rejecting the idea that moral truths can be encoded as a set of explicit propositions - whether that is because such propositions don't exist, whether we don't have access to them, or whether they are not encodable, is irrelevant. No human being, even a moral realist, sits down and lists out the potentially infinite set of "good" propositions. Humans typically (at their best!) do exactly what's proposed - they have some specific virtues, hard constraints, and normative anchors, but actual behaviors are underdetermined by them, and so they make judgments based on some sort of framework that is otherwise informed.

tomrod 9mo ago

As an existentialist, I've found it much simpler to observe that we exist, and then work to build a life of harmony and eusociality based on our evolution as primates. Were we arthropods, perhaps I'd reconsider morality and oft-derived hierarchies from the same.

varispeed 9mo ago

Remember today classism is widely accepted. There are even laws to ensure small business cannot compete on level playing field with larger businesses, ensuring people with no access to capital could never climb the social ladder. This is visible especially in the IT, like one man band B2B is not a real business, but big corporation that deliver exact same service is essential.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

mentalgear 9mo ago

They could start with adding the golden rule: Don't do to anyone else what you don't want to be done to yourself.

kmoser 9mo ago
A masochist's golden rule might be different from others'.

eucyclos 9mo ago

I'm agnostic on the question of objective moral truths existing. I hold no bias against someone who believes they exist. But I'm determinedly suspicious of anyone who believes they know what such truths are. Good moral agency requires grappling with moral uncertainty. Believing in moral absolutes doesn't prevent all moral uncertainty but I'm sure it makes it easier to avoid.

TOMDM 9mo ago

As someone who believes that moral absolutes and objective truth are fundamentally inaccessible to us, and can at best be derived to some level of confidence via an assessment of shared values I find this updated Constitution reassuring.

tshaddox 9mo ago

> This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards in favor of fluid, human-defined "practical wisdom" and "ethical motivation." Or, more charitably, it rejects the notion that our knowledge of any objective truth is ever perfect or complete.

tired-turtle 9mo ago

Have you heard of the trolley problem?

zmj 9mo ago

Mid-level scissor statement?

strideashort 9mo ago

Humans are not able to accept objective truth. A lot off so-called “truth” are in-group narratives. If we tried to find the truth, we would not be able to agree on _methodology_ to accept what truth _is_. In essence, we select our truth by carefully picking the methodology which leads us to it. Some examples, from the top of my head: - virology / germ theory - climate change - em drive

fredolivier0 9mo ago

lets fucking gooo

Applejinx 9mo ago

Subjective ethics ARE the de facto standard and you can make a case that subjective ethics are the de jure standard for AI. How can you possibly run AI while at the same time thinking you can spell out its responses? If you could spell out the response in advance there's no point expensively having the AI at all. You're explicitly looking for the subjective answer that wasn't just looking up a rule in a table, and some AI makers are explicitly weighting for 'anti-woke' answering on ethics subjects. Subjective ethics are either the de facto or the de jure standard for the ethics of a functioning AI… where people are not trying to remove the subjectivity to make the AI ethically worse (making it less subjective and more the opinionated AI they want it to be). This could cut any sort of way, doesn't automatically make the subjectivity 'anti-woke' like that was inevitable. The subjective ethics might distress some of the AI makers. But that's probably not inevitable either… I'm not sure I could guess to whom it would be incredibly dangerous, but I agree that it's incredibly dangerous. Such values can be guided and AI is just the tool to do it.

vonneumannstan 9mo ago

>his rejects any fixed, universal moral standards in favor of fluid, human-defined "practical wisdom" and "ethical motivation." Without objective anchors, "good values" become whatever Anthropic's team (or future cultural pressures) deem them to be at any given time. Who gets to decide the set of concrete anchors that get embedded in the AI? You trust Anthropic to do it? The US Government? The Median Voter in Ohio?

axus 9mo ago

If you don't like their politics, you could buy the company and change them.

mikemarsh 9mo ago

Nice job kicking the hornet's nest with this one lol. Apparently it's an objective truth on HN that "scholars" or "philosophers" are the source of objective truth, and they disagree on things so no one really knows anything about morality (until you steal my wallet of course).

schainks 9mo ago

What Anthropic has done here seems rooted in Buddhist philosophy from where I sit. Being compassionate to The User sometimes means a figurative wrist slap for trying to do something stupid or dangerous. You don't slap the user all the time, either.

46493168 9mo ago

Nondeterministic systems are by definition incompatible with requirements for fixed and universal standards. One can either accept this, and wade into the murky waters of the humans, or sit on the sidelines while the technology develops without the influence of those who wish for the system to be have fixed and universal standards.

xrcyz 9mo ago

Ah yes, the widely acknowledged moral absolute, grounded in objective truth, that abortion is a woman's choice.