Employing AI to Better Understand Our Morals

We present a summary of research that we have conducted employing AI to better understand human morality. This summary adumbrates theoretical fundamentals and considers how to regulate development of powerful new AI technologies. The latter research aim is benevolent AI, with fair distribution of benefits associated with the development of these and related technologies, avoiding disparities of power and wealth due to unregulated competition. Our approach avoids statistical models employed in other approaches to solve moral dilemmas, because these are “blind” to natural constraints on moral agents, and risk perpetuating mistakes. Instead, our approach employs, for instance, psychologically realistic counterfactual reasoning in group dynamics. The present paper reviews studies involving factors fundamental to human moral motivation, including egoism vs. altruism, commitment vs. defaulting, guilt vs. non-guilt, apology plus forgiveness, counterfactual collaboration, among other factors fundamental in the motivation of moral action. These being basic elements in most moral systems, our studies deliver generalizable conclusions that inform efforts to achieve greater sustainability and global benefit, regardless of cultural specificities in constituents.

Pathogens Are Linked to Human Moral Systems Across Time and Space

Infectious diseases have been an impending threat to the survival of individuals and groups throughout our evolutionary history. As a result, humans have developed psychological pathogen-avoidance mechanisms and groups have developed societal norms that respond to the presence of disease-causing microorganisms in the environment. In this work, we demonstrate that morality plays a central role in the cultural and psychological architectures that help humans avoid pathogens. We present a collection of studies which together provide an integrated understanding of the socio-ecological and psychological impacts of pathogens on human morality. Specifically, in Studies 1 (2,834 U.S. counties) and 2 (67 nations), we show that regional variation in pathogen prevalence is consistently related to aggregate moral Purity. In Study 3, we use computational linguistic methods to show that pathogen-related words co-occur with Purity words across multiple languages. In Studies 4 (n = 513) and 5 (n = 334), we used surveys and social psychological experimentation to show that pathogen-avoidance attitudes are correlated with Purity. Finally, in Study 6, we found that historical prevalence of pathogens is linked to Care, Loyalty, and Purity. We argue that particular adaptive moral systems are developed and maintained in response to the threat of pathogen occurrence in the environment. We draw on multiple methods to establish connections between pathogens and moral codes in multiple languages, experimentally induced situations, individual differences, U.S. counties, 67 countries, and historical periods over the last century.

Fine Moving Value in Behavioral Anomalies to Minimize Poverty in Disadvantaged Areas

Indonesia isa wealthycountry with resources,be theyhuman resources or naturalresources. However,even ifIndonesia is a resource-rich country,itcontinues to work to solve the problem of poverty.Unfortunately, there is no strategic solution that can alleviate poverty.Deprivationtriggersa behavioral anomaly in society,especially in disadvantaged areas. This research aims to determine the effect of community behavior on poverty alleviation in underprivileged areas.The study is based on a subtle value-moving approach to behavioral irregularities of people in disadvantaged areas.This study is included inaquantitative research with regional populations in Indonesia designated as lagging regions in 2020-2021. The sample of respondents included110 people from areas/provinces designated as lagging areas. Research instruments use data collection in the form of observations and in-depth interviews. Four hypotheses were developedto explain the influence between causal relationships through hypothesis testing and analyzed usingStructural Equation Modeling with the help of LISREL 8.8 software. The analysis results ofthis study showed that through a smooth-moving value approach,there was a significant favorable influence of behavioral anomalies onthe poverty rate. The study concluded that this movement of subtle values could be an attempt to raise awareness and change in the emergence of behavioral anomalies of people in disadvantaged areas.This study contributes to the understanding that the value of smooth-moving behavior can be an attempt to improve the emergence of societal behavioral anomalies. This ingenious solution can strengthen values, attitudes, mental and moral systems to reduce poverty in disadvantaged areas.

To wish you well: the biopolitical subjectivities of medical crowdfunders during and after Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 lockdown

Crowdfunding platforms apply a marketized, competitive logic to healthcare, increasingly functioning as generative spaces in which worthy citizens and biopolitical subjects are produced. Using a lens of biopower, this article considers what sort of biopolitical subjectivities were produced in and through New Zealand crowdfunding campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. It focuses on a discursive and dialogical analysis of 59 online medical crowdfunding campaigns that were active during lockdown and chose to mention the pandemic. These pages pointed to interrelated biological, social and economic precarities, speaking to questions about how citizens navigate uneven needs during uncertain times. Findings showed that crowdfunders referred to the pandemic in order to narrate their own situation in culturally coherent ways and to establish context-specific relations of care. This included contextualising their needs through establishing shared crisis narratives that also made the infrastructural contexts of healthcare visible and performing relational labour in ways that aligned with nationally specific affective regimes. By highlighting their own vulnerability, crowdfunders strategically mobilised broader lockdown discourses of self-sacrifice on behalf of vulnerable people. In this way, New Zealand’s lockdown produced subjectivities both drawing on wider neoliberal moral regimes and specific to the nuanced and emergent moral systems of pandemic citizenship.

Social choice using moral metrics

PurposeThis paper aims to develop a geometry of moral systems. Existing social choice mechanisms predominantly employ simple structures, such as rankings. A mathematical metric among moral systems allows us to represent complex sets of views in a multidimensional geometry. Such a metric can serve to diagnose structural issues, test existing mechanisms of social choice or engender new mechanisms. It also may be used to replace active social choice mechanisms with information-based passive ones, shifting the operational burden.Design/methodology/approachUnder reasonable assumptions, moral systems correspond to computational black boxes, which can be represented by conditional probability distributions of responses to situations. In the presence of a probability distribution over situations and a metric among responses, codifying our intuition, we can derive a sensible metric among moral systems.FindingsWithin the developed framework, the author offers a set of well-behaved candidate metrics that may be employed in real applications. The author also proposes a variety of practical applications to social choice, both diagnostic and generative.Originality/valueThe proffered framework, derived metrics and proposed applications to social choice represent a new paradigm and offer potential improvements and alternatives to existing social choice mechanisms. They also can serve as the staging point for research in a number of directions.

Rationality and Morality

To what extent is morality based on reason? To answer this question, we need to clarify which aspect of morality is under investigation, and which notion of reason is in play. Recent work in moral psychology has attempted to debunk central aspects of moral judgment and metaethical judgment. However, rational processes might play a vital role in the acquisition of moral systems. This chapter sets out the basic idea of processes and suggests that one kind of process—statistical learning—is especially significant for moral learning. Statistical learning processes are both empiricist, in that they are domain-general processes, and they are rational, in that they conform to the rules of probability theory. Thus they are poised to provide alternatives to both nativist and sentimentalist accounts of our moral psychology.

Scope

Commonsense, as well as experimental psychology, indicates that there are subtle distinctions in the normative domain. Many people, both adults and children, think that it’s worse to produce a bad consequence than to allow it and that it’s worse to produce a bad consequence with intent than to produce it with mere foreknowledge. People also often think that it’s forbidden to treat people of their own community in a certain way, but not that it’s forbidden to treat people in other communities in that way. It has been unclear exactly how these distinctions arise in ordinary moral thought. This chapter draws on the “size principle,” which is implicated in word learning, to explain how children would use scant and equivocal evidence to acquire these aspects of moral systems.

Rational Rules

Moral systems, like normative systems more broadly, involve complex mental representations. Rational Rules offers an account of the acquisition of key aspects of normative systems in terms of general-purpose rational learning procedures. In particular, it offers statistical learning accounts of: (1) how people come to think that a rule is act-based, that is, the rule prohibits producing certain consequences but not allowing such consequences to occur or persist; (2) how people come to expect that a new rule will also be act-based; (3) how people come to believe a principle of liberty, according to which whatever is not expressly prohibited is permitted; and (4) how people come to think that some normative claims hold universally while others hold only relative to some group. This provides an empiricist theory of a key part of moral acquisition, since the learning procedures are domain general. It also entails that crucial parts of our moral system enjoy rational credentials since the learning procedures are forms of rational inference. There is another sense in which rules can be rational—they can be effective for achieving our ends, given our ecological settings. Rational Rules argues that at least some central components of our moral systems are indeed ecologically rational: they are good at helping us attain common goals. In addition, the book argues that a basic form of rule representation brings motivation along automatically. Thus, part of the explanation for why we follow moral rules is that we are built to follow rules quite generally.

Could God Love Cruelty?

One of the foremost objections to theological voluntarism is the contingency objection. If God’s will fixes moral facts, then what if God willed that agents engage in cruelty? I argue that even unrestricted theological voluntarists should accept some logical constraints on possible moral systems—hence, some limits on ways that God could have willed morality to be—and these logical constraints are sufficient to blunt the force of the contingency objection. One constraint I defend is a very weak accessibility requirement, related to (but less problematic than) existence internalism in metaethics. The theological voluntarist can maintain: Godcouldn’t have loved cruelty, and even though he could have willed behaviors we find abhorrent, he could only have done so in a world of deeply alien moral agents. We cannot confidently declare such a world unacceptable.

Robots and Moral Revolutions

Human societies have, historically, undergone a number of moral revolutions. Some of these have been precipitated by technological changes. Will the integration of robots into our social lives precipitate a new moral revolution? In this keynote, I will look at the history of moral revolutions and the role of techno-social change in facilitating those revolutions. I will examine the structural properties of human moral systems and how those properties might be affected by social robots. I will argue that much of our current social morality is agency-centric and that social robots, as non-standard agents, will disrupt that model.