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Comment by mentalgear | Hacker News Reader

Agree with many of the points. However one at the root of it all seems easily definable - if we only want.

> we can’t agree on a shared ethical framework among ourselves

The Golden Rule: the principle of treating others as you would like to be treated yourself. It is a fundamental ethical guideline found in many religions and philosophies throughout history so there is already a huge consensus across time and cultures around it.

I never found anyone successfully argue against it.

PS: the sociopath argument is not valid, since it's just an outlier. Every rule has it's exceptions that need to be kept in check. Even though sometimes I think maybe the state of the world attests to the fact that the majority of us didn't successfully keep the sociopathic outliers in check.

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The core question of ethics as posed by the ancient Greeks is something like "what is the best way to lead your life".

"... to accomplish what?", is a damn reasonable follow-up, and ends (telos) is something the same Greeks discussed quite extensively.

Modern treatments have tried to skip over this discussion, and derive moral arguments not based on an explicit ends. Problem being they still smuggle in varying choices of ultimate ends in these arguments, without clearly spelling them out, opting to hand-wave about preferences instead.

As such this question is often glossed over in modern ethical discussion, and disagreements about moral ends is the crux of what leads to differing conclusions about what is ethical.

Is it to maximized your own happiness like Aristotle would argue, or the prosperity of the state, or the salvation of the soul, or to maximize honor, or to minimize suffering, or to minimize injustice, or to elevate the soul, or to maximize shareholder value, or to make the as world beautiful as possible, or something else?

If you fundamentally disagree about what our goal should be, you're very unlikely to agree on the means to accomplish the goal.

Lets offer you a "trade up" on that "Golden Rule"

In order of priority, if possible while maintaining the health and safety of yourself and your loved ones:

- Treat others as THEY wish to be treated

- Treat others as YOU would wish to be treated in their situation

- Treat others with as much kindness and compassion as you can safely afford

When we are safe, we can do BETTER than the Golden Rule. We also have to admit that safety is a requirement that changes expectations.

I have to give credit to Dennis E Taylor's "Heaven's River" for this root idea.

> I never found anyone successfully argue against it.

I think what you mean is you've never found a rule you personally prefer more, based purely on vibes. Which is all moral knowledge can ever be.

It's easy to argue against the golden rule anyway, from many angles, depending on your first principles.

The simplest is: How I would like to be treated is not necessarily how they would like to be treated.

The better version of this principle is John Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance".

In this "original position", their position behind the "veil of ignorance" prevents everyone from knowing their ethnicity, social status, gender, and (crucially in Rawls's formulation) their or anyone else's ideas of how to lead a good life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position

This is as useful as doing physics with spherical cows.

Elaborate

But it is the same most of the time for most humans. Should I take this close parking spot or let the old lady behind me take it? Consider it in the spirit not the letter of the law.

Aye. I've sometimes heard treating others like you want to be treated framed as the silver rule. The golden rule being treating others how they want to be treated.

Both have problems.

Most of MAGA is "thread on me daddy", so I think you really got a point here.

There are very large portions of societies that believe class systems are the way it should be, even if they aren't on the top, as long as they have someone below them.

>The Golden Rule: the principle of treating others as you would like to be treated yourself. It is a fundamental ethical guideline found in many religions and philosophies throughout history so there is already a huge consensus across time and cultures around it.

The rules we go by are based on our strengths and weaknesses. They can at most apply to ourselves, and to other forms of life that share certain things with us. Such as feeling pain, needing to sleep, to eat, needing help, needing to breathe air, these generate what we feel as "fear" based on biology etc. You cannot throw these kinds of values on AI, or AGI, as it will possess a wildly different set of strengths and weaknesses to us humans.

You can barely throw these rules on humans as the first thing we do is dehumanize anything that's not in some very tiny classification (depending on the scope of our power, the more powerful we are the smaller it gets).

The Golden Rule is a good starting point if you have a sense of self along with a sense of what you want or need. AI doesn't even have these concepts as of yet. Even the concept of empathy requires this as well. We need to figure out how to instill a sense of self and others for AI to be able to have a morality.

You’re assuming people have similar desires.

Even in human relations it’s dangerous. I for one don’t want to be treated the same way someone into BDSM wants to be treated. I don’t want to avoid cooking or turning the lights on (or off!) on a Friday night but others are quite happy with that.

If you assign that morality to a species that isn’t the same as you that’s a problem. My guinea pig wants nothing more from like than hay, nuggets, sole room to run around and some shelter from scary shapes. If they were in charge of the world life would be very different.

“Live and let live” might be a similar theme but not as problematic, but then how do you define “living”. You can keep someone alive for decades while torturing them.

How about allowing freedom? Well that means I’m free to build a nuclear bomb. And set it off where I want. We see today especially that type of freedom isn’t really liked.

Usually the quote comes in a positive light. We won’t make a law/rule around it, it’s a principle so it’s meant to be short. So yeah you could argue about anything in any way you want, positive or negative. And if you want to be really precise then you make a law but it’s so precise it won’t cover edge cases. Don’t you agree that the baseline for most humans is to be in peace, find love, patience, joy, kindness, mildness ? You can manifest any of those traits to any stranger and you’ll likely have a positive impact right ? That’s the context of the Golden Rule quote I guess

That's not the human norm though. Doubt an average human way of existing is literal torture for some obscure number of people. I think you're missing the forest for the threes with that BDSM example. You can always find isolated examples as counter-argument for basically anything, but in reality that's an obscure number.

Due to the complexity of our reality a lot of things find themselves on a spectrum, but in numbers things are pretty clear.

Nothing is clear with humanity. The very first thing we do as a species is dehumanize anyone we disagree with.

Sociopaths aren’t the only problem with that philosophy. I agree with the philosophy but it assumes everyone wants good things. Many people want what others perceive to be bad, not because they are sociopaths but because they are different. A clear example of this is healthcare in the U.S. A large number of people actively vote against their best interests — some of the biggest supporters of the U.S. healthcare system are those that suffer under it most. People (including us) are idiots at least some of the time.

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