What Does Having Morals Mean

What are morals?

What does it mean to have good morals?

How do we decide what morals are good?

What does it mean to be human?

Do humans have morals?

If you have ever wondered about these questions, you're not alone.



A popular game called the Talos Principle has tried to answer some of them.

If you have not played the Talos Principle here is a quick summary. The world of humans has ended, we are dead and gone. A computer program has been running simulations with artificial intelligence robots to find one who is able to think like a human. This winning bot will be sent out into the world entrusted with all of human knowledge to maintain the progress humanity made. You play as the AI solving puzzles attempting to prove that you have the ability to think like a human. One of the requirements of 'think like a human' is to be able to make decisions unique to a given situation rather than just responding according to a set of rules or code.

Have you seen the movie I,Robot?

The idea behind Sunny, a robot who can make unique decisions not based off just a set of rules, is the same idea in Talos.



This is the idea of particularism, that there is no universal moral code. No answer will always work all the time. Moral decisions must be made in a case by case scenario.



Although the robot who saved Will Smith's character in the movie made the most rational decision based on the values and laws it was programmed with, the cop who valued a little girls life above his own disagreed.



In order to think like a human it would have had to think on more than one plain, take into account more than just who was most likely to survive. For example, when he was signally for the robot to save the little girl, a human would have understood and changed their moral decision based off his actions.

So here is the question, do humans have a universal moral code?

These examples seem to show that we do not, moral choices depend on the situation. If you knew that the kid was already a murderer and the adult was a good cop, regardless of what the cop said it would change the results. There are so many variables like this that could be altered and they would change who would be saved from a watery grave.

But if there is no universal moral code, then what is a 'gut reaction?'

Why do people say that things, " are just plain wrong," with no real information to back up that statement, they "just know." Why does most of humanity have ideas of what being 'good' and being 'evil' that are similar?

Example One:
A trolley is on course to kill five people. You have the ability to pull a switch so that it changes course and kills only one person on a different track and saves the five, what do you do?

Example Two:
You are in a hospital, five people are about to die unless they get an organ transplant and you do not have any organs to give them. A healthy man walks in who could be harvested for his organs and by doing so you could save the five people about to die by killing one, what do you do?

Most people agree to killing one person to save five in the first example but not the second, why?

(cited from Discovery.com article)

Even with games and movies exploring the idea that a universal moral code is not 'human' and to make a robot think like a human it is a recquirement that it not have this, why does there appear to be evidence in hypothetical situations such as this that we do have some sort of universal moral code?

And we are human, so if we have one, then to be human is to have a universal moral code.