I suggest avoiding a reliance on Philosophy entirely, and using Science instead. Which has a means for telling people their ideas are incorrect, called Bayesianism (a.k.a. the Scientific Method). For ethics, the relevant science is Evolutionary Moral Psychology. Or, to put this in philosophical terminology, my recommended metaethics is Naturalism.
Unfortunately the challenge with this is that coming up with plausible-sounding hypothesis about the evolutionary optima for hominds is easy — and actually testing one is incredibly time-consuming and expensive. So scientific progress in this area is slow. Which is why I see AI-Assisted Alignment as having a large, complex, and expensive AI-Assisted Soft Sciences component. Pretty-much, what an engineer would call customer research.
I suggest avoiding a reliance on Philosophy entirely, and using Science instead. Which has a means for telling people their ideas are incorrect, called Bayesianism (a.k.a. the Scientific Method). For ethics, the relevant science is Evolutionary Moral Psychology. Or, to put this in philosophical terminology, my recommended metaethics is Naturalism.
Unfortunately the challenge with this is that coming up with plausible-sounding hypothesis about the evolutionary optima for hominds is easy — and actually testing one is incredibly time-consuming and expensive. So scientific progress in this area is slow. Which is why I see AI-Assisted Alignment as having a large, complex, and expensive AI-Assisted Soft Sciences component. Pretty-much, what an engineer would call customer research.
[For a longer exposition, see Grounding Value Learning in Evolutionary Psychology: an Alternative Proposal to CEV]