Tom McCabe: speaking as someone who morally disapproves of murder, I’d like to see the AI reprogram everyone back, or cryosuspend them all indefinitely, or upload them into a sub-matrix where they can think they’re happily murdering each other without all the actual murder. Of course your hypothetical murder-lovers would call this imoral, but I’m not about to start taking the moral arguments of murder-lovers seriously. You just have to come to grips with the fact that the thing we call Morality isn’t anything special from a global, physical perspective. It isn’t written in the stars, it doesn’t follow from pure logic, it isn’t simple or easy to describe. It’s a big messy, complicated aspect of our specific nature as a species.
Coming to grips with this fact doesn’t mean you have to turn into a moral relativist, or claim that morality is made of nothing but arbitrary individual preference. Those conclusions just don’t follow.
Tom McCabe: speaking as someone who morally disapproves of murder, I’d like to see the AI reprogram everyone back, or cryosuspend them all indefinitely, or upload them into a sub-matrix where they can think they’re happily murdering each other without all the actual murder. Of course your hypothetical murder-lovers would call this imoral, but I’m not about to start taking the moral arguments of murder-lovers seriously. You just have to come to grips with the fact that the thing we call Morality isn’t anything special from a global, physical perspective. It isn’t written in the stars, it doesn’t follow from pure logic, it isn’t simple or easy to describe. It’s a big messy, complicated aspect of our specific nature as a species.
Coming to grips with this fact doesn’t mean you have to turn into a moral relativist, or claim that morality is made of nothing but arbitrary individual preference. Those conclusions just don’t follow.