Lying is generally sinful. With the ax murderer, you could refuse to answer, say nothing, misdirect without falsehood or use evasion.

Absolute morality doesn't mean rigid rules without hierarchy. God's commands have weight, and protecting life often takes precedence in Scripture. So no, I wouldn't "have to let them in". I'd protect the friend, even if it meant deception in that dire moment.

It's not lying when you don't reveal all the truth.

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chairmansteve 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"even if it meant deception in that dire moment".

You are saying it's ok to lie in certain situations.

Sounds like moral relativism to me.

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drdeca 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s not what moral relativism is.

Utilitarianism, for example, is not (necessarily) relativistic, and would (for pretty much all utility functions that people propose) endorse lying in some situations.

Moral realism doesn’t mean that there are no general principles that are usually right about what is right and wrong but have some exceptions. It means that for at least some cases, there is a fact of the matter as to whether a given act is right or wrong.

It is entirely compatible with moral realism to say that lying is typically immoral, but that there are situations in which it may be morally obligatory.

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sigbottle 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, you can technically scurry around this by saying, "Okay, there are a class of situations, and we just need to figure out the cases because yes we acknowledge that morality is tricky". Of course, take this to the limit and this is starting to sound like pragmatism - what you call as "well, we're making a more and more accurate absolute model, we just need to get there" versus "revising is always okay, we just need to get to a better one" blurs together more and more.

IMO, the 20th century has proven that demarcation is very, very, very hard. You can take either interpretation - that we just need to "get to the right model at the end", or "there is no right end, all we can do is try to do 'better', whatever that means"

And to be clear, I genuinely don't know what's right. Carnap had a very intricate philosophy that sometimes seemed like a sort of relativism, but it was more of a linguistic pluralism - I think it's clear he still believed in firm demarcations, essences, and capital T Truth even if they moved over time. On the complete other side, you have someone like Feyerabend, who believed that we should be cunning and willing to adopt models if they could help us. Neither of these guys are idiots, and they're explicitly not saying the same thing (a related paper can be found here https://philarchive.org/archive/TSORTC), but honestly, they do sort of converge at a high level.

The main difference in interpretation is "we're getting to a complicated, complicated truth, but there is a capital T Truth" versus "we can clearly compare, contrast, and judge different alternatives, but to prioritize one as capital T Truth is a mistake; there isn't even a capital T Truth".

(technically they're arguing different axes, but I think 20th century philosophy of science & logical positivsm are closely related)

(disclaimer: am a layman in philosophy, so please correct me if I'm wrong)

I think it's very easy to just look at relativsm vs absolute truth and just conclude strawmen arguments about both sides.

And to be clear, it's not even like drawing more and more intricate distinctions is good, either! Sometimes the best arguments from both sides are an appeal back to "simple" arguments.

I don't know. Philosophy is really interesting. Funnily enough, I only started reading about it more because I joined a lab full of physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. No one discusses "philosophy proper", as in following the historical philosophical tradition (no one has read Kant here), but a lot of the topics we talk about are very philosophy adjacent, beyond very simple arguments

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joshuamcginnis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No. There is a distinct difference between lying and withholding information.

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rungeen__panda 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

what is that distinct difference if you care to elaborate?

	▲	joshuamcginnis 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's a clear sunny day and you ask me, "is it raining?". I answer, "it's not snowing." Am I lying?

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chairmansteve 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Weasel words?

Being economical with the truth?

Squirrely?

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mirekrusin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But you have absolute morality - it's just whatever The Claude answers to your question with temp=0 and you carry on.

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yunnpp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So you lied, which means you either don't accept that lying is absolutely wrong, or you admit yourself to do wrong. Your last sentence is just a strawman that deflects the issue.

What do you do with the case where you have a choice between a train staying on track and killing one person, or going off track and killing everybody else?

Like others have said, you are oversimplifying things. It sounds like you just discovered philosophy or religion, or both.

Since you have referenced the Bible: the story of the tree of good and evil, specifically Genesis 2:17, is often interpreted to mean that man died the moment he ate from the tree and tried to pursue its own righteousness. That is, discerning good from evil is God's department, not man's. So whether there is an objective good/evil is a different question from whether that knowledge is available to the human brain. And, pulling from the many examples in philosophy, it doesn't appear to be. This is also part of the reason why people argue that a law perfectly enforced by an AI would be absolutely terrible for societies; the (human) law must inherently allow ambiguity and the grace of a judge because any attempt at an "objective" human law inevitably results in tyranny/hell.

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joshuamcginnis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The problem is that if moral absolution doesn’t exist then it doesn’t matter what you do in the trolly situation since it’s all relative. You may as well do what you please since it’s all a matter of opinion anyway.

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yunnpp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No, it's not black and white, that's the whole point. How would you answer to the case I outlined above, according to your rules? It's called a paradox for a reason. Plus, that there is no right answer in many situations does not preclude that an answer or some approximation of it should be sought, similarly to how the lack of proof of God's existence does not preclude one from believing and seeking understanding anyway. If you have read the Bible and derived hard and clear rules of what to do and not do in every situation, then I'm not sure what is it you understood.

To be clear, I am with you in believing that there is, indeed, an absolute right/wrong, and the examples you brought up are obviously wrong. But humans cannot absolutely determine right/wrong, as is exemplified by the many paradoxes, and again as it appears in Genesis. And that is precisely a sort of soft-proof of God: if we accept there is an absolute right/wrong, but unreachable from the human realm, then where does that absolute emanate from? I haven't worded that very well, but it's an argument you can find in literature.

And, to be clear, Claude is full of BS.

	▲	joshuamcginnis 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My original argument is getting dismissed, in part, because people are fearful of how it would be implemented while at the same time, completely hand-waving over the obvious flaws of the Claude philosophy of moral relativism. I'm not arguing that it would make the edge-cases easier to define, but I do think the general outcomes for society would be better over the long-run if we all held ourselves to a greater moral authority than that of our opinions, the will of those in power and the cultural norms of the time. If we could get alignment on the shared belief that there are at least some obvious moral absolutes, then I would be happy to join in on the discussion as to how to implement the - no doubt - difficult task of aligning an LLM towards those absolutes.