Comment by joshuamcginnis
13 hours ago
The problem is that if moral absolution doesn’t exist then it doesn’t matter what you do in the trolly situation since it’s all relative. You may as well do what you please since it’s all a matter of opinion anyway.
No, it's not black and white, that's the whole point. How would you answer to the case I outlined above, according to your rules? It's called a paradox for a reason. Plus, that there is no right answer in many situations does not preclude that an answer or some approximation of it should be sought, similarly to how the lack of proof of God's existence does not preclude one from believing and seeking understanding anyway. If you have read the Bible and derived hard and clear rules of what to do and not do in every situation, then I'm not sure what is it you understood.
To be clear, I am with you in believing that there is, indeed, an absolute right/wrong, and the examples you brought up are obviously wrong. But humans cannot absolutely determine right/wrong, as is exemplified by the many paradoxes, and again as it appears in Genesis. And that is precisely a sort of soft-proof of God: if we accept there is an absolute right/wrong, but unreachable from the human realm, then where does that absolute emanate from? I haven't worded that very well, but it's an argument you can find in literature.
And, to be clear, Claude is full of BS.
My original argument is getting dismissed, in part, because people are fearful of how it would be implemented while at the same time, completely hand-waving over the obvious flaws of the Claude philosophy of moral relativism.
I'm not arguing that it would make the edge-cases easier to define, but I do think the general outcomes for society would be better over the long-run if we all held ourselves to a greater moral authority than that of our opinions, the will of those in power and the cultural norms of the time.
If we could get alignment on the shared belief that there are at least some obvious moral absolutes, then I would be happy to join in on the discussion as to how to implement the - no doubt - difficult task of aligning an LLM towards those absolutes.
This sounds like your better take so far. I think your previous statements came across very black/white, especially that Bible reference that made things sound rather fundamentalist, and that got the downvotes. But I don't think anyone would disagree with what you stated here.