Trolley problems appeal to people who like solving puzzles.
Ethics is not sudoku. That way of thinking reliably leads to extreme moral misjudgment.https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1235990195297816577 …
-
-
Replying to @Meaningness
If I suddenly found myself on a trolley platform with perfect knowledge of trolleys and a weird choice to make, my attention would be on trying to understand the context of how the fuck I got there, not on the ethics of the weird choice.
3 replies 1 retweet 15 likes -
Replying to @Malcolm_Ocean
Yup! The more-clueful-rationalist response is “this is difficult due to incomplete knowledge”; a better response is “this is silly due to the inherent nebulosity of ethics and artificial decontextualization”
2 replies 2 retweets 11 likes -
Replying to @Meaningness @Malcolm_Ocean
Could you elaborate this difference? I still find it rather difficult to comprehend what it could mean to say "x decision-relevant factor is inherently nebulous," apart from "there are no risk-free decisions at any higher-order level of abstraction."
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
so e.g. no risk free way of deciding (esp. ahead of time) whether one should be more of a consequentialist or a virtue-ethicist in some particular situation.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @11kilobytes @Malcolm_Ocean
Well… that’s sort of pointing in the right direction?
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
But “should” and “risk” suggets there is an actually correct answer, which you don’t know. But there isn’t.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
That’s the difference between uncertainty (an epistemological phenomenon) and nebulosity (an ontological one). Nebulosity means that, for many questions, there are no right answers… just ones that are better or worse for classes of purposes.
-
-
(Sorry if this isn’t clear; it’s bed time for me and I’m thinking slowly)
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @Meaningness @Malcolm_Ocean
Nope, your last tweet was very helpful thanks. Good night :p.
0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.