I’m not even joking here. The essay about “beware fictional evidence” is there for a reason. The kinds of things that a rational person should be able to get from an EA-based story that drive him towards EA should be very limited, because as an author you control all sorts of things about the world of the story that you don’t control in the real world.
I’m not trying to have a fictional world provide evidence that EA is true. I’m trying to write a basic intro to EA essay that people who wouldn’t read an ‘EA 101 post’ will read because it is embedded in the text of a novel that they are reading because I got them to care about what happens to the characters and how the story problems get resolved.
Also, I do think works of fiction can definitely be places to create extended thought experiments that are philosophically useful. I mean something like Those Who Walk Away from Omelas is a perfectly good expression and explanation of a view about the problems with utilitarianism. I don’t like it because I bite the bullet involved and because I think vaguely pointing in a direction and saying ‘there has to be a better solution’ isn’t actually pointing at a solution. But the problem with it as a piece of philosophical evidence is not that it is fiction, any more than the problem with every single trolley problem ever is that it is a work of fiction.
Beware fictional evidence.
I’m not even joking here. The essay about “beware fictional evidence” is there for a reason. The kinds of things that a rational person should be able to get from an EA-based story that drive him towards EA should be very limited, because as an author you control all sorts of things about the world of the story that you don’t control in the real world.
I don’t think that is relevant to this project.
I’m not trying to have a fictional world provide evidence that EA is true. I’m trying to write a basic intro to EA essay that people who wouldn’t read an ‘EA 101 post’ will read because it is embedded in the text of a novel that they are reading because I got them to care about what happens to the characters and how the story problems get resolved.
Also, I do think works of fiction can definitely be places to create extended thought experiments that are philosophically useful. I mean something like Those Who Walk Away from Omelas is a perfectly good expression and explanation of a view about the problems with utilitarianism. I don’t like it because I bite the bullet involved and because I think vaguely pointing in a direction and saying ‘there has to be a better solution’ isn’t actually pointing at a solution. But the problem with it as a piece of philosophical evidence is not that it is fiction, any more than the problem with every single trolley problem ever is that it is a work of fiction.