From: avrom@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Avrom Faderman)
Subject: Re: Brain and mind (killing boring wife)
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 23:56:43 GMT


In article <1992Nov11.172601.632@cine88.cineca.it> 
avl0@cine88.cineca.it writes:

| In article <1992Nov4.234723.22038@Csli.Stanford.EDU> 
| avrom@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Avrom Faderman) writes:
...
|> Imagine a society 
|> that was generally evil.  All the customs, all the mores of this society 
|> are complete inverses of our own--wanton torture is considered a perfectly 
|> acceptible way to pass an afternoon.  I think even a hard-core anti-
    mechanist
|> would agree that, without exposure to other societies, it would be next to 
|> impossible for any member to abandon these evil ways.  But does this mean 
|> that they are not morally responsible for their actions?
...
| Moral judges actions in relation with a Fundamental Goal.
| The society you have described is a moral one if the Fundamental Goal of 
   its people
| is to have a funny afternoon.

Well, I guess this is a matter of intuition.  By my lights though (and 
I think most people will agree with me on this one), a society that 
gleefully tortures innocent people in a neverending quest to have a 
funny afternoon is an immoral one.

| Responsibility is merely a consequence of free-will, no matter if the action 
| is moral or not.

Even were I to accept your previous claim about Fundamental Goals (and I 
don't), I don't see how it would obligate me to accept this.  It still 
doesn't strike me as obvious (or even true).

|> it is by 
|> no means clear to me that you could sell or buy a robot that had 
|> considerable functional similarity to a human.
...
| you acknowledge that human beings have some value, 
| you try to derive it from his functionality.  Then, robots which have a
   similar
| functionality, have the similar value.
| Let me be a little presumptuous, I have just built the dreamed android. 
| It's Me its creator, really are you saying that I can not switch it off?!
| *I* wanted it to behave like my self, *I* wanted it to have e.g. 
   electronic
| dreams to re-organise acquired information, *I* want it to stop living,
   why not?
...
| Old Romans were much coherent with a materialistic view of Man.
...
| Hitler also was coherent: mad people have less functionality (or not at all) 
| than others humans THEN they are less (or not at all) human than the others, 
| and he killed them.

My fault for using a slightly ambiguous term (functional).  I don't mean 
the organism's _use_ to society.  I mean internal structure.  If an 
organism has internal states corresponding to pleasure and pain in 
humans, and these internal states interact with one another, the 
organism's behaviour, and the rest of the organism's internal states in 
the way that human pleasure an pain interact with the analogous human 
structures, the organism is functionally equivalent to a human (the way 
I'm using the term).
I said in the previous post that I wasn't going to try to give a positive 
argument that functional similarity to a human was sufficient for being 
a moral patient, but I doubt you would consider it intuitive.  So, here's 
a sketchy attempt at an argument.

When I say of something that it is moral, I don't mean it jibes with the 
Fundamental Goal of my society (which I may disagree with) or with some 
Platonist Form of the Good (which I have no evidence exists).  I am 
instead expressing my approval of it--I am letting it be known that 
I have a reaction of applause when I contemplate it.  Now, what 
kinds of actions trigger (internal) applause in me?  Or rather, more 
to the point of the "Killing Boring Wife" example, what kinds of actions 
trigger outrage in me?  
When I view another entity, and see that it has all the internal workings 
that I identify in myself, it is quite natural and involuntary that I 
empathize with it.  When I witness its pain, I imagine _myself_ in 
such pain, and I am strongly inclined to try and put a stop to it (by 
locking the perpetrator up, for example).  This, I would advocate, is 
much of the basis of morality--witness the fact that the first step 
in inspiring people to commit atrocities has historically been the 
alienization and dehumanization (the denial of functional similarity) of 
the prospective victim.
When I empathize with the robot you create, the knowledge that you made 
it does nothing to diminish this, any more than if you were a genetic 
engineer that created a human from basic organic molecules, the 
knowledge of this would kill my empathy with the product of your 
efforts.


-- 
Avrom I. Faderman                  |  "...a sufferer is not one who hands
avrom@csli.stanford.edu            |    you his suffering, that you may 
Stanford University                |    touch it, weigh it, bite it like a
CSLI and Dept. of Philosophy       |    coin..."  -Stanislaw Lem
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.logic