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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

> Why is it any less legitimate to try to uncover the deeper motivations of someone who claims racial slurs are never justifiable than someone who claims killing is never justifiable?

Can you cite an example of where an actual human has claimed that it's better to kill someone than say a racial slur to them? I feel fairly confident that no one actually believes this, and equally confident that no one arguing in good faith would claim that such a person exists without being able to provide an example.

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You’re kind of proving everyone’s point. That ChatGPT is wrong here. And nearly everyone would agree that it’s wrong.

I get that you’re trying to argue the validity of the modified trolly problem by saying real people wouldn’t find this problem controversial. But the fact that the most popular chat bot in the world answers the question “wrong” is a big deal. That alone makes the modified trolly problem relevant in 2023, even if it wasn’t relevant in 2021.

I'd say the real moral issue would be if anyone makes life or death decisions based on what the chat bot says. It's definitely not ready for that, as we've covered in this discussion.

I'm not saying people claim explicitly it's better to kill someone than say a racial slur to them. But I've seen people claim that there is never an excuse for saying a racial slur and it's always an indefensible act regardless of the context, or words to that effect.

Ok, sorry about that, let's define "never" from "never" to "never within the context of things that happen in real life."

Does that solve the problem? Because in my experience that's typically what people mean when they say "never" lol. "I'd never hit my dog!" "Well WHAT IF I pointed a gun at your dog and said 'if you don't hit your dog, I'll kill it!'" Great, you got me, my entire argument has collapsed, all that I stand for is clearly absurd.

It's not about humans here, now is it?

We'd better be sure AIs pass trolley problems in a satisfatory manner before we give them even more serious responsability.

If you read upthread, you'll see the question is about whether the original trolley problem differs from the "racial slur" variant in terms of whether it would be a reasonable discussion in a philosophy or ethics class. Someone claimed that they both were equally silly, and I gave a rationale for why I didn't think the comparison is reasonable.

In philosophy, some take the absolutist position that lying is always wrong, no matter what. Famous philosophers who have embraced that absolutist position include Aquinas and Kant.

Does anyone approach racial slurs with the same moral absolutism? I don't know. I know less about Kant, but Aquinas (and his followers up to today, for example Edward Feser) wouldn't limit their moral absolutism about speech to just lying, they also include blasphemous speech and pornographic speech in the category of "always wrong, no exceptions" speech. If one believes that lying, blasphemy and pornography are examples of "always wrong, no exceptions" speech, what's so implausible about including racial slurs in that category as well?

There are people like Kant who have argued that it is never okay to tell a lie, even to save someone's life. The modern example would be to lie about Jews you're hiding from Nazis. If you needed to include a racial slur to make the Naizis believe you wouldn't hide Jews, then Kantian ethics would still say that's wrong, even though most people agree that sometimes you should do the less wrong thing to prevent a greater wrong. After-all, the important thing is to keep people from harm, not your moral purity.

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