Your doctor with 5 organs strikes me as Vizzini’s princess bride dilemma, “I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.”
So it goes, calculating I know you know I know unto silliness. Consequentialists I’ve recently heard lecturing went to great lengths, as you did, to rationalize what they ’knew” to be right. Can you deny it? The GOAL of the example was to show that “right thinking” consequentialists would come up with the same thing all our reptile brains are telling us to do.
When you throw a ball, your cerebral cortex doesn’t do sums to figure where it will land. Primitive analog calculation does it fast and with reasonable accuracy. As we all know, doctors across the nation don’t do your TDL sums either. Nor do I think they’re internalized the results unconsciously either. They have an explicit moral code which in it’s simple statements would disagree.
The thing I find interesting, the challenge I’d like to suggest, is whether consequentialism is somewhat bankrupt in that it is bending over backwards to “prove” things we all seem to know, instead of daring to prove something less obvious (or perhaps unknown / controversial). If you can make a NEW moral statement, and argue to make it stick, well that’s like finding a new particle of matter or something: quite valuable.
People’s moral intuitions are incoherent, and will tend to return different answers for the same dilemma phrased in different terms. Our evolved heuristics have their uses, among them is not turning into a social pariah in a group that relies on the same heuristics, but they’re certainly not isomorphic to strict consequentialism.
Your doctor with 5 organs strikes me as Vizzini’s princess bride dilemma, “I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.”
So it goes, calculating I know you know I know unto silliness. Consequentialists I’ve recently heard lecturing went to great lengths, as you did, to rationalize what they ’knew” to be right. Can you deny it? The GOAL of the example was to show that “right thinking” consequentialists would come up with the same thing all our reptile brains are telling us to do.
When you throw a ball, your cerebral cortex doesn’t do sums to figure where it will land. Primitive analog calculation does it fast and with reasonable accuracy. As we all know, doctors across the nation don’t do your TDL sums either. Nor do I think they’re internalized the results unconsciously either. They have an explicit moral code which in it’s simple statements would disagree.
The thing I find interesting, the challenge I’d like to suggest, is whether consequentialism is somewhat bankrupt in that it is bending over backwards to “prove” things we all seem to know, instead of daring to prove something less obvious (or perhaps unknown / controversial). If you can make a NEW moral statement, and argue to make it stick, well that’s like finding a new particle of matter or something: quite valuable.
People’s moral intuitions are incoherent, and will tend to return different answers for the same dilemma phrased in different terms. Our evolved heuristics have their uses, among them is not turning into a social pariah in a group that relies on the same heuristics, but they’re certainly not isomorphic to strict consequentialism.