Philosophical discussion on ethical development and the Golden Rule

222 12 The Engineering and Development of Ethics To the extent that the Golden Rule is valued as an ethical imperative, experiential grounding may be supplied via observing the behaviors of others. This in itself is a powerful argument in favor of the Golden Rule: without it, the experiential library a system possesses is restricted to its own experience, which is bound to be a very small library compared to what it can assemble from observing the behaviors of others. The overall upshot is that, ideally, an ethical intelligence should act according to a log- ically coherent system of principles, which are exemplified in its own direct and observational experience, which are comprehensible to others and set a good ex- ample for others, and which would serve as adequate universal laws if somehow thus implemented. But, since this set of criteria is essentially impossible to fulfill in prac- tice, real-world intelligent agents must balance these various criteria — often in complex and contextually-dependent ways. We suggest that ethically advanced humans, in their pragmatic ethical choices, tend to act in such a way as to appropriately contextually balance the above factors (along with other criteria, but we have tried to articulate the most key factors). This sort of multi-factorial approach is not as crisp or elegant as unidimensional imperatives like the Golden Rule or the Categorical Imperative, but is more realistic in light of the complexly interacting multiple determinants guiding individual and group human behavior. And this brings us back to CEV, CAV, CBV and other possible ways of mining ethical supergoals from the community of existing human minds. Given that abstract theories of ethics, when seriously pursued as we have done in this section, tend to devolve into complex balancing acts involving multiple factors — one then falls back into asking how human ethical systems habitually perform these balancing acts. Which is what CHV, CAV, CBV try to measure. 12.5.1 The Golden Rule and the Stages of Ethical Development Next we explore more explicitly how these Golden Rule based imperatives align with the eth- ical developmental stages we have outlined here. With this in mind, specific ethical qualities corresponding to the five imperatives have been italicized in the above table of developmental stages. It seems that imperatives 1-3 are critical for the passage from the pre-ethical to the conven- tional stages of ethics. A child learns ethics largely by copying others, and by being interacted with according to simply comprehensible implementations of the Golden Rule. In general, when interacting with children learning ethics, it is important to act according to principles they can comprehend. And given the nature of the concrete stage of cognitive development, experiential groundedness is a must. As a hypothesis regarding the dynamics underlying the psychological development of con- ventional ethics, what we propose is as follows: The emergence of concrete-stage cognitive capabilities leads to the capability for fulfillment of ethical imperatives 1 and 2 — a comprehen- sible and workable implementation of the Golden Rule, based on a combination of inferential and simulative cognition (operating largely separately at this stage, as will be conjectured be- low). The effective interoperation of ethical imperatives 1-3, enacted in an appropriate social environment, then leads to the other characteristics of the conventional ethical stage. The first three imperatives can thus be viewed as the seed from which springs the general nature of conventional ethics. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013138