One of the things I realised recently is one of the things that’s confusing about ethics is if you’re used to doing science, you say, “Well, I’m going to separate a piece of the system,” and I’m going to say, “I’m going to study this particular subsystem. I’m going to figure out exactly what happens in the subsystem. Everything else is irrelevant.”
But in ethics, you can never do that.
That seems not accurate. In social science and engineering there are usually countless variables which influence everything, but that doesn’t prevent us from estimating expected values for different alternatives. Ethics appears to be very similar. Unpredictability is merely an epistemic problem in both cases.
Yeah. I don’t think this actually makes ethics harder to study, but I wonder if he’s getting at...
Unlike in experimental or applied science, in ethics you can’t ever build a simple ethical scenario, because you can’t isolate any part of the world from the judgement or interventionist drives of every single person’s value systems. Values, inherently, project themselves out onto the world, nothing really keeps them localized in their concerns. If someone runs a brutal and unnecessary medical experiment on prisoners in an underground lab, it doesn’t matter how many layers of concrete or faraday shielding separate me from it, I still care about that, a bunch of other people care in different ways. You can’t isolate anything. The EV considers everything.
That seems not accurate. In social science and engineering there are usually countless variables which influence everything, but that doesn’t prevent us from estimating expected values for different alternatives. Ethics appears to be very similar. Unpredictability is merely an epistemic problem in both cases.
Yeah. I don’t think this actually makes ethics harder to study, but I wonder if he’s getting at...
Unlike in experimental or applied science, in ethics you can’t ever build a simple ethical scenario, because you can’t isolate any part of the world from the judgement or interventionist drives of every single person’s value systems. Values, inherently, project themselves out onto the world, nothing really keeps them localized in their concerns.
If someone runs a brutal and unnecessary medical experiment on prisoners in an underground lab, it doesn’t matter how many layers of concrete or faraday shielding separate me from it, I still care about that, a bunch of other people care in different ways. You can’t isolate anything. The EV considers everything.