so anyways my ethics classes are going great im having a fun great awesome cool fun great poggers time
Lol why would Mother Theresa be trying to convince people not to torture others? Her whole things was letting sick people suffer as much as possible to bring them closer to God.
I’m gonna torture Sally and her father. Not to get the location of the bomb, just because I enjoy it.
Basic Hitlerite
Yeah and Mother Theresa and Gandhi better watch their asses.
Have you ever considered running for office? I think you’d do well in the USA.
Honestly, the biggest failure in ethics is not focusing on uncertainty. Thought experiments are less than useless because you can never have full knowledge of outcomes in reality. Ethics often presupposes deductive reasoning, making it inapplicable to our uncertain reality. You cannot prove anything about reality, only about the forms that we made the fuck up to approximate it. All of those formal systems are built on induction, meaning they are always uncertain.
Uncertainty is inevitable, fundamental, and unavoidable. If we want ethical theories to apply to real life, they must deal with uncertainties at every level. Reject deduction, accept epistemological solipsism. I just don’t see how we can ever be certain, but that’s ok. We can build far more if we accept that limitation from the get go.
Just change the thought experiment set up to: “you suspect x will happen,” instead of “x will happen.”
Am I missing your point?
It took a while to type this out so the commenter above may have already responded but:
I think their point is for example: in the scenario with Sally’s father’s nuclear bomb
It’s constructed to have people evaluate the extremities of their moral convictions. Some philosophers argue that it is never moral to lie or to break a promise. Some argue that it’s never moral to torture a person. I reckon the thought experiment is designed to get people to consider whether torture is actually absolutely morally wrong.
What I think the commenter above you was saying is: In reality, how could we become convinced this scenario was unfolding before us. What experiences could a person actually have that would give them adequate confidence in the story to actually decide that it was justified to torture Sally.
Like if a person walked up to you on the street IN REAL LIFE and said:
My name is Sally, and I promised my father not to tell anyone where he had buried an atomic bomb that will kill 1 million people when it explodes in half an hour, but I concede I would be convinced to break my promise through torture.
Would you feel justified in torturing her? What if you were the chief of police? I hope you don’t think so, because this is clearly a person having delusions related to some form of a psychotic episode.
Even if she was telling the truth and you did succeed in torturing the information out of her, how quickly could you do it, and how quickly could you act on the information in a way that would save lives?
Actual real world moral reasoning must account for people’s skepticism of the premises of the thought experiment.
If we’re trying to construct some sort of useful ethical system, it has to accommodate the uncertainty humans have to navigate. This is probably why the classic trolley problem is so divisive. Some people are intuitively accounting for their uncertainty in the premise’s stated ‘known’ outcomes.
You’re spot on. Uncertainty makes a huge difference, especially in regards to utilitarianism. With certainty of the full outcomes, act utilitarianism is probably the best theory. Unfortunately for act utilitarians, that certainty is impossible, making it a shit theory in practice. That’s where virtue, contract, and rule based theories shine. They can balance uncertain outcomes with probable consequences. They will lead to the worse outcome some percentage of the time, but that’s life. You can try your best and still lose.
You’re probably aware of this inherent contradiction by for the sake of any third parties reading:
TotallynotJessica is advocating for virtue, contract, and rule based ethical paradigms based on the hypothesis that they will, in general, more effectively lead to outcomes preferred by utilitarianism.
I think this contradiction is only important to people that are entrenched on one side or the other (or the other, or the other). For people that just want to understand how to make good decisions in their lives it’s a bit of a moot point.
It certainly helps with the annoying parts of ethics. It made it more accessible to know that most past philosophers wasted time chasing the unobtainable and ignoring what is useful.
Every ethics book I’ve read has had the Times New Roman typeset. This is clearly unethical as it is ignoring the entire sans-serif typeset family.
I don’t need to do ethics, I will simply not do bad things, it’s not hard
I feel like the main point of ethics is the introspection required to understand ones own prejudeces and definitions of moral right or wrongs claims of I will simpl y not do bad have very little meaning when the definition of bad isn’t elaborated on
Edit: I mean some people think being trans is a sin does it make it so? No. We like those transphobes who don’t bother knowing any better should be aware of potential misjudgements we may subconsciously make when not viewing the entire situation in a spectrum
No, you just don’t do bad things, transphobia is a bad thing so you don’t do it ❤️
Right, but how is a transphobe who’s been taught since birth that trans people are bad supposed to learn they aren’t?
I’d say the fact that you think that this type of thinking would solve anything means you don’t understand the problem.
What problem is that? I see no problems to be solved here
Studying ethics is at least one of the ways we try to deal with the problem that “I won’t do bad things” means different things to different people. There isn’t a cosmic definition of “bad”.
Nah
Torture will not extricate the info Sally has, she’s not culpable. Sally’s father should be held liable for the lives and land lost from the nuke.
Mother Teresa was a cunt and she should go to the same pit the Hitlerites are going to
I dunno what the third one is but fuck em
Therac-25 was a human error
Oh noes ethical dilemmas are hard! Can we please not have to think about them anymore?
The point isn’t to tell you how to think, the point is to make you think. If you’re upset by someone making you think, that’s on you, not on a field of study.
My favorite dilemma is the one where you have a time machine but you can’t kill Hitler, but you can steal Hitler’s wallet. All the bad things will still happen, all you will accomplish is Hitler will have one bad night. So is it ethical to steal Hitler’s wallet? The ethical answer is no, because there’s no positive benefit to it. But as one ethicist said “Yeah but I’d still do it because it’s Hitler, fuck that guy.”
You don’t always have to do the ethical thing but it’s useful to know the ethical answer so you understand when you’re doing something with non-ethical motives. Sometimes you’re just doing stuff to make yourself happy and that’s fine.
So you have to let the million people die b/c torture is too naughty:
Consider another example. Suppose that Sally’s father has planted a nuclear a half hour. Sally is the only person who knows bomb that will detonate in where he hid it, and she has promised him that she will not reveal the location to anyone. Although she regrets his act, as a devoted daughter she refuses to break her promise and give away the secret. However, if we do not discover where the bomb is and dismantle it within the next half hour, it will blow up a city and kill a million people. Suppose we can torture Sally to get this information from her.
According to the DDE, is this permissible?
No, for the end does not justify the means. Con- dition 2 is violated. We are using a bad act to bring about a good effect.Bonus:
On the other hand, suppose someone has tampered with the wires of my television set in such a way that turning it on will send an electrical signal to the next town where it will detonate a bomb. Suppose I know that this will happen. Is it morally wrong, according to the DDE, to turn on my television to watch an edifying program? Yes it is because condition 4 is violated. The unintended evil outweighs the good.
You know that meme about how any metric used as a target, ceases to be a good metric? That applies to torture: the torturee’s main goal is to end the torture and it’s fairly likely they will provide bad information
I should’ve added - we know torture doesn’t work, but that should be mentioned in the hypothetical. As it stands, I’m tempted to believe torturing the daughter is guaranteed to result in her revealing the information which will save a million lives.
Yo those examples are wild
This was one of the discussion board questions we could choose from to answer this week:
- Examine the Galactican superrational counterexample. Would superrational beings be justified in treating us as we treat animals, even eating us.
Great argument for being vegan tbh
No one besides Sally and her father knows there is a nuclear device planted somewhere because Sally’s father only told Sally and Sally hasn’t told anyone. So no one would have any reason to tell Mother Teresa or Mohandas Gandhi to convince the Hitlerites to torture Sally for the information. Not to mention the button that saves Europe and Africa is not even applicable in this circumstance since Sally would have pressed it herself if the city that was in danger was located in Europe and/or Africa. The scenario inherently prevents us from taking action due to our ignorance derived from the premise and thus lacks an ethical question, normative or otherwise, for us to consider. /s edit: typo
The nuclear bomb and Hitlerite examples are from different pages. I was worried the phrasing would imply they were tied together, but the excerpt is elaborating on a different section of text right before it, which is different from the excerpt about Sally and the nuclear bomb. Sorry for any confusion there.
Sorry for any confusion there.
I put /s. My comment was a joke in its entirety. I assume the section about the button that saves Europe and Africa is a different, unrelated section as well. It seemed more fun to respond to the post as if it was one continuous thought experiment. =P
As much as we can accuse ethicists of living in the Moon, if there’s one thing worse than being an ethicist is not considering ethics at all. If you haven’t put at least a basic effort into rationally justifying your ethics, you end up choosing right or wrong based on vibes, including but not limited to positions such as “well life begins at conception so abortion is murder and always wrong”, “this moral flaw may have been minor but that person is CREEPY and that confirms my suspicion that they’re a MONSTER” and “noooo you cannot have a gender identity/sexual orientation that I don’t understand, you must be a deviant and a pervert”
Ooohhhh you’re turning into Chidi.
I had to look this up and Chidi is an obsessive(?) ethics professor from The Good Place. I should really get around to watching that show…
It’s really brilliant. Like, really really brilliant. I think you’ll appreciate as someone who’s studying ethics.
I’ve seen clips and a few trailers and it looks up my alley. Also fwiw I’m studying social and behavioral psychology, not ethics specifically. This is just one of the required classes and seemed the most interesting out of the classes I could choose from.
Oh yea. You’ll def love it when you have time to get to it. I envy you the opportunity to see it for the first time lol.
Fuck maybe I should study ethics
What if I just torture Sally not asking about the nuclear bomb and let the bomb detonate. Isn’t that a peak ethical acheive?
Were you a lawyer in the Bush administration?
Saying there’s no real-world use for thought experiments or theory is like saying tricycles are useless because they’re slower than jogging.
