It will be hard to know whether there is one true ethics as the natural convergent ideal, without first understanding morality as a phenomenon of consciousness, including how it relates to non-moral factors in human decision making.
I don’t understand this point. Why do you need to analyze consciousness to understand ethics? I think I’m missing some crucial information here.
Moral feelings are states of consciousness, and moral judgments are acts of consciousness, and these distinctive mental phenomena are the entire basis of morality and ethics. Without them, no one would believe there are such things as moral right and wrong. Examining their nature, how fallible they are, and what they imply about the ontology of the moral, seems to me an essential ingredient in understanding what morality is, and how it relates to the rest of reality. Moral faculties, insofar as they exist, are a specific capability of the conscious mind.
You could try to be a pure materialist and “heterophenomenologist” about this; or you could be a pure moral philosopher who takes the basic structures of subjectivity for granted. But an investigator strictly following the first approach is artificially denying themselves the use of their own first-person knowledge and experience, and everything that can provide; and we are ultimately aiming to make AIs into ideal moral agents, so the second approach also needs something more. I conclude that we need to solve the problems of consciousness in order to really know what we’re doing.
I don’t understand this point. Why do you need to analyze consciousness to understand ethics? I think I’m missing some crucial information here.
Moral feelings are states of consciousness, and moral judgments are acts of consciousness, and these distinctive mental phenomena are the entire basis of morality and ethics. Without them, no one would believe there are such things as moral right and wrong. Examining their nature, how fallible they are, and what they imply about the ontology of the moral, seems to me an essential ingredient in understanding what morality is, and how it relates to the rest of reality. Moral faculties, insofar as they exist, are a specific capability of the conscious mind.
You could try to be a pure materialist and “heterophenomenologist” about this; or you could be a pure moral philosopher who takes the basic structures of subjectivity for granted. But an investigator strictly following the first approach is artificially denying themselves the use of their own first-person knowledge and experience, and everything that can provide; and we are ultimately aiming to make AIs into ideal moral agents, so the second approach also needs something more. I conclude that we need to solve the problems of consciousness in order to really know what we’re doing.