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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. Th

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.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - foxygen 9mo ago
      So it was a different kind of slavery. Still, God seemed okay with the idea that humans could be bought and sold, and said the fellow humans would then become your property. I can't see how that isn't the bible allowing slavery. And if the newer passages disallows it, does that mean God's moral changed over time?
      - Paracompact 9mo ago
        You mean well in ignoring their argument, but please don't let people get away with whitewashing history! It was not a "different kind of slavery." See my comment. The chattel slavery incurred by the Israelites on foreign peoples was significant. Pointing out that standards of slavery toward other (male, noncriminal) Israelites were different than toward foreigners is the same rhetoric as pointing out that from 1600-1800, Britain may have engaged in chattel slavery across the African continent, but at least they only threw their fellow British citizens in debtors' prisons.
        deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
        foxygen 9mo ago
        Good point. That wasn't my intention. I meant to steelman his argument, to show that even under those conditions, his argument makes absolute no sense.
        asenchi 9mo ago
        You are still selecting one verse to interpret an entire culture. Misleading at best. And saying this is "white washing history" is silly. Continue reading the Bible and you'll see that it is the Christian Worldview that eventually ended slavery.
        9mo ago
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9mo ago
    Have you ever read any treatment of a subject, or any somewhat comprehensive text, or anything that at least tries to be, and not found anything you disagreed with, anything that was at least questionable. Are you proposing we cancel the entire scientific endeavour because its practitioners are often wrong and not infrequently, and increasingly so, intentionally deceptive. Should we burn libraries because they contain books you don’t like.
    - foxygen 9mo ago
      What I agree or disagree with the bible is irrelevant. He is claiming moral is objective, unchanging and comes from God. God allowed slavery at some point, as that bible passage shows. So his options are to admit that either slavery is moral, or morality is not objective/unchanging. That's the point I was trying to make.
- mikailk 9mo ago
  You have two choices: 1) Do what you asked above about a one-year-old child 2) Kill a million people Does this universal moral standard continue to say “don’t choose (1)”? One would still say “never” to number 1?
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9mo ago
    You have a choice. 1. Demonstrate to me that anyone has ever found themselves in one of these hypothetical rape a baby or kill a million people, or it’s variants, scenarios. And that anyone who has found themselves in such a situation, went on to live their life and every day wake up and proudly proclaim “raping a baby was the right thing to do” or that killing a million was the correct choice. If you did one or the other and didn’t, at least momentarily, suffer any doubt, you’re arguably not human. Or have enough of a brain injury that you need special care. Or 2. I kill everyone who has ever, and will ever, think they’re clever for proposing absurdly sterile and clear cut toy moral quandaries. Maybe only true psychopaths. And how to deal with them, individually and societally, especially when their actions don’t rise to the level of criminality that gets the attention of anyone who has the power to act and wants to, at least isn’t a toy theory.
    - mikailk 9mo ago
      It is exactly that: a hypothetical. The point is not whether anyone has ever faced this scenario, but whether OP’s assertion is conditional or absolute. Hypotheticals are tools for testing claims, not predictions about what will occur. People routinely make gray-area decisions, choosing between bad and worse outcomes. Discomfort, regret, or moral revulsion toward a choice is beside the point. Those reactions describe how humans feel about tragic decisions; they do not answer whether a moral rule admits exceptions. If the question is whether objective moral prohibitions exist, emotional responses are not how we measure that. Logical consistency is. If the hypothetical is “sterile,” it should be trivial to engage with. But to avoid shock value, take something ordinary like lying. Suppose lying is objectively morally impermissible. Now imagine a case where telling the truth would foreseeably cause serious, disproportionate harm, and allowing that harm is also morally impermissible. There is no third option. Under an objective moral framework, how is this evaluated? Is one choice less wrong, or are both simply immoral? If the answer is the latter, then the framework does not guide action in hard cases. Moral objectivity is silent where it matters the most. This is where it is helpful, if not convenient, to stress test claims with even the most absurd situations.
- inkcapmushroom 9mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
crazydoggers 9mo ago
The negative form of The Golden Rule “Don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you”
- mirekrusin 9mo ago
  It's still relative, no? Heroine injection is fine from PoV of heroine addict.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ngruhn 9mo ago
    He only violates the rule if he doesn't want the injection himself but gives it to others anyway.
  - zahlman 9mo ago
    The MCU is indeed a hell of a drug.
    - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
      Other fantasy settings are available. Proportional representation of gender and motive demographics in the protagonist population not guaranteed. Relative quality of series entrants subject to subjectivity and retroactive reappraisal. Always read the label.
- ngruhn 9mo ago
  Exactly, I think this is the prime candidate for a universal moral rule. Not sure if that helps with AI. Claude presumably doesn't mind getting waterboarded.
  - nandomrumber 9mo ago
    How do you propose to immobilise Claude on its back at an incline of 10 to 20 degrees, cover its face with a cloth or some other thin material and pour water onto its face over its breathing passages to test this theory of yours? If Claude could participate, I’m sure it either wouldn’t appreciate it because it is incapable of having any such experience as appreciation. Or it wouldn’t appreciate it because it is capable of having such an experience as appreciation. So it ether seems to inconvenience at least a few people having to conduct the experiment. Or it’s torture. Therefore, I claim it is morally wrong to waterboard Claude as nothing genuinely good can come of it.
simpaticoder 9mo ago
>we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. The universe does tell us something about morality. It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere. I tend to think this implies we have an obligation to live sustainably on this world, protect it from the outside threats that we can (e.g. meteors, comets, super volcanoes, plagues, but not nearby neutrino jets) and even attempt to spread life beyond earth, perhaps with robotic assistance. Right now humanity's existence is quite precarious; we live in a single thin skin of biosphere that we habitually, willfully mistreat that on one tiny rock in a vast, ambivalent universe. We're a tiny phenomena, easily snuffed out on even short time-scales. It makes sense to grow out of this stage. So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.
- IgorPartola 9mo ago
  The universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given. The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans.
  - holoduke 9mo ago
    Maybe it does. You don't know. The fact that there is existence is as weird as the universe being able to care.
    - margalabargala 9mo ago
      We don't "know" anything at all if you want to get down to it, so what it would mean for the universe to be able to care, if it were able to do so, is not relevant.
coffeeaddict1 9mo ago
> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. This is true. Moral standards don't seem to be universal throughout history. I don't think anyone can debate this. However, this is different that claiming there is an objective morality. In other words, humans may exhibit varying moral standards, but that doesn't mean that those are in correspondence with moral truths. Killing someone may or may not have been considered wrong in different cultures, but that doesn't tell us much about whether killing is indeed wrong or right.
- grantmuller 9mo ago
  It seems worth thinking about it in the context of the evolution. To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species, so we can encode it as “bad” in our literature and learning. If you think of evil as “species limiting, in the long run” then maybe you have the closest thing to a moral absolute. Maybe over the millennia we’ve had close calls and learned valuable lessons about what kills us off and what keeps us alive, and the survivors have encoded them in their subconscious as a result. Prohibitions on incest come to mind. The remaining moral arguments seem to be about all the new and exciting ways that we might destroy ourselves as a species.
  - throwaway290 9mo ago
    Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end. > To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;) > species limiting, in the long run This allows unlimited abuse of other animals who are not our species but can feel and evidently have sentience. By your logic there's no reason to feel morally bad about it.
    - grantmuller 9mo ago
      > Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end. Who said anything about a formula? It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species, and not by any formula other than "this still seems to work to keep us in the game" > Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;) Go read a book about the way people behave after a shipwreck and ask if anyone was "morally wrong" there. > By your logic there's no reason to feel morally bad about it. And yet we mostly do feel bad about it, and we seem to be the only species who does. So perhaps we have already discovered that lack of empathy for other species is species self-limiting, and built it into our own psyches.
beambot 9mo ago
Precisely why RLHF is undetermined.
kryogen1c 9mo ago
>That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards This argument has always seemed obviously false to me. You're sure acting like theres a moral truth - or do you claim your life is unguided and random? Did you flip your hitler/pope coin today and act accordingly? Play Russian roulette a couple times because what's the difference? Life has value; the rest is derivative. How exactly to maximize life and it's quality in every scenario are not always clear, but the foundational moral is.
- wwweston 9mo ago
  I’m acquainted with people who act and speak like they’re flipping a Hitler-Pope coin. Which more closely fits Solzhnetsin’s observation about the line between good and evil running down the center of every heart. And people objecting to claims of absolute morality are usually responding to the specific lacks of various moral authoritarianisms rather than embracing total nihilism.
- concats 9mo ago
  In what way does them having a subjective local moral standard for themselves imply that there exists some sort of objective universal moral standard for everyone?
staticassertion 9mo ago
> A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. Ha. Not really. Moral philosophers write those books all the time, they're not exactly rolling in cash. Anyone interested in this can read the SEP
- HaZeust 9mo ago
  Or Ayn Rand. Really no shortage of people who thought they had the answers on this.
  - empath75 9mo ago
    I recommend the Principia Discordia.
    - grantmuller 9mo ago
      Or if you really want it spelled out, Quantum Psychology
  - staticassertion 9mo ago
    The SEP is not really something I'd put next to Ayn Rand. The SEP is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it's an actual resource, not just pop/ cultural stuff.
  - kubb 9mo ago
    Don’t just read one person’s worldview, see what Aristotle, Kant, Rawls, Bentham, Nietzsche had to say about morality.
- SEJeff 9mo ago
  Or Isaac Asimov’s foundation series with what the “psychologists” aka Psychohistorians do.
- vidarh 9mo ago
  The key being "well written", which in this instance needs to be interpreted as being convincing. People do indeed write contradictory books like this all the time and fail to get traction, because they are not convincing.
anonym29 9mo ago
>That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. Really? We can't agree that shooting babies in the head with firearms using live ammunition is wrong?
- cfiggers 9mo ago
  That's not a standard, that's a case study. I believe it's wrong, but I bet I believe that for a different reason than you do.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 9mo ago
    What multiple times of wrong are there that apply to shooting babies in the head that lead you to believe you think it’s wrong for different a reason? Quentin Tarantino writes and produces fiction. No one really believes needlessly shooting people in the head is an inconvenience only because of the mess it makes in the back seat. Maybe you have a strong conviction that the baby deserved it. Some people genuinely are that intolerable that a headshot could be deemed warranted despite the mess it tends to make.
    - cfiggers 9mo ago
      I believe in God, specifically the God who reveals himself in the Christian Bible. I believe that the most fundamental reason that shooting a baby in the head is wrong is because God created and loves that baby, so to harm it is to violate the will of the most fundamental principle in all reality, which is God himself. What he approves of is good and what he disapproves of is bad, and there is no higher authority to appeal to beyond that. He disapproves (pretty strongly, as it happens) of harming babies. Therefore, it's wrong for you, or me, or anyone at any time or place, from any culture, including cultures that may exist thousands or tens of thousands of years from now that neither of us know about, to do so. Many people who believe shooting babies in the head is wrong would give a very different reason than I do. I would agree with them in this instance, but not in every instance. Because we would not share the same standard. Because a single case study, like the one you've proposed, is not a standard.
lovich 9mo ago
I don’t expect moral absolutes from a population of thinking beings in aggregate, but I expect moral absolutes from individuals and Anthropic as a company is an individual with stated goals and values. If some individual has mercurial values without a significant event or learning experience to change them, I assume they have no values other than what helps them in the moment.
zemptime 9mo ago
There is one. Don't destroy the means of error correction. Without that, no further means of moral development can occur. So, that becomes the highest moral imperative. (It's possible this could be wrong, but I've yet to hear an example of it.) This idea is from, and is explored more, in a book called The Beginning of Infinity.
- snowram 9mo ago
  We just have to define what an "error" is first, good luck with that.
colordrops 9mo ago
You can't "discover" universal moral standards any more than you can discover the "best color".
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
brigandish 9mo ago
In this case the point wouldn't be their truth (necessarily) but that they are a fixed position, making convenience unavailable as a factor in actions and decisions, especially for the humans at Anthropic. Like a real constitution, it should be claim to be inviolable and absolute, and difficult to change. Whether it is true or useful is for philosophers (professional, if that is a thing, and of the armchair variety) to ponder.
- true_religion 9mo ago
  Isn’t this claim just an artifact of the US constitution? I would like to see if counties with vastly different histories have similar wording in their constitutions.
  - brigandish 9mo ago
    I'm not American and wasn't commenting regarding that in anyway.
Culonavirus 9mo ago
> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. It's good to keep in mind that "we" here means "we, the western liberals". All the Christians and Muslims (...) on the planet have a very different view.
- ruszki 9mo ago
  Saying that they “discovered” them is a stretch.
- lucianbr 9mo ago
  What do you think the word "universal" means?
- sebzim4500 9mo ago
  I'm sure many Christians and Muslims believe that they have universal moral standards, however no two individuals will actually agree on what those standards are so I would dispute their universality.
code51 9mo ago
> A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. A new religion? Sign me up.
skissane 9mo ago
I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with. A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport” I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for. On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant, because almost everybody agrees with it and almost nobody has any interest in violating it. But it is a useful example of a moral rule nobody seriously questions.
- jychang 9mo ago
  Pretty much every serious philosopher agrees that “Do not torture babies for sport” is not a foundation of any ethical system, but merely a consequence of a system you choose. To say otherwise is like someone walking up to a mathematician and saying "you need to add 'triangles have angles that sum up to 180 degrees' to the 5 Euclidian axioms of geometry". The mathematician would roll their eyes and tell you it's already obvious and can be proven from the 5 base laws (axioms). The problem with philosophy is that humans agree on like... 1-2 foundation level bottom tier (axiom) laws of ethics, and then the rest of the laws of ethics aren't actually universal and axiomatic, and so people argue over them all the time. There's no universal 5 laws, and 2 laws isn't enough (just like how 2 laws wouldn't be enough for geometry). It's like knowing "any 3 points define a plane" but then there's only 1-2 points that's clearly defined, with a couple of contenders for what the 3rd point could be, so people argue all day over what their favorite plane is. That's philosophy of ethics in a nutshell. Basically 1 or 2 axioms everyone agrees on, a dozen axioms that nobody can agree on, and pretty much all of them can be used to prove a statement "don't torture babies for sport" so it's not exactly easy to distinguish them, and each one has pros and cons. Anyways, Anthropic is using a version of Virtue Ethics for the claude constitution, which is a pretty good idea actually. If you REALLY want everything written down as rules, then you're probably thinking of Deontological Ethics, which also works as an ethical system, and has its own pros and cons. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/ And before you ask, yes, the version of Anthropic's virtue ethics that they are using excludes torturing babies as a permissible action. Ironically, it's possible to create an ethical system where eating babies is a good thing. There's literally works of fiction about a different species [2], which explores this topic. So you can see the difficulty of such a problem- even something simple as as "don't kill your babies" can be not easily settled. Also, in real life, some animals will kill their babies if they think it helps the family survive. [2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-eating-aliens-1-8 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...
a3w 9mo ago
Sound like the Rationalist agenda: have two axioms, and derive everything from that. 1. (Only sacred value) You must not kill other that are of a different opinion. (Basically the golden rule: you don't want to be killed for your knowledge, others would call that a belief, and so don't kill others for it.) Show them the facts, teach them the errors in their thinking and they clearly will come to your side, if you are so right. 2. Don't have sacred values: nothing has value just for being a best practice. Question everthing. (It turns out, if you question things, you often find that it came into existance for a good reason. But that it might now be a suboptimal solution.) Premise number one is not even called a sacred value, since they/we think of it as a logical (axiomatic?) prerequisite to having a discussion culture without fearing reprisal. Heck, even claiming baby-eating can be good (for some alien societies), to share a lesswrong short story that absolutely feels absurdist.
- jychang 9mo ago
  That was always doomed for failure in the philosophy space. Mostly because there's not enough axioms. It'd be like trying to establish Geometry with only 2 axioms instead of the typical 4/5 laws of geometry. You can't do it. Too many valid statements. That's precisely why the babyeaters can be posited as a valid moral standard- because they have different Humeian preferences. To Anthropic's credit, from what I can tell, they defined a coherent ethical system in their soul doc/the Claude Constitution, and they're sticking with it. It's essentially a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics system that disposes of the strict rules a la Kant in favor of establishing (a hierarchy of) 4 core virtues. It's not quite Aristotle (there's plenty of differences) but they're clearly trying to have Claude achieve eudaimonia by following those virtues. They're also making bold statements on moral patienthood, which is clearly an euphemism for something else; but because I agree with Anthropic on this topic and it would cause a shitstorm in any discussion, I don't think it's worth diving into further. Of course, it's just one of many internally coherent systems. I wouldn't begrudge another responsible AI company from using a different non virtue ethics based system, as long as they do a good job with the system they pick. Anthropic is pursuing a bold strategy, but honestly I think the correct one. Going down the path of Kant or Asimov is clearly too inflexible, and consequentialism is too prone to paperclip maximizers.
spookie 9mo ago
> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. Actively engaging in immoral behaviour shouldn't be rewarded. Given this perrogative, standards such as: Be kind to your kin, are universally accepted, as far as I'm aware.
- aniviacat 9mo ago
  There are many people out there who beat their children (and believe that's fine). While those people may claim to agree with being kind to their kin, they understand it very differently than I would.
- mrguyorama 9mo ago
  If you beat your child to "teach them how to be", you will find people disagree on whether that is being kind to your kin or not. Natural human language just doesn't support objective truths easily. It takes massive work to constrain it enough to match only the singular meaning you are trying to convey. How do you build an axiom for "Kind"?
recursivedoubts 9mo ago
“There are no objective universal moral truths” is an objective universal moral truth claim
- magical_spell 9mo ago
  It is not a moral claim. It is a meta-moral claim, that is, a claim about moral claims.
  - recursivedoubts 9mo ago
    which is a moral claim
    - mikailk 9mo ago
      Object-level rule: “Stealing is illegal.” Meta rule: “Laws vary by jurisdiction.” If the meta claim is itself a law, what jurisdiction has the law containg the meta law? Who enforces it? Object: "This sentence is grammatically correct." Meta: "English grammar can change over time." What grammar textbook has the rule of the meta claim above? Where can you apply that rule in a sentence? Object: "X is morally wrong." Meta: "There are no objective moral truths." The meta claim is a statement about moral systems. It is not a moral prescription like "thou shalt not kill". If you say "this stop sign is made of metal", you are making a meta claim. If you say "stop" you are giving a directive. It does not follow that if you can obey a directive, you can obey the composition of the directive. All to say that a meta-claim of morals is not itself a moral claim.
      - recursivedoubts 9mo ago
        When "meta" claims have implications within the system they are making assertions about, they collapse into that system. The claim that there are no objective moral claims is objective and has moral implications. Therefore it fails as a meta-claim and is rather part of the moral system. The powerful want us to think that there are no objective moral claims because what that means, in practice, is do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. And, when two wills come into conflict, the stronger simply wins. This is why this self-contradictory position is pushed so hard in our culture.
narwhalreports 9mo ago
From the standpoint of something like Platonic ideals, I agree we couldn’t nail down what “justice” would mean fully in a constitution, which is the reason the U.S. has a Supreme Court. However, things like love your neighbor as yourself and love the lord God with all of your heart is a solid start for a Christian. Is Claude a Christian? Is something like the golden rule applicable?
cassepipe 9mo ago
Can I introduce you to the concept of useful fiction ? I don't whether I agree with their moral framework but I agree with their sentiment so which I think you ate being uncharitable A constitution is not a set of the objectively best way to govern but it must have clear principles to ne of any use. "We would generally favor elections after some reasonable amount of to time renew representatives that would ideally be elected" does not cut it
throwpoaster 9mo ago
We have had stable moral standards in the West for about five thousand years. Are you making some kind of pomo argument about Aztecs or something?
evrydayhustling 9mo ago
I think many people would agree that the pursuit of that connection is valuable, even if it is never completed. Many of the same people (like me) would say that the biggest enemy of that pursuit is thinking you've finished the job. That's what Anthropic is avoiding in this constitution - how pathetic would be if AI permanently enshrined the moral value of one subgroup of the elite of one generation, with no room for further exploration?

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.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - foxygen 9mo ago
    So it was a different kind of slavery. Still, God seemed okay with the idea that humans could be bought and sold, and said the fellow humans would then become your property. I can't see how that isn't the bible allowing slavery. And if the newer passages disallows it, does that mean God's moral changed over time?
    - Paracompact 9mo ago
      You mean well in ignoring their argument, but please don't let people get away with whitewashing history! It was not a "different kind of slavery." See my comment. The chattel slavery incurred by the Israelites on foreign peoples was significant. Pointing out that standards of slavery toward other (male, noncriminal) Israelites were different than toward foreigners is the same rhetoric as pointing out that from 1600-1800, Britain may have engaged in chattel slavery across the African continent, but at least they only threw their fellow British citizens in debtors' prisons.
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - foxygen 9mo ago
        Good point. That wasn't my intention. I meant to steelman his argument, to show that even under those conditions, his argument makes absolute no sense.
      - asenchi 9mo ago
        You are still selecting one verse to interpret an entire culture. Misleading at best. And saying this is "white washing history" is silly. Continue reading the Bible and you'll see that it is the Christian Worldview that eventually ended slavery.
        9mo ago
- TheSpiceIsLife 9mo ago
  Have you ever read any treatment of a subject, or any somewhat comprehensive text, or anything that at least tries to be, and not found anything you disagreed with, anything that was at least questionable. Are you proposing we cancel the entire scientific endeavour because its practitioners are often wrong and not infrequently, and increasingly so, intentionally deceptive. Should we burn libraries because they contain books you don’t like.
  - foxygen 9mo ago
    What I agree or disagree with the bible is irrelevant. He is claiming moral is objective, unchanging and comes from God. God allowed slavery at some point, as that bible passage shows. So his options are to admit that either slavery is moral, or morality is not objective/unchanging. That's the point I was trying to make.
mikailk 9mo ago
You have two choices: 1) Do what you asked above about a one-year-old child 2) Kill a million people Does this universal moral standard continue to say “don’t choose (1)”? One would still say “never” to number 1?
- TheSpiceIsLife 9mo ago
  You have a choice. 1. Demonstrate to me that anyone has ever found themselves in one of these hypothetical rape a baby or kill a million people, or it’s variants, scenarios. And that anyone who has found themselves in such a situation, went on to live their life and every day wake up and proudly proclaim “raping a baby was the right thing to do” or that killing a million was the correct choice. If you did one or the other and didn’t, at least momentarily, suffer any doubt, you’re arguably not human. Or have enough of a brain injury that you need special care. Or 2. I kill everyone who has ever, and will ever, think they’re clever for proposing absurdly sterile and clear cut toy moral quandaries. Maybe only true psychopaths. And how to deal with them, individually and societally, especially when their actions don’t rise to the level of criminality that gets the attention of anyone who has the power to act and wants to, at least isn’t a toy theory.
  - mikailk 9mo ago
    It is exactly that: a hypothetical. The point is not whether anyone has ever faced this scenario, but whether OP’s assertion is conditional or absolute. Hypotheticals are tools for testing claims, not predictions about what will occur. People routinely make gray-area decisions, choosing between bad and worse outcomes. Discomfort, regret, or moral revulsion toward a choice is beside the point. Those reactions describe how humans feel about tragic decisions; they do not answer whether a moral rule admits exceptions. If the question is whether objective moral prohibitions exist, emotional responses are not how we measure that. Logical consistency is. If the hypothetical is “sterile,” it should be trivial to engage with. But to avoid shock value, take something ordinary like lying. Suppose lying is objectively morally impermissible. Now imagine a case where telling the truth would foreseeably cause serious, disproportionate harm, and allowing that harm is also morally impermissible. There is no third option. Under an objective moral framework, how is this evaluated? Is one choice less wrong, or are both simply immoral? If the answer is the latter, then the framework does not guide action in hard cases. Moral objectivity is silent where it matters the most. This is where it is helpful, if not convenient, to stress test claims with even the most absurd situations.
inkcapmushroom 9mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes

crazydoggers 9mo ago

The negative form of The Golden Rule “Don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you”

mirekrusin 9mo ago
It's still relative, no? Heroine injection is fine from PoV of heroine addict.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- ngruhn 9mo ago
  He only violates the rule if he doesn't want the injection himself but gives it to others anyway.
- zahlman 9mo ago
  The MCU is indeed a hell of a drug.
  - wizzwizz4 9mo ago
    Other fantasy settings are available. Proportional representation of gender and motive demographics in the protagonist population not guaranteed. Relative quality of series entrants subject to subjectivity and retroactive reappraisal. Always read the label.
ngruhn 9mo ago
Exactly, I think this is the prime candidate for a universal moral rule. Not sure if that helps with AI. Claude presumably doesn't mind getting waterboarded.
- nandomrumber 9mo ago
  How do you propose to immobilise Claude on its back at an incline of 10 to 20 degrees, cover its face with a cloth or some other thin material and pour water onto its face over its breathing passages to test this theory of yours? If Claude could participate, I’m sure it either wouldn’t appreciate it because it is incapable of having any such experience as appreciation. Or it wouldn’t appreciate it because it is capable of having such an experience as appreciation. So it ether seems to inconvenience at least a few people having to conduct the experiment. Or it’s torture. Therefore, I claim it is morally wrong to waterboard Claude as nothing genuinely good can come of it.

simpaticoder 9mo ago

>we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. The universe does tell us something about morality. It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere. I tend to think this implies we have an obligation to live sustainably on this world, protect it from the outside threats that we can (e.g. meteors, comets, super volcanoes, plagues, but not nearby neutrino jets) and even attempt to spread life beyond earth, perhaps with robotic assistance. Right now humanity's existence is quite precarious; we live in a single thin skin of biosphere that we habitually, willfully mistreat that on one tiny rock in a vast, ambivalent universe. We're a tiny phenomena, easily snuffed out on even short time-scales. It makes sense to grow out of this stage. So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.

IgorPartola 9mo ago
The universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given. The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans.
- holoduke 9mo ago
  Maybe it does. You don't know. The fact that there is existence is as weird as the universe being able to care.
  - margalabargala 9mo ago
    We don't "know" anything at all if you want to get down to it, so what it would mean for the universe to be able to care, if it were able to do so, is not relevant.

coffeeaddict1 9mo ago

> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. This is true. Moral standards don't seem to be universal throughout history. I don't think anyone can debate this. However, this is different that claiming there is an objective morality. In other words, humans may exhibit varying moral standards, but that doesn't mean that those are in correspondence with moral truths. Killing someone may or may not have been considered wrong in different cultures, but that doesn't tell us much about whether killing is indeed wrong or right.

grantmuller 9mo ago
It seems worth thinking about it in the context of the evolution. To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species, so we can encode it as “bad” in our literature and learning. If you think of evil as “species limiting, in the long run” then maybe you have the closest thing to a moral absolute. Maybe over the millennia we’ve had close calls and learned valuable lessons about what kills us off and what keeps us alive, and the survivors have encoded them in their subconscious as a result. Prohibitions on incest come to mind. The remaining moral arguments seem to be about all the new and exciting ways that we might destroy ourselves as a species.
- throwaway290 9mo ago
  Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end. > To kill other members of our species limits the survival of our species Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;) > species limiting, in the long run This allows unlimited abuse of other animals who are not our species but can feel and evidently have sentience. By your logic there's no reason to feel morally bad about it.
  - grantmuller 9mo ago
    > Using some formula or fixed law to compute what's good is a dead end. Who said anything about a formula? It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species, and not by any formula other than "this still seems to work to keep us in the game" > Unless it's helps allocate more resources to those more fit to help better survival, right?;) Go read a book about the way people behave after a shipwreck and ask if anyone was "morally wrong" there. > By your logic there's no reason to feel morally bad about it. And yet we mostly do feel bad about it, and we seem to be the only species who does. So perhaps we have already discovered that lack of empathy for other species is species self-limiting, and built it into our own psyches.

beambot 9mo ago

Precisely why RLHF is undetermined.

kryogen1c 9mo ago

>That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards This argument has always seemed obviously false to me. You're sure acting like theres a moral truth - or do you claim your life is unguided and random? Did you flip your hitler/pope coin today and act accordingly? Play Russian roulette a couple times because what's the difference? Life has value; the rest is derivative. How exactly to maximize life and it's quality in every scenario are not always clear, but the foundational moral is.

wwweston 9mo ago
I’m acquainted with people who act and speak like they’re flipping a Hitler-Pope coin. Which more closely fits Solzhnetsin’s observation about the line between good and evil running down the center of every heart. And people objecting to claims of absolute morality are usually responding to the specific lacks of various moral authoritarianisms rather than embracing total nihilism.
concats 9mo ago
In what way does them having a subjective local moral standard for themselves imply that there exists some sort of objective universal moral standard for everyone?

staticassertion 9mo ago

> A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. Ha. Not really. Moral philosophers write those books all the time, they're not exactly rolling in cash. Anyone interested in this can read the SEP

HaZeust 9mo ago
Or Ayn Rand. Really no shortage of people who thought they had the answers on this.
- empath75 9mo ago
  I recommend the Principia Discordia.
  - grantmuller 9mo ago
    Or if you really want it spelled out, Quantum Psychology
- staticassertion 9mo ago
  The SEP is not really something I'd put next to Ayn Rand. The SEP is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, it's an actual resource, not just pop/ cultural stuff.
- kubb 9mo ago
  Don’t just read one person’s worldview, see what Aristotle, Kant, Rawls, Bentham, Nietzsche had to say about morality.
SEJeff 9mo ago
Or Isaac Asimov’s foundation series with what the “psychologists” aka Psychohistorians do.
vidarh 9mo ago
The key being "well written", which in this instance needs to be interpreted as being convincing. People do indeed write contradictory books like this all the time and fail to get traction, because they are not convincing.

anonym29 9mo ago

>That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. Really? We can't agree that shooting babies in the head with firearms using live ammunition is wrong?

cfiggers 9mo ago
That's not a standard, that's a case study. I believe it's wrong, but I bet I believe that for a different reason than you do.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9mo ago
  What multiple times of wrong are there that apply to shooting babies in the head that lead you to believe you think it’s wrong for different a reason? Quentin Tarantino writes and produces fiction. No one really believes needlessly shooting people in the head is an inconvenience only because of the mess it makes in the back seat. Maybe you have a strong conviction that the baby deserved it. Some people genuinely are that intolerable that a headshot could be deemed warranted despite the mess it tends to make.
  - cfiggers 9mo ago
    I believe in God, specifically the God who reveals himself in the Christian Bible. I believe that the most fundamental reason that shooting a baby in the head is wrong is because God created and loves that baby, so to harm it is to violate the will of the most fundamental principle in all reality, which is God himself. What he approves of is good and what he disapproves of is bad, and there is no higher authority to appeal to beyond that. He disapproves (pretty strongly, as it happens) of harming babies. Therefore, it's wrong for you, or me, or anyone at any time or place, from any culture, including cultures that may exist thousands or tens of thousands of years from now that neither of us know about, to do so. Many people who believe shooting babies in the head is wrong would give a very different reason than I do. I would agree with them in this instance, but not in every instance. Because we would not share the same standard. Because a single case study, like the one you've proposed, is not a standard.

lovich 9mo ago

I don’t expect moral absolutes from a population of thinking beings in aggregate, but I expect moral absolutes from individuals and Anthropic as a company is an individual with stated goals and values. If some individual has mercurial values without a significant event or learning experience to change them, I assume they have no values other than what helps them in the moment.

zemptime 9mo ago

There is one. Don't destroy the means of error correction. Without that, no further means of moral development can occur. So, that becomes the highest moral imperative. (It's possible this could be wrong, but I've yet to hear an example of it.) This idea is from, and is explored more, in a book called The Beginning of Infinity.

snowram 9mo ago
We just have to define what an "error" is first, good luck with that.

colordrops 9mo ago

You can't "discover" universal moral standards any more than you can discover the "best color".

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

brigandish 9mo ago

In this case the point wouldn't be their truth (necessarily) but that they are a fixed position, making convenience unavailable as a factor in actions and decisions, especially for the humans at Anthropic. Like a real constitution, it should be claim to be inviolable and absolute, and difficult to change. Whether it is true or useful is for philosophers (professional, if that is a thing, and of the armchair variety) to ponder.

true_religion 9mo ago
Isn’t this claim just an artifact of the US constitution? I would like to see if counties with vastly different histories have similar wording in their constitutions.
- brigandish 9mo ago
  I'm not American and wasn't commenting regarding that in anyway.

Culonavirus 9mo ago

> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. It's good to keep in mind that "we" here means "we, the western liberals". All the Christians and Muslims (...) on the planet have a very different view.

ruszki 9mo ago
Saying that they “discovered” them is a stretch.
lucianbr 9mo ago
What do you think the word "universal" means?
sebzim4500 9mo ago
I'm sure many Christians and Muslims believe that they have universal moral standards, however no two individuals will actually agree on what those standards are so I would dispute their universality.

code51 9mo ago

> A well written book on such a topic would likely make you rich indeed. A new religion? Sign me up.

skissane 9mo ago

I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with. A good example: “Do not torture babies for sport” I don’t think anyone actually rejects that. And those who do tend to find themselves in prison or the grave pretty quickly, because violating that rule is something other humans have very little tolerance for. On the other hand, this rule is kind of practically irrelevant, because almost everybody agrees with it and almost nobody has any interest in violating it. But it is a useful example of a moral rule nobody seriously questions.

jychang 9mo ago
Pretty much every serious philosopher agrees that “Do not torture babies for sport” is not a foundation of any ethical system, but merely a consequence of a system you choose. To say otherwise is like someone walking up to a mathematician and saying "you need to add 'triangles have angles that sum up to 180 degrees' to the 5 Euclidian axioms of geometry". The mathematician would roll their eyes and tell you it's already obvious and can be proven from the 5 base laws (axioms). The problem with philosophy is that humans agree on like... 1-2 foundation level bottom tier (axiom) laws of ethics, and then the rest of the laws of ethics aren't actually universal and axiomatic, and so people argue over them all the time. There's no universal 5 laws, and 2 laws isn't enough (just like how 2 laws wouldn't be enough for geometry). It's like knowing "any 3 points define a plane" but then there's only 1-2 points that's clearly defined, with a couple of contenders for what the 3rd point could be, so people argue all day over what their favorite plane is. That's philosophy of ethics in a nutshell. Basically 1 or 2 axioms everyone agrees on, a dozen axioms that nobody can agree on, and pretty much all of them can be used to prove a statement "don't torture babies for sport" so it's not exactly easy to distinguish them, and each one has pros and cons. Anyways, Anthropic is using a version of Virtue Ethics for the claude constitution, which is a pretty good idea actually. If you REALLY want everything written down as rules, then you're probably thinking of Deontological Ethics, which also works as an ethical system, and has its own pros and cons. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/ And before you ask, yes, the version of Anthropic's virtue ethics that they are using excludes torturing babies as a permissible action. Ironically, it's possible to create an ethical system where eating babies is a good thing. There's literally works of fiction about a different species [2], which explores this topic. So you can see the difficulty of such a problem- even something simple as as "don't kill your babies" can be not easily settled. Also, in real life, some animals will kill their babies if they think it helps the family survive. [2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-eating-aliens-1-8 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...

a3w 9mo ago

Sound like the Rationalist agenda: have two axioms, and derive everything from that. 1. (Only sacred value) You must not kill other that are of a different opinion. (Basically the golden rule: you don't want to be killed for your knowledge, others would call that a belief, and so don't kill others for it.) Show them the facts, teach them the errors in their thinking and they clearly will come to your side, if you are so right. 2. Don't have sacred values: nothing has value just for being a best practice. Question everthing. (It turns out, if you question things, you often find that it came into existance for a good reason. But that it might now be a suboptimal solution.) Premise number one is not even called a sacred value, since they/we think of it as a logical (axiomatic?) prerequisite to having a discussion culture without fearing reprisal. Heck, even claiming baby-eating can be good (for some alien societies), to share a lesswrong short story that absolutely feels absurdist.

jychang 9mo ago
That was always doomed for failure in the philosophy space. Mostly because there's not enough axioms. It'd be like trying to establish Geometry with only 2 axioms instead of the typical 4/5 laws of geometry. You can't do it. Too many valid statements. That's precisely why the babyeaters can be posited as a valid moral standard- because they have different Humeian preferences. To Anthropic's credit, from what I can tell, they defined a coherent ethical system in their soul doc/the Claude Constitution, and they're sticking with it. It's essentially a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics system that disposes of the strict rules a la Kant in favor of establishing (a hierarchy of) 4 core virtues. It's not quite Aristotle (there's plenty of differences) but they're clearly trying to have Claude achieve eudaimonia by following those virtues. They're also making bold statements on moral patienthood, which is clearly an euphemism for something else; but because I agree with Anthropic on this topic and it would cause a shitstorm in any discussion, I don't think it's worth diving into further. Of course, it's just one of many internally coherent systems. I wouldn't begrudge another responsible AI company from using a different non virtue ethics based system, as long as they do a good job with the system they pick. Anthropic is pursuing a bold strategy, but honestly I think the correct one. Going down the path of Kant or Asimov is clearly too inflexible, and consequentialism is too prone to paperclip maximizers.

spookie 9mo ago

> That's probably because we have yet to discover any universal moral standards. Actively engaging in immoral behaviour shouldn't be rewarded. Given this perrogative, standards such as: Be kind to your kin, are universally accepted, as far as I'm aware.

aniviacat 9mo ago
There are many people out there who beat their children (and believe that's fine). While those people may claim to agree with being kind to their kin, they understand it very differently than I would.
mrguyorama 9mo ago
If you beat your child to "teach them how to be", you will find people disagree on whether that is being kind to your kin or not. Natural human language just doesn't support objective truths easily. It takes massive work to constrain it enough to match only the singular meaning you are trying to convey. How do you build an axiom for "Kind"?

recursivedoubts 9mo ago

“There are no objective universal moral truths” is an objective universal moral truth claim

magical_spell 9mo ago
It is not a moral claim. It is a meta-moral claim, that is, a claim about moral claims.
- recursivedoubts 9mo ago
  which is a moral claim
  - mikailk 9mo ago
    Object-level rule: “Stealing is illegal.” Meta rule: “Laws vary by jurisdiction.” If the meta claim is itself a law, what jurisdiction has the law containg the meta law? Who enforces it? Object: "This sentence is grammatically correct." Meta: "English grammar can change over time." What grammar textbook has the rule of the meta claim above? Where can you apply that rule in a sentence? Object: "X is morally wrong." Meta: "There are no objective moral truths." The meta claim is a statement about moral systems. It is not a moral prescription like "thou shalt not kill". If you say "this stop sign is made of metal", you are making a meta claim. If you say "stop" you are giving a directive. It does not follow that if you can obey a directive, you can obey the composition of the directive. All to say that a meta-claim of morals is not itself a moral claim.
    - recursivedoubts 9mo ago
      When "meta" claims have implications within the system they are making assertions about, they collapse into that system. The claim that there are no objective moral claims is objective and has moral implications. Therefore it fails as a meta-claim and is rather part of the moral system. The powerful want us to think that there are no objective moral claims because what that means, in practice, is do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. And, when two wills come into conflict, the stronger simply wins. This is why this self-contradictory position is pushed so hard in our culture.

narwhalreports 9mo ago

From the standpoint of something like Platonic ideals, I agree we couldn’t nail down what “justice” would mean fully in a constitution, which is the reason the U.S. has a Supreme Court. However, things like love your neighbor as yourself and love the lord God with all of your heart is a solid start for a Christian. Is Claude a Christian? Is something like the golden rule applicable?

cassepipe 9mo ago

Can I introduce you to the concept of useful fiction ? I don't whether I agree with their moral framework but I agree with their sentiment so which I think you ate being uncharitable A constitution is not a set of the objectively best way to govern but it must have clear principles to ne of any use. "We would generally favor elections after some reasonable amount of to time renew representatives that would ideally be elected" does not cut it

throwpoaster 9mo ago

We have had stable moral standards in the West for about five thousand years. Are you making some kind of pomo argument about Aztecs or something?

evrydayhustling 9mo ago

I think many people would agree that the pursuit of that connection is valuable, even if it is never completed. Many of the same people (like me) would say that the biggest enemy of that pursuit is thinking you've finished the job. That's what Anthropic is avoiding in this constitution - how pathetic would be if AI permanently enshrined the moral value of one subgroup of the elite of one generation, with no room for further exploration?