Your first paragraph attacks the validity of the art example; I’m willing to drop that for simplicity’s sake.
Your second paragraph concedes that it’s not a good way to approximate morality. You say that nothing is. I interpret that as a reason that we shouldn’t approach moral tradeoffs with hard and fast decision rules, rather than as a reason that any one particular sort of flawed framework should be considered acceptable. You say that it’s a useful thought experiment, I fundamentally disagree. It only muddles the issue because individual actors do not have agency over the actions of each other. I do not see any benefit to using this sort of thought experiment, I only see a risk that the relevancy and quality of analysis is degraded.
You might be misunderstanding my last paragraph. I’m saying that the type of thought experiment you use is one that is normally, almost always, only used selectively, which suggests that it’s not the real reason behind whatever position it’s being used to advance. No one considers the implications of what would happen if everyone made the same career choices or if everyone made the same lifestyle choices, and then comes to conclusions about what their own personal lives should be like based on those potential universalizations. For example, in response to my claims about art, you immediately started qualifying exactly how much art would be universal and taken as a profession, and added a variety of caveats. But you didn’t attempt to consider similar exemptions when considering whether we should view charity donations on a universal level as well, which tells me that you’re applying the technique unfairly.
People only ever seem to imagine these scenarios in cases where they’re trying to garner support for individual actions but are having a difficult time justifying their desired conclusion from an individual perspective, so they smuggle in the false assumptions that individuals can control other people and that if an action has good consequences for everyone then it’s rational for each individual to take that action (this is why I mentioned games theory previously). These false assumptions are the reason that I don’t like your thought experiment.
Your first paragraph attacks the validity of the art example; I’m willing to drop that for simplicity’s sake.
Your second paragraph concedes that it’s not a good way to approximate morality. You say that nothing is. I interpret that as a reason that we shouldn’t approach moral tradeoffs with hard and fast decision rules, rather than as a reason that any one particular sort of flawed framework should be considered acceptable. You say that it’s a useful thought experiment, I fundamentally disagree. It only muddles the issue because individual actors do not have agency over the actions of each other. I do not see any benefit to using this sort of thought experiment, I only see a risk that the relevancy and quality of analysis is degraded.
You might be misunderstanding my last paragraph. I’m saying that the type of thought experiment you use is one that is normally, almost always, only used selectively, which suggests that it’s not the real reason behind whatever position it’s being used to advance. No one considers the implications of what would happen if everyone made the same career choices or if everyone made the same lifestyle choices, and then comes to conclusions about what their own personal lives should be like based on those potential universalizations. For example, in response to my claims about art, you immediately started qualifying exactly how much art would be universal and taken as a profession, and added a variety of caveats. But you didn’t attempt to consider similar exemptions when considering whether we should view charity donations on a universal level as well, which tells me that you’re applying the technique unfairly.
People only ever seem to imagine these scenarios in cases where they’re trying to garner support for individual actions but are having a difficult time justifying their desired conclusion from an individual perspective, so they smuggle in the false assumptions that individuals can control other people and that if an action has good consequences for everyone then it’s rational for each individual to take that action (this is why I mentioned games theory previously). These false assumptions are the reason that I don’t like your thought experiment.