Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
> Jef Allbright writes:
>
> [Stathis Papaioannou]
>>> If slavery could be scientifically shown to promote the well-being of
>>> the species as a whole does that mean we
>>> should have slavery? Does it mean that slavery is good?
>>
>> Teaching that slavery is "bad" is similar to teaching that lying is
>> "bad". In each case it's a narrow over-simplification of a more general
>> principle of what works. Children are taught simplified modes of moral
>> reasoning to match their smaller context of understanding. At one end of
>> a moral scale are the moral instincts (experienced as pride, disgust,
>> etc.) that are an even more condensed form of "knowledge" of what worked
>> in the environment of evolutionary adaptation. Further up the scale are
>> cultural--including religious--laws and even the patterns of our
>> language that further codify and reinforce patterns of interaction that
>> worked well enough and broadly enough to be taken as principles of
>> "right" action.
>> Relatively few of us take the leap beyond the morality that was
>> inherited or given to us, to grasp the broader and more extensible
>> understanding of morality as patterns of behavior assessed as promoting
>> increasingly shared values over increasing scope. Society discourages
>> individual thinking about what is and what is not moral; indeed, it is a
>> defining characteristic that moral principles subsume both narrow self
>> interest and narrow situational awareness. For this reason, one can not
>> assess the absolute morality of an action in isolation, but we can
>> legitimately speak of the relative morality of a class of behavior
>> within context.
>>
>> Just as lying can clearly be the right action within a specific context
>> (imagine having one's home invaded and being unable, on moral grounds,
>> to lie to the invaders about where the children are hiding!), the moral
>> issue of slavery can be effectively understood only within a larger
>> context.
>> The practice of slavery (within a specific context) can be beneficial to
>> society; numerous examples exist of slavery contributing to the economic
>> good of a locale, and on a grander scale, the development of western
>> philosophy (including democracy!) as a result of freeing some from the
>> drudgery of manual labor and creating an environment conducive to deeper
>> thought. And as we seek to elucidate a general principle regarding
>> slavery, we come face-to-face with other instances of this class of
>> problem, including rights of women to vote, the moral standing of
>> sentient beings of various degrees of awareness (farm animals, the great
>> apes, artificial intelligences), and even the idea that all "men", of
>> disparate mental or emotional capability, are "created equal"? Could
>> there be a principle constituting a coherent positive-sum stance toward
>> issues of moral interaction between agents of inherently different
>> awareness and capabilities?
>>
>> Are we as a society yet ready to adopt a higher level of social
>> decision-making, "moral" to the extent that it effectively promotes
>> increasingly shared values over increasing scope, one that provides an
>> increasingly clear vision of effective interaction between agents of
>> diverse and varying capabilities, or are going to hold tightly to the
>> previous best model, one that comfortingly but childishly insists on the
>> fiction of some form of strict equality between agents? Are we mature
>> enough to see that just at the point in human progress where
>> technological development (biotech, nanotech, AI) threatens to
>> drastically disrupt that which we value, we are gaining the necessary
>> tools to organize at a higher level--effectively a higher level of
>> wisdom?
>
> Well, I think slavery is bad, even if it does help society - unless we
> were actually in danger of extiction without it or something. So yes,
> the moral rules must bend in the face of changing circumstances, but the
> point at which they bend will be different for each individual, and
> there is no objective way to define what this point would or should be.
>
> Slightly off topic, I don't see why we would design AI's to experience
> emotions such as resentment, anger, fear, pain etc.
John McCarthy says in his essay, "Making Robots Conscious of their Mental States"
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/consciousness/consciousness.html
> In fact, if we could
> reprogram our own minds at will, it would be a very different world.
> Suppose you were upset because you lost your job. You might decide to
> stay upset to the degree that it remains a motivating factor to look for
> other work, but not affect your sleep, ability to experience pleasure,
> etc. If you can't find work you might decide to downgrade your
> expectations, so that you are just as content having less money or a
> menial job, or just as content for the next six months but then have the
> motivation to look for interesting work kick in again, but without the
> confidence- and enthusiasm-sapping disappointment that comes from
> repeated failure to find work.
I think that's called a cocaine habit. :-)
Brent Meeker
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Received on Mon Dec 25 2006 - 00:06:45 PST