Robots sent to destroy human life on Earth would be more moral than humans are capable of being.

I will offer my responses to his counterpoints thusly:On AP 2Pro points out that the robots were created for a purpose whereas the humans were not. However, this is completely irrelevant; the fact that robots were designed for a particular purpose is a descriptive fact, not a normative one. Pro's argument against humans having objective moral codes was based entirely on Hume's is - ought gap: the observation that people often illicitly move from an 'is' (slavery causes suffering) to an 'ought' (slavery is wrong). Pro falls into his own trap: he moves from an 'is' (robots were designed for killing) to an 'ought' (robots ought to kill). As far as this goes, I agree that this is a valid argument. One cannot move solely from the descriptive fact that robots are programmed to kill to the normative fact that robots ought to kill. Pro makes a confused distinction between what the printer 'ought' to do and what it has an 'obligation' to do - the very nature of an obligation is that it is something that one ought to do, so this point fails as well. Besides, it can be easily substituted - according to Pro's definition, a printer 'ought' to do what it is programmed to do. This is an obviously false consequence that reveals the failure of Pro's argument. Overcoming the is - ought gap. I will respond to Pro's misplaced response shortly - however, it is worth pointing out that even if my account of the is -ought gap fails, Pro still loses this point. For the definition provided of morality was 'conforming to the rules of right conduct'. Once one has in place an account of right conduct, it does not matter whether the is - ought gap can be crossed. For humans would still be 'moral' by conforming to these rules of right conduct and thus would be capable of being more moral than Pro's robots. However, does his critique of hypothetical imperatives succeed in any case? Not at all, because he misunderstands the nature of my claim. It is not the hypothetical imperative that is supposed to be objective in this case - the hypothetical imperative simply crosses the gap to the objective standard of morality, which was supposed to be Mill's utilitarianism. Put it this way - facts about which actions produce the most happiness are objective. There are actual, objective answers to questions of the sort 'will this action produce more happiness than suffering? ' that do not depend on subjective opinion. Taking this account of right conduct, humans can hypothetically perform actions which produce more happiness than suffering and thus be moral: more moral than the robots. Now Pro's objection was that we cannot cross the gap from the statement 'X action will produce more happiness than harm' to the statement 'I ought to do X'. Now, this has nothing to do with whether or not humans can be moral - but whether there is any reason they ought to be moral. My claim was that this can be achieved with a hypothetical imperative - which is itself subjective (how could motivation be anything else? ) but is used to provide a reason to conform to the objective standard of morality, thus crossing the is - ought gap.