# Universal Moral Core Principle 2

**Published by:** [Continuations](https://continuations.com/)
**Published on:** 2026-08-24
**Categories:** pm, umc, responsibility, power
**URL:** https://continuations.com/universal-moral-core-principle-2

## Content

The second principle in my proposed Universal Moral Core (UMC) is as follows: Accept the responsibility that comes from power. This principle is inspired by the great font of philosophical wisdom that is Spider-Man. As a fun aside, while in movies and newer comics this line is credited to Peter Parker’s guardian, Uncle Ben, it originally appeared in the closing narration of the issue of Amazing Fantasy that introduced Spider-Man. Let me start by pointing out that the principle only applies when you have power. This feels fairly obvious and so I omitted a qualifying subclause to keep the language concise. Somewhat maybe less obvious is that power is situational. If you are the CEO of a company one might think you have a lot of power, but not when you find yourself hiking and encounter a grizzly bear. What exactly do I mean by power? The ability to influence the future for others by making choices and taking actions in the present. The key here is the impact on others. A king leading his country into war is exercising massive power over his subjects. My choice of a Cappuccino for breakfast by contrast involves minimal power. Why does it involve any power at all? Because I am choosing to drink coffee with milk. So there is an incredibly dilute impact on the future of coffee growers, traders, roasters, etc. and the same for cows, milk farmers, etc. The principle, like the others, is intentionally written without referring to a specific actor. It applies not just to individuals, but also to groups, organizations, corporations, countries. Take Google and Facebook as examples. They each operate platforms which wield great power over the lives of billions of people through the algorithms which determine where attention is routed. The principle even applies at the level of humanity as a whole. We have power over whales, not whales over us (again, this can be reversed in a specific situation as in the story of Jonah). Another reason why the principle is worded this way is because it is also meant to apply to artificial intelligences (AIs). This is the claim to true universality. The principle should apply to anyone who can understand it. Now will AIs have power in the way I have defined it? Arguably they already do. There are AI systems in use today that make decisions which influence the future of humans. Today’s decisioning systems largely lack “agency” (so the principle applies to their developers) but the emerging agentic AI and eventual artificial super intelligence (ASI) will have a great deal of power. To see this clearly we need to examine the source of power for humanity. Our power derives from technology, which in turn is enabled by knowledge. We can’t fly like birds, but our knowledge lets us build airplanes. We can’t dive under the sea like fish, but knowledge lets us build submarines. As a result of our technology we can catch whales, but whales can’t catch us. Our human technologies and the knowledge underpinning them are completely alien to animals. Sufficiently advanced technology is starting to be alien even to us humans. For instance, we are having trouble fully understanding why large language models (LLMs) work as well as they do. And we certainly don’t understand the overall complexity of the “technosphere” (the totality of technology). So with ASI it is extremely likely that artificial systems will hold real power over humans. We very much want this principle to apply to them. What about responsibility? Responsibility means taking into account the impact of actions on those who are affected by them when choosing between different courses of action. Will this action cause suffering or create opportunity? Here again we are confronted with the same issue as in the first principle. There is no way around the need to apply judgment. The third principle introduces a key value to be considered in forming this judgment. Instead of digging into this value now, I want to relate the responsibility principle to the three major categories of ethics. Does your internal state matter? This is the question brought up by virtue ethics. Well it matters in the sense that if you pretend externally to care about the impact of your actions but internally you don’t, then your judgment won’t actually be taking consequences into account. Other aspects of your internal state matter a lot less though. For instance, it doesn’t really matter why you are applying the principle. It could be because you genuinely care about the principle or because you are part of a group that has adopted this principle. How do you evaluate consequences for others? Utilitarianism would have you believe that we can somehow calculate the answer to this question, arriving at an optimal decision. Given the complexity of the world this is utterly impossible. The best we can hope for is to apply heuristics that help us make trade-offs between different values. Is it the actually realized consequences that matter or the anticipated ones? What matters is that you are diligent in thinking through consequences. Diligence means not just looking at the immediate possible outcomes but also the longer term impact. Why can’t I follow a set of behavioral rules? Because behavioral rules don’t take into account the specifics of a situation. We saw this in the discussion of lying in the context of the knowledge principle. Lying to protect someone from prosecution may well be the right thing to do, whereas lying by falsifying research data is more likely to be against the knowledge principle. We simply cannot construct a list of all possible situations and have behavior rules for each. In making choices we must be able to do so “out of distribution,” meaning in new situations that have not previously been encountered. Being human is hard because we cannot escape the difficulty of exercising judgment. The responsibility principle further complicates judgment because it is asking us to include the impact on others. We can therefore easily experience responsibility as a burden, but would do well to remind ourselves that it derives from power. In many cases this is power that we have actively sought (as when joining the board of a corporation). Often it is power that we could share or diminish, such as including team members in making a decision. Rarely do we need to exercise judgment alone or in isolation. The next post in the series will examine some of the implications of the second principle for different types of choices.

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