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12.4 Ethical Synergy
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Thus, empathic “ethics of care” involves a combination of episodic and sensorimotor ethics, complementing the mainly declarative ethics associated with the “ethics of justice.”

In Gilligan’s perspective, the earliest stage of ethical development occurs before empathy becomes a consistent and powerful force. Next, the hallmark of the conventional stage is that at this point, the individual is so overwhelmed with their empathic response to others that they neglect themselves in order to avoid hurting others. Note that this stage doesn’t occur in Kohlberg’s hierarchy at all. Kohlberg and Gilligan both begin with selfish unethicality, but their following stages diverge. A person could in principle manifest Gilligan’s conventional stage without having a refined sense of justice (thus not entering Kohlberg’s conventional stage); or they could manifest Kohlberg’s conventional stage without partaking in an excessive degree of self-sacrifice (thus not entering Gilligan’s conventional stage). We will suggest below that in fact the empathic and logical aspects of ethics are more unified in real human development than these separate theories would suggest. However, even if this is so, the possibility is still there that in some AGI systems the levels of declarative and empathic ethics could wildly diverge.

It is interesting to note that Gilligan’s and Kohlberg’s final stages converge more closely than their intermediate ones. Kohlberg’s post-conventional stage focuses on universal rights, and Gilligan’s on universal compassion. Still, the foci here are quite different; and, as will be elaborated below, we believe that both Kohlberg’s and Gilligan’s theories constitute very partial views of the actual end-state of ethical advancement.

12.4.3 An Integrative Approach to Ethical Development

We feel that both Kohlberg’s and Gilligan’s theories contain elements of the whole picture of ethical development, and that both approaches are necessary to create a moral, ethical artificial general intelligence – just as, we suggest, both internal simulation and uncertain inference are necessary to create a sufficiently intelligent and volitional intelligence in the first place. Also, we contend, the lack of direct analysis of the underlying psychology of the stages is a deficiency shared by both the Kohlberg and Gilligan models as they are generally discussed. A successful model of integrative ethics necessarily contains elements of both the care and justice models, as well as reference to the underlying developmental psychology and its influence on the character of the ethical stage. Furthermore, intentional and attentional ethics need to be brought into the picture, complementing Kohlberg’s focus on declarative knowledge and Gilligan’s focus on episodic and sensorimotor knowledge.

With these notions in mind, we propose the following integrative theory of the stages of ethical development, shown in Tables 12.4, 12.5 and 12.6. In our integrative model, the justice-based and empathic aspects of ethical judgment are proposed to develop together. Of course, in any one individual, one or another aspect may be dominant. Even so, however, the combination of the two is equally important as either of the two individual ingredients.

For instance, we suggest that in any psychologically healthy human, the conventional stage of ethics (typifying childhood, and in many cases adulthood as well) involves a combination of Gilligan-esqe empathic ethics and Kohlberg-esque ethical reasoning. This combination is supported by Piagetan concrete operational cognition, which allows moderately sophisticated linguistic interaction, theory of mind, and symbolic modeling of the world.

And, similarly, we propose that in any truly ethically mature human, empathy and rational justice are both fully developed. Indeed the two interpenetrate each other deeply.

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