This sounds like to me as though it’s essentially a giant recapitulation of the trolley problem—you have one side claiming that the opposition doesn’t understand 5 > 1 and isn’t trying to maximize utility and should be pushing the fat man onto the tracks, and you have the other side not wanting to violate obvious moral norms such as “Don’t push people onto train tracks where they will die” for the sake of hypotheticals that are not merely unlikely but unrealistic. (How is that man so fat that he’ll block a trolley going fast enough to crush five other people, anyway?)
Then the first group argues that sometimes you need to be able to engage rational overrides when the situation is different from what you’re used to (or adapted to) and in this case we’re stipulating that the man is fat enough to stop the trolley if you push him onto the tracks, and the second group argues that you want bright-line ethical rules and guards against corrupted hardware and con artists trying to convince you to do evil deeds “for the greater good”.
In this case a bit less freedom would guarantee a lot less distress.
If this statement is to be taken as a hypothetical stipulation similar to that of the trolley problem, I agree with the hypothetical breeding license.
As a real-life policy suggestion, though, it sounds like a terrible idea due to violating a lot of people’s moral norms (which will cause distress), having implementation difficulties (who will make/mark the tests for getting a license), being prone to frighteningly nasty abuse, and underspecification. Please do not take my support of the hypothetical stipulation as being in any way supportive of the actual policy suggestion.
This sounds like to me as though it’s essentially a giant recapitulation of the trolley problem—you have one side claiming that the opposition doesn’t understand 5 > 1 and isn’t trying to maximize utility and should be pushing the fat man onto the tracks, and you have the other side not wanting to violate obvious moral norms such as “Don’t push people onto train tracks where they will die” for the sake of hypotheticals that are not merely unlikely but unrealistic. (How is that man so fat that he’ll block a trolley going fast enough to crush five other people, anyway?)
Then the first group argues that sometimes you need to be able to engage rational overrides when the situation is different from what you’re used to (or adapted to) and in this case we’re stipulating that the man is fat enough to stop the trolley if you push him onto the tracks, and the second group argues that you want bright-line ethical rules and guards against corrupted hardware and con artists trying to convince you to do evil deeds “for the greater good”.
If this statement is to be taken as a hypothetical stipulation similar to that of the trolley problem, I agree with the hypothetical breeding license.
As a real-life policy suggestion, though, it sounds like a terrible idea due to violating a lot of people’s moral norms (which will cause distress), having implementation difficulties (who will make/mark the tests for getting a license), being prone to frighteningly nasty abuse, and underspecification. Please do not take my support of the hypothetical stipulation as being in any way supportive of the actual policy suggestion.