[ExI] Medical power of attorney for cryonicsts

[Anders Sandberg]

John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> , 6/12/2014 10:43 PM:

I think it's pretty clear there is a intuitive feeling among all human beings (except for psychopaths) that some acts are moral and others are not, but as the trolley problem makes clear this universal feeling that I have as strongly as you is not logically self consistent, and there is no reason we should have expected it to be otherwise.  If morality is encoded in our genes then Evolution invented it, but like all of Evolution's inventions it need not be perfect all of the time, it just has to be slightly better than the competition most of the time. 


Moral intuitions are a hot topic these days in moral psychology; lots of papers and talk (and yes, brain scanning and psychological experiments). I think the rough consensus is that we definitely have an evolved slot for morality just like we have one for language, and quite possibly more specific modules that bias us in certain ways. As you say, the structure does not look self consistent, and evolution does not necessarily aim for that. This is a huge headache for some philosophers: if our moral intuitions or feelings are not truth-tracking but just what evolution left us with, why should we believe or follow them at all? 


At the same time these intuitions seem to underlay most everyday moral behaviour, with the kind of ethical thinking we have been discussing in this thread being somewhat rare (but potent). It is very much Kahneman's system I and II:
http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/new-synthesis-haidt.pdf
(Haidt is very much the moral psychologist du jour; whether one agrees or not, his thinking shows up in the debates)




So the specific skill set that smart people have that dumb people lack,  the ability to see patterns and use logic to make grand structures from a few simple starting points, will be of limited value in questions of morality. If there is no consistent moral thread because none exists then a dumb ethicists will be about as good at his profession as a smart one. As for medical ethicists, you'd need smarts to handle the medical part but not the ethical part.


I think this is wrong. If moral intuitions were all there was to moral thinking, then intelligence would be irrelevant. But you need to be able to notice a problem, consider likely consequences to you and others, how they would feel and so on - all very cognitively demanding things. The moral intuition part is fast but inflexible (very much pattern matching), while the reflective thinking is slower but able to take more of the situation into account.


An ethicist who can only state his intuitions is a lousy ethicist: they would just be a moralist pushing some agenda. What you learn in ethics courses is how to reflect on ethical problems. You become able to construct logical arguments for why some things are better than others, and this takes significant brainpower. Especially when your arguments force you to question moral intuitions that seem self-evident. 


As transhumanists we do not think evolution is the last word, so we should be deeply suspicious of any arguments that are too strongly based on evolved intuitions. They may just have made sense on a stone age savannah. 

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
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