FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2019 7:33 pm
Do you really mean arbitrary here? Surely any such principle applies to certain sorts of situation and not others.
Occam's razor doesn't seem like a useful way to decide between salad and soup for a starter. So assigning a principle for application to a situation would be instrumentally irrational if that tool were entirely inappropriate for said situation.
Then there would seem to be some principles that while sort of related to the variables involved in situation at hand, don't seem to be relevant anyway (e.g. "Democracy is doomed because ... too many cooks spoil the broth").
You are strawmanning. In any one situation more than one principle is appropriate.
Choosing any one of the appropriate principles is arbitrary. e.g Occam's Razor vs Hickam's dictum.
Justify why you are seeking the simplest explanation when you are studying the most complex system in existence (the universe).
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2019 7:33 pm
So you see, if we consider the point you were responding to rather than the weird segue, you can invoke the Pareto Principle if you like for the purposes for which it is useful (deciding hoe to achieve a goal efficiently). But it's instrumentally irrational to try to use it to decide what is right and what is wrong. It's a management theory, not a moral tool.
I am not using it to decide what's right and wrong. I am using it to decide what is "more wrong" and "less wrong" given the options A and B.
Both Extinction and Genocide are wrong. Genocide is less wrong.
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2019 7:33 pm
PotAYto PotAHto. In either case, you took the the key element of the problem, discarded it without answer, and then pretended you solved the whole thing. The trolley problem is not a question about what would you do ... more or less everybody irl would do the same thing. It is a question of what makes a choice morally right or wrong.
Trolley problems are not about right and wrong. Trolley problems are about degrees of wrongness.
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Fri Apr 05, 2019 7:33 pm
It's got no solution because it offers only morally wrong options, that is the point. If it were so easy to answer, it wouldn't get discussed ever, it is boring in every other respect.
There is no formulation of the trolley problem in which everybody dies. Including the person pulling the lever and all humans on Earth.
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Tue Apr 02, 2019 7:18 pm
What's the point in that? Your hypothetical is set up specifically to create a situation where all available choices are evil and one is less evil than the rest. If we inject any element of plausibility into it such as simply not exporting fossil fuels to China, the whole thing is pointless.
I think you are missing the point. Of course every philosopher (moral or otherwise) knows how to play the re-framing/re-interpretation game.
In this case of moral philosophy the relativist wins every argument.
The point is - I am playing the relativist game but relation to Extinction. If the death one person is "evil" (or bad, or wrong, or undesirable, or it's just going to make me cry) then by induction the death of all people is "the greatest evil". It's not objective morality, but it is objective immorality.
And objective immorality is still a moral fact.
Of course, for the sake of contrarianism you could argue that extinction + killing one pony is more evil.
There is no difference between skepticism and nihilism in practice.
Nihilist says: Life is meaningless anyway. Doesn't bother with pulling lever.
Skeptic says: I doubt there is a such a thing as right and wrong. Doesn't bother to pull lever.
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Tue Apr 02, 2019 7:18 pm
Yet you speak of "If you believe in objective morality (and I do)".
Indeed. I do. Look in the mirror on this one.
We agree that genocide is the lesser evil to extinction, yet you are not going through with the preferable course of action. You are still indecisive.
Your new moral dilemma is thus: the longer you are NOT-committing genocide - the closer we get to extinction. There is a point of no return at which it becomes too late to act.
By choosing not to choose genocide you have inadvertently chosen extinction. Not-committing genocide is immoral.
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Tue Apr 02, 2019 7:18 pm
I'm having some difficulty working out what your actual position is. Is it some Hegelian thing where morality is like history and only visible from a perspective that isn't available to the individuals participating in the actual events?
I don't even know what that means? Are you having difficulty giving a label to my position, or are you having difficulty understanding the consequences/implications of my position?
I have taken the consequential/epistemic route to morality. The Pyrrhonic-skeptic definition of "knowledge" is absence of uncertainty.
Even outside of morality "facts" are difficult things to pin down. "All swans are white" was a fact until we found some black swans.
But here is a statement that is 100% certain to be true: not all swans are white.
I don't know the color of all swans, but I know it's not white.
I don't know what is "right", but I know what is wrong.
By induction. If murder is wrong then genocide is wronger and extinction is wrongest.
Logik wrote: ↑Tue Apr 02, 2019 8:47 pm
I see little value in a description of the principles of morality that only applies in a blasted wasteland where all morality is rendered irrelevant and decency is suspended for the duration of world ending hostilities. Perhaps we could describe it as it applies in actual use.
I am not sure we can describe it via use or otherwise, because I don't what "relevant morality" looks like on a planet without humans.
Morality is a social construct. No society - no morality.