I wouldn't agree that the party primarily cares about profitable citzenry, unless you think of profits also as votes and attention.

But otherwise I agree with the spirit of your post. Parties and elections have their good side but they can also encourage focus on public image and more immediately gratifying change. It discourages long-term goals and sustained, ongoing collaboration, unless the public can heavily agree on what those goals are. The problem arises is if the public is manipulated, kept ignorant, or even just having largely different lifestyles (e.g. rural versus urban), agreement on long-term goals can be even harder to come by.

In practice I doubt the AI could propose something we think is fucked up without us saying uhhhh no.

You are right that the author is talking about an ideal that doesn't exist. Right now that AI would be heavily influenced by a "cabal of intellectuals" (but probably not even intellectuals).

But it's still an interesting thought to deshrine or at least point out flaws in democracy. Not anything completely new, but I do think the piece adds to the conversation. As the auth points out, majorites don't often reflect proper application of ethical principles. Democracy places some degree faith in the ability of the people and their human nature to govern. Not that people aren't fallible, but democracy intends to be self-correcting.

an AI-ocracy would place faith in the ability of rational, impartial AI to reflect proper application of ethical principles, which in theory would be nice but obviously would need a code of values and morals to build off from to decide what's more rational and ethical in the gray areas, and these values, morals, and working definitions change over time. If it skips the more gray areas, then it's usefulness of a governing body is diminished.

Perhaps AI-ocracy is not feasible or overall better, but blending AI with other governance forms, using AI as a tool might be.

For right now, maybe a practical solution is for AI to review cases or applications of law and offer an opinion on whether it is using application of ethical principles. It's code base should be open and public so anyone can have a look-see. Having a consistent review might be a good testing ground to see how it could be used in other governance contexts.

What makes a human?

Hey it’s me the resident nerd.

I often read early Inhuman comics and one of the big moral debates is what to do withe alpha primitives. The Alphas are basically cloned netherhals created to serve the inhumans as slaves. But the inhumans debate is that right to enslave them; are they people to?

Then I think of the Star Wars extended universe and Star Trek, and they always ponder a question when is a robot sentient and deserve rights? That is kind of the back drop of George Lucas’s clone wars and the legacy stories from it, the morality of clones and droids shooting each other.

So I want to know; can you justify clone servants even if they are of a lesser “human” species?

Can you argue the humanity of a machine?

So this sounds like Rawl's argument from Political Liberalism, but even Rawls changed his mind, see "Public Reason Revisited." Excluding personal or religious reasons from public deliberation is just a way of imposing a set of moral values on a democratic public without/before the process of democracy. Wolterstorff talks about this in his book with Robert Audi. A really good take down of this point of view is Christopher Eberle, Religious Conviction in liberal politics. Check out the sep article on public reason and all of the criticisms. Even the arch rationalist Habermas changed his mind about religious reasons in the public square.

I think your best bet is to go with including everybody and all their reasons in the most robust democratic deliberation possible. Go with an epistemic defense of democracy that argues the legitimacy of democracy comes from its epistemic ability to identify and solve social problems. Check out Helene Landemore and David Estlund. Epistemic democracy is a super hot topic right now and I think it makes the best argument for Democratic legitimacy.

I did say that we can't do without it in the previous sentence.

> it is just a popularity contest to see which king will be ruling over us.

Well yes but the cliche response is evergreen: any other system for nominating leaders is worse.

That just sounds like most democracies today. The public guide meta ethics and (theoretically) experts develop policy to further our community's choices.

Hey, so I'm new to the subreddit so apologies in advance.

Here's my question under determinism there are a couple distinctions made: compatiblist and incompatiblist with regards to free-will. Doesn't that distinction carry over to a non-deterministic world as well? Just because a world isn't inherently deterministic, that doesn't guarantee that we have free will.... Right?

Again sorry if this is the wrong place or if my terminology is flawed.

Edit: sorry, wrong place

Yes, I wrote in another comment that values and power distributions are the best arguments for democracy.

I’ll be arguing that democracy is useful for establishing these overarching values where the moral principles of the social contract are ordered in terms of priority. These are the values of a society which may be expressed through voting. Although this is different than policy making, which turns those national political values into concrete legal rules. The former applies moral principles to social and cultural circumstances to create constitutional values whereas the latter applies those constitutional values to social facts to create legal rules. Yet reason is applied in both cases. Values that can’t be publicly justified aren’t values that have political authority.

Singapore disagrees.

>You're missing the inherent virtue of democracy: it provides the maximum dispersion of power throughout a population, which matters because in a free society everyone should have an equal voice, virtually by definition.

Direct democracy would provide maximum dispersion, what we have in most countries is representative democracies.

In a nutshell it is the method we have decided to do this:

>How could we decide which cabal of intellectuals is granted tyranny over us?

Not saying that we can do away with representative democracy, we can't (at least not for now if we want a functioning society)

Just that although a useful tool, it is just a popularity contest to see which king will be ruling over us.

I don't mean aesthetic values, I mean fundamental politics. I.e. hierarchy vs egalitarianism. The left and right can both make rational arguments for these opposing values. How do you decide if the experts should push left or right wing policy?

I would say democratically.

Yeah, I agree. That’s why I said non-verbal languages and didn’t specifically refer to Sign languages like ASL. I gave hand gestures as a kind of non-verbal language, which I think it is, and mostly for comedic effect with reference to G.E. Moore’s use of hand gestures in his argument against external world skepticism.

You have a good point.

This is also not my personal definition of ''fluency'', but as I have understood it from society and native speakers of different languages. Perhaps my comment was not 100% appropriate to the thread. I just noticed over the years: I could say I'm fluent in english though a native speaker could say they do not agree with that statement. I was commenting under a video in which a deaf person was talking about how people with hearing cannot speak sign language fluently because it is not the language in which they need to communicate their needs 24/7. If that's their definition of ''fluency'' - I get it. And if that's your definition of ''fluency'' - I get it. You seem to have more knowledge of the term so thank you for clearing that up for me.

One’s religious, artistic, or personal values can’t have any political authority over others who don’t share those values. What has political authority is reason, more specifically, those principles which can’t be reasonably rejected. Those are our moral principles, which any legitimate political and legal institution needs to be based on.

And it would be either private parties or experts (judges, admin agencies, etc.). Although this power would be based on degrees rather than purely categorical. There are instances where reason would require majority rule vs expert judgment.

I’ll be writing in article discussing this further that addresses the trustee vs delegate issue.

The rational / best solution is a matter of values, not intellect. I'd like you to take a stab at that problem.

And who exactly decides? What kind of person is worthy? Philosopher kings?

2 also devolves to 1 in enough cases that democracy tends to be more stable, producing more of the aforementioned "inherently good" benefits.

As said, biology is evolution and evolution is never perfect, its trials and errors, adaptation to survive.

But once it has found a formula that works, it will become universal and spread among the species, becoming its objective foundation, survival of the best biology.

The link is trials and errors with side effects, biological evolution is not a factory made precision machine, lol.

But its still totally mind independent, meaning its objective.

It's interesting seeing languages mingle almost in realtime, and Japanese is a perfect example. They have a whole script primarily for loan words or foreign names and historically have a lot of words adapted from Portuguese, but have been taking more and more from English as the digital age goes on to the point that younger people can use a lot of English words without even being conscious of it. To make things even more complicated, English ends up taking a lot of words that were already loans from english, especially from video games, HP, ring out, level up, etc. Are all words that went from English to Japanese and back and we don't even think about it.

I'm pretty sure that it was a lot more than just English speakers, right?

Well to be fair, I didn’t argue that humans can’t find truth. We seem to find plenty of it in discrete contexts of physical environments; where measured validations confirm with confidence a representative of truth was found. This is even contextual on the prior basis of developed “truth” though, as one thing builds upon another.

There are times where some new revelation happens (such as light is not infinite) and models of what we owned as “truth” have to be rebuilt. And that will hold until another revelation comes.

I think this notion of “truth” is much like Happiness in the Bill of Rights. “A pursuit of happiness” - “A pursuit of Truth”. The pursuit is ever present, the realization of it… a “maybe-ish”.

But then to move into philosophy, where all notions are abstract, metaphorical, and hypothesis that is incapable of scientific validation… the notion of Truth becomes far more wiggly. Truth may even be an inappropriate word to define outcomes. Perhaps “workable models” is better.

Of course the domain of beliefs (everything we believe as explicit “trues” about reality is largely as subjective as objective. (E.g. Capitalism is good or bad, theology is right or wrong, etc.)

There is not really any absolute truth in this domain, it’s more a truth of “believing is seeing”. And the seeing becomes evidence again for believing.

I do think it’s very safe to acknowledge we can and do develop very reliable models of “true’s” (a “true” being an outcome which can be verified externally) though that is a different notion than truth is. To me anyway.

Perhaps I would go so far as to say we can (in some cases) access as much of a genuine truthful view as is possible within our contextual frame. To be honest though, one would have to be omniscient to have complete absolute truth; as any absence of any truth is an incomplete truth, so not “the” truth.

Unfortunately deaf or hard of hearing or mute characters haven't gotten much attention for a very very long time, though that's been changing lately. Just the last couple years we had eternals and Hawkeye, which had at least one of each between them. A silent voice(koe no katachi) is a great movie with a deaf woman as the female lead and shows pretty great JSL.

1. People exist (premise)
2. People can intentionally harm eachother (premise)
3. Therefore, intentional harming of others exists (conclusion)

​

1. People exist (premise)
2. People can intentionally protect eachother (premise)
3. Therefore, intentional protection of others exists (conclusion)

​

1. Intentional protection of others exists (premise)

2. Benevolence (behaviour exhibiting a kind/charitable/altruistic attitude, good will, wishing others well) exists (premise)

3. Benevolently protecting others is good (opposite of evil) (premise)

4. Therefore, good (opposite of evil) exists (conclusion)

​

1. Intentional harming of others exists (premise)

2. Malevolence (behaviour exhibiting a hostile/spiteful attitude, ill will, wishing ill on others) exists (premise)

3. Malevolently harming of others is evil (premise)

4. Therefore, evil exists (conclusion)

​

1. A person can recognize good (premise)

2. A person can recognize evil (premise)

3. A person can recognize the distinction between good and evil (premise)

4. A person's recognition of the distinction between good and evil and choosing to be good (or even try to) is that person's morality (premise)

5. Therefore, morality (personal morality) exists (conclusion)

​

1. A person can recognize good (premise)

2. A person can recognize evil (premise)

3. A person can recognize the distinction between good and evil (premise)

4. A person's recognition of the distinction between good and evil and choosing to be evil (or even try to) is that person's immorality (premise)

5. Therefore, immorality (personal immorality) exists (conclusion)

​

1. Even if no people exist in the past or present, people will exist in the future (premise)

2. Even if no people exist in the past or present, people will be able to harm eachother in the future (premise)

3. Even if no people exist in the past or present, benevolence and malevolence will exist in the future (premise)

4. Therefore, even if no people existed in the past or present, good and evil will exist in the future (conclusion)

​

1. Even if no people exist in the past or present, good and evil will exist in the future (premise)

2. Even if no people exist in the past or present, people will be able to recognize the distinction between good and evil and choose to be one or the other (or even try to) (premise)

3. Therefore, even if no people exist in the past or present, personal morality and personal immorality will exist in the future (conclusion)

​

1. A person's recognition of the distinction between good and evil and choosing to be good (or even try to) is that person's morality (personal morality) (premise)

2. Even if no people exist in the past or present, good and evil will exist in the future (premise)

3. Even if no people exist in the present, there is nothing different about the present that would prevent them from being good or being evil as they will in the future (premise)

4. Even if no people exist in the present, there is nothing different about the present that would prevent their recognition of the distinction between good and evil and choosing to be good (or even try to) (premise)

5. Therefore, morality (abstract morality) exists in all past, present and future of this universe whether people (and their personal morality) exist or not (conclusion)

​

1. An abstract thing is not bound in time or to conditions* (premise)

2. People can exist at some point in time (premise)

3. Good and evil can exist because people can exist (premise)

4. Personal morality can exist because good and evil can exist (premise)

5. Abstract morality exists because personal morality can exist (premise)

6. Therefore, abstract morality exists across all time (and arguably even beyond) (conclusion)

In a nutshell, the abstract thing of (even potential) entities distinguishing and choosing cooperation over hostility and vice versa** exists across all time (and arguably even beyond). That abstract thing is what I personally refer to as morality and the reason I so confidently claim morality exists outside the mind.

People prefer to fumble around believing that morality is "how you should behave and how you should not behave" or something to do with winning Zeus's or Odin's approval or whatever, that ain't none a' my beeezwax.

-

* E.g. the abstract things distance, danger, clue, pattern and choice existed before there were any non-abstract things to have distance to one another, be in danger, have patterns, be investigative or make choices just as they will still exist after those non-abstract things cease to exist. Since they will still exist even if time and space cease and (potentially) non-abstract things might exist again to "embody" them.

In other words, the abstract thing lifeform exists independent of this universe or any other, it exists independent of all that just by not being a myth, just by not being Zeus throwing lightning bolts since he is not an abstract thing but a fiction, a broken mirror magically causing seven years bad luck is not an abstract thing but a fiction and "should" is not an an abstract thing but a fiction.

Which I already tried to explain in my second comment to you:

"The same way it always exists; Rape would be immoral because it would be evil because it would be malevolent. That there is no longer anyone in existence to be malevolent or benevolent does not erase that from reality. Nor did organic life bring it into reality, it was always there.

Kind of like... hmm... "Organic life would grow because organic life would have genetics." Organic life actually existing is irrelevant."

** To which I'm sure some would draw parallells to game theory.

>"No, I don't. When I say no reason, I mean no reason."

But I don't understand what you mean by bringing it up. If you had out of the blue said that you have no reason to survive, would you be trying to imply you no longer desire to survive or even that you desire the opposite, to die?

Or would you just be agreeing with me that organisms neither "should" or "must" survive (which would be absolutely redundant and be like out of the blue telling me you're human or that we're on reddit)?

Or would you be trying to imply that I have failed to provide you with a reason to survive rather than remain suicidal?

Because I have no interest in giving you a reason to do anything.

I have no interest in giving you a reason to agree with me that the Earth orbits the Sun, my interest would be in having a conversation about whether or not it does.

In other words, I am not here to give you a reason to agree with me or stop eating sugar or go kill yourself or to not go kill yourself. I have not been trying to do any of those things because I have no reason to do them. Can you give me a reason to do one of those things? How about I give you a gun to put to my head, would that change something?

Am I putting a gun to your head and demanding you agree with anything I say? No, I am simply having a conversation with you about a subject and that subject is "Does morality exist outside the mind?" I am arguing it does because you argued it doesn't, that's it. Anything beyond that, your agreement etc. that (in a nutshell) ain't none a' my beeezwax.

>"Why are you assuming something that I didn't even say?"

There was no assumption. In short: There was a question and then a 'in case'.

>"Having a reason to believe something does not mean you should believe it, all it does is provide proof in favour of its reality or its factualness or accurateness."

That's not quite how it works.

Me: The Stone Age lasted 3.4 million years.

You: I don't agree and I see no reason to do so. If I had such a reason it would provide proof that the Stone Age lasted 3.4 million years.

Me: The reason would? Isn't that kind of backwards? Cart before the horse? Isn't it that good enough proof of X being true MAY BE reason alone for you to agree that X is true?

EDIT: Note that I stuck with the word "agree" despite your just switching to the word "believe".

>"So, no, I'm not talking about should or must as you have decided to randomly assume."

See above.

>"Yeah, that's why it isn't necessarily. I didn't say it was necessarily, I said it wasn't. What are you even talking about? Your whole response there wasn't even contrary to anything I had said."

That's not quite true although of course I get the gist. You don't seem to get the gist of what I'm saying; that you're still using the term "necessarily" in our conversation as if I'm to still to conform to what it implies.

>"How have you logically proven this at all?"

Read on.

>"Morality is a word with a definition."

You're just going to willfully ignore what I've said about definitions, huh?

>"You're just using your own definition, which is fine, but don't act like you have at all proven what morality is factually."

Read on.

>"This whole section, as I understand it, was meant to prove that morality is as you say it is: "If you're malevolently doing harm (evil) without some benevolent prevention/undoing harm (good) to "cancel it" you're not being a moral person, you're being an immoral person""

Yes.

>"The issue with this, however, is it isn't even an argument. It's just a conclusion. I think you misunderstand how deductive logic works. You have to provide premises that show what you're saying is right. I'm not sure how to put this more clearly, but you simply have not done that."

Understood but read on.

>"No, that doesn't actually logically follow. Just because "should", "right", and "wrong" do not actually exist does not mean that morality necessarily has to ascribe to something real."

That was not what I was saying there. I was eliminating morality being about "should" and "right/wrong".

>"That's not a logically sound argument, because the conclusion does not follow from the premises. All that would prove is that morality may not be talking about something real in the first place."

Exactly.

>"In fact, one of the viable, actually logical conclusion from these premises is that morality is imaginary, as I have been arguing. Let me demonstrate this with deductive logic: 1. Morality is generally considered by definition (in available dictionaries), by the general populace, and by philosophers to be about "should", "right", and "wrong" (premise)

>2. "Should", "right", and "wrong" are imaginary (premise)

>3. Therefore, morality as it is defined and understood (by the general populace) is about imaginary things (conclusion)"

Yes, except right and wrong are not imaginary e.g. there's accurate and inaccurate just to give one example, so the second premise does not hold without rephrasing.

>"This is logically sound."

Except for the problem with the second premise.

>"If you disagree, please respond in a similar manner, using a deductive argument that is organized in a similar manner (with numbered points, and labelling your premises and your conclusion) or else I'm just not going to respond."

Please hold... (grumbles: Man, I'm gonna type this whole thing out in a very inefficient way, I just know it!)