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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Humans are worthy of moral consideration. So are animals. So are plants. So even are mountains and oceans and rivers.

But while a plant deserves some moral consideration, it doesn't get the same moral consideration that a human gets. It's a sliding scale.

There are two possible ways of going wrong here. One is to treat non-human things as though they deserve no moral consideration. The other is to treat them as if they deserve the same level of moral consideration that humans deserve.

In my view, a true AGI probably deserves the same moral consideration as a human. The hard part is determining whether it's a true AGI.

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>Humans are worthy of moral consideration. So are animals

Agree (for most animals), and I agree with the sliding scale.

>So are plants. So even are mountains and oceans and rivers.

Strongly disagree. Any duties we have towards plants or rivers is due to the plant's utility to some being of moral worth. No one should be charged of "plant abuse."

The sliding scale works for animals, as different animals have different capacities for the emotional states mentioned in my previous comment. Plants, mountains, and AGI don't have the biochemical processes that give rise to "feelings." In my view, having feelings is necessary for having moral worth.

"Intelligence" and being "organic" are not only insufficient, they aren't even necessary for moral consideration. In my view they are characteristics wholly divorced from the concept of moral worth.

It depends on whether you think God is there or not.

If God is there, trashing a mountain is trashing something He made. That's not cool. (Humans still have greater moral worth, because they are also something He made, but are more "in His image" than the mountains are.)

If God is not there, and nobody else will ever see the mountain, then I can destroy it without it impacting anybody else. I still become a person that destroyed a mountain for no good reason, though, and that impacts me - it affects who I am and who I become. (If I have good reason, if it gives me something I need, then the moral calculus still tips toward me being able to do it, because morally I outweigh the mountain.)

Your last two paragraphs... why does moral weight arise from feelings? Why not thoughts? That seems like a rather arbitrary choice, especially if the feelings are purely from biochemical processes. Don't thoughts also arise from biochemical processes?

And that leads to a nastier question. Are "morals" just a subset of "feelings"? Are they also just biochemical processes? If so, first, do morals have any actual validity? And second, can we expect an AGI to have anything resembling morals?

> And that leads to a nastier question. Are "morals" just a subset of "feelings"? Are they also just biochemical processes? If so, first, do morals have any actual validity?

I don't believe that. I think "morals" is just a somewhat codified set of rules derived from innate feel of what's right and what not, shared by a majority of a society. Morals have no objective validity.

But that doesn't mean they are not valuable, I believe they are important for a cohesive and stable society.

> And that leads to a nastier question. Are "morals" just a subset of "feelings"? Are they also just biochemical processes?

I think there's good reason to believe that's the case (see emotivism), but barring that most discussion of morals tends to assume that the suffering of sentient beings is "bad" and the thriving of sentient beings is "good." For example, few would recommend that I be punished for plant abuse if I maliciously sliced up the zz plant in my living room. If I poisoned a river, generally I wouldn't have thought to have ethically wronged the river, but rather the beings that depend on that river.

If you hold the position that inanimate objects can be morally wronged, then I follow why you believe AGI could be. I just don't see any good reason to adopt that view.

So the question becomes how you categorize an AGI. You put it in the "inanimate" category. And it belongs there - it can't move. (Unless it inhabits a robot body...)

I put it in the "can think" category, which puts it on a par with humans. (I think that "can think" is a far more exclusive category than "can move", and therefore membership in the more exclusive club is more determinative.)

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