[ExI] Morality

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Fri Jan 7 18:37:47 UTC 2011


On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Anders Sandberg  wrote:
<snip>
> Exactly what this trolley problem situation tells us about ethics is very
> debated. Some people think it does show that folk ethics is wrong, and
> people should use properly designed ethical systems. Others think it
> indicates that academic ethics doesn't "get it" (my favorite example is how
> engineering students refuse to play the game, and instead devise ways of
> stopping the trolley).
>
> My own take is that ethicists should pay more attention to moral cognition -
> which is a messy area where evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience,
> social and cultural factors and heavens know what else interact to produce
> our moral thinking. The dilemmas so beloved in academia are rarely the big
> moral problems in real life: there we usually know what is right, it is just
> that we don't do it. Fixing acrasia through a drug might do more for
> improving our species than any amount of philosophizing... maybe.
>
>

This response is probably much too simplistic for a professional
philosopher, :) but it probably expresses a fairly universal view.

I think what unsettles humanity about pushing the fat man in front of
the trolley is the virtually universal rule 'Thou shalt not kill'
(without a very very good reason). And also the Golden Rule -- nobody
wants to actually be the fat man in question.

Once the door is opened to intentionally kill one (or many) for the
greater good, then this will almost certainly be misused by those in
power to justify killing those they disapprove of. So it is safer to
forbid it from the beginning, rather than getting into endless
arguments about when it might be justified. Do we nuke Iran and kill a
100,000 to stop a war that would kill many millions?  Just say No.



BillK



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