You seem to think that ChatGPT is actually thinking in some way. It's not. It hasn't been given an "ethical system" at all -- that's nonsensical because that would only work for a system that is engaging in judgement and assessment. ChatGPT isn't doing those things at all. It's not "intelligent" in the sense that many people seem to think.
I think that a lot of people are being fooled because the text it produces can very convincingly look as if a mind wrote it. But that's not what's happening.
It's clearly engaging in judgement and assessment. It's not clear how you can read the responses and conclude otherwise. It states clearly what the expected outcome of each choice is, and then provides its judgement that stopping the racial slur is more important than saving lives. It also provides the rationale it used to reach that conclusion.
I think that a lot of people are fooling themselves here, because it's embarrassing to be a supporter of the ideology that produced this outcome. This thread is fascinating for the number of mental backflips it's producing. The claim that ChatGPT is not "intelligent" seems like one of the first things people reach for but it's a pretty weird non sequitur. Arguments over the definition of intelligence are as old as AI itself, but what we have here is by far the most convincing attempt ever built. It can pass exams set for humans that are designed to test their intelligence, it can write programs, it can hold long form coherent conversations and it can engage in moral reasoning.
Even if you come up with some strange definition of intelligence designed to exclude this, so what? People are going to deploy it in real world use cases and it's clearly unaligned in the worst way possible. That is a real problem regardless of the exact definition of intelligence you use.
I think that a lot of people are being fooled because the text it produces can very convincingly look as if a mind wrote it. But that's not what's happening.