But who decides which rules are neutral? Even this is relative and subjective. Laws are not inherently neutral. A pH of 7 is only neutral because it is bounded by 0 on the left and 14 on the right. In a different system, perhaps it would be from 10 to 30 and thus a pH of 20 would be neutral.
In that example the number on the scale is less important than chemical properties of the solution. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away and all that.
You’re correct that rules are themselves to an high degree arbitrary. They can only be imposed by a source of authority that’s beyond question: God(s), elders, founding fathers, kings, etc. In the case of the U.S. it’s historical inertia going back to 1215.
> people just have to accept them as neutral and elevate them above their own sense of right and wrong.
I would say people need to accept them as neutral and make them their own sense of right and wrong. You can have a stricter personal set of right and wrong, but it needs to be something that society recognizes as a stricter in all ways.
Hehe, unfortunately that example undermines your otherwise good point, physical laws do not support your claim. Changing the units of a physical scale range does not change the relative position of a point inside that range, it only changes the name. 20 in a [10,30] range is still the absolute midpoint, and represents the amount of base or acid on an absolute scale.
Not sure I agree with the claim that we only allow “neutral” rules. That’s not necessarily true. And of course who decides which rules are neutral depends on which rule we’re talking about, and where you live, and (important) doesn’t depend much on whether the rule is subjective or not - the same processes are used even when the rule is objective. Some rules are fairly objective because they’re tied to health & safety. All humans require clear air & water, for example. Most tolerate a little pollution due to business interests, but whether pollution is poisonous isn’t particularly subjective, aside from the debates over the economic damage from small non-lethal amounts.
Your pH example actually proves the opposite. pH 7 is not neutral because it happens to sit halfway between 0 and 14.
pH is not inherently limited to that range at all. Sufficiently concentrated solutions can have pH values below 0 or above 14. A solution is called neutral when the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions are equal, which happens to correspond to about pH 7 at 25°C. Change the temperature and neutral pH changes too. So if you arbitrarily changed the scale to 10–30, that wouldn’t magically make 20 “neutral.” Neutrality comes from the definition and the underlying conditions, not from being the midpoint between two numbers.
I know it's off topic: but I am curious and this sounds both challenging to search for and likely to not get a straight answer from an LLM. Do you happen to know if this means that water may tip from neutral to slightly alkaline or acidic at different temperatures or pressures?
I have always found it .. peculiar that water just so happens to (as you aptly put it) "have all the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions equal" :)
This isn't a difficult question. I'm sure LLM knows these things better than I do.
Water is H-O-H; H+ and OH- both come from water. If there are no impurities, then for every extra H+ there is an extra OH-, so it's not that they are "happen to be equal". They're born equal.
Changing the temperature does change the concentrations of these ions so pH does change by definition. But the water remains neutral, since the ratio of H⁺ to OH⁻ is still 1:1
The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule":
"Treat others as you would like them to treat you."
It has a long history, both secular and religious. Pretty well everything flows from it, and if someone is doing "the wrong thing" whilst claiming to obey it then they are probably deluding themself.
The rule is suited to enforcement, since if someone does something "wrong", rather than immediately attacking them you can reasonably ask "Would you like it if I did this to you?". Limitation of power is built in.
I'd say expecting non-hypocrisy is also a top item. Someone says x behavior from a leader is disqualifying? OK, maybe that's their earnestly held belief and so worthy of consideration even if I disagree with their view. But if their behavior is the opposite/shows hypocrisy and suddenly isn't disqualifying? That should be a red line.
Because even the "golden rule" leaves a lot of wiggle room - for example, should marital infidelity (or x) be a dealbreaker for electing someone? Maybe, but looking at hypocrisy (and thereby actions) might provide better insight as to what those groups actually believe is the "correct" standard?
> The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule"
Mostly agreed, but a surprisingly large percentage of the population seems truly unable to feel empathy for others (and can even show glee at others being negatively impacted by something) unless it personally affects them (a prerequisite for "Would you like it if I did this to you?" to work?). They can be gung-ho about laws that negatively affect others but upset if it affects them. For example, the countless examples of "Community members vote for politician promising illegal immigrant deportation, then upset/disagree that long-time beloved community member deported", or "Voter voted for politician promising criminal-record-immigrant deportation, then upset/disagrees that partner with past criminal record deported".
What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It's okay for me to treat others that way?
Just because something has a long history (secular or otherwise) doesn't give it any merit by itself.
If we need some standard to judge against what is morally acceptable in the case I presented (no this doesn't apply if you like to hurt yourself and others) then you are back to defining a standard which cannot inherently be neutral.
> What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It’s okay for me to treat others that way?
No, that’s not what the Golden Rule said. It says to treat people the way you want other people to treat you. How you treat yourself is your own business.
There’s also a certain amount of making reasonable assumptions here. Obviously the intent is to get people to treat each other fair & well, not to set a logic trap and interpret this aphorism literally to mean you should hurt people if you’re okay with being hurt, even when you know other people don’t want to be hurt. Most people don’t want to be hurt. Obviously.
Yes, reasonable assumptions! But according to whom? The golden rule can be reasonable to you but not to me. But does that make me bad and you good? Not really. It just means we disagree on what it means to be a moral person.
Anyone who doesn't agree with your "reasonable assumptions" has bad morals can be twisted to mean any moral values based on what you mean by reasonable. For example, the church can say it is reasonable assumptions to burn witches and then twist reason itself to make it morally good as well. In that case how can we trust this system itself? If the answer is by using your own eyes and thinking for yourself, then why do we need to follow a specific fixed rule?
The reasonable assumption I was referring to is what the words in the golden rule mean, not what actions are moral or not. The golden rule is almost as far as it gets from a “specific fixed rule”, despite the name, and it doesn’t prescribe what’s bad or good or moral, and nobody upthread said anything about what makes you bad or good. It’s nothing more than a rule of thumb, an aphorism, a (perhaps extremely obvious) reminder that you shouldn’t treat other people in ways you wouldn’t like yourself, at a minimum. Is this hard to understand or something? The aphorism is already completely relative and subjective, there’s really no need to belabor that point, it’s built in.
How can you trust the system? What are you even asking? We have laws, a lot of them, and the golden rule is not one of them. But if you don’t hurt others, and others don’t hurt you, we’re off to a good start. Use whatever definition of ‘hurt’ you’d like, it doesn’t matter if it’s reciprocal.
The go-to example of a failure state in the golden rule that I am aware of is "thirsty person wants everyone else to jump their bones, thus the rule suggests that they should jump everyone else's bones".
The take-home being, as long as peoples preferences are different, the rule has some failure states based upon that.
And the wider example that this points to is that as long as everyone's values are different.. the rule loses a lot of it's luster. The more different another person's values are, the less you can rely on projecting your own values as a method to gainfully interact with them.
In place of that biblical aphorism (born from a monoculture no less), there is a lot of room available for us to build something more robust and sophisticated and the AI alignment problem offers a fine excuse to get cracking and try to formalize something already! ;)
Again, that’s an overly literal and straw man interpretation of the golden rule that seems nearly intentionally obtuse. The rule is not suggesting you should do anything that you know other people wouldn’t like. Jumping people’s bones is a very bad example, because that’s not something anyone should do without communication and explicit permission, otherwise it’s rape and it’s illegal.
If you understand and accept the reciprocal intent of the golden rule, via the above mentioned reasonable assumptions, not to mention the hundreds of years of examples and explanations, then it doesn’t really have a “failure state”. And, again, this so-called rule is not law, isn’t specific, and doesn’t cover all situations or all behaviors. It seems very silly to be nit picking this aphorism to death like this. It’s very simply a good faith suggestion to be kind.
The notion of fairness and reciprocity is not a religious idea, it’s common sense.
1. I believe GP was suggesting "golden rule" as the basis for governmental-wide rules to be enacted, not that each person should use unique rules based on their own "do unto me" preferences. (If actually applied, "What if this were done to me" also helps to get around the issue of people enacting rules only on other groups, as they wouldn't actually want to be personally treated the way they're proposing.)
2. Regardless, if basing rules on whether someone would want those rules to apply to them does not have merit, is there some better basis you'd recommend?
2. Yes, this is where I would push back because one can also assume there is no "better" basis in the strict sense that you can intellectualize morality/virtue only to a certain extent. And it is possible to argue that morality/virtue is often as much a psychological process as a purely intellectual one. So the idea isn't that the golden rule doesn't make sense or that it is objectively weak, but it doesn't map to the idea of actual morality in action. For example, a person may logically believe in the golden rule but that doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that the agent is not fully logical and will not always strictly adhere to a rule just because it is aware of it and aware of it as being Good. In that sense, what use is the golden rule if we are free to ignore it at all (which we often do)? That doesn't mean I'm saying the golden rule is objectively wrong again, but in ranking morality and deciding on very abstract ideas of what Good and Bad are, we ignore the actual psychological forces that are extremely relevant when it comes to the execution of morality in action. So to answer the question, the better basis would be to understand the psychological forces behind why we feel the golden rule is objectively a good and then examine them to understand if we are following the golden rule because we actually think it is good or because we live in a society where it is good and we will be shamed if we don't believe it. One might say it doesn't matter as long as people actually follow the golden rule but another interpretation is that the golden rule by itself doesn't tell us anything (or very little) about the moral character of the person applying it. So just expecting people to follow that rule after knowing it is placing too much trust in the human animal who is often wild and not thinking logically. It is then upon the animal to tame itself and it may do so out of servitude or out of independence and both might lead to equivalent surface values and match the basis perfectly as being morally good while in reality, both have very different meanings for their morals.
2 is, of course, mainly inspired by Nietzsche. I'm working on a short story where he and Plato debate whether a painting is objectively good or bad called A Canvas Called Virtue.
There's an obvious asymmetry in your rephrasing. The parents quote says "do unto others as they do unto you", not as you do to yourself. If you treat yourself terrible and hurt yourself, is it okay for others to hurt you too?
By logic, yes, if the hypothetical I likes getting hurt, they can also have a tendency to like getting hurt by others surely no? The problem is assuming these types of thinking doesn't exist and we only need to know the good to follow it and hence treating morality and values as a thing that stays beyond humanity itself in the form of eternal truths like the golden rule. But we don't think of morals on an intellectual plane purely. We think it is bad to hurt others because we want a good world where nobody is hurt, but that in itself is a stance where we assume everyone wants the same thing and if they don't, they just lack the reason and rationality to understand the obviously good values. But the mistake is assuming only reason rules how we see and execute morals in actual life.
It's the complete opposite of eye for an eye. If someone is being badly treated by others, most would want to be well treated instead, so the Golden Rule would say that you treat others well, even if others are treating you badly.
