FAE is a complicated issue. It is an error of prediction sure, but not an error of passing moral judgement. It means, if average normal people can do bad things in bad circumstances, if that is the most common case, then being an average normal person is simply not good enough, so we need a secular version of "we are all sinners".
I should write longer about it. The crux of the issue is that we tend to think being average means you are okay. Because that is literally how our minds work, our moral instincts are based on social approval in some prehistoric tribe, so being a typical tribe member has okay written all over it. That is why we like to think people who do bad have an abnormal "essence". But if FAE shows it is not so, that most people who look like they did something horrible were driven there under the pressure of uniquely bad circumstances, we have only two choices. We must admit average means bad. Either forgive everybody or damn everybody. Guess what, the second is safer. We have historical experience with a we are all sinners view. It kinda functioned. We don't have much with a set all the innocent souls in the prisons free type of stuff.
Or we silently forget FAE and go on with ancient common of ritually excommunicating / scapegoating (Rene Girard) people who did bad under the pressure of bad circumstances and pretend they are made of a rotten essence, so that we can salvage our illusion that most people are good and thus would not do bad in bad circumstances. Perhaps this noble lie works best. As this has also a lot of historical testing behind it.
To keep to the dog-kicking example, there are 3 kinds of people:
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
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