Jack comments on The Preference Utilitarian’s Time Inconsistency Problem - Less Wrong
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Comments (104)
These thought experiments aren't supposed to make you more ethical, they're supposed to help us understand our morality. If you think there are regularities in ethics- general rules that apply to multiple situations then it helps to concoct scenarios to see how those rules function. Often they're contrived because they are experiments, set up to see how the introduction of a moral principle affects our intuitions. In natural science experimental conditions usually have to be concocted as well. You don't usually find two population groups for whom everything is the same except for one variable, for example.
Agree with orthonormal. Not sure what this would mean. I don't think Godel even does that for arithmetic-- arithmetic is simple (though not trivial) and consistent, it just isn't complete. I have no idea if ethics could be a complete axiomatic system, I haven't done much on completeness beyond predicate calculus and Godel is still a little over my head.
I just mean that any simple set of principles will have to be applied inconsistently to match our intuitions. This, on moral particularism, is relevant.
I didn't use "consistence" very rigorously here, I more meant that even if a principle matched our intuitions there would be unanswerable questions.
Regardless, good answer. The link seems to be broken for me, though.
Link is working fine for me. It is also the first google result for "moral particularism", so you can get there that way.
Tried that and it gave me the same broken site. It works now.
Why on Earth was this downvoted?