this can scarcely be true. For good or ill, ethical choices often fly in the face of logic. They may come from gut instinct, natural cussedness, a desire to show off, a vague inkling, a shudder, a sense of unease, or a sudden imaginative insight.
I am marching through North Carolina with the Union Army, utterly convinced that only military victory over the Confederacy will abolish the hateful institution of slavery. But I no sooner see the face of the enemy – a scrawny, shoeless seventeen-year old farm boy – than I throw away my gun and run sobbing from the battlefield. This is an ethical decision resulting in decisive action, only it isn’t made in cold blood, and it goes against the logic of my position.
Computer scientists writing the logic program for an ethical robot may appear as modern as modern can be, but their arguments come from the 1700s. The idea that ethics are logical appeals to what – in another context – Hilary Putnam describes as:
the comfortable eighteenth century assumption that all intelligent and well-informed people who mastered the art of thinking about human actions and problems impartially would feel the appropriate ‘sentiments’ of approval and disapproval in the same circumstances unless there was something wrong with their personal constitution.*
* Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, 2002.
The thinking may be strictly 1700s, but the technology isn’t. The US Department of Defense is at work on tiny rotorcrafts known as FLACs (Fast Lightweight Autonomous Crafts) that will that will be able to go inside flats and houses, office blocks and restaurants and deliver a one-gram explosive charge to puncture the cranium. These FLACs are types of Lethal Automative Weapons Systems. (LAWS). If drones weren’t bad enough, LAWS are on a whole new level. With drones, a human always makes the decision whether to kill, from however far away. But LAWS are a break with tradition. They are fully autonomous.
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