Open Thread, June 1-15, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

My brain came up with this thought:

All else being equal, a murder is better than an accidental death, because a murder at least satisfies someone's preferences.

I was very tempted to take this as a reductio ad absurdum of consequentialism, to find all the posts where I advocated consequentialism and edit them, saying I'm not a consequentialist anymore, and to rethink my entire object-level ethics from the ground up.

And then my brain came up with other thoughts that defeated the reductio and I'm just as consequentialist as before.

For some reason, this was all very scary to me. This is the third data point now in examples of, "Grognor's opinion being changed by arguments way too easily". I think I'm gullible.

Three things: 1) I'm curious if other consequentialists will find the same knockdown for the reductio that I did; 2) Should I increase my belief in consequentialism since it just passed a strenuous test, decrease it because it just barely survived a bout with a crippling illness, or leave it the same because they cancel out or some other reason? 3) I can't seem to figure out when not to change my mind in response to reasonable-looking arguments. Help

Hmmm. Murder decreases the 'expected utility' (cfg. life expentancy), so I think it would still be considered bad in some forms of consequentialism. The corner case - where expected utility would not change (much) would be e.g. shooting somebody who is falling off a cliff who will certainly not survive.

More general, it seems ethical systems are usually post-hoc organizing principles for our messy ethical intuitions. However, those intuitions are so messy, that for every simple set of rules, we can find some exception. Hence we get things like the trolley problem...

7wedrifid14y

It can't be a reductio ad absurdium of consequentialism because the quoted claim isn't even implied by consequentialism. It is implied by some forms of utilitarianism. Consequentialism cares (directly) only about one set of preferences and the fact that the murderer has a preference for successfully murdering doesn't get a positive weighting unless the specific utility function arbitrarily happens to do so. It is just as easy to have a consequentialist utility function that prefers the accident to the murder as the reverse.

4Ezekiel14y

3) I allot a reasonable-seeming amount of time to think before deciding to drastically change something important. The logic is that the argument isn't evidence in itself - the evidence is the fact that the argument exists, and that you're not aware of any flaws in it. If you haven't thought about it for a while, the probability of having found flaws is low whether or not those flaws exist - so not having found them yet is only weak evidence against your current position. So basically, "Before you've had time to consider them".