fubarobfusco comments on On accepting an argument if you have limited computational power. - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Dmytry 11 January 2012 05:07PM

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Comment author: CG_Morton 12 January 2012 08:33:08PM 0 points [-]

That's hardly a critique of the trolley problem. Special relativity itself stipulates that it doesn't apply to faster-than-light movement, but a moral theory can't say "certain unlikely or confusing situations don't count". The whole point of a moral theory is to answer those cases where intuition is insufficient, the extremes you talk about. Imagine where we'd be if people just accepted Newtonian physics, saying "It works in all practical cases, so ignore the extremes at very small sizes and very high speeds, they are faulty models". Of course we don't allow that in the sciences, so why should we in ethics?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 13 January 2012 12:33:01AM -1 points [-]

The analogy between moral theories and physics seems to suggest that just as we expect modern physics to act like Newtonian physics when dealing with big slow objects, we should expect some modern moral theory to act like folk morality when dealing with ordinary human life situations. Does that hold?