BluffThis and Chezlaw's Weird Philosophical Contortions

[RJT]

Chez:

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Don't think I can agree that in extreme circumstances like war that its never worth killing innocents but war is a breakdown of ethics anyway.

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Ethics are ethics. If you want to compromise them in instances like war, why not compromise them out of convenience?



(There is a difference between allowing the killing of innocents and unintentional accidents that might happen during the course of war. For example, a hero soldier/sniper sets his aim at a villain target and someone bumps his elbow and he misses and a woman walking down the street gets the bullet. Oh well, such is life as Kurt V says.)

[chezlaw]

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Chez:


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Don't think I can agree that in extreme circumstances like war that its never worth killing innocents but war is a breakdown of ethics anyway.


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Ethics are ethics. If you want to compromise them in instances like war, why not compromise them out of convenience?


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because ethically I distinguish between matters of convenience and wars.

This came up in a conversation with DS a long time ago. There's a difference between what its okay to do in a civilised society and what we do to defend a civilised society.

chez

[pvn]

Link to background thread plz?

[hexag1]

I'd like to throw another gear in the works here. Sklansky has highlighted the philosophical contradictions that can be arrived at when one is attempting to rationalize an action.

First, one proposes an action of moral significance. One generally has a reaction to this proposition. You have an instant intuition of the moral consequences of this action.

If your reaction was to think that the action was moral, then:

Second, one attempts to rationalize this action, but in doing so, finds another moral consequence that wasn't considered in the initial judgment.

Third, one is now faced with a new dilemma. The arduous task of working out all of the consequences of your action in painstaking detail. Who will die immediately, and how many? Who will be saved immediately, and how many? Who will be terrible injured, and how many? Who will be saved from terrible injury, and how many? And so on, way down the chain of causation, until you reach events that cannot be viewed as direct foreseeable consequences.

In the course of such a chain of thought, one could flip-flop endlessly, making no real progress. Your opponents can jump on this indecision and say your reasoning is flawed, or that your philosophical assumptions are wrong.
You could give up, and say that there is no moral position to take, no clear answer. Then you are truly lost.

Ethical dilemmas of the sort Sklansky poses are called Trolley problems . There is an excellent article on Edge.org today (9/12) which mentions this very problem:
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....Most people who study morality now read and write about emotions, the brain, chimpanzees, and evolution, as well as reasoning. This is exactly what E. O. Wilson predicted in Sociobiology: that the old approaches to morality...would be swept away or merged into a new approach that focused on the emotive centers of the brain as biological adaptations. Wilson even said that these emotive centers give us moral intuitions, which the moral philosophers then justify while pretending that they are intuiting truths that are independent of the contingencies of our evolved minds.

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Basically, what researchers have found, is that moral judgment almost completely hardwired in the brain. You take an action, and decide immediately if its right or wrong. Then you try to rationalize post-hoc an action that was performed without premeditation. All this happens even if you haven't performed the action, but are just considering it.

With this in mind, can we even decide these questions? Or are we will we be forever unable to decide these moral question, until our brains evolve wiring that makes it automatic?