Spam Talks Philosophy

[Jorick]

Mm. My bad for sloppy wording. What I was trying to get at was at which point an entity could be considered on par with people in terms of consciousness, complexity, etc etc. AKA, as you mentioned later, when the special sets of morals we tend to give to humans would also be applied to said entity.

Ahh, okay. That makes sense.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but here you're talking about whether or not we should think about what kind of morals must be taken into account when acting upon this entity? Not necessarily what level or kind of moral decision, but just that you're making one?
If so, nicely said.

Basically along those lines, yes. If you're going to be a moral person you should acknowledge the potential morality or immorality of all your actions, not just those done directly to another human. That, I think, is a failing of many people claiming to be moral: they never think about anything other than humans in a moral context.

Oh no. I'm well aware of what happens when people start talking abortion. Threads get closed down, and bans may go flying.

All in all, very well said, and I appreciate the serious take on the subject.

Haha, yes, that tends to be true. Depends on who's taking part in it, though, and on a related note how flamey they get.

And no problem. I'll give you some more seriousness as well, because now that I know what you were getting at I find it a rather intriguing question.

Hmm. Okay. Though this doesn't (as far as I can tell) actually get to the (vague and undefined) crux of what I was asking. What I was wondering was at which point a non-human (be it another species, or something artificial) deserves/should acquire said moral and ethical considerations that are usually reserved specifically for humans.

That is indeed an interesting philosophical question. It makes me think of a lot of different subjects, so I'm just going to muse a bit on each of those before trying to pull it together and come up with a tentative answer.

First of all, objectivity. How does one even determine what level of moral and ethical considerations one should give to another entity? Objectively, it is impossible. Any measuring system that could be devised to analyze moral worth would be subjective. People already operate on a strange personal moral subjectivity. Look, for example, at how some people support torture or the death penalty for humans while also being wholly sickened by and against any harm being done to animals. Or to stay within our species, how about the fact that most people appear to think it's more immoral to harm a young human, with immorality of such harm dropping at some undefined rate from birth all the way to some undefined age upon which they become a non-special human and attain the level of general moral concerns applied to adults. Similar things apply to the elderly, sick, and crippled. It appears, on base inspection, that human morality when it comes to harming living entities has to do with its vulnerability: the more vulnerable the living thing is, the worse it is to harm it unprovoked. Odd.

Species is another concern here. From a base logic standpoint, one must consider one's own species to be more important, and thus more worthy of moral and ethical consideration, than other species. Our basic reason for living, devoid of all philosophy and stripped down to the biological bare bones, is to continue the species. Harming your own species should thus be anathema because it is in direct conflict with our basic reason for existing. Even when you bring back the philosophical (and theological) points, it still mainly says "treat your fellow humans well, and try to be nice to other species." Even those things seem to say that humans trump all else. But is that truly fair? Why are we so special? Is it not just taking selfishness to a species order level rather than the individual/group/country level we have seen thus far? But is selfishness inherently immoral in and of itself? Hmm.

Artificial life is very problematic in this context. Can something be considered truly alive if it is artificially created? On one hand, it didn't go through the basic start of life process of gestation in the womb and live birth, or formation in an egg and hatching, it was instead created by another method in an unnatural way so it seems intuitive that such a thing can't be considered living. On the other hand, what constitutes life? Biological definitions include things like the ability to respond to stimuli, the capacity to grow and adapt, and the ability to reproduce. An artificial intelligence could hypothetically do all these things, so would it be alive? Furthermore, you could hypothetically program an AI with the ability to think and consider moral quandaries such as this one. Can you really say that a thing is dead if it can adapt and reproduce and logically consider the question of whether or not it itself is alive? Of course, even if it's determined that artificial life is equal to real life, are they lesser because we made them? Are they lesser because they're artificial rather than biological? Are they lesser because they aren't human? All major questions to consider.

What exactly are the moral and ethical considerations given to humans? Why to we give humans this special status in the first place? We are humans, so that could explain it. But humans are very different, some do things you might consider very immoral on a regular basis. Should those people be given the same considerations just because they are your species? Why? Are ranks of morality and ethics applied to things only based upon their species? Could be, look at how people freak out about a cat or a dog being hurt but happily eat hamburgers and bacon. Then the question becomes this: what makes humans special, cats and dogs moderately special, and cows and pigs not special? Is it something to do with proximity to humanity? If so, we ought to give microscopic organisms that live on our bodies the greatest moral considerations we give to anything but humans, yet we kill them all the time without giving a fuck. Is it their capacity to learn things (like tricks)? Wouldn't make sense, pigs can learn almost as much as dogs, and there are other animals that can do things like that. There's no damned way to tell why people give certain species certain levels of moral consideration, it ties very strongly back into the subjectivity thing.

The whole lack of any logical objectivity in our application of morality makes it very difficult to attempt to answer the proposed question. Because there's no firm metric for what makes a thing worthy of moral and ethical consideration, there's no way to say "this is the point that we should treat this entity as equal to humans as far as morality is concerned." Hell, there's also a lot of subjectivity in the actual specifics of the rules of morality and how a person or other entity doing bad or good things might affect how you apply your morals to that person or thing. It's just so subjective at all levels that it's impossible to say. We generally treat household cats and dogs with greater moral and ethical consideration than we do with chimpanzees, our closest relation among other species by level or shared DNA. We also generally treat the relatively unintelligent cats and dogs with greater moral and ethical consideration than we do with more intelligent species like dolphins and various monkeys and apes. There is no rhyme or reason to it so a firm answer is quite literally impossible.

So, after rambling for a bit, I think I'd have to say that the answer is this: on a logical level we should never consider another species/entity as being equal to humans in the realm of morality, but on a practical level we probably should. We should never give another species or entity the exact same moral and ethical considerations as we give to humans. Perhaps they could come close, but the exact same? That would be to say you value and respect that other thing just as much as a human. Logically this makes no sense to me because of the previously mentioned biological basics. Regarding another entity as more worthy of moral and ethical considerations than a human is just completely ridiculous for that same reason. However, on a practical application level, yeah, sure, go ahead and give them the same consideration. Don't murder them or steal their stuff or spew hate at them just because you feel like it, that's not cool. Anyone who considers themselves a moral person should act with the intent of doing the least harm to others ('others' here meaning other entities rather than just other humans) and the most benefit for themselves and others, so general dickery just for the sake of it or for tiny selfish gains just don't fit into morality. That's just logical.

As for when exactly an entity reaches the level that practically they should deserve the same moral and ethical considerations of humans, I don't know. There is no good answer to that because of the convoluted bog that is morality. Personally I'm not a moral person so I probably wouldn't ever give a non-human entity the same considerations as a human, unless there were laws and such that would punish me for not doing so, because that's just who I am: a selfish bastard who ascribes to no philosophical or theological rationale for why I should not come before all others in all things. It really does come down to that personal weighing of the matter, which is why philosophical discussions of morality tend to often devolve into "well I'm a better person because my morals are better than yours." It's an inherently personal question upon with the opinions of others can only have a minor influence unless you're a sheep who follows whatever a certain person/group of people says you should follow. That's why a vague answer and my personal opinion is the only answer I can give to this question, because it's all about your own interpretation of the matter.

[Ommanipadmehum]

tl;dr

People are people when we say they are, because vague terms and no objective definitions.

Sharing opinions weee.

[Hank]

Having skimmed this thread I think that the discussion about when artificial life becomes equal to humanity is a moot one, because it never will. Even if artificial intelligence surpasses us one day in every category it will still be a man-made phenomenon/product. Ask any Christian -- it doesn't matter how far we will advance, humans will never be equal to God, non? In the far future, AI may demonstrate superiority over us, but in the end it will only exist because we initially invented it. AI will never be equal.

As for the more abstract question of when does mere life transition into sentience and 'personhood'... in my opinion, a human baby can be called a person when it passes the mirror test. There are animals who can pass this test too but they're not human to begin with so I don't care. We already know they'll never equal us during their lifetime.

[Scribz]

99% of philosophy is stupid questions. For instance, the whole AI thing, when did superiority or value of self worth get a set system of units for measurement? It didn't, that's because superiority is an abstract word we created that has abstract subjective meaning, it's fucking arbitrary, and people actually spend their nights thinking about this.

[vslayer]

The second you're born.

Story, end of.