[ExI] ethics vs intelligence

[Anders Sandberg]

On 12/09/2012 14:27, Stefano Vaj wrote:
> Hey, this is a good example of how moral philosophies (your and mine) 
> that I suspect to be fairly different, can converge in very similar 
> moral principles in a given field. And this, irrespective of the - 
> irrelevant - degree of your and mine actual compliance with those 
> principles (ie, our personal "morality").
>

Exactly! If you had to be a moral person to do ethics, there would be 
almost nobody in the department.
(As Eric Schwitzgebel has shown, ethicists are definitely not to be 
trusted: check out his papers at "The Relationship Between Moral 
Reflection and Moral Behavior": http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/ )

Mid level principles most moral systems agree on are nice, and they are 
also interesting on their own: why are they so robustly sensible? I'm 
involved in one research project that tries to figure out a new one, and 
I suspect it might deep down be a matter of game theory and structural 
stability: the game-theoretically right way of acting might not be 
strongly affected if you perturb people's utility functions.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University