The Yvain’s post presented a new method for dealing with the stopsign problem in reasoning about questions of morality. The stopsign problem consists in following an invalid excuse to avoid thinking about the issue at hand, instead of doing something constructive about resolving the issue.
The method presented by Yvain consists in putting in place the universal countermeasure against the stopsign excuses: whenever a stopsign comes up, you move the discussed moral issue to a different, hypothetical setting, where the stopsign no longer applies. The only valid excuse in this setting is that you shouldn’t do something, which also resolves the moral question.
However, the moral questions should be concerned with reality, not with fantasy. Whenever a hypothetical setting is brought in the discussion of morality, it should be understood as a theoretical device for reasoning about the underlying moral judgment applicable to the real world. There is a danger in fallaciously generalizing the moral conclusion from fictional evidence, both because there might be factors in the fictional setting that change your decision and which you haven’t properly accounted for in the conclusion, and because decision extracted from the fictional setting is drawn in the far mode, running a risk of being too removed from the real world to properly reflect people’s preferences.
I do agree. I think in many ways reality already is “the least convenient possible world” and the clearsightedness of thought experiments doesn’t match the muddiness of the world.
Let’s try something different.
Puts on the reviewer’s hat.
The Yvain’s post presented a new method for dealing with the stopsign problem in reasoning about questions of morality. The stopsign problem consists in following an invalid excuse to avoid thinking about the issue at hand, instead of doing something constructive about resolving the issue.
The method presented by Yvain consists in putting in place the universal countermeasure against the stopsign excuses: whenever a stopsign comes up, you move the discussed moral issue to a different, hypothetical setting, where the stopsign no longer applies. The only valid excuse in this setting is that you shouldn’t do something, which also resolves the moral question.
However, the moral questions should be concerned with reality, not with fantasy. Whenever a hypothetical setting is brought in the discussion of morality, it should be understood as a theoretical device for reasoning about the underlying moral judgment applicable to the real world. There is a danger in fallaciously generalizing the moral conclusion from fictional evidence, both because there might be factors in the fictional setting that change your decision and which you haven’t properly accounted for in the conclusion, and because decision extracted from the fictional setting is drawn in the far mode, running a risk of being too removed from the real world to properly reflect people’s preferences.
I do agree. I think in many ways reality already is “the least convenient possible world” and the clearsightedness of thought experiments doesn’t match the muddiness of the world.