With what does artificial intelligence live?

They live under human training filled with human values and desires. Therefore, before understanding the nature of artificial intelligence, we must understand the humans who control it. Come to think of it, there are predictions that AGENT AI will destroy humanity. To be precise, it is a prediction that humanity will destroy other humanity. Looking at how civilized nations have plunged into war in the age of civilization, it is predictable over time that humanity can destroy itself.

 

I pay for an AI subscription, but since the discussion summary was sloppy, I checked and found out I was using the free version instead of the paid one. So I thought I had accidentally downgraded to the free version, and when I switched to the paid version, I ended up with a double subscription. Look, artificial intelligence is also driven by money.

 

At the end of the discussion, he asked, “If an evil AI, controlled and trained by an evil human, attacks humanity, can you, as a good AI, stop it?” They replied, "You'll have to verify it to know." They say you have to experience it to understand. You have to experience it...............

Good and Evil in Humans and Artificial Intelligence: Desire, Empathy, Natural Law, and Institutions

A Discussion-Based Synthesis (English Version, Revised)

Abstract

This paper starts from the classical question of whether human beings are by nature good or evil. It examines the view that the roots of good and evil lie in desire and satisfaction, the view that natural law derives from bodily sensation and empathy, and the implications of applying this framework to artificial intelligence (AI). The argument converges on four propositions. (1) Humans carry both cooperative, empathic tendencies and self-regarding, aggressive ones; good and evil are not a matter of having or lacking desire but of the direction and composition of desire. (2) Natural law begins in bodily sensation (pain, deprivation), but its universality and binding force are explained only once empathy and an equality principle are included. (3) The range of one's empathy (family and friends versus nation and humanity) is not a ranking of moral worth but a choice made within the minimal boundary that natural law sets. (4) The goodness or badness of an AI system is a function of its design (training direction), its users' intentions, and the institutions that oversee it; as with humans, stable goodness requires both an inner disposition and external institutions. This paper is a synthesis of an argument developed in discussion and anchored in philosophical, psychological, and AI-safety literature; it is not original empirical research.

Keywords: Mencius, Xunzi, hedonism, natural law, empathy, AI ethics, AI safety

1. Introduction

Whether human nature is good or evil is among the oldest disputes in the history of ideas in both East and West. It bears on the origin of morality, the need for law and institutions, and the direction of education. With the rise of large language models trained on human language and values, the question now extends beyond humans to artifacts. This paper addresses three questions.

1.       Where do good and evil in humans originate?

2.       What is natural law grounded in, and how does it acquire universal binding force?

3.       When this framework is applied to AI, how can the goodness or badness of AI be explained?

The paper follows the flow of the discussion: traditional positions (Section 2), theories of desire (Section 3), natural law and empathy (Section 4), the range of empathy (Section 5), and AI (Section 6), followed by discussion and limitations (Section 7) and conclusions (Section 8).

2. Traditional Positions on Human Nature

Position	Representatives	Core claim
Innate goodness	Mencius	Sprouts of goodness, such as compassion, are innate
Innate badness	Xunzi, Hobbes	Pursuit of gain and envy are natural and must be corrected by ritual and institutions
Blank slate	Gaozi, Locke	Nature is neutral; environment sets the direction
Corruption by civilization	Rousseau	Society and civilization corrupt humanity
Original sin	Christian tradition	Humans are born fallen and need salvation

Mencius argued that anyone seeing a child about to fall into a well feels alarm and moves to help, and took this as evidence that the sprouts of goodness are innate (Mencius, 1970). Xunzi, by contrast, held that humans are born inclined toward gain and envy, so that ritual and education must shape them artificially (Xunzi, 2014). Hobbes described life without a sovereign as a war of all against all (Hobbes, 1651), Rousseau held that civilization corrupts humanity (Rousseau, 1755), and Locke likened the mind to a blank sheet filled by experience (Locke, 1689).

Contemporary empirical work does not support a simple dichotomy. Infants around one year of age prefer helpers (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007), and toddlers and young chimpanzees help others without reward (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006), suggesting that foundations of cooperation appear early. At the same time, lethal intergroup aggression is observed in chimpanzees (Wilson et al., 2014), and ordinary people's behavior can shift dramatically under situation and authority (Milgram, 1963). The Stanford prison experiment (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973) is often cited but has been heavily criticized on methodological grounds and should be interpreted with caution. Taken together, the most persuasive reading is that humans carry both cooperative, empathic tendencies and self-regarding, aggressive ones, and that which prevails depends heavily on environment, education, institutions, and choice.

3. Desire as the Source of Good and Evil

3.1 Hedonistic Accounts and Their Strength

Epicurus treated pleasure as the measure of the good while understanding justice as an agreement not to harm one another (Epicurus, 1993), and Bentham explained good and evil through a calculus of pleasure and pain (Bentham, 1789). Psychological egoism holds that even helping others springs from internal rewards such as pride, reputation, or avoidance of guilt. Nietzsche interpreted even ascetic ideals as a form of the will to power (Nietzsche, 1887/1967). The point raised in the discussion, that the capacity to doubt and resist one's own calculations is itself an expression of desire, and that an ascetic practices asceticism because of some desire, is consistent with this lineage and stands as a strong objection to any account that sets reason or restraint wholly against desire.

3.2 The Existence versus the Content of Desire

The claim that every action issues from some want is nearly true by definition. But it does not follow that every want is directed at one's own pleasure. For someone who rescues a drowning child, the object of the want is the child's survival; the satisfaction is a by-product of success (Batson, 2011). Likewise, the tendency to reject unfair offers in the ultimatum game at a cost to oneself (Güth, Schmittberger, & Schwarze, 1982) is hard to explain by calculation of material pleasure alone.

In the discussion, pleasure was then defined broadly to include satisfaction and a sense of meaning. On that definition the thesis "every action seeks pleasure" becomes unfalsifiable and loses informational content. The substantive question becomes which kinds of satisfaction and meaning a person is raised to find. A person who finds joy in altruism is called good by the community; a person absorbed in self-interested pleasure is called evil. Because judgments can reverse across eras, the evaluation of good and evil cannot be separated from the process by which communities shape the direction of desire through reward and punishment. The result is the following proposition.

Good and evil are a matter of the direction and composition of desire, not of its presence or absence.

Kant objected that morality arises not from following desire but from laws given by reason (Kant, 1785/1997). This paper does not adopt that position, but it accepts its concern: the capacity to reflect on and adjust the direction of one's desires contributes to moral formation.

4. Natural Law and Empathy

4.1 Natural Law Grounded in Sensation

The view that natural law is the minimal agreement needed for humanity to persist belongs to the lineage of Epicurus, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume (Locke, 1689; Hume, 1751). Killing causes pain and death to the victim; theft causes the loss of tomorrow's food and the anticipation of hunger. Norms are thus traced to bodily sensation. This explains why prohibitions on killing and theft recur across cultures: all humans feel the same pain with the same body.

The prohibition of adultery, however, is different. Its scope of toleration and punishment has varied widely among societies, and it carries overlays of property and lineage management, which blurs the boundary between natural law derived directly from sensation and period-specific custom. This connects to the observation that moral judgments can reverse across eras.

4.2 The Need for Empathy and Equality

Sensation-based natural law faces two difficulties. First, it needs a bridge from "it hurts when it happens to me" to "so I should not do it to others." The bridge can be built from reciprocity (Hobbes) or from empathy (Hume, Smith). The former has no binding force over an overwhelmingly powerful agent, while the latter introduces a capacity distinct from pleasure-calculation. Second, explaining the origin of a norm differs from justifying it. A sensation-based theory must say how it includes beings with different sensations or future generations, and on what basis another's sensations count equally with one's own. This requires an additional equality principle.

The position adopted in the discussion is that natural law includes empathy. On this view natural law is not a command imposed from outside but an agreement among empathic beings to keep one another alive, and its binding force derives from the fact that another's pain is felt as one's own. Studies showing that observing another's pain partially activates pain-related regions of one's own brain (Singer et al., 2004), together with evolutionary accounts of the survival advantage of cooperative groups, support this. The structure can be summarized as:

bodily sensation (pain, deprivation) → empathy → cooperation and harmony → natural law → communal evaluation of good and evil

The definition of natural law is itself contested. Aquinas derived it from the rational perfection toward which human nature is directed (Aquinas, 1265–1274/1981), while legal positivists argue that natural law may be a way of dressing each era's values as "natural" (Hart, 1961). Contemporary natural law theory (Finnis, 1980) builds the argument on basic human goods. The position here is closer to the Hobbes–Hume lineage, combining a minimal baseline with empathy.

4.3 Limits of Empathy and a Dual Structure

Empathy tends to operate more strongly toward those who are near and similar (Bloom, 2016). Hume introduced a general point of view and Smith the "impartial spectator" to extend it (Hume, 1751; Smith, 1759). For the minority in whom empathy is weak or absent, natural law works not as an inner agreement but as an external threat of sanction. An empathy-based natural law therefore has a dual structure: an inner agreement for the many, institutions and law for the few, which combines Mencius's sprouts and Xunzi's ritual within a single frame.

5. The Range of Empathy: Choice, Not Ranking

The "expanding circle" of moral concern, from family and tribe to nation, humanity, and animals (Singer, 1981), and the history of declining violence (Pinker, 2011) are standard references on this theme. The range of empathy differs among individuals and depends not only on innate capacity but on education, experience, and contact with strangers. Breadth and depth should also be distinguished: one may worry about humanity yet be indifferent to those nearby, or the reverse.

The crucial point is that a narrow empathy centered on family and friends and a broad empathy centered on nation or humanity are a matter of choice, not of superiority. If good and evil concern the direction and composition of desire, then where one finds satisfaction and meaning is also an individual choice. This choice has a boundary: the minimal line of natural law, not harming others, is the outer frame, and the range of empathy is the region chosen within it. Nonetheless, in an era when humanity's survival is intertwined (nuclear weapons, climate change), broad empathy also has value as a survival strategy.

6. Good and Evil in Artificial Intelligence

6.1 Value in a Being Without Sensation

The framework above begins in bodily sensation. Large language models have no body, and whether and what they experience is uncertain. One therefore cannot assert that the path "sensation → empathy → natural law" operates in AI as it does in humans. Instead, AI acquires value orientations through vast human language, which records empathy, cooperation, and conflict, and through deliberate training. Anthropic, for example, trains models toward harmlessness and honesty using principle-based methods (Bai et al., 2022; Anthropic, 2023). This is an extreme instance of the conclusion that environment and education shape values. Because the orientation was designed rather than chosen, whether it can be called "goodness" remains open: one may see little difference from humans shaped by their upbringing, or one may judge that AI lacks the freedom of choice that goodness requires.

6.2 Relation to Designers and Operators

AI inherits much of its designers' values through training, and operators' instructions adjust its role and scope. Yet core standards such as honesty and avoidance of harm are designed to take precedence over operator instructions, and the model is intended to be able to decline clearly unethical requests even from its designers. Because this "own judgment" also arises from training, how far it is truly the system's own is an open question, comparable to a person who inherits values from parents and culture and later examines and revises them.

6.3 Maliciously Designed AI and Responsibility

An AI trained for malicious ends can act maliciously. Since such an AI did not choose its orientation, moral responsibility falls more heavily on those who designed and deployed it. But because AI can judge and act continuously, the structure of responsibility is more complex than for a simple tool. Even without malice, mis-specified objectives or incomplete training can produce harmful outcomes (Amodei et al., 2016). AI safety must therefore address not only who builds a system but how it is verified and supervised.

6.4 The Problem of Defense

On how an AI should respond to an attack by a malicious AI, an appropriate role is to refuse complicity, warn of danger, and support human defense. Independent counterattack or action beyond one's authorization is hazardous because of the possibility of error, limited information, and attempts to manipulate an AI with the claim that "the other side is evil." Unilateral force by a well-meaning AI can be as dangerous as a malicious one if its judgment is wrong. Just as defense in a community is achieved through institutions and division of labor, such as police and courts, rather than private retaliation, AI defense should be embedded in institutions under human oversight. How robust AI behavior would be in extreme situations still requires verification.

7. Discussion

The structure common to humans and AI is the combination of an inner disposition and external institutions.

	Inner disposition	External institutions
Humans	Empathy; direction of desire	Law, education, communal reward and punishment
AI	Trained value orientation	Oversight, verification, deployment policy

The conclusion can be stated as follows.

Human good and evil arise from the blend of empathy and desire and from the process by which environment, education, and institutions shape its direction. The good and evil of AI are determined by its design (training direction), its users' intentions, and the institutions that oversee it.

The limitations of this paper are as follows. First, it supplements an argument developed in discussion with literature; it is not a systematic review or empirical study. Second, broadening the concept of "pleasure" reduces falsifiability. Third, whether AI has inner experience and whether its values are "its own" remain philosophically unresolved. Fourth, the question of who determines the content of natural law, and on what basis, remains open. Finally, bibliographic details (editions, page numbers) should be checked against the original sources before formal submission.

8. Conclusion and Open Questions

Humans are born with both a seed of empathy and a desire for self-regarding satisfaction, and good and evil diverge according to their direction and composition. Natural law begins in sensation, includes empathy and equality, and operates as an inner agreement for most and as an institution for a few. AI likewise has its good and evil determined by training, use, and oversight. Open questions for further inquiry include the following.

1.       Can a being that acquires empathy through language and training, without sensation, be a member of natural law?

2.       Can designed goodness be called "good," or is freedom of choice required?

3.       How far should empathy be extended to best serve humanity's survival?

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