[Towaway69]

That’s the result of equating survival with earning money. Western societies have done a good job of ensuring that. As long as morals aren’t equated to either to money or survival, they lose their meaning and become nice to have.

[Aurornis]

> That’s the result of equating survival with earning money. Western societies have done a good job of ensuring that.

OpenAI engineers with vested shares are not worried about having enough money to survive.

This is a lame attempt to shoe-horn unrelated political talking points and “Western society bad” into a conversation about highly paid engineers who will have no problem putting food on the table.

[Towaway69]

I was responding to a question on why have morals if they have no application.

If don’t like this example, how about folks going to church on Sundays listening to the Christian morals on not killing each other and during the week, these same folks work at the DoW organising wars around the world.

Or the politician taking lobbyists money. Or those folks who engage in recreational drug use while fighting a “war on drugs”.

There are many examples of morals playing second fiddle to the broader world around us.

[ajam1507]

And in every case there are people like you making excuses for them. Engineers working at OpenAI are not scraping by to provide for their families. They don't get a pass to do unethical things to keep their jobs.

[reverius42]

I wonder to what extent a lot of people in this discussion have no idea how high OpenAI's salary ranges are.

[Aurornis]

I think they know, but they see topics like this as a generic place to discuss their ideas about society or politics. So they start making points about something different and forget that it doesn’t have any relevance to the topic.

[kelseyfrog]

I know that's the result.

My question is, given that result, why continue to have them if they don't influence one's choices? You're making a case that our current economic system is incompatible with having morals.

[Towaway69]

Morals are there so that folks go to church with their families on Sunday, have an affair with their sectaries during the week and drink too much with their mates on Friday night because they feel bad about their moral choices.

[kelseyfrog]

You're saying the purpose of morals is not to inform choice making, but to make people feel bad?

Why have them then? The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

[Towaway69]

Morals were invented to hold a larger group of humans together. Smaller groups can be held together by everyone knowing each other, larger groups required a more complex system of trust.

Morals are the glue for nation states. Morals prevent us from driving over others, morals prevent us from being mean to others. Moral makes us trust the politicians we vote for because we are told they have the same morals as we.

My somewhat cynical picture of morals is only to make a point of how deep morals go in our societies. Folks have conscience and morals are the basis of that conscience - be it good or evil.

Police and armies enforce these morals in the form of laws and legal constructs. Important to note though that morals are not filly encoded as laws, these are two concepts are separate societal adhesives.

[kelseyfrog]

You're saying that if we believe we share the same morals, then we're more likely to let things slide for the sake of harmony and less likely to hold violators accountable?

[Towaway69]

No I'm not saying that, that's your interpretation of what I am saying. What I'm saying is what I have written, no deeper meaning.

What I said is that we vote for politicians whom we are told share our morals or we assume that they do. I don't make any judgement nor prediction what happens if that happens not to be the case - either before or after the event of voting.