How Robots and Monsters Might Break Human Moral Systems

[C C]

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/201...break.html

EXCERPT: Human moral systems are designed, or evolve and grow, with human beings in mind. So maybe it shouldn't be too surprising if they would break apart into confusion and contradiction if radically different intelligences enter the scene.

[...] My own emphasis would be this: Our moral systems, whether deontological, consequentialist, virtue ethical, or relatively untheorized and intuitive, take as a background assumption that the moral community is composed of stably distinct individuals with roughly equal cognitive and emotional capacities (with special provisions for non-human animals, human infants, and people with severe mental disabilities). If this assumption is suspended, moral thinking goes haywire....

[Magical Realist]

Zombies might do this. They'd cause us to question what it means to be human, to be alive. Especially jarring is the fact that the zombie could be your own child or grandmother. A zombie most certainly falls within the realm of the pest to be exterminated--feasting on human flesh and spreading its disease. But a zombie is a sub human too. Perhaps it goes to malls out of some vague residual memory of shopping as a comforting activity. Perhaps it sits in a car all day yearning for some long lost dream of driving. It can't help being cannibalistic. It is afflicted. It is insane. But deep down inside, the template of humanity might still persist, causing us all to ponder the possibility of being a zombie in some sense already. Of taking life indiscrimnately without any moral compunction whatsoever. "He who fights with monsters must beware lest he become a monster."--Nietzsche