On 6/5/07, Mark Waser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I would not claim that agency requires consciousness; it is necessary
> only that an agent acts on its environment so as to minimize the
> difference between the external environment and its internal model of
> the preferred environment
OK.
> Moral agency, however, requires both agency and self-awareness. Moral
> agency is not about the acting but the deciding
So you're saying that deciding requires self-awareness?
No, I'm saying that **moral** decision-making requires self-awareness.
> This requirement of expanded decision-making context is what makes the
> difference between what is seen as merely "good" (to an individual)
> and what is seen as "right" or "moral" (to a group.) Morality is a
> function of a group, not of an individual. The difference entails
> **agreement**, thus decision-making context greater than a single
> agent, thus recognition of self in order to recognize the existence of
> the greater context including both self and other agency.
So you're saying that if you act morally without recognizing the greater
context then you are not acting morally (i.e. you are acting amorally --
without morals -- as opposed to immorally -- against morals).
Yes, a machine that has been programed to carry out acts which others
have decided are moral, or a human who follows religious (or military)
imperatives is not displaying moral agency.
I would then argue that we humans *rarely* recognize this greater context --
and then most frequently act upon this realization for the wrong reasons
(i.e. fear of ostracism, punishment, etc.) instead of "moral" reasons
because realistically most of us are hard-wired by evolution to feel in
accordance with most of what is regarded as moral (with the exceptions often
being psychopaths).
Yes! Our present-day moral agency is limited due to what we might
lump under the term "lack of awareness." Most of what is presently
considered "morality" is actually only distilled patterns of
cooperative behavior that worked in the environment of evolutionary
adaptation, now encoded into our innate biological preferences as well
as cultural artifacts such as the Ten Commandments.
A more accurate understanding of "morality" or decision-making seen as
"right", and extensible beyond the EEA to our increasingly complex
world might be something like the following:
Decisions are seen as increasingly moral to the extent that they enact
principles assessed as promoting an increasing context of increasingly
coherent values over increasing scope of consequences.
For the sake of brevity here I'll resist the temptation to forestall
some anticipated objections.
- Jef
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