If in fact our minds and thoughts can be traced down to the neuron, and interconnections between them, I see no reason an equivilent system couldn’t in theory be artificially constructed. Creating and applying a moral code doesn’t seem on the whole different from a large number of our cognitive tasks, we use our minds, and what we’ve learned or experienced to apply our ‘moral’ code to how we act. I’ll admit it strikes me as almost unromantic to think we’re just a product of our neurons firing, and a large part of me rebels at thinking of our actions and why we do things as so deterministically.

Back to the point(ish), I took an very interesting sociology course where we examined how ‘normal’ people could violate what were supposed to be commonly held moral values in committing war crimes. It was really very depressing, some experiments had some results where a substantial majority of people would violate what many people (including me) would like to believe are at least universal moral values under a certain amount of sociological pressure.

It seems to me humans in general doing a pretty poor job of implementing their own moral standards (if they even have them!), so I think a fairer question to ask might be, could we ever have an artificial robot with morality approximately as good (or better) as ours. And if it does have a physical root we can understand, I don’t see why would couldn’t artificially construct it.

I have read that ethics and moral judgement in humans resides in a specific part of the brain. When this is damaged through injury or stroke, victims tend to display amoral behaviour (not immoral), and a total lack of empathy towards others. (Sources escape me, sorry.)

If ethics relys on specific neural circuitry, perhaps it can be produced artificially.

On the other hand, empathy implies identifying with the feelings of others. In order to understand the concept of “other”, one needs to understand the concept of “self”, implying self-awareness. Could it be that in order to create an ethical AI, it would have to be self-aware? Would the reverse be true? Could a self-aware (and rational) AI be amoral?