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gjm comments on My Kind of Moral Responsibility - Less Wrong Discussion
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Whether it's the right choice is a function of your moral system. Under some moral systems it is, and under some it isn't. However notice the "everyone knows" part. Everyone does know. Which percentage of the population do you expect to agree that letting the child drown was the right thing to do?
Any more than the trolley one? Hypotheticals aren't know for their realism.
Right. And provided some of the latter moral systems are ones endorsed by actual people, it cannot be true that "Everyone knows ...".
Oh, I'm sorry. I'd thought we were having a discussion about ethics, not a popularity contest. What percentage of the population has even heard of utilitarianism? What proportion has heard of it and has a reasonably accurate idea what it is?
Nope, ridiculous to a similar extent and in similar ways. This is relevant not because there's anything wrong with using unrealistic hypothetical questions to explore moral systems, but because there's something wrong with making a naked appeal to intuition when addressing an unrealistic hypothetical question (that being what entirelyuseless just did). Because our intuitions are not calibrated for weird hypothetical situations and we shouldn't expect what they tell us about such situations to be very enlightening.