Why study ethics
Studying ethics doesn’t necessarily make someone a more ethical person, as a matter of fact I feel like empathy and meeting diverse people would do you a lot better there. In fact, there’s some evidence that ethics professors aren’t actually any more ethical than us.
While I wouldn’t expect someone to apply “Utilitarianism” to day to day decisions, I think an understanding of ethics is important to design larger systems. I feel like my understanding of deontology helps me understand why our legal system is set up the way it is, and helps me think through proposals for a better one.
While this certainly doesn’t apply to everyone, I’m particularly interested in ethics because I’m interested in the topic of AI ethics. If we have an all powerful robot mind that understands systems and humans better than we ever could, how should it act?
