On 28/05/07, Jef Allbright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Before you consider whether killing the machine would be bad, you have to > consider whether the machine minds being killed, and how much it minds being > killed. You can't actually prove that death is bad as a mathematical > theorem; it is something that has to be specifically programmed, in the case > of living things by evolution. You're perpetuating a popular and pervasive moral fallacy here. The assumption that the moral rightness of a decision is tied to another's "personhood" and/or preferences is only an evolved heuristic based on its effectiveness in terms of promoting positive-sum interactions between similar agents. Any decision is always only a function of the decider in terms of promoting its own values. The morality of terminating a machine intelligence (or a person) depends not on the preference or intensity of preference of the object entity, but is a function of the decision-making context and expected scope of consequences of the principle(s) behind such a choice. To the extent terminating the object entity would be expected to promote the decider's values then the decision will be considered "good." To the extent such a "good" decision has agreement over a larger context of social decision-making, and to the extent the desired values are expected to be promoted over large scope, the decision will be considered "moral."
Could you give an example of how this reasoning would apply, say in the case of humans eating meat? -- Stathis Papaioannou ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&user_secret=7d7fb4d8
