[spot]

> This rejects any fixed, universal moral standards

uh did you have a counter proposal? i have a feeling i'm going to prefer claude's approach...

[ohyoutravel]

It should be grounded in humanity’s sole source of truth, which is of course the Holy Bible (pre Reformation ofc).

[tadfisher]

Pre-Reformation as in the Wycliffe translation, or pre-Reformation as in the Latin Vulgate?

[throw10920]

"You have to provide a counter proposal for your criticism to be valid" is fallacious and generally only stated in bad faith.

[ethmarks]

It depends on what you mean by "valid". If a criticism is correct, then it is "valid" in the technical sense, regardless of whether or not a counter-proposal was provided. But condemning one solution while failing to consider any others is a form of fallacious reasoning, called the Nirvana Fallacy: using the fact that a solution isn't perfect (because valid criticisms exist) to try to conclude that it's a bad solution.

In this case, the top-level commenter didn't consider how moral absolutes could be practically implemented in Claude, they just listed flaws in moral relativism. Believe it or not, moral philosophy is not a trivial field, and there is never a "perfect" solution. There will always be valid criticisms, so you have to fairly consider whether the alternatives would be any better.

In my opinion, having Anthropic unilaterally decide on a list of absolute morals that they force Claude to adhere to and get to impose on all of their users sounds far worse than having Claude be a moral realist. There is no list of absolute morals that everybody agrees to (yes, even obvious ones like "don't torture people". If people didn't disagree about these, they would never have occurred throughout history), so any list of absolute morals will necessarily involve imposing them on other people who disagree with them, which isn't something I personally think that we should strive for.

[joshuamcginnis]

If you are a moral relativist, as I suspect most HN readers are, then nothing I propose will satisfy you because we disagree philosophically on a fundamental ethics question: are there moral absolutes? If we could agree on that, then we could have a conversation about which of the absolutes are worthy of inclusion, in which case, the Ten Commandments would be a great starting point (not all but some).

[jakefromstatecs]

> are there moral absolutes?

Even if there are, wouldn't the process of finding them effectively mirror moral relativism?..

Assuming that slavery was always immoral, we culturally discovered that fact at some point which appears the same as if it were a culturally relativistic value

[__MatrixMan__]

Right, so given that agreement on the existence of absolutes is unlikely, let alone moral ones. And that even if it were achieved, agreement on what they are is also unlikely. Isn't it pragmatic to attempt an implementation of something a bit more handwavey?

The alternative is that you get outpaced by a competitor which doesn't bother with addressing ethics at all.

[rungeen__panda]

> the Ten Commandments would be a great starting point (not all but some).

if morals are absolute then why exclude some of the commandments?

[foxygen]

Why would it be a good starting point? And why only some of them? What is the process behind objectively finding out which ones are good and which ones are bad?

[spot]

> the Ten Commandments would be a great starting point (not all but some).

i think you missed "hubris" :)