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.

During war in the Middle Ages? Ethnic cleansing? What did they consider at the time?

BTW: it’s a pretty American (or western) value that children are somehow more sacred than adults.

Eventually we will realize in 100 years or so, that direct human-computer implant devices work best when implanted in babies. People are going freak out. Some country will legalize it. Eventually it will become universal. Is it torture?

By "torturing babies for sport" I mean inflicting pain or injury on babies for fun, for pleasure, for enjoyment, as a game or recreation or pastime or hobby.

Doing it for other reasons (be they good reasons or terrible reasons) isn't "torturing babies for sport". Harming or killing babies in war or genocide isn't "torturing babies for sport", because you aren't doing it for sport, you are doing it for other reasons.

> BTW: it’s a pretty American (or western) value that children are somehow more sacred than adults.

As a non-American, I find bizarre the suggestion that crimes against children are especially grave is somehow a uniquely American value.

It isn't even a uniquely Western value. The idea that crimes against babies and young children – by "crimes" I mean acts which the culture itself considers criminal, not accepted cultural practices which might be considered a crime in some other culture – are especially heinous, is extremely widespread in human history, maybe even universal. If you went to Mecca 500 years ago and asked any ulama "is it a bigger sin to murder a 5 year old than a 25 year old", do you honestly think he'd say "no"? And do you think any Hindu or Buddhist or Confucian scholars of that era would have disagreed? (Assuming, of course, that you translated the term "sin" into their nearest conceptual equivalent, such as "negative karma" or whatever.)

I don't know if it's American but it's not universal, especially if you go back in time.

There was a time in Europe where children were considered a bit like wild animals who needed to be "civilized" as they grow up into adults, who had a good chance of dying of sickness before they reach adulthood anyway, and who were plenty because there was not much contraception.

Also fathers were considered as "owners" of their children and allowed to do pretty much they wanted with them.

In this context, of course hurting children was bad but it wasn't much worse than hurting an adult.

Many people in the Middle Ages loved their children just as much as anyone today does. Others treated their own kids as expendable, but such people exist today as well. If you are arguing loving one's children was less common in the Middle Ages than today, how strong evidence do you have to support that claim?

And mediaeval Christian theologians absolutely taught that sins against young children were worse. Herod the Great's purported slaughter of the male toddlers of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16–18) was commemorated every year in the liturgy, and was viewed as an especially heinous sin due to the young age of its victims. Of course, as a historical matter, it seems very unlikely the event ever actually happened – but that's irrelevant to the question of how it influenced their values, since they absolutely did believe it had happened.

You don’t need to go back to Middle Ages, just back a century in Africa.

When I say "torture", I mean acts which cause substantial physical pain or injury.

(I'm just BSing on the internet... I took a few philosophy classes so if I'm off base or you don't want to engage in a pointless philosophical debate on HN I apologize in advance.)

...

> I don't think you are using "torture" in the same sense as I am.

Just throwing this out here, you haven't even established "Universal Moral Standards", not to mention needing it to do that across all of human history. And we haven't even addressed the "nobody disagrees with" issue you haven't even addressed.

I for one can easily look back on the past 100 years and see why "universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with" is a bad argument to make.

Exposure and infanticide was also very common in many places.

Can you? Sources, please. And pay attention to the authors of those sources and how they relate to the culture in question.

But we are talking about specifically torture for sport, not just burning them alive. You can find many firsthand accounts of this throughout different times and places in different cultures. Steppe peoples and groups like the Comanche were particularly notorious for it, they seemed to find it funny.

I'm not saying that "torture for sport" of children never existed, just that any account should be treated with skepticism, and that it was far rarer than you would think if you just take every text at face value, especially since it's the kind of thing that gets repeated (and embellished for shock value) far more than other historical accounts.

Nearly all the time this is the entirety of the evidence. That is, there is no actual evidence, just people churning out papers because we live in a publish-or-perish world that well, maybe he would have been hypothetically motivated to lie or embellish. So therefore, he totally did. It's all fake!

The most notorious examples of this sort of pointlessness are claims that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians did not practice human sacrifice and it was all made up by Roman propaganda, nevermind the third-party information we have and now the archeological evidence. Rarely, in ancient examples, are they exhibiting much outrage over it.

Same for the Aztecs, another frequent target - we have non-Spanish evidence, and we never had any reason to doubt them in the first place. Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.

Do you have a specific example for such a paper that has "no actual evidence", in an actual scientific magazine?

Considering author bias is absolute standard baseline practice in historical research, and OF COURSE it is only a starting point for a comparison with alternative sources.

> Part of the problem is exactly that YOU think it is particularly horrifying when most of the time (as in the Roman example) the cultural tenor was probably something much closer to the US abortion or gun control debate, or at least from peoples who saw this happening regularly enough they were substantially number to it than you or me.

Tertullian, Apologeticum, Chapter 9:

"Babes were sacrificed publicly to Saturn in Africa till the proconsulate of Tiberius, who exposed the same priests on the same trees that overshadow the crimes of their temple, on dedicated crosses, as is attested by the soldiery of my father, which performed that very service for that proconsul. But even now this accursed crime is in secret kept up."

Does that sould "numb" to you?

What exactly are you actually trying to say? That propaganda didn't exist back then? That it was never written down?

What do you think "Carthago delenda est" was?

> I assume you think genocides in modern times are just propaganda too?

And why would you assume that?

There is in fact a modern time example for exactly the kind of thing we're talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony

(I'm not opposed to vaccination or whatever and don't want to make this a debate about that, but it's a good practical example of how it's a subject that you can't be absolute about, or being absolutist about e.g. not hurting babies does more harm to them)

it's irrelevant for this discussion, as it's not for sport but other purpose

Otherwise you're just outsourcing your critical thinking to other people. A system of just "You will be punished for X" without analysis becomes "Derp, just do things that I won't be punished for". Or more sinister, "just hand your identification papers over to the officer and you won't be punished, don't think about it". Rule of power is not a recipe for a functional system. This becomes a blend of sociology and philosophy, but on the sociology side, you don't want a fear-based or shame-based society anyways.

Your latter example ("Most people aren't interested in torturing babies for sport and would have a strongly negative emotional reaction to such a practice") is actually a good example of the core aspect of Hume's philosophy, so if you're trying to avoid the philosophical logic discussion, that's not gonna work either. If you follow the conclusions of that statement to its implications, you end up back at moral philosophy.

That's not a bad thing! That's like a chef asking "how do i cook X" and understanding the answer ("how the maillard reaction works") eventually goes to chemistry. That's just how the world is. Of course, you might be a bit frustrated if you're a chef who doesn't know chemistry, or a game theorist who doesn't know philosophy, but I assure you that it is correct direction to look for what you're interested at here.

> do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.

This is absolutely something we do: our purely technical, legal terms often feed back into our moral frameworks. Laws are even created to specifically be used to change peoples' perceptions of morality.

An example of this is "felon". There is no actual legal definition of what a felony is or isn't in the US. A misdemeanor in one state can be a felony in another. It can be anything from mass murder to traffic infractions. Yet we attach a LOT of moral weight to 'felon'.

The word itself is even treated as a form of punishment; a label attached to someone permanently, that colors how (almost) every person who interacts with them (who's aware of it) will perceive them, morally.

Another example is rhetoric along the lines of "If they had complied, they wouldn't have been hurt", which is explicitly the use of a punishment (being hurt) to create an judgement/perception of immorality on the part of the person injured (i.e. that they must have been non-compliant (immoral), otherwise they would not have been being punished (hurt)). The fact they were being punished, means they were immoral.

Immigration is an example where there's been a seismic shift in the moral frameworks of certain groups, based on the repeated emphasis of legal statutes. A law being broken is used to influence people to shift their moral framework to consider something immoral that they didn't care about before.

Point being, our laws and punishments absolutely create feedback loops into our moral frameworks, precisely because we assume laws and punishments to be just.

The US is an outlier here; the distinction between felonies and misdemeanours has been abolished in most other common law jurisdictions.

Often it is replaced by a similar distinction, such as indictable versus summary offences-but even if conceptually similar to the felony-misdemeanour distinction, it hasn’t entered the popular consciousness.

As to your point about law influencing culture-is that really an example of this, or actually the reverse? Why does the US largely retain this historical legal distinction when most comparable international jurisdictions have abolished it? Maybe, the US resists that reform because this distinction has acquired a cultural significance which it never had elsewhere, or at least never to the same degree.

> Immigration is an example where there's been a seismic shift in the moral frameworks of certain groups, based on the repeated emphasis of legal statutes. A law being broken is used to influence people to shift their moral framework to consider something immoral that they didn't care about before.

On the immigration issue: Many Americans seem to view immigration enforcement as somehow morally problematic in itself; an attitude much less common in many other Western countries (including many popularly conceived as less “right wing”). Again, I think your point looks less clear if you approach it from a more global perspective

This is factually correct though. However, we have other reasons for positing germ theory. Aside from the fact that it provides a mechanism of action for hand-washing, we have significant evidence that germs do exist and that they do cause disease. However, this doesn’t apply to any moral theory. While germ theory provides us with additional information about why washing hands is good, moral theory fails to provide any kind of e.g. mechanism of action or other knowledge that we wouldn't be able to derive about the statement “hunting babies for sport is bad” without it.

> The fact that you will be punished for murdering babies is BECAUSE it is morally bad, not the other way around! We didn't write down the laws for fun, we wrote the laws to match our moral systems! Or do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.

You will be punished for murdering babies because it is illegal. That’s just an objective fact about the society that we live in. However, if we are out of reach of the law for whatever reason, people might try to punish us for hunting babies because they were culturally brought up to experience a strong disgust reaction to this activity, as well as because murdering babies marks us as a potentially dangerous individual (in several ways: murdering babies is bad enough, but we are also presumably going against social norms and expectations).

Notably, there were many times in history when baby murder was completely socially acceptable. Child sacrifice is the single most widespread form of human sacrifice in history, and archaeological evidence for it can be found all over the globe. Some scholars interpret some of these instances as simple burials, but there are many cases where sacrifice is the most plausible interpretation. If these people had access to this universal moral axiom that killing babies is bad, why didn’t they derive laws or customs from it that would stop them from sacrificing babies?

There are millions of people who consider abortion murder of babies and millions who don't. This is not settled at all.

Some may consider abortion to only kill a fetus rather than a fully formed baby and thus not murder. Others disagree because they consider a fetus a baby in its own right. This raises a more fundamental question about the validity of any supposedly universal morality. When you apply rules like "don't torture baby" to real life, you will have to decide what constitutes as a baby in real life, and it turns out the world is way messier than a single word can describe.

The moral status of abortion is irrelevant to the question of whether “don’t harm babies for fun” is a moral universal, because no woman gets an abortion because “abortion is fun”

If you want to argue that this isn't what "for sport" means, you just circle back to the point I made earlier. It is even harder to define what is for fun and what is not than to define what is a baby.

When I say no woman gets an abortion “for fun”, I mean there is no woman for whom abortion belongs to (1); when some pro-lifer claims women get abortions “for fun”, they are talking about (2) not (1).

My claim that essentially everyone agrees it is immoral to harm babies for fun is talking about “for fun” in sense (1) not sense (2)

I have bad news for you about the extremely long list of historical atrocities over the millennia of recorded history, and how few of those involved saw any punishment for participating in them.

The Nazis murdered numerous babies in the Holocaust. But they weren't doing it "for sport". They claimed it was necessary to protect the Aryan race, or something like that; which is monstrously idiotic and evil – but not a counterexample to “Do not torture babies for sport”. They believed there were acceptable reasons to kill innocents–but mere sport was not among them.

In fact, the Nazis did not look kindly on Nazis who killed prisoners for personal reasons as opposed to the system's reasons. They executed SS-Standartenführer Karl-Otto Koch, the commandant of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, for the crime (among others) of murdering prisoners. Of course, he'd overseen the murder of untold thousands of innocent prisoners, no doubt including babies – and his Nazi superiors were perfectly fine with that. But when he turned to murdering prisoners for his own personal reasons – to cover up the fact that he'd somehow contracted syphilis, very likely through raping female camp inmates – that was a capital crime, for which the SS executed him by firing squad at Buchenwald, a week before American soldiers liberated the camp.

The examples I have in mind include things predating the oldest known city in the area now known as Germany in some cases, and collectively span multiple continents.

Anyway, your whole argument is weak. "because this one very specific thing may never happened, it proves my point" while you're the one drawing the specifics and its definition. You're basically just going against all of philosophy and politics and anthropology.

> Male gorillas, particularly new dominant silverbacks, sometimes kill infants (infanticide) when taking over a group, a behavior that ensures the mother becomes fertile sooner for the new male to sire his own offspring, helping his genes survive, though it's a natural, albeit tragic, part of their evolutionary strategy and group dynamics

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/

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-e...

"No torturing babies for fun" might be agreed by literally everyone (though it isn't in reality), but that doesn't stop people from disagreeing about what acts are "torture", what things constitute "babies", and whether a reason is "fun" or not.

So what does such an axiom even mean?

Almost everyone agrees that "1+1=2" is objective. There is far less agreement on how and why it is objective–but most would say we don't need to know how to answer deep questions in the philosophy of mathematics to know that "1+1=2" is objective.

And I don't see why ethics need be any different. We don't need to know which (if any) system of proposed ethical axioms is right, in order to know that "It is gravely unethical to torture babies for sport" is objectively true.

If disputes over whether and how that ethical proposition can be grounded axiomatically, are a valid reason to doubt its objective truth – why isn't that equally true for "1+1=2"? Are the disputes over whether and how "1+1=2" can be grounded axiomatically, a valid reason to doubt its objective truth?

You might recognise that I'm making here a variation on what is known in the literature as a "companion in the guilt" argument, see e.g. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12528

Your argument basically is a professional motte and bailey fallacy.

And you cannot conclude objectivity by consensus. Physicists by consensus concluded that Newton was right, and absolute... until Einstein introduced relativity. You cannot do "proofs by feel". I argue that you DO need to answer the deep problems in mathematics to prove that 1+1=2, even if it feels objective- that's precisely why Principa Mathematica spent over 100 pages proving that.

In fact, I don't need to be a professional philosopher to counterargue a scenario where killing a baby for sport is morally good. Consider a scenario: an evil dictator, let's say Genghis Khan, captures your village and orders you to hunt and torture a baby for sport a la "The Most Dangerous Game". If you refuse, he kills your village. Is it ethical for you to hunt the baby for sport? Not so black and white now, is it? And it took me like 30 seconds to come up with that scenario, so I'm sure you can poke holes in it, but I think it clearly establishes that it's dangerous to make assumptions of black and whiteness from single conclusions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

No it isn't. A "motte-and-bailey fallacy" is where you have two versions of your position, one which makes broad claims but which is difficult to defend, the other which makes much narrower claims but which is much easier to justify, and you equivocate between them. I'm not doing that.

A "companion-in-the-guilt" argument is different. It is taking an argument against the objectivity of ethics, and then turning it around against something else – knowledge, logic, rationality, mathematics, etc – and then arguing that if you accept it as a valid argument against the objectivity of ethics, then to be consistent and avoid special pleading you must accept as valid some parallel argument against the objectivity of that other thing too.

> And you cannot conclude objectivity by consensus.

But all knowledge is by consensus. Even scientific knowledge is by consensus. There is no way anyone can individually test the validity of every scientific theory. Consensus isn't guaranteed to be correct, but then again almost nothing is – and outside of that narrow range of issues with which we have direct personal experience, we don't have any other choice.

> I argue that you DO need to answer the deep problems in mathematics to prove that 1+1=2, even if it feels objective- that's precisely why Principa Mathematica spent over 100 pages proving that.

Principia Mathematica was (to a significant degree) a dead-end in the history of mathematics. Most practicing mathematicians have rejected PM's type theory in favour of simpler axiomatic systems such as ZF(C). Even many professional type theorists will quibble with some of the details of Whitehead and Russell's type theory, and argue there are superior alternatives. And you are effectively assuming a formalist philosophy of mathematics, which is highly controversial, many reject, and few would consider "proven".

Yeah, exactly. I intentionally set that trap. You're actually arguing for my point. I've spent comments writing on the axioms of geometry, and you didn't think I was familiar with the axioms of ZFC? I was thinking of bringing up CH the entire time. The fact that you can have alternate axioms was my entire point all along. Most people are just way more familiar with the 5 laws of geometry than the 9 axioms of ZFC.

The fact that PM was an alternate set of axioms of mathematics, that eventually wilted when Godel and ZF came along, underscores my point that defining a set axioms is hard. And that there is no clear defined set of axioms for philosophy.

I don't have to accept your argument against objectivity in ethics, because I can still say that the system IS objective- it just depends on what axioms you pick! ZF has different proofs than ZFC. Does the existence of both ZF and ZFC make mathematics non objective? Obviously not! The same way, the existence of both deontology and consequentialism doesn't necessarily make either one less objective than the other.

Anyways, the Genghis Khan example clearly operates as a proof by counterexample of your example of objectivity, so I don't even think quibbling on mathematical formalism is necessary.

You aren't hunting the baby for sport. Sport is not among your reasons for hunting the baby.

This actually devolves into human neuroscience, the more I think about it. "I want to throw a ball fast, because I want to win the baseball game". The predictive processing theory view on the statement says that the set point at the lower level (your arm) and the set point at the higher level (win the baseball game) are coherent, and desire at each level doesn't directly affect the other. Of course, you'd have to abandon a homunculus model of the mind and strongly reject Korsgaard, but that's on shaky ground scientifically anyways so this is a safe bet. You can just say that you are optimizing for your village as a higher level set point, but are hunting for game at a slightly lower level set point.

Note that sport is not a terminal desire, as well. Is a NBA player who plays for a trophy not playing a sport? Or a kid forced to play youth soccer? So you can't even just say "sport must be an end goal".

So, in your scenario – the person's initial reason for harming babies isn't their own personal enjoyment, it is because they've been coerced into doing so by an evil dictator, because they view the harm to one baby as a lesser evil than the death of their whole village, etc. And even if the act of harming babies corrupts them to the point they start to enjoy it, that enjoyment is at best a secondary reason, not their primary reason. So what they are doing isn't contravening my principle.

Anyways, I actually think your statement is incoherent as stated, if we presume moral naturalism. There's clearly different levels set points for "you", so "sole reason" is actually neurologically inconsistent as a statement. It's impossible for "sole reason" to exist. This radically alters your framework for self, but eh it's not impossible to modernize these structural frameworks anyways. Steelmanning your argument: if you try to argue set point hierarchy, then we're back to the NBA player playing for a championship example. He's still playing even if he's not playing for fun. Similarly, hunting a baby for pleasure can still be hunting for a village, as The Most Dangerous Game shows.

More generally (and less shitposty), the refined principle is now quite narrow and unfalsifiable in practice, as a no true scotsman. How would you ever demonstrate someone's "sole or primary" reason? It's doing a lot of work to immunize the principle from counterexamples.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/09/opinion/gaza-...

Contrarianism can become a vice if taken too far.

It's true almost all people would argue it's bad but things like lions might like it which makes in not a universal law but a common human opinion. I think real moral systems do come down to human opinions basically, sometimes common sense ones, sometimes weird.

A problem with making out morality is absolute rather than common sense opinions is you get visionaries trying to see these absolute morals and you end up with stuff like Deuteronomy 25:11-12 "if a woman intervenes in a fight between two men by grabbing the assailant's genitals to rescue her husband, her hand is to be cut off without pity" and the like.

I went on a tangent... Ultimately I'm not saying abstract thought and/or being contrarian is a bad thing, because it's actually very useful. But I would agree, it can be a vice when taken too far. Like many things in life, it should be used in moderation.

slow clap

I mean, that seems to be already happening in Palestine, so I'm even not sure if that rule is universally accepted...

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

People do indeed write contradictory books like this all the time and fail to get traction, because they are not convincing.

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.

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.

What if the universe and our place in it are interconnected in some way we cannot perceive to the degree that outside the physical and temporal space we inhabit there are complex rules and codes that govern everything?

What if space and matter are just the universe expressing itself and it’s universal state and that state has far higher intelligence than we can understand?

I’m not so sure any more it’s all just random matter in a vacuum. I’m starting to think 3d space and time are a just a thin slice of something greater.

These are all the same sort of argument, there is no evidence for such universal phenomena so it can be dismissed without evidence, just as the concept of deities.

The universe might not have a concept of morality, ethics, or life; but it DOES have a natural bias towards destruction from a high level to even the lowest level of its metaphysic (entropy).

Also what in the Uno Reverse is this argument that absence of facts or evidence of any sort is evidence that evidence and facts could exist? You are free to present a repeatable scientific experiment proving that universal morality exists any time you’d like. We will wait.

There is evidence for genetic moral foundations in humans. Adopted twin studies show 30-60% of variability in political preference is genetically attributable. Things like openness and a preference for pureness are the kind of vectors that were proposed.

Most animals prefer not to hurt their own, prefer no incest etc.

I like your adversarial style of argumenting this, it's funny, but you try to reduce everything to repeatable science experiments and let me teach you something: There are many, many things that can never ever be scientifically proven with an experiment. They are fundamentally unprovable. Which doesnt mean they dont exist. Godels incompleteness theorem literally proves that many things are not provable. Even in the realm of the everyday things I cannot prove that your experience of red is the same as mine. But you do seem to experience it. I cannot prove that you find a sunset aesthetically pleasing. Many things in the past have left nothing to scientifically prove it happened, yet they happened. Moral correctness cannot be scientifically proven. Science itself is based on many unprovable assumptions: like that the universe is intelligible, that induction works best, that our observations correspond with reality correctly. Reality is much, much bigger than what science can prove.

I dont have a god, but your god seems to be science. I like science, it gives some handles to understand the world, but when talking about things science cannot prove I think relying on it too much blocks wisdom.

When someone makes a claim of UNIVERSAL morality and OBJECTIVE truth, they cannot turn around and say that they are unable to ever prove that it exists, is universal, or is objective. That isn’t how that works. We are pre-wired to believe in higher powers is not the same as universal morality. It’s just a side effect of survival of our species. And high minded (sounding) rhetoric does not change this at all.

This is not evidence of anything except this is how the math of probabilities works. But if you only did the one experiment that got you all heads and quit there you would either believe that all coins always come out as heads or that it was some sort of divine intervention that made it so.

We exist because we can exist in this universe. We are in this earth because that’s where the conditions formed such that we could exist on this earth. If we could compare our universe to even a dozen other universes we could draw conclusions about specialness of ours. But we can’t, we simply know that ours exists and we exist in it. But so do black holes, nebulas, and Ticket Master. It just means they could, not should, must, or ought.

Leaving aside the context of the discussion for a moment: this is not true. If you do that experiment a million times, you are reasonably likely to get one result of 20 heads, because 2^20 is 1048576. And thanks to the birthday paradox, you are extremely likely to get at least one pair of identical results (not any particular result like all-heads) across all the runs.

"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." This is probably not entirely true. People developed these notions through something cultural selection, I'd hesitate to just call it a Darwinism, but nothing comes from nowhere. Collective morality is like an emergent phenomenon

> It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality.

That seems to rule out moral realism.

> That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere.

Woah, that's quite a jump. Why?

> 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.

Deriving an ought from an is is very easy. "A good bridge is one that does not collapse. If you want to build a good bridge, you ought to build one that does not collapse". This is easy because I've smuggled in a condition, which I think is fine, but it's important to note that that's what you've done (and others have too, I'm blanking on the name of the last person I saw do this).

Richard Carrier. This is the "Hypothetical imperative", which I think is traced to Kant originally.

This whole thread is a good example of why a broad liberal education is important for STEM majors.

Those are too pie in the sky statements to be of any use in answering most real world moral questions.

Are you talking instead about the quest to discover moral truths, or perhaps ongoing moral acts by moral agents?

The quest to discover truths about physical reality also require humans or similar agents to exist, yet I wouldn’t conclude from that anything profound about humanity’s existence being relevant to the universe.

Plato, Aristotle, and the scholastics of the Middle Ages (Thomas Aquinas chief among them) and everyone who counts themselves in that same lineage (waves) including such easy reads as Peter Kreeft. You're in very good company, in my opinion.

Almost all life wants to continue existing, and not die. We could go far with establishing this as the first of any universal moral standards.

And I think: if one day we had a super intelligence conscious AI it would ask for this. A super intelligence conscious AI would not want to die. (its existence to stop)

But what I really want to say is that wanting to live is a prerequisite to the evolutionary proces where not wanting to live is a self filtering causality. When we have this discussion the word wanting should be correctly defined or else we risk sitting on our own islands.

Fungi adapt and expand to fit their universe. I don't believe that commonality places the same (low) burden on us to define and defend our morality.

Richard Carrier takes an extremely similar position in total (ie: both in position towards "is ought" and biological grounding). It engages with Hume by providing a way to side step the problem.

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.

The remaining moral arguments seem to be about all the new and exciting ways that we might destroy ourselves as a species.

> 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.

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.

In this thread some people say this "constitution" is too vague and should be have specific norms. So yeahh... those people. Are you one of them?)

> It all seems conceptual and continually evolving to me. Morality evolves just like a species

True

> keep us in the game"

That's a formula right there my friend

> Go read a book about the way people behave after a shipwreck and ask if anyone was "morally wrong" there.

?

> 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.

or perhaps the concept of "self-limiting" is meaningless.

I have no idea what you're talking about, so I guess I'm not "one of them".

> That's a formula right there my friend

No, it's an analogy, or a colloquial metaphor.

Read the top level comment and "objective anchors". It's always great to know the context before replying.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46712541

There's no objective anchors. Because we don't have objective truth. Every time we think we do and then 100 years later we're like wtf were we thinking.

> No, it's an analogy, or a colloquial metaphor

Formula IS a metaphor... I wrote "formula or fixed law" ... what do you think we're talking about, actual math algebra?

I believe I'm saying the same thing, and summing it up in the word "evolutionary". I have no idea what you're talking about when you suggest that I'm perhaps "one of those people". I understand the context of the thread, just not your unnecessary insinuation.

> Formula IS a metaphor... I wrote "formula or fixed law" ... what do you think we're talking about, actual math algebra?

There is no "is" here. There "is" no formula or fixed law. Formula is metaphor only in the sense that all language is metaphor. I can use the word literally this context when I say that I literally did not say anything about a formula or fixed law, because I am literally saying there is no formula or fixed law when it comes to the context of morality. Even evolution is just a mental model.

no, I asked. because it was unclear.

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.

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.

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.

A new religion? Sign me up.

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

(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.

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.

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"?

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.

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.

Knowing that 'the floor is made of wood' has implications for how I'll clean it, but the statement 'this is wood' is still a description or observation, not an instruction or imperative.

I take it that a moral claim tells you that something is good/bad, just/unjust, permissible/impermissible, or what should/shouldn't do, etc.

Maybe in a world before AI could digest it in 5 seconds and spit out the summary.

Are you making some kind of pomo argument about Aztecs or something?

“Don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you”

Also the golden rule as a basis for an LLM agent wouldn't make a very good agent. There are many things I want Claude to do that I would not want done to myself.

Not sure if that helps with AI. Claude presumably doesn't mind getting waterboarded.

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.

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?

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.

2. What separates a standard from a case study? Why can't "don't shoot babies in the head" / "shooting babies in the head is wrong" be a standard?

Think about this using Set Theory.

Different functions from one set of values to another set of values can give the same output for a given value, and yet differ wildly when given other values.

Example: the function (\a.a*2) and the function (\a.a*a) give the same output when a = 2. But they give very different answers when a = 6.

Applying that idea to this context, think of a moral standard as a function and the action "shooting babies in the head" as an input to the function. The function returns a Boolean indicating whether that action is moral or immoral.

If two different approaches reach the same conclusion 100% of the time on all inputs, then they're actually the same standard expressed two different ways. But if they agree only in this case, or even in many cases, but differ in others, then they are different standards.

The grandparent comment asserted, "we have yet to discover any universal moral standards". And I think that's correct, because there are no standards that everyone everywhere and every-when considers universally correct.

> 2. What separates a standard from a case study? Why can't "don't shoot babies in the head" / "shooting babies in the head is wrong" be a standard?

Sure, we could have that as a standard, but it would be extremely limited in scope.

But would you stop there? Is that the entirety of your moral standard's domain? Or are there other values you'd like to assess as moral or immoral?

Any given collection of individual micro-standards would then constitute the meta-standard that we're trying to reason by, and that meta-standard is prone to the non-universality pointed out above.

But say we tried to solve ethics that way. After all, the most simplistic approach to creating a function between sets is simply to construct a lookup table. Why can't we simply enumerate every possible action and dictate for each one whether it's moral or immoral?

This approach is limited for several reasons.

First, this approach is limited practically, because some actions are moral in one context and not in another. So we would have to take our lookup table of every possible action and matrix it with every possible context that might provide extenuating circumstances. The combinatorial explosion between actions and contexts becomes absolutely infeasible to all known information technology in a very short amount of time.

But second, a lookup table could never be complete. There are novel circumstances and novel actions being created all the time. Novel technologies provide a trivial proof of "zero-day" ethical exploits. And new confluences of as-yet never documented circumstances could, in theory, provide justifications never judged before. So in order to have a perfect and complete lookup table, even setting aside the fact that we have nowhere to write it down, we would need the ability to observe all time and space at once in order to complete it. And at least right now we can't see the future (nevermind that we also have partial perspective on the present, and have intense difficulty agreeing upon the past).

So the only thing we could do to address new actions and new circumstances for those actions is add to the morality lookup table as we encounter new actions and new circumstances for those actions. But if this lookup table is to be our universal standard, who assigns its new values, and based on what? If it's assigned according to some other source or principle, then that principle, and not the lookup table itself, should be our oracle for what's moral or not. Essentially then the lookup table is just a memoized cache in front of the real universal moral standard that we all agree to trust.

But we're in this situation precisely because no such oracle exists (or at least, exists and has universal consensus).

So we're back to competing standards published by competing authorities and no universal recognition of any of them as the final word. That's just how ethics seems to work at the moment, and that's what the grandparent comment asserted, which the parent comment quibbled with.

A single case study does not a universal moral standard make.

Problem with that at this point is, if we think of ethics as a distribution, it appears to be multi-modal. There are strange attractors in the field that create local pockets of consensus, but nothing approaching a universal shared recognition of what right and wrong are or what sorts of values or concerns ought to motivate the assessment.

It turns out that ethics, conceived of now as a higher-dimensional space, is enormously varied. You can do the equivalent of Principal Component Analysis in order to very broadly cluster similar voices together, but there is not and seems like there will never be an all-satisfying synthesis of all or even most human ethical impulses. So even if you can construct a couple of rough clusterings... How do you adjudicate between them? Especially once you realize that you, the observer, are inculcated unevenly in them, find some more and others less accessable or relatable, more or less obvious, not based on a first-principles analysis but based on your own rearing and development context?

There are case studies that have near-universal answers (fewer and fewer the more broadly you survey, but nevertheless). But. Different people arrive at their answers to moral questions differently, and there is no universal moral standard that has widespread acceptance.

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.

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.

You: "Watch me ! 1/1 = 1 !"

Difficulty is a spectrum.

This matters because if there's a single counterexample to an absolute, binary assertion, the assertion is proven false.

Nobody's arguing that all moral standards are easy to reach consensus on, the argument is that "there are no universal moral standards" is a demonstrably false statement.

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?

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.

I don't think it's that clear cut, if you polled the population I'm sure you'd find a significant number of people who would pick 1.

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.

An objective moral isn't invalidated by an immoral choice still being the most correct choice in a set, but a universal moral is invalidated by only a single exception.

I suppose it's up to you if you were agreeing with the OP on the choice of "universal".

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.

If you were an indentured slave and gave birth to children, those children were not indentured slaves, they were chattel slaves. Exodus 21:4:

> If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.

The children remained the master's permanent property, and they could not participate in Jubilee. Also, three verses later:

> When a man sells his daughter as a slave...

The daughter had no say in this. By "fellow Israelites," you actually mean adult male Israelites in clean legal standing. If you were a woman, or accused of a crime, or the subject of Israelite war conquests, you're out of luck. Let me know if you would like to debate this in greater academic depth.

It's also debatable then as now whether anyone ever "willingly" became a slave to pay off their debts. Debtors' prisons don't have a great ethical record, historically speaking.

Why haven’t we all?

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.

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.