[ExI] ethics and ethology

[Tara Maya]

On Dec 10, 2011, at 10:12 AM, Stefano Vaj wrote:
> 
> 
> Absolutely. But it is not clear to me why you refuse to categorise all that simply as our ethology and psychology.
> 
> The real domain of ethics IMHO is the moral dilemma (to do what one is genetically inclined or forced to do in the first place may generate pleasure, to infringe one's own rules may generate guilt, but certainly neither thing involves ethical decisions). 
> 
> A moral dilemma implies that there is a real, actual uncertainty on what is the "right thing to do". 
> 
> An ethical "system" is in turn simply a set of answers and/or of theories on how to solve such problems, which in turn reflects different values and priorities, not to mention "anthropologies" in the philosophical sense. 
> 
> A work which in my view remains seminal in this respect is Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Even if one does really share Nietzsche's specific conclusions on the merits of what he is discussing, this short work would still remain in my opinion exemplary anyway as to the method. And all the contemporary "memetics" reading of how ideas arise, circulate and go extinct in human societies nicely completes it.


Ethics is grounded in ethology, but distinct from it, and this is what gives ethics its aspects of cultural specificity and individual responsibility.

As highly complex and highly adaptable beings, human evolution has responded to multiple pressures. For instance, we have an instinct to survive, and we consider the resulting needs basic: eat, fight or cower if attacked, try to breath if shoved underwater, etc. Then we have instincts shaped by millennia of sexual competition. Probably most of our greed and envy and striving to out-do others through the display of material things such as fashion (especially for women) and wealth/power (especially for men),  comes from this. Then we have the competition to raise vulnerable children with skill sets that take decades to acquire. (Even if the "simplest" of human societies, one study estimated it took 12 years for girls and 14 years for boys to achieve mastery of their adult roles). Here we find all our instincts to protect and teach our children, and our kin's children.

In addition to these, which we share to some extent with other animals, we have other evolutionary pressures, such as the ability to spread memes (how many humans have been killed because they failed to adapt to the right orthodoxy in time?), and the ability to engage in reciprocal altruism (trade and capitalism follows from this instinct, even if it is sexual competition that drives conspicuous consumption). And so on.

All of these pressures add up to our ethology, but do not describe a single system of ethics, because ethics is what we call the ability to raise one instinct over another. Individuals and cultures balance these pressures in different ways, sometimes by habit, sometimes with a great deal of excrusiating internal struggle. In the Chinese epic of The Three Kingdoms, there's a famous scene where a man is guarding a pass. An enemy is fleeing and asks to be allowed through the pass. Normally, the guard's loyalty to his king and people would make his obligation obvious; kill the enemy. But it turns out that this enemy once saved his life. Now the enemy asks, "Is it ethical to kill a man who saved your life?" The guard lets him through. The enemy carried a message critical to the war, and the guard's kingdom falls. The question debated in the text is, did the guard do the right thing? Which was more important, to be true to one's pledged word to help someone who helped you (reciprocal altruism) or loyalty to one's own people (kin selection)?

Now, here is why I just shake my head when I hear the idea that super-intelligent machines or super-intelligent aliens or super-intelligent people would not have problems because they would be "more" ethical than we are. Very likely they would; but this would only make ethical dilemmas MORE DIFFICULT. The greater the intelligence involved, the more loyalties such an intelligence would have to balance, and the greater the oportunity  for ethical conflicts.

What I do hope to see is less faulty-ethical systems. What I mean is that people want a certain thing, such as less alcoholics. So they create an ethical or legal system aimed at that, such as forbidding alcohol. But because they have inaccurately gauged their own behavior in response to rewards and punishments, the very opposite of their goal is brought about, along with other undesirable consequences, such as mafia involvement. There are a whole category of sins that humans respond to in this way, and do not seem to learn from experience that merely outlawing certain kinds of things (usually "negative" behaviors which are nonetheless strongly selected for by evolution), does not eliminate the behavior, and in fact, may even exacerbate it.


Tara Maya
Conmergence (a speculative fiction anthology)
Burst (an sf short story)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20111212/04a2907f/attachment.html>