It’s clear from the negative points that a lot of people don’t like hearing the truth. Let me spell this out even more starkly for them. What we have with the organ donor thought experiment is a situation where an approach to morality is being labelled as wrong as the result of a deeply misguided attack on it. It uses the normal human reactions to normal humans in this situation to make people feel that the calculation is wrong (based on their own instinctive reactions), but it claims that you’re going against the spirit of the thought experiment if the moral analysis works with normal humans—to keep to the spirit of the thought experiment you are required to dehumanise them, and once you’ve done that, those instinctive reactions are no longer being applied to the same thing at all.
Let’s look at the fully dehumanised version of the experiment. Instead of using people with full range of feelings, we replace them with sentient machines. We have five sentient machines which have developed hardware faults, and we can repair them all by using parts from another machine that is working fine. They are sentient, but all they’re doing is enjoying a single sensation that goes on and on. If we dismantle one, we prevent it from going on enjoying things, but this enables the five other machines to go on enjoying that same sensation in its place. In this case, it’s find to dismantle that machine to repair the rest. None of them have the capacity to feel guilt or fear and no one is upset by this decision. We may be upset that the decision has had to be made, but we feel that it is right. This is radically different from the human version of the experiment, but what the philosophers have done is use our reactions to the human version to make out that the proposed system of morality has failed because they have made it dehumanise the people and turn them into the machine version of the experiment.
In short, you’re breaking the rules and coming to incorrect conclusions, and you’re doing it time and time again because you are failing to handle the complexity in the thought experiments. That is why there is so much junk being written about this subject, and it makes it very hard for anyone to find the few parts that may be valid.
Minus four points already from anonymous people who can provide no counter-argument. They would rather continue to go on being wrong than make a gain by changing their position to become right. That is the norm for humans , sadly.
It’s clear from the negative points that a lot of people don’t like hearing the truth. Let me spell this out even more starkly for them. What we have with the organ donor thought experiment is a situation where an approach to morality is being labelled as wrong as the result of a deeply misguided attack on it. It uses the normal human reactions to normal humans in this situation to make people feel that the calculation is wrong (based on their own instinctive reactions), but it claims that you’re going against the spirit of the thought experiment if the moral analysis works with normal humans—to keep to the spirit of the thought experiment you are required to dehumanise them, and once you’ve done that, those instinctive reactions are no longer being applied to the same thing at all.
Let’s look at the fully dehumanised version of the experiment. Instead of using people with full range of feelings, we replace them with sentient machines. We have five sentient machines which have developed hardware faults, and we can repair them all by using parts from another machine that is working fine. They are sentient, but all they’re doing is enjoying a single sensation that goes on and on. If we dismantle one, we prevent it from going on enjoying things, but this enables the five other machines to go on enjoying that same sensation in its place. In this case, it’s find to dismantle that machine to repair the rest. None of them have the capacity to feel guilt or fear and no one is upset by this decision. We may be upset that the decision has had to be made, but we feel that it is right. This is radically different from the human version of the experiment, but what the philosophers have done is use our reactions to the human version to make out that the proposed system of morality has failed because they have made it dehumanise the people and turn them into the machine version of the experiment.
In short, you’re breaking the rules and coming to incorrect conclusions, and you’re doing it time and time again because you are failing to handle the complexity in the thought experiments. That is why there is so much junk being written about this subject, and it makes it very hard for anyone to find the few parts that may be valid.
Minus four points already from anonymous people who can provide no counter-argument. They would rather continue to go on being wrong than make a gain by changing their position to become right. That is the norm for humans , sadly.