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Comment by joshuamcginnis | Hacker News Reader

If you are a moral relativist, as I suspect most HN readers are, then nothing I propose will satisfy you because we disagree philosophically on a fundamental ethics question: are there moral absolutes? If we could agree on that, then we could have a conversation about which of the absolutes are worthy of inclusion, in which case, the Ten Commandments would be a great starting point (not all but some).

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> are there moral absolutes?

Even if there are, wouldn't the process of finding them effectively mirror moral relativism?..

Assuming that slavery was always immoral, we culturally discovered that fact at some point which appears the same as if it were a culturally relativistic value

You think we discovered that slavery was always immoral? If we "discover" things which were wrong to be now right, then you are making the case for moral relativism. I would argue slavery is absolutely wrong and has always been, despite cultural acceptance.

How will you feel when you "discover" other things are wrong that you currently believe are right? How will you feel when others discover such things and you haven't caught up yet? How can you best avoid holding back the pace of such discovery?

It is a useful exercise to attempt to iterate some of those "discovery" processes to their logical conclusions, rather than repeatedly making "discoveries" of the same sort that all fundamentally rhyme with each other and have common underlying principles.

Right, so given that agreement on the existence of absolutes is unlikely, let alone moral ones. And that even if it were achieved, agreement on what they are is also unlikely. Isn't it pragmatic to attempt an implementation of something a bit more handwavey?

The alternative is that you get outpaced by a competitor which doesn't bother with addressing ethics at all.

> the Ten Commandments would be a great starting point (not all but some).

if morals are absolute then why exclude some of the commandments?

The Ten Commandments are commandments and not a list of moral absolutes. Not all of the commandments are relevant to the functioning of an ethical LLM. For example, the first commandment is "I am the Lord thy God. Thou shall not have strange gods before Me."

Why would it be a good starting point? And why only some of them? What is the process behind objectively finding out which ones are good and which ones are bad?

It's a good starting point because the commandments were given by God. And without God, there is no objective moral standard. Everything, including your opinion on my point of view, is subjective and relative. Whatever one would want to call "good" or "evil" would just be a matter of opinion.

Thats all very nice, but first prove god.

If you are done solving that question, next prove that the book you favor is from god. There's a lot of competition for this claim as you know.

> the Ten Commandments would be a great starting point (not all but some).

i think you missed "hubris" :)

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