There is no reason to expect them to answer all moral questions that we can think of.
— Mark S
It's going to have to say something about Trolley Car. — RogueAI
People commonly judge throwing a switch to sacrifice one person to save five as moral. But they judge it immoral to push a large man off a bridge (sacrificing one person) to block a trolley, saving five people. Why the difference when the body count is the same? — Mark S
Pushing the large man off the bridge will reduce trust between people (if you stand next to someone they may kill you) — Mark S
Tom Storm, et al., what do you make of this:
The most reasonable foundation for morality is what morality is and always has been - the rules we live by to maintain cooperative societies.
— Mark S
Has Mark presented a cogent argument for this contention? Is he right? — Banno
I think Mark is putting up a valiant fight against the vagaries of morality in the current world. — Tom Storm
I wrote a paper on that once, many years ago, although the case I was looking at was Trolley Car vs abducting a person to harvest their organs and save five people. I think in the trolley car cases, we see that as a rare one-off, so we sacrifice the one, but in the other trolley-car like cases where we get our hands dirty (pushing a person, abducting a person), we can see how society could head down a scary path where it starts to actively look for ways to kill people for "the greater good". — RogueAI
Does this lead us into a space that there is nothing intrinsically good or bad and that almost anything might be allowable under the right circumstances? — Tom Storm
Do you think this is a controversial statement? I see where you are coming from but many people who do not share your values could find this problematic. — Tom Storm
I've found @Banno helpful on many subjects. He certainly reminds me that philosophy is not easy and to be wary of easy answers. He alerted me to virtue ethics when I first arrive here. Philosophy seems to be about continually refining the questions we are asking, which may matter as much as, if not more so, than the putative answers. — Tom Storm
Pushing the large man off the bridge will reduce trust between people (if you stand next to someone they may kill you)
— Mark S
Or will it increase trust, in that those who comment on the event after the fact will see pushing the large man off the bridge as showing that you can be relied on to make difficult decisions, and as an exemplar of how one ought act?
Perhaps things are not so clear as you suppose.
Foot's Trolley problem was conceived as a way of showing some of the limitations of consequentialism. The trolley was to be contrasted with the case of killing a healthy person in order to harvest their organs to save five terminally ill patients. Same consequence, differing intuitions. (I see Rogue is aware of this).
Cooperation seems of little use here, in line with ↪RogueAI's strategy of asking for explicit and practical examples of the use of a cooperation approach, in order to test it's utility. — Banno
Claiming science is, therefore, useless would be silly.
— Mark S
Of course, I've done no such thing. What I have done is simply point to the is/ought distinction, and warned against taking what humans have done as evidence for what they ought do. — Banno
Morality as Cooperation Strategies explains fast moral thinking, not slow moral thinking. — Mark S
Morality as Cooperation Strategies explains fast moral thinking, not slow moral thinking.
— Mark S
I think your sense of what is an explanation of what is a bit unrealistic. I think the adaptiveness of fast moral thinking (considered within an evolutionary framework) is more accurate as an explanation for human moral thinking. — wonderer1
Do you have a different explanation of the content of the fast moral thinking adaptation? — Mark S
Inasmuch as evolution might be said to have a 'purpose' that purpose is to produce individuals with a high probability of success in passing on their genes. When evolution is occuring in a species which gets a lot of benefit from social cooperation we can expect evolutionary changes that take advantage of that environmental niche of living as a member of a social species. However, it isn't realistic to think cooperation is the 'purpose' of that evolution. A relatively high level of cooperation is just a side effect of evolution in such an environmental niche. — wonderer1
What's your essential perspective on moral 'foundations'? — Tom Storm
I guess I have a problem with your use of "strategy".
Whose strategy is it? — wonderer1
"Women must be submissive to men" and "Homosexuality is evil" are common parts of traditional moralism. Now I can explain why people thought they were moral but since they contradict morality's function of solving the cooperation/exploitation dilemma, I know they are immoral. — Mark S
You don’t see the link between your wrapping this narrative in the cloak of science and religious norms of conduct?
Failing to understand why people’s attempts to get along with others fall short of your standards can lead you in one of two directions. You can either experiment with your construction of the puzzling and seemingly ‘immoral’ behavior of a group or individual until you come up with a more effective way to understand why it represented the best moral thinking for therm at the time, or you can blame them for your inability to make sense of their actions , slap a label of immorality on it and try and knock some sense into them. — Joshs
You could be more specific. But what I said summarizes all there is. — Mark S
Are you arguing for some kind of moral relativism? Do you hold that "Women must be submissive to men" and "Homosexuality is evil" are norms some societies can morally advocate and enforce or what?
I can make sense of why men would selfishly cooperate to impose moral norms such as "women must be submissive to men". That is easy to understand. But making sense of it in terms of why they did it has nothing to do with its morality. — Mark S
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