From: Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Date: Fri Dec 04 1998 - 12:52:35 MST
How do you define a moral system? Then, how do you define "absolute
morality"?
Consider an ALife creature. Faced with a situation, it has a choice of
actions, and an algorithm to choose an action.
A moral system would seemingly be, in general, a way of ranking actions,
for every possible situation, from best to worst.
This definition is rather broad, because it includes "moral systems" that
would be conventionally be considered immoral, or even inconsistent.
However we might want to include such forms of morality in a broad
definition. And the definition does include systems which capture
the various kinds of conventional morality.
There are obviously a multitude of possible moral systems. If we think
of the moral system as an algorithm which, given a situation and a list
of actions, produces a rank ordering of the actions, then there would
probably be potentially an infinite number of moral systems, since there
are an infinite number of computer programs.
How do we single out the one or ones which represent "absolute morality"?
What does this concept mean? I can't get a grip on it. Is there
really such a thing?
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:54 MST