rehoot comments on Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas - Less Wrong

18 Post author: Vladimir_M 23 August 2011 09:13AM

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Comment author: rehoot 04 September 2011 03:21:53AM 2 points [-]

Yvain said:

You can end up utilitarian either because you're a psychopath and don't have the special moral module - in which case you default to general purpose reasoning - or because you're very philosophical and have a specific preference for determining moral questions by the same logic with which you determine everything else, thus deliberately overruling the special moral module.

I participate in utilitarian forum, and from that experience I would add to the quote above by saying that there are some people who encountered emotional arguments about "painism" or "speciesism" (e.g. arguments from Singer; Ryder, and the like) and followed those arguments to utilitarianism. I would expect that there are few people in this category as a percentage of the total population (in part because few people seriously study ethics of any kind and fewer still find their way to that end).