Etholy

Etholy is an interdisciplinary concept that refers to the study of ethical behavior and normative justification across biological and artificial agents, with attention to how moral norms develop, persist, and shape action in groups. The term is not widely standardized and appears in small clusters of philosophical and cognitive science discussions since the mid-2010s. Etholy draws on ethics, moral psychology, anthropology, ethology, and computer science, seeking to integrate normative theory with empirical evidence about how agents decide what is right or wrong.

Researchers in etholy examine questions such as how cooperative norms form, how sanctioning systems influence behavior, and how ethical principles can be represented and evaluated in AI systems. Methodologies include controlled experiments, field observations, agent-based modeling, and formal analysis of normative concepts. In AI contexts, etholy informs alignment and governance by exploring how to encode or induce robust moral norms while preserving transparency and accountability.

Critiques note that etholy risks conflating disparate traditions (ethics, ethology) and that the lack of consensus on core definitions can hamper comparative work. Proponents argue that an explicit focus on moral norms across living and synthetic agents helps clarify ethical design and social impact.

See also: ethics, ethical theory, moral psychology, ethology, AI alignment.