Is there a set of basic moral "rules", outside of religion or culture, that all intelligent life might theoretically agree on?

Question

Any time I consider asking a question involving "right" or "wrong", moral values at even the most basic level (like "don't needlessly hurt people"), I stop myself, deciding that the question would be stopped right there:

"What's your definition of right and wrong?"

It seems that perhaps there might be no definition of right and wrong that someone couldn't disagree with. So that's my question:

For the sake of intellectual discussion, outside of the scope of religious laws or cultural rules,¹ is there any set of principles that two intelligent² minds from any place in the universe should be able to agree on as being "right" and "wrong"?

Or is it all purely a matter of opinion, culture, religion, experiences, benefit, etc?

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¹ not discounting any rules defined by culture or religion, simply ruling out reasoning specific to cultural or religious practices and/or beliefs

² for the sake of being specific: current era human level of intelligence or higher

Answer 1

There's a few pertinent issues in your question.

First, you haven't really precisely specified "intelligent life", which may lead to some difficulties down the road in talking about this. I think it actually turns out to be very hard to reach a good definition of this term, so I am going to leave that concern aside.

Second, your exclusion of religion and culture does not seem well-justified. Here, I'm not trying to argue religion, politics, or culture with you. Instead, there's an important ambiguity that makes for some pretty disparate cases. Specifically, we need to be careful to distinguish between rules and their justifications.

A religion or culture might both tell you that murder is wrong and give a justification for why murder is wrong. Now, if it tells us that murder is wrong because the flying spaghetti monster told us its wrong, then I would definitely agree that we should skip over the justification which will definitely not prove to be universal. On the other hand, that does not mean that we should per se exclude "murder is wrong" from consideration as a universal law.

The same issue arises with culture. Each culture has taboos and ethical norms. And these norms have behind them somewhat strikingly different stories at times. But if your question is about universal rules, then who cares about the stories?

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There's two or three lines that I'm familiar with that think all intelligent life has at least some common rules.

First, there's sociological and cultural accounts. James Rachels for instance provides an article that talks about cultural relativism and leaves him with a few common principles that he thinks are trans-cultural for humans:

1. Some system of care for the young
2. Rules about truth-telling
3. Rules about life-taking
4. Rules about who we have sex with and when

Anthropologists have some somewhat variant lists, but the gist is that to make a human society that survives it needs certain sustaining practices -- which could be seen as consequences of human intelligence.

Second, there's Kantian and neo-Kantian accounts that take what unifies us as rational beings to be certain capacities which in the case of our sorts of beings enable us to follow moral rules. Christine Korsgaard has a pretty ingenious account where what makes us moral is that we are committed to certain values insofar as we are committed to action.

Third, there are Aristotelian accounts of morality. The key here is that Aristotle thinks that humans and other rational creatures engage in the pursuit of ends. And that there are features of pursuing ends that will require us to behave in ways consistent with what we are and with the achievement of good function for ourselves and the attainment of our ends.

Answer 2

There are a whole bunch of moral rules that humans nearly-universally agree with (at least unless they're specifically trained to think otherwise. There's a whole field of studying this sort of innate morality, including studies in babies or animals.

If intelligent life is a result of evolutionary processes, there are a weaker set of constraints: harming your own babies would be "wrong" under most circumstances (assuming that intelligent creatures have a very small number of very metabolically and temporally expensive progeny, which matches what we see on Earth, save for octopuses). It might be possible to escape even this if somehow the intelligent creatures have no control over what happens to their progeny or whether they have any.

However, Kant notwithstanding, there is little reason to believe there are such constraints for completely general intelligences. The reason is that for any particular moral prohibition ("it is wrong to torture intelligent beings"), the general intelligence could be imbued with as its highest goal doing or promoting exactly that. One can attempt to generate paradoxes ("if you are being tortured you can't torture others"), but those needn't have any more force than some of the paradoxes or unfulfillable goals we have (e.g. we almost all value life extremely highly but we also all die). Even if the mind is rational, this just means that fulfilling its goal is fraught with compromises.

Answer 3

Morals which have clean derivations from a tautology have a good chance of spanning cultural, even species gaps.

For example, if a species has a concept of a "purpose of life," then one can start with a tautology of "there is a purpose to life or there isn't." If there is a purpose, then it is not a hard argument to argue that there is likely good in searching for it. If there is no purpose, then there is no harm in searching for it, because there was no purpose, thus nothing to lose. Thus "Searching for a purpose of life" would be easy to declare "not wrong." (there's a Hedonism counter argument, but its a tricky one to make without accidentally declaring the purpose of life being self gratification).

After that, the next question is how the intelligent creature defines "itself." This has been an open ended philosophical debate for centuries, "What is the 'Self?'" If, in any of the species philosophies, it extends any portion of its Self-hood to you, then your search for the purpose of life also becomes not-wrong. This creates the effect of a "basic moral rule," whether you actually call it "moral" or not.

Whether it is possible to be intelligent and not feel some extension of yourself to others in a transitive relationship would be up for debate, but I like to believe it cannot occur in imperfect beings for a long duration.

Answer 4

Of course ...provided only that you define intelligence as agreeing with a particular set of moral laws!

The problem is that there are many intelligent people alive today in the world who disagree vehemently around various judgments of morality. If human beings can't even agree among themselves, the possibility of further agreement with a wholly alien mind becomes a matter of wishful thinking.

A better question would be whether there is some general standard of morality that theoretically rules all things, regardless of intelligence. I would personally argue in the affirmative, but that's far from an universal or uncontroversial opinion.

Answer 5

Personally, I work under the moral principle of No Hubris: My views are not a priori better or worse than any other person (which is highly contingent on the lack of some dictating deity, which I reject). If everyone were to work under this principle, you would at least have a base framework for coming to some sort of consensus on moral axioms. Without it, there will always be some person who wants to privilege their view over all others (which is the essence of hubris). I'm not certain everyone would agree to this, but I would claim they ought to agree to this.

Put another way, if you are trying to find some universal morality, there cannot be any appeal to authority. The morality must somehow be "intrinsic", and so you need as wide a range of opinions on this intrinsic morality as possible. Hubris is a strong claim of authority: my opinion (not my idea!) is more "worthy" than yours. This has to be eliminated.

Answer 6

Referring to the work of Thomas Hobbs (b. 1588 - d. 1679), John Locke (b. 1632 - d. 1704), and Francis Bacon (b. 1561 - d. 1662), the innate concepts of right and wrong boil down to "Might equals Right". This is the rule while living in the "State of Nature". To move out of the "State of Nature" (i.e. To form a society) people must collectively form a social contract that replaces the "Might equals Right" concept with what ever social order the community is founded on. However, even the truth of "Might equals Right" remains, except we forfeit some of our individual freedom and strength over to the "Sovereign" who is now the apex of "Might" in society.

It can be argued that Charles Darwin (b. 1809 - d. 1882) proposed additional insight into the regular behavioral incentives exhibited in nature; survival in order to reproduce. However, his theories were not exclusive to "intelligent" creatures. In fact he argues that it is the environment that dictates much of the "rules" we come to abide by to survive and procreate.

Lastly, you may want to consider the topic of Utilitarianism, starting with John Stuart Mills (b. 1806 - d. 1873). In Utilitarianism, we abandon the qualitative evaluations of good versus bad. You instead quantify them in terms of increased utility (which provides parameters on how to distinguish and calculate good). This is not a universally excepted definition, but in quantifying utility you demonstrate your reasoning, rather than arguing based on the subjective qualitative features.

Answer 7

Yes, it would be possible for a group of individuals to agree on any number of "rules," but without consequences, or the means to enforce the rules, they could become useless.