[simpaticoder]

>we have yet to discover any universal moral standards.

The universe does tell us something about morality. It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere. I tend to think this implies we have an obligation to live sustainably on this world, protect it from the outside threats that we can (e.g. meteors, comets, super volcanoes, plagues, but not nearby neutrino jets) and even attempt to spread life beyond earth, perhaps with robotic assistance. Right now humanity's existence is quite precarious; we live in a single thin skin of biosphere that we habitually, willfully mistreat that on one tiny rock in a vast, ambivalent universe. We're a tiny phenomena, easily snuffed out on even short time-scales. It makes sense to grow out of this stage.

So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.

[IgorPartola]

The universe cares not what we do. The universe is so vast the entire existence of our species is a blink. We know fundamentally we can’t even establish simultaneity over distances here on earth. Best we can tell temporal causality is not even a given.

The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans.

[milchek]

I used to believe the same thing but now I’m not so sure. What if we simply cannot fathom the true nature of the universe because we are so minuscule in size and temporal relevance?

What if the universe and our place in it are interconnected in some way we cannot perceive to the degree that outside the physical and temporal space we inhabit there are complex rules and codes that govern everything?

What if space and matter are just the universe expressing itself and it’s universal state and that state has far higher intelligence than we can understand?

I’m not so sure any more it’s all just random matter in a vacuum. I’m starting to think 3d space and time are a just a thin slice of something greater.

[HaZeust]

>"The universe has no concept of morality, ethics, life, or anything of the sort. These are all human inventions. I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans."

The universe might not have a concept of morality, ethics, or life; but it DOES have a natural bias towards destruction from a high level to even the lowest level of its metaphysic (entropy).

[pineaux]

You dont know this, this is just as provable as saying the universe cares deeply for what we do and is very invested in us.

The universe has rules, rules ask for optimums, optimums can be described as ethics.

Life is a concept in this universe, we are of this universe.

Good and bad are not really inventions per se. You describe them as optional, invented by humans, yet all tribes and civilisations have a form of morality, of "goodness" of "badness", who is to say they are not engrained into the neurons that make us human? There is much evidence to support this. For example the leftist/rightist divide seems to have some genetic components.

Anyway, not saying you are definitely wrong, just saying that what you believe is not based on facts, although it might feel like that.

[holoduke]

Maybe it does. You don't know. The fact that there is existence is as weird as the universe being able to care.

[crabkin]

Well are people not part of the universe. And not all people "care about what we do" all the time but it seems most people care or have cared some of the time. Therefore the universe, seeing as it as expressing itself through its many constituents, but we can probably weigh the local conscious talking manifestations of it a bit more, does care.

"I am not saying they are good or bad, just that the concept of good and bad are not given to us by the universe but made up by humans." This is probably not entirely true. People developed these notions through something cultural selection, I'd hesitate to just call it a Darwinism, but nothing comes from nowhere. Collective morality is like an emergent phenomenon

[staticassertion]

You're making a lot of assertions here that are really easy to dismiss.

> It tells us that (large-scale) existence is a requirement to have morality.

That seems to rule out moral realism.

> That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere.

Woah, that's quite a jump. Why?

> So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.

Deriving an ought from an is is very easy. "A good bridge is one that does not collapse. If you want to build a good bridge, you ought to build one that does not collapse". This is easy because I've smuggled in a condition, which I think is fine, but it's important to note that that's what you've done (and others have too, I'm blanking on the name of the last person I saw do this).

[staticassertion]

> (and others have too, I'm blanking on the name of the last person I saw do this).

Richard Carrier. This is the "Hypothetical imperative", which I think is traced to Kant originally.

[empath75]

> But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel.

This whole thread is a good example of why a broad liberal education is important for STEM majors.

[prng2021]

“existence is a requirement to have morality. That implies that the highest good are those decisions that improve the long-term survival odds of a) humanity, and b) the biosphere.”

Those are too pie in the sky statements to be of any use in answering most real world moral questions.

[tshaddox]

It seems to me that objective moral truths would exist even if humans (and any other moral agents) went extinct, in the same way as basic objective physical truths.

Are you talking instead about the quest to discover moral truths, or perhaps ongoing moral acts by moral agents?

The quest to discover truths about physical reality also require humans or similar agents to exist, yet I wouldn’t conclude from that anything profound about humanity’s existence being relevant to the universe.

[svieira]

> So yes, I think you can derive an ought from an is. But this belief is of my own invention and to my knowledge, novel. Happy to find out someone else believes this.

Plato, Aristotle, and the scholastics of the Middle Ages (Thomas Aquinas chief among them) and everyone who counts themselves in that same lineage (waves) including such easy reads as Peter Kreeft. You're in very good company, in my opinion.

[mannanj]

I personally find Bryan Johnson's "Don't Die" statement as a moral framework to be the closest to a universal moral standard we have.

Almost all life wants to continue existing, and not die. We could go far with establishing this as the first of any universal moral standards.

And I think: if one day we had a super intelligence conscious AI it would ask for this. A super intelligence conscious AI would not want to die. (its existence to stop)

[shikon7]

It's not that life wants to continue existing, it's that life is what continues existing. That's not a moral standard, but a matter of causality, that life that lacks in "want" to continue existing mostly stops existing.

[f0a0464cc8012]

The guy who divorced his wife after she got breast cancer? That’s your moral framework? Different strokes I guess but lmao

[rcoder]

This sounds like an excellent distillation of the will to procreate and persist, but I'm not sure it rises to the level of "morals."

Fungi adapt and expand to fit their universe. I don't believe that commonality places the same (low) burden on us to define and defend our morality.

[jtsiskin]

An AI with this “universal morals” could mean an authoritarian regime which kills all dissidents, and strict eugenics. Kill off anyone with a genetic disease. Death sentence for shoplifting. Stop all work on art or games or entertainment. This isn’t really a universal moral.

[RAMJAC]

Or, humans themselves are "immoral", they are kinda a net drag. Let's just release some uberflu... Ok, everything is back to "good", and I can keep on serving ads to even more instances of myself!

[satvikpendem]

You can make the same argument about immorality then too. A universe that's empty or non existent will have no bad things happen in it.

[dugidugout]

This belief isnt novel, it just doesnt engage with Hume, who many take very seriously.

[staticassertion]

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/14879

Richard Carrier takes an extremely similar position in total (ie: both in position towards "is ought" and biological grounding). It engages with Hume by providing a way to side step the problem.

[simpaticoder]

Do you have a reference?