Until you pick one interim best guess, the discomfort will consume your attention, distract you from the search, tempt you to confuse the issue whenever your analysis seems to trend in a particular direction.
Oh no. Eliezer, I have disagreed with you at times, but you have not actually disappointed me until this moment. As an avid reader of yours, I beseech you, please think through this again.
You simply have not presented a moral dilemma. You’ve presented a pantomine; shadows on a wall; an illusion of a dilemma. If there’s any dilemma here at all, it was whether I should play pretend-philosopher by giving an eloquent and vacuous response or else take philosophy and morals seriously by suggesting that your question is not yet ready to be answered. I chose the latter, partly because I also have been taking seriously your other writings—the ones where you chide people for substituting wishful thinking for self-critical sober rational analysis. I’m attracted to the mind of a man who tries to live by a difficult and worthy principal, because that’s what I do, too; and what I am doing.
Real moral dilemmas have context, and the secret to solving them always involves that context. We frequently find them in literature, richly expressed. Instead, you are just asking us to play a game with unspecified rules and goals. You toss off a scenario in a few sentences. How is that interesting? I guess it’s a bit interesting to see how some people commenting have made bold assumptions and foisted unspoken premises on your example. It’s a window onto their biases, maybe. Is that really enough to satisfy you?
I could understand if you don’t want to make the effort to create a fully realized philosophical problem for us to work through (putting together those problems is a challenge). But geez, I’m surprised you would criticize me for doing what a philosopher is supposed to do: study the situation to understand the question better, rather than make a definite answer to a question I don’t understand.
Until you pick one interim best guess, the discomfort will consume your attention, distract you from the search, tempt you to confuse the issue whenever your analysis seems to trend in a particular direction.
Oh no. Eliezer, I have disagreed with you at times, but you have not actually disappointed me until this moment. As an avid reader of yours, I beseech you, please think through this again.
You simply have not presented a moral dilemma. You’ve presented a pantomine; shadows on a wall; an illusion of a dilemma. If there’s any dilemma here at all, it was whether I should play pretend-philosopher by giving an eloquent and vacuous response or else take philosophy and morals seriously by suggesting that your question is not yet ready to be answered. I chose the latter, partly because I also have been taking seriously your other writings—the ones where you chide people for substituting wishful thinking for self-critical sober rational analysis. I’m attracted to the mind of a man who tries to live by a difficult and worthy principal, because that’s what I do, too; and what I am doing.
Real moral dilemmas have context, and the secret to solving them always involves that context. We frequently find them in literature, richly expressed. Instead, you are just asking us to play a game with unspecified rules and goals. You toss off a scenario in a few sentences. How is that interesting? I guess it’s a bit interesting to see how some people commenting have made bold assumptions and foisted unspoken premises on your example. It’s a window onto their biases, maybe. Is that really enough to satisfy you?
I could understand if you don’t want to make the effort to create a fully realized philosophical problem for us to work through (putting together those problems is a challenge). But geez, I’m surprised you would criticize me for doing what a philosopher is supposed to do: study the situation to understand the question better, rather than make a definite answer to a question I don’t understand.