Timeline for Do all systems of ethics boil down to maximizing pleasure and/or minimizing suffering?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
21 events
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| Aug 13, 2021 at 3:58 | comment | added | RonJohn | @causative specifically, they may know it's wrong "because their parents told them", and do it anyway (due to selfishness/greed). | |
| Aug 13, 2021 at 3:57 | comment | added | RonJohn | @causative I've never seen a child who -- at some point didn't try to get away with something they knew was wrong. | |
| Aug 13, 2021 at 3:20 | comment | added | causative♦ | @RonJohn Kids have different personalities. Some are opportunists scheming about how they can get away with stuff and not be punished. Some are naturally rule-following with a sense of how things "ought" to be, and get upset when others break the rules. The latter kind aren't thinking about personal cost/benefit. They treat life as more like a math test with right answers and wrong answers, where the rightness or wrongness of the answer is a matter of how it relates to the question, independent of whether the kid gets a gold star for the answer or not. | |
| Aug 13, 2021 at 2:50 | comment | added | RonJohn | "The child is not performing a utilitarian calculus about what would result in the most pleasure for them." Obviously you were never spanked as a child for shoplifting. | |
| Aug 13, 2021 at 0:15 | comment | added | Barmar | @causative I didn't mean to imply that they ONLY learn from punishment. | |
| Aug 13, 2021 at 0:12 | comment | added | causative♦ | @Barmar Just because a child may be punished, does not mean they do not also, separately from that, believe their parents when their parents say something is "wrong," and be motivated not to do "wrong" things. Not everyone is the same. Some people will refuse to break rules like stealing, lying, or cheating even when there is no chance of being punished. Remember the 2nd robot scenario - just because pain/pleasure may be involved in a situation does not mean it is the primary driver of a behavior. | |
| Aug 12, 2021 at 15:30 | comment | added | Barmar | Children don't always follow the rules that are given to them. When they don't they get punished, on the theory that this will teach them that it's better for them to follow the rules. | |
| Aug 12, 2021 at 11:10 | comment | added | causative♦ | @kaya3 Well, ok, you're right that's a different question. Still, the ethicist has his own motives when he tries to answer the question of whether it is ethical not to vote, which can be based on habit or tradition as well. Or other things. Personally, I think that understanding/wisdom is much more important than pain or pleasure. Pain is basically just like an error report for a program; you wouldn't want to minimize error reports, they serve a useful purpose. You do want to minimize the errors themselves, which are only inaccurately and approximately represented in the reports. | |
| Aug 12, 2021 at 10:29 | comment | added | Passer By | @causative There is behaviour driven by instincts, sure. But that's not my point. I'm saying your argument about learnt rules boils down to a pain/pleasure calculus, and isn't grounds for arguing for anything beyond utilitarianism. | |
| Aug 12, 2021 at 9:59 | comment | added | kaya3 | They can, but whether or not those rules are ethical is a different question to what their motivation for following those rules is, isn't it? For example, if someone always votes out of sheer habit rather than any consideration for the consequences of voting, an ethicist can still answer the question of whether it is ethical not to vote, but can they do so without reference to human pleasure and/or suffering? | |
| Aug 12, 2021 at 9:52 | comment | added | causative♦ | @kaya3 It's not about whether the robot's behavior is ethical or unethical, it's about what human motivations might be for following a moral code. Like the robot, these human motivations can involve behavior rules that are not (primarily) based on a pain/pleasure calculus. | |
| Aug 12, 2021 at 9:33 | comment | added | kaya3 | Robots can indeed have rules like your examples, but can their rules be defined as ethical or unethical without reference to human pleasure or suffering? That's the question, isn't it? As for the pleasure button, one could argue that we have defined "pleasure" in the wrong way if the pleasure that button gives is not desirable over not pressing the button - or that ablating one's mind would be a greater suffering than the pleasure given - or that we should use a similar word instead of "pleasure" when asking the original question, but otherwise it is still essentially the same question. | |
| Aug 12, 2021 at 7:29 | comment | added | causative♦ | @PasserBy Animals (including humans) have certain instincts where, if a certain situation occurs, the instinct just makes them behave a certain way. e.g. a woodchuck hibernating. There may be pleasure involved in following the instinct, but this is in addition; the instinctual behavior primarily is driven by a hard-coded rule. This is especially clear the first time the instinct triggers, because at that time the animal had not yet experienced any pleasure from the behavior and therefore could not have acted in anticipation of pleasure. | |
| Aug 12, 2021 at 7:23 | history | edited | causative♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 173 characters in body
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| Aug 12, 2021 at 7:21 | comment | added | causative♦ | @PasserBy Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear. In the second robot scenario, the robot is given a hard coded rule that primarily drives its behavior, and a small reward signal that may slightly drive its behavior. It is in this case programmed with a mixture of rule-based behavior and RL. And the point is, just because it received a reward for closing the gate, we should not assume this reward was the primary driver of its behavior. | |
| S Aug 12, 2021 at 7:17 | history | suggested | CommunityBot | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
changed to inclusive language
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| Aug 12, 2021 at 7:04 | comment | added | Passer By | BTW I think you misunderstood what reinforcement learning typically does, it's unlikely there's a "rule" in there. | |
| Aug 12, 2021 at 7:00 | comment | added | Passer By | "humans give other humans rules", yes and we follow them because we are social creatures. Not following them has an immediate emotional impact, specifically because how our brains evolved, and in the long term may cause you to get socially shunned. Ultimately, it is still because of some form of reward, material or not. | |
| Aug 12, 2021 at 6:50 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Aug 12, 2021 at 7:17 | |||||
| Aug 12, 2021 at 5:02 | comment | added | Al Brown | Lol. Daniel kahneman defined two happinesses. One from interrupting at random times to ask subjects to rate how they were right then and then averaged. Another from a monthly look at and evaluation of how happy they were with their life. 1. Both could mean happy and dont correlate as well as youd think. Stuff like having kids affects one up and one down. Watching tv does too, other way of course. 2 We remember set periods as being overall much happier if they began and ended well, even if actual average was low. | |
| Aug 11, 2021 at 22:12 | history | answered | causative♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |