The point of ethical thought experiments like the sick villager problem is.… to illuminate seeming contradictions in our values.
That’s fair. I understand the value: it exposes the weakness of using overly rigid heuristics by presenting a situation where those heuristics feel wrong. And I agree that it’s an evasion to nitpick the thought experiment in an attempt to avoid having to face the contradiction of your poorly-formed heuristics.
My standard response to thought-experiment questions is: “I would do everything possible to have my cake and eat it too.” In many cases, that response satisfies whoever asked the question. Immediately defaulting to the LCPW is putting words into the other person’s mouth by assuming they wouldn’t be satisfied with that ethical approach.
Making the LCPW something “normal” seriously underestimates how world-bendingly different it would be from reality. If we truly lived in the LCPW, in most cases it would be such a different reality from the one we exist in that it would require a completely different set of ethics, and I just haven’t really thought hard enough about it to generate a new system of ethics for each tailor-made LCPW.
Incidentally I don’t have a problem with the LCPW when it’s actually realistic, as is the case with the “charity” example.
That’s fair. I understand the value: it exposes the weakness of using overly rigid heuristics by presenting a situation where those heuristics feel wrong. And I agree that it’s an evasion to nitpick the thought experiment in an attempt to avoid having to face the contradiction of your poorly-formed heuristics.
My standard response to thought-experiment questions is: “I would do everything possible to have my cake and eat it too.” In many cases, that response satisfies whoever asked the question. Immediately defaulting to the LCPW is putting words into the other person’s mouth by assuming they wouldn’t be satisfied with that ethical approach.
Making the LCPW something “normal” seriously underestimates how world-bendingly different it would be from reality. If we truly lived in the LCPW, in most cases it would be such a different reality from the one we exist in that it would require a completely different set of ethics, and I just haven’t really thought hard enough about it to generate a new system of ethics for each tailor-made LCPW.
Incidentally I don’t have a problem with the LCPW when it’s actually realistic, as is the case with the “charity” example.