Well sure, if we proceed from the assumption that the moral theory really was correct, but the point was that none of those proposed theories has been generally accepted by moral philosophers.
Your point was that “none of the existing ethical theories are up to the task of giving us such a set of principles that, when programmed into an AI, would actually give results that could be considered “good”.” But this claim is simply begging the question by assuming that all the existing theories are false. And to claim that a theory would have bad moral results is different from claiming that it’s not generally accepted by moral philosophers. It’s plausible that a theory would have good moral results, in virtue of it being correct, while not being accepted by many moral philosophers. Since there is no dominant moral theory, this is necessarily the case as long as some moral theory is correct.
I gave one in the comment? That philosophy has accepted that you can’t give a set of human-comprehensible set of necessary and sufficient criteria for concepts
If you’re referring to ethics, no, philosophy has not accepted that you cannot give such an account. You believe this, on the basis of your observation that philosophers give different accounts of ethics. But that doesn’t mean that moral philosophers believe it. They just don’t think that the fact of disagreement implies that no such account can be given.
It seems obvious to me that physics does indeed proceed by social consensus in the manner you describe. Someone does an experiment, then others replicate the experiment until there is consensus that this experiment really does produce these results; somebody proposes a hypothesis to explain the experimental results, others point out holes in that hypothesis, there’s an extended back-and-forth conversation and further experiments until there is a consensus that the modified hypothesis really does explain the results and that it can be accepted as an established scientific law. And the same for all other scientific and philosophical disciplines. I don’t think that ethics is special in that sense.
So you haven’t pointed out any particular features of ethics, you’ve merely described a feature of inquiry in general. This shows that your claim proves too much—it would be ridiculous to conduct physics by studying psychology.
Sure, there is a difference between what ordinary people believe and what people believe when they’re trained professionals: that’s why you look for a social consensus among the people who are trained professionals and have considered the topic in detail, not among the general public.
But that’s not a matter of psychological inquiry, that’s a matter of looking at what is being published in philosophy, becoming familiar with how philosophical arguments are formed, and staying in touch with current developments in the field. So you are basically describing studying philosophy. Studying or researching psychology will not tell you anything about this.
Your point was that “none of the existing ethical theories are up to the task of giving us such a set of principles that, when programmed into an AI, would actually give results that could be considered “good”.” But this claim is simply begging the question by assuming that all the existing theories are false. And to claim that a theory would have bad moral results is different from claiming that it’s not generally accepted by moral philosophers. It’s plausible that a theory would have good moral results, in virtue of it being correct, while not being accepted by many moral philosophers. Since there is no dominant moral theory, this is necessarily the case as long as some moral theory is correct.
If you’re referring to ethics, no, philosophy has not accepted that you cannot give such an account. You believe this, on the basis of your observation that philosophers give different accounts of ethics. But that doesn’t mean that moral philosophers believe it. They just don’t think that the fact of disagreement implies that no such account can be given.
So you haven’t pointed out any particular features of ethics, you’ve merely described a feature of inquiry in general. This shows that your claim proves too much—it would be ridiculous to conduct physics by studying psychology.
But that’s not a matter of psychological inquiry, that’s a matter of looking at what is being published in philosophy, becoming familiar with how philosophical arguments are formed, and staying in touch with current developments in the field. So you are basically describing studying philosophy. Studying or researching psychology will not tell you anything about this.