how many instances could you possibly be basing this judgment on?
Pretty many; I certainly haven’t kept close count, but going by the age at which I was first introduced to the dilemma and the approximate number of times per year it’s come up, I would estimate somewhere between 100 and 150
It would have been more accurate to say that many people will dismiss the dilemma on counterfactual grounds once, and a second prompt will separate the pedants and jokers from the true rejectors, who will persist in dismissing the question regardless of how it is framed, even in the face of peer pressure.
Anyway, on reflection, I feel like this post was probably not that well considered; I should have at least held off until I had reliable documentation of the phenomenon, with tests to winnow out alternate hypotheses. I still strongly suspect that a significant proportion of those rejecting the hypothesis are doing so based on a rejection of the idea that they should have any coherent moral system, but this impression rests too strongly on interpretations of what the rejectors have actually said to come across well in the post. I really didn’t provide adequate data.
On the question itself I’m not sure having a coherent moral system is something it is important for people to have- though I’m hesitant to make the point since I’m not confident in my ability to make the claim convincing enough to avoid the downvotes that come from saying something that sounds so dumb at first.
Morality is the product of a chaotic, random and unguided process. There is no particular reason to expect human morality to be coherent. That isn’t what evolution optimized it for. If the morality we evolved isn’t coherent (a precise definition of coherent in this context I’ll leave for later, or someone else) what should we do? A lot of people here seem to want to cull, shape or ignore our intuitions so that we act according to a coherent normative theory (preference utilitarianism for example). But to me this looks just like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. You don’t get more moral by sacrificing parochial deontological rules for abstract principles. If a hodge-podge is what we got then a hodge-podge is what we’re stuck with (until we evolve a different hodge-podge). To demand that folk morality meet the demands of logic and coherence feels like a mistake to me. It also feels anti-human.
Pretty many; I certainly haven’t kept close count, but going by the age at which I was first introduced to the dilemma and the approximate number of times per year it’s come up, I would estimate somewhere between 100 and 150
It would have been more accurate to say that many people will dismiss the dilemma on counterfactual grounds once, and a second prompt will separate the pedants and jokers from the true rejectors, who will persist in dismissing the question regardless of how it is framed, even in the face of peer pressure.
Anyway, on reflection, I feel like this post was probably not that well considered; I should have at least held off until I had reliable documentation of the phenomenon, with tests to winnow out alternate hypotheses. I still strongly suspect that a significant proportion of those rejecting the hypothesis are doing so based on a rejection of the idea that they should have any coherent moral system, but this impression rests too strongly on interpretations of what the rejectors have actually said to come across well in the post. I really didn’t provide adequate data.
On the question itself I’m not sure having a coherent moral system is something it is important for people to have- though I’m hesitant to make the point since I’m not confident in my ability to make the claim convincing enough to avoid the downvotes that come from saying something that sounds so dumb at first.
Morality is the product of a chaotic, random and unguided process. There is no particular reason to expect human morality to be coherent. That isn’t what evolution optimized it for. If the morality we evolved isn’t coherent (a precise definition of coherent in this context I’ll leave for later, or someone else) what should we do? A lot of people here seem to want to cull, shape or ignore our intuitions so that we act according to a coherent normative theory (preference utilitarianism for example). But to me this looks just like trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. You don’t get more moral by sacrificing parochial deontological rules for abstract principles. If a hodge-podge is what we got then a hodge-podge is what we’re stuck with (until we evolve a different hodge-podge). To demand that folk morality meet the demands of logic and coherence feels like a mistake to me. It also feels anti-human.