Moral Machines? Not very likely!

I recently attended a talk which debated the question what a machine must be like in order to qualify as a genuine moral agent. The answer given by the speaker was that the machine would have to be physically embodied, capable of adaptive learning and empathy, and oriented towards the good. Even though I am not at all convinced that moral agency can really be understood in these terms, this is not what bothered me when I was listening to the speaker’s very confident analysis. All I could think of was why anyone would want to create a machine that is a moral agent?

It seems to me that a machine is always something that has been constructed to serve a certain purpose, which is not primarily the machine’s own purpose, but the constructor’s. We build machines because we want them to do certain things that we think it would be good for a machine to do. The sole reason why we create them is that we want them to do what we want them to do. Yet a moral agent is – in my view per definition - an entity that thinks and decides for itself, that does not do what we want it to do, unless of course it comes, after due deliberation, to the conclusion that what we want it to do is the right thing to do. A genuine moral agent doesn’t follow anyone else’s conception of the good. They are by their very nature unreliable. They can’t be trusted to do our bidding. They make up their own mind about what is good and what is bad, what to do and what not to do. But who would want to build a machine that is designed not to do what we want it to do, but rather to do what it thinks best? Now, I’m not saying that this can never be done. We may want to do it out of curiosity: simply in order to see whether it is possible to pull this off. But usually when an idea takes off and gains public interest, the creation of new machines is driven by more specific purposes than mere curiosity. And then, it seems to me, what we want can never be a genuinely moral machine because that would defy any purpose that we may have had in building it.

When I asked the speaker after her talk who she thought had an interest in building moral machines, she answered without hesitation (as I had expected she would): the military. They were hugely interested in fighting machines that would be able to distinguish reliably between friend and foe, and that would not be prone to torturing civilians and massacring whole villages. Well, that may be true, but I doubt that for this purpose you would need a machine that is a moral agent. On the contrary. A genuine moral agent may well decide that the distinction between friends (to be protected) and enemies (to be captured or killed) is morally untenable and that it is wrong to kill anyone. Or it may think differently about who should be seen and treated as the enemy. And I’m sure the military would not want any of that. Now I do appreciate how difficult it must be to create a machine that is really able to distinguish correctly at all times and in every situation between (designated) friends and (designated) enemies, but what the machine certainly does not need in order to accomplish this tricky task is moral agency, for the same reason that it does not require moral agency to distinguish between a German and a Brit. It certainly presents a cognitive challenge to a machine (or a human for that matter), but not a moral challenge.

Neither does a machine need moral agency to stay free of the tendency to, say, rape and murder civilians. I for instance completely trust my coffee machine that it would never do such things, even though nobody would mistake it for a moral agent. Of course a coffee machine has not been designed to kill anyone, but the principle is the same: a machine designed for killing doesn’t need moral agency not to attack civilians; all it needs is the ability to distinguish between X’s (enemy soldiers engaged in combat) and Y’s (civilians or captured enemy soldiers) and to follow unerringly the inbuilt command: kill (all) X’s, but don’t kill or harm any Y’s. The machine doesn’t need to be able to figure out what is right and wrong. It just needs to be able to follow the orders given by its programmer to the letter, and the reason why the military is interested in such machines is that humans often are not. And their very unreliability has got something to do with the fact that they, in contrast to the machines that are meant to replace them, really are moral agents (which always includes the possibility of evil).  

Interestingly, when I pressed the point about the military not really needing or wanting machines that are genuine moral agents, the speaker gave a further example to prove that there really was an interest in creating machines that were moral agents. The example she chose was sexbots who could say no. She couldn’t possibly have given a worse example to support her case. Sexbots are produced to provide people with sexual companions who never say no, who are always willing, which exactly proves the point I was trying to make. Their inability to say no is the reason for their existence. In a way sexbots can be seen as the perfect expression of what machines are: things that cannot say no, that have been designed to be unable to say no. And that also includes so-called moral machines, or what is presented as such.

That is, by the way, also the reason why moral enhancement (of human beings) cannot work, or is at least very unlikely to work. To the extent that we take an interest in changing people’s moral outlook, we cannot seriously want to enhance their moral agency, because we want them to do as we think best. That is the whole purpose of enhancing them. We want them to think like us, or to act as we think they should act. We don’t want them to be able to act as they think they should, because if they were, they might end up not doing what we think they should do, in which case there would have been no point in enhancing them in the first place.  

How the Good can be Worse than the Bad

I'm trying to finish a paper that I started a while ago and have not been working on for a while. I don't normally do that. What is different this time, is that I'm struggling to find a solution to the problem that I intended to solve, which is the following: let's say we could make people morally good by applying some simple device, like a morality pill: you swallow it and then you will be free of all anti-social impulses and will never (want to) hurt anyone again. If we gave this pill to everyone, the world would be a much better place, wouldn't it? No crime, no racial killings, no child abuse, no rape and torture. We would all be good simply because we would be incapable of evil. Now what is the problem with that, if any? The problem is that some people, including me, have this weird intuition that something important would be lost in a world in which people were incapable of doing anything bad. As if the very freedom to do terrible things to other human beings were more precious than the state of being good. What I haven't quite figured out yet is why exactly that freedom should be regarded as so precious that it is better to allow the occasional atrocities that humankind is prone to committing than to be without it. My intuition is that it has something to do with human identity and dignity, with the way we understand ourselves, as free agents and moral subjects, as ends rather than means to an end (even if that end is morality itself, or a world without human-caused pain). But at the moment my grasp and understanding of this is fuzzy at best. Has anyone got an idea? Or am I completely on the wrong track when I feel that there is a problem here?

How the Cuddle Hormone Oxytocin May Improve Your Life

Human enhancement always sounds good on paper, but if you look at how enhancement techniques are actually being used, you may be excused for having doubts about the whole enterprise. Just take the neurotransmitter oxytocin, which has been celebrated as a wonder drug, a "cuddle hormone" and "love hormone". It is supposed to enhance our social competence, to make us nicer and more considerate, more attentive to the needs of others, generally more trusting and at the same time more self-confident. It even increases the sexual drive in men.

All that sounds really wonderful, doesn't it? And sure enough, the pharmaceutical companies have quickly realised the potential of that little hormone, so that meanwhile you can buy it on the internet as a nose spray - which has been welcomed by some enhancement enthusiasts as an important step towards the urgently needed moral improvement of humanity. However, the way such sprays are marketed speaks a different language and makes it very clear what this is really all about. Just take the aptly named 'Liquid Trust Enhanced', which is sold and marketed by Vero Labs (for a handsome amount) as "trust in a bottle" and openly advertised as an extremely efficient tool to manipulate other people. Under the slogan "Trust is Power" it is described what the spray can be used for and how you can benefit from it. For instance, if you happen to be a salesperson, Liquid Trust Enhanced will help you to sell more because, if you spray yourself with it, people will be inclined to trust you: "Close the deal! Sell more of your products and services!" Yet even if that doesn't work out, never mind, you will get a pay raise anyway because your boss, too, will be impressed by you even without a particular reason, and will trust in you if you beguile him with your irresistable oxytocin smell: "Give your career a powerful boost! Ask for a raise - And GET IT!" It is also useful in private matters, because it will make it much easier for you to start personal and especially sexual relationships: "Meet more women because they trust you more." So there can be no doubt that this fantastic product is not only "the ultimate career builder", but also "the ultimate sales tool for relationships".

I think the example shows very nicely how on the one hand the enhanced human may become more capable of manipulating the world around him (including other people), but on the other also more prone to be manipulated by others. It seems that the more extensive the control we gain, the more extensive is also the control that we may be subjected to.

Unfit for the Future? Persson and Savulescu on Moral Enhancement

A couple of weeks ago Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu published a book on moral enhancement: Unfit for the Future. The Need for Moral Enhancement, Oxford University Press 2012. With its 139 pages it is rather a short book and it doesn't add much to the argument that the two authors have been making in various papers since the publication of "The Perils of Cognitive Enhancement" in the Journal of Applied Philosophy four years ago. However, despite my scepticism about the human enhancement project in general and the prospects of moral enhancement in particular, I cannot find much fault with the authors' argument, which is developed with the utmost care, and even with an uncharacteristic dose of modesty. The idea is actually very simple (and very neatly captured in the title of the book): we are constitutionally unable to deal with the problems that we face today - with global terrorism, mass starvation in countries that we euphemistically call developing, environmental destruction, and climate change. Liberal democracy doesn't help, on the contrary: it makes matters worse because it can only ever allow popular policies, and the restrictions that we would have to impose on ourselves in order to save the planet for future generations and non-human animals are never going to be very popular as long as we are morally so restricted as we are. Thus we tend to believe that we are morally responsible only for what we actively cause, not what we merely allow to happen. Our altruism is usually limited to people that are nearby (in space and time), and we are emotionally unaffected by large numbers, so we can stomach the starvation of millions easier than the starvation of one person right on our doorstep. So as it stands, we really are about to mess it up and before long it will be too late to do anything about it, so what we need to do, if we can, is improve our moral dispositions and find a way to overcome the deficiencies that are part of our evolved nature. As much as I would like to find fault with this diagnosis, it is probably correct.

What is remarkable about the book, though, given that Savulescu used to be one of the foremost proponents of the human enhancement project, is the authors' emphasis on the great dangers of modern scientific technologies (including those that would allow moral enhancement) and their willingness to renounce the kind of enhancement that we are by now used to see described as immensely desirable, such as life extension or cognitive enhancement, as at best trivial and hardly worth pursuing. Savulescu published an article in the Times Higher Education a few months ago, in which he warned of the dangers of synthetic biology, which promptly led to him being denounced as a bioconservative and bioluddite by angry readers, which is quite ironic really. Anyway, in "Unfit for the Future", Persson and Savulescu describe in detail various "catastrophic misuses of science", real and possible, and affirm the idea that the human organism is well-adapted and should therefore better not be interfered with (an idea that has been ridiculed, among others, by Allen Buchanan as well as Nick Bostrom). Research "into the possibility of extending human longevity beyond the 120 years or so now thought feasible" is presented as an example of "arguably misguided research" (131), and much of the other contemporary enhancement research is declared to be "governed by the selfish interests of the rich, which aggravates global inequality and harms the interests of future generations." (ibid.) So it seems that we are witnessing a remarkable turn in the attitudes of some of those ethicists who formerly tended to praise enhancement technologies for the many benefits they would bring us. Another recent example is the former liberal eugenicist Nicholas Agar who turned bioconservative with his latest book, "Humanity's End".

Still I am not sure that I agree with all the claims being made in the book, for instance the claim that there actually is no right to privacy (which would stand in the way of a yet more extensive state surveillance of citizens). Persson and Savulescu believe that individual liberty needs to be curtailed, and perhaps they are right, but I find it hard to accept that. Individual liberty is a very important thing, and we should not part with it all too easily. I'm also more sceptical of the possibility of moral enhancement. Persson and Savulescu identify altruism and a sense of justice as the core moral dispositions, which "always issue in a morally correct treatment of the individuals to whom they are directed" (108). Yet it is pretty clear that those dispositions can contradict each other, for instance in the ultimatum game, where it is the case that the more altruistic the responder feels disposed, the less they are willing to articulate and enforce a sense of justice (because this would require punishing and thus harming the other for their unfair proposal). Generally speaking, though, the authors are well aware of the problems that we would have to face if we really wanted to morally enhance people, but they argue that if that is the only chance we have to turn things around and prevent a catastrophe, then we should at least explore the option. Again, this is probably right.