You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

tim comments on The Trolley Problem and Reversibility - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: casebash 30 September 2015 04:06AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (27)

Comments (27)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: tim 30 September 2015 06:03:11AM *  1 point [-]

I am not a deontologist, but it's clear you're painting the entire school of thought with a fairly broad brush.

However, deontologists would say that you don’t have the right to make that decision.

It is hard to argue against this conclusion, assuming that there is a strong moral obligation for Aaron not to flick the switch, along the lines of “Do not kill”.

I can’t see any pathway to find a logical contradiction, but I can’t imagine that many people would defend this state of affairs.

It is hoped that this post won’t be oversimplified into a, “this is why you are wrong” post, but to help deontologists understand and refine their commitments better.

The entire tone of the post reeks of strawmanning. There is no discussion regarding how different sets of deontological rules might come to seperate conclusions. Each premise is assumed to be correct and there is zero effort made to exploring why it might be wrong (see: steel manning). And finally, almost every paragraph ends with a statement along the lines of:

  • "...it seems..."
  • "...seems consistent with..."
  • "...I can’t imagine that..."
  • "...this doesn’t seem..."
  • "...seems strange to suggest..."
  • "...this seems like a very hard position to defend."

If you ignore the ethical prescriptivism, there's not a whole lot of substance left.

Comment author: casebash 30 September 2015 06:32:59AM *  0 points [-]

Deontology is a very broad philosophical position and so it is hard to avoid broad brush strokes whilst also trying to keep an article to a reasonable length. If there is a need, then I will write a follow up article that dives into how this problem relates to more specific deontological positions based upon feedback.

"And finally, almost every paragraph ends with a statement along the lines of: it seems..." - the purpose of this article was to demonstrate that someone who has accepted deontology will most likely find themselves accepting some kind of strange philosophical commitments. I wanted to acknowledge the fact that there were many points at which a deontologist might object to my chain of thought and to not overrepresent how strong the chains of logic were.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit