12.4 Ethical Synergy 215 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