MugaSofer comments on The Psychological Diversity of Mankind - Less Wrong

79 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 09 May 2010 05:53AM

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Comment author: ata 09 May 2010 04:55:04PM *  8 points [-]

I've picked up some anecdotal evidence for that over the past few months. Just a week ago I was talking with one guy with AS about some ethics problems; he brought up an example where you're with 20 other people, including a baby who won't stop crying, hiding from an approaching army. Under some simplified assumptions, if the baby keeps crying, the army will find and kill all of you, and if the baby stops, they probably won't. If killing the baby is the only way to stop it, is it moral to do so? The consequentialist answer seemed obvious to both of us, even when he specified that the army would spare the baby's life but kill the rest of you. He told me that this is a characteristically autistic way of thinking about moral problems, and he's had more contact with autistic/AS people than I have (aside from being one himself), so I'm inclined to believe him. (I'm not AS myself, but I'm apparently close enough that several people at several points in my life have suspected it, but not enough to be diagnosed with it.)

Edit: He wasn't sure about torture vs. dust specks, but that seemed to be more because he didn't see how a problem involving such impossibly huge numbers of people could have any useful implications about more realistic ethical scenarios. I disagreed — the math is the same, and I think pathological cases are useful for testing the integrity and consistency of ethical theories and for testing how seriously a person takes the theory/methodology they profess to follow — but he didn't find that particular point to be relevant.