Many theistic traditions posit that moral law is revealed through divine command — for example, “Thou shalt not kill.” Yet life, at its most fundamental biological level, requires death to sustain itself: cellular apoptosis, predator-prey dynamics, immune systems eliminating threats, and even agriculture — all entail some form of killing.
This raises a higher-order question: If a deity embeds death as a structural necessity of life, how should we interpret moral prohibitions against killing?
I’m not posing this as a theological trap or rhetorical trick, but as a genuine inquiry into the coherence of divine systems design:
Are divine commands like “do not kill” idealized constraints meant to elevate us beyond our biological constraints — or are they context-specific ethical nudges?
Is the moral prohibition against killing aimed at a specific kind of intentionality, rather than the act itself?
More broadly: how should we reason about normative systems when they appear to conflict with the embedded structure of the world they govern?
This question isn’t just theological — it has implications for AGI alignment, embedded cognition, and how we train systems to resolve moral commands against dynamic constraints.
I’d welcome thoughts on:
Divine command theory as a form of meta-alignment
Evolutionary game theory and moral realism
Embedded agency models that must resolve between moral directives and structural inevitabilities
If Mortality Is Structurally Embedded in Life, What Does That Imply About Systems of Divine Command and Ethical Coherence?
Many theistic traditions posit that moral law is revealed through divine command — for example, “Thou shalt not kill.” Yet life, at its most fundamental biological level, requires death to sustain itself: cellular apoptosis, predator-prey dynamics, immune systems eliminating threats, and even agriculture — all entail some form of killing.
This raises a higher-order question:
If a deity embeds death as a structural necessity of life, how should we interpret moral prohibitions against killing?
I’m not posing this as a theological trap or rhetorical trick, but as a genuine inquiry into the coherence of divine systems design:
Are divine commands like “do not kill” idealized constraints meant to elevate us beyond our biological constraints — or are they context-specific ethical nudges?
Is the moral prohibition against killing aimed at a specific kind of intentionality, rather than the act itself?
More broadly: how should we reason about normative systems when they appear to conflict with the embedded structure of the world they govern?
This question isn’t just theological — it has implications for AGI alignment, embedded cognition, and how we train systems to resolve moral commands against dynamic constraints.
I’d welcome thoughts on:
Divine command theory as a form of meta-alignment
Evolutionary game theory and moral realism
Embedded agency models that must resolve between moral directives and structural inevitabilities