Re:Claude's New Constitution
by joshuamcginnis on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @10:14PM
(#46714835)
My original argument is getting dismissed, in part, because people are fearful of how it would be implemented while at the same time, completely hand-waving over the obvious flaws of the Claude philosophy of moral relativism.
I'm not arguing that it would make the edge-cases easier to define, but I do think the general outcomes for society would be better over the long-run if we all held ourselves to a greater moral authority than that of our opinions, the will of those in power and the cultural norms of the time.
If we could get alignment on the shared belief that there are at least some obvious moral absolutes, then I would be happy to join in on the discussion as to how to implement the - no doubt - difficult task of aligning an LLM towards those absolutes.
This sounds like your better take so far. I think your previous statements came across very black/white, especially that Bible reference that made things sound rather fundamentalist, and that got the downvotes. But I don't think anyone would disagree with what you stated here.
To be clear, I am with you in believing that there is, indeed, an absolute right/wrong, and the examples you brought up are obviously wrong. But humans cannot absolutely determine right/wrong, as is exemplified by the many paradoxes, and again as it appears in Genesis. And that is precisely a sort of soft-proof of God: if we accept there is an absolute right/wrong, but unreachable from the human realm, then where does that absolute emanate from? I haven't worded that very well, but it's an argument you can find in literature.
And, to be clear, Claude is full of BS.