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olin posted:In utilitarianism wouldn't you be obligated to torture an innocent child to death if your doing so would save 10,000 other lives? Any real-world application of utilitarianism has to take both uncertainty/ignorance and the utility of the rule established when answering a question like this. So, in an absurd situation where you know 100% for sure that torturing a child would save 10,000 lives and your decision will never ever no matter what influence others to treat torturing children as not such a bad thing, maybe. But in the world we actually live in, neither of those premises are true, and both are important when evaluating the utility of an act.
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May 19, 2016 16:58
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olin posted:Hypothetical questions are used to draw out the underlining principles. And also you just admitted that under certain circumstances it is morally correct to torture an innocent child to death. Your ethical system is bankrupt. Even if my ethical system were strictly utilitarian (which is something I continue to actively consider, and I haven't come to a definite conclusion), a hypothetical situation that cannot occur in real life illustrates nothing. There are literally no circumstances where I would be called on to make a moral decision without uncertainty, so my moral system must take uncertainty into account, and the existence of uncertainty stops me from ever sanctioning the torture of a child.
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May 19, 2016 17:03
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Basically the reason I said "maybe" in response to "would you torture a child in those circumstances" wasn't just waffling, it's like asking someone who's moral system is theistic what they would do if God didn't exist. It might reveal something about them personally, about the intuitions that underlie their ethics, but it says very little about their moral system because it rejects the premises that their moral system is based on.
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May 19, 2016 17:06
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olin posted:Rejecting hypotheticals and thought experiments because "they can't happen in real life" is antithetical to doing philosophy.One of the reasons that people today score about 30 points higher on IQ tests then 100 years ago is that people are more able to answer questions with hypothetical premises. You're mischaracterizing my objection. I would expect a Christian to be able to think about how they would live if they didn't believe in God, but I would not expect Christianity, as a system in any of its typical forms, to answer the question "how would morality work without God" because at that point it would no longer be Christianity. olin posted:Also, lets say ISIS captured you and a bunch of other prisoners. The terms of release for all the prisoners were for you to kill the child prisoner. Otherwise they would behead you all in one week. Sure. Assuming I'm brave enough to stick by my principles, I wouldn't kill the child in those circumstances, for a variety of reasons. I don't know if I can trust ISIS to keep their word, and I don't know what they hope to achieve. I'm willing to assume that the interests of an organization who kidnapped me and threatened to kill me are antithetical to my interests, that the taboo against killing and hurting human beings generally serves the interests of minimizing human suffering, and that ISIS shows very little regard for that taboo. I don't want to advance a cause that I suspect has significant disutility, and my estimate of the disutility of killing the child is much greater than the small possibility that a) ISIS would keep its word and b) ISIS's goals in creating this dilemma have positive or neutral utility.
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May 19, 2016 18:17
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