cultural ethics are the answers that other people have already agreed upon; they are ethical computations which have already been computed, and while there may be errors, most of the potential errors an ethicist might arrive upon have already been weeded out.
This is idealized to uselessness. Most such computations are disputed (gun control? abortion? debt? lying? cheating?)
“I presume that you mean that terminal values determine instrumental values. This is not an obvious statement by any means, and is generally false for any realistic case.”
Yet most people, when their sister is sick, would assume that administering penicillin is a good idea. That’s actually a fantastic link in supporting my argument that ad-hoc ethics are too computationally expensive to calculate for most people.
“This is idealized to uselessness. Most such computations are disputed (gun control? abortion? debt? lying? cheating?)”
On the contrary, very few such computations are disputed (by the culture at large). Hence the sister and penicillin example.
It was the example the very post you linked to was built upon.
[Edit] Which is to say, I wasn’t generalizing from one example, I was demonstrating that a particular argument doesn’t apply by demonstrating that its central example supports me.
I presume that you mean that terminal values determine instrumental values. This is not an obvious statement by any means, and is generally false for any realistic case.
This is idealized to uselessness. Most such computations are disputed (gun control? abortion? debt? lying? cheating?)
“I presume that you mean that terminal values determine instrumental values. This is not an obvious statement by any means, and is generally false for any realistic case.”
Yet most people, when their sister is sick, would assume that administering penicillin is a good idea. That’s actually a fantastic link in supporting my argument that ad-hoc ethics are too computationally expensive to calculate for most people.
“This is idealized to uselessness. Most such computations are disputed (gun control? abortion? debt? lying? cheating?)”
On the contrary, very few such computations are disputed (by the culture at large). Hence the sister and penicillin example.
Generalizing From One Example.
It was the example the very post you linked to was built upon.
[Edit] Which is to say, I wasn’t generalizing from one example, I was demonstrating that a particular argument doesn’t apply by demonstrating that its central example supports me.