The Moral Order: Humans, not AI, must retain their authority on ethical problems

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was, in many ways, the philosopher of the 21st century. He was pivotal to the invention of calculus, binary arithmetic, and statistics, and his work on organizing information logically undergirds the science that makes computers possible. He was able to see the world this way because he believed the universe was fundamentally rational, much as many modern physicists do when they contend that a single theory could describe all physical phenomena within one coherent framework.

For Leibniz, morality was a matter of debate only because we lacked a sufficiently developed ethical theory. Just as mathematical modeling of the solar system eliminated any need for debate about when eclipses would occur, a young Leibniz dreamed that one day ethicists would resolve their disputes by simply calculating the correct answer.¹

It's an especially intriguing idea today. With modern computing, could we arrive at an ethical theory that solves every problem? If so, an app on your phone could tell you what to do, no matter the circumstances. Nobody would ever have to do wrong from a lack of knowledge again. 

Say an AI tool was released that made recommendations aligning with your moral intuition. You could type up a brief description of your problem and get a reliable report on what you should do. Would it be desirable to use such a system to determine your actions?

Though the prospect of moral certainty may seem appealing, ceding ethical decision-making to an algorithm would in reality be both practically dubious and philosophically pointless. Practically, it would put ethics in the hands of a machine that is capable of learning in only limited ways, and which is vulnerable to biases it can’t correct. Philosophically, we gain a lot from contemplating our actions through an ethical lens; the right outcome is only part of the value. If we give too much authority to the machines, we’ll lose our stake in ourselves.