You need something to work with otherwise ethical reasoning couldn’t get off the ground. But it doesn’t necessarily imply that people are not being properly rational (irrational would have to be defined according to a goal, and ethics is about goals.)
One, do you believe that those five links also take a similarly mindkilling form and that mindkilling is justified because it is standard practice in ethics? If this is true, does the fact that it is standard practice justify it, and if so what determines what is and isn’t justified by an appeal to standard practice?
Refuting counter-argument X by saying that if X was your full set of ethical principles you would reach repugnant conclusion Y is at its strongest an argument that X is not a complete and fully satisfactory set of ethical principles. I fail to see how it can be a strong argument that X is invalid as a subset of ethical principles, which is how it appears to have been used above.
In addition, when we use an argument of the form “X leads to some conclusion Y for which Y can be considered a subset of Z, and all Z are bad” we imply that for all such Z, you can (even in theory) create an internally consistent ethical system, even in theory, where for any given principle set P such that P is under some circumstance leading to an action in some such set Z, P is wrong. I would claim that if you include all your examples of such Z, it is fairly easy to construct situations such that the sets Z contain all possible actions and thus all ethical systems P, which would imply no such ethical systems can exist, and if you well-define all your terms, I would be happy to attempt to construct such a scenario.
Many arguments here seem to take the mindkilling form of “If we had to derive our entire system of moral value based on explicitly stated arguments, and follow those arguments ad absurdum, bad thing results.”
I don’t think this form of argument is mindkilling. “Bad thing” needs to refer to something the person whose position you’re criticizing considers unacceptable too. You’d be working with their own intuitions and assumptions. So I’m not advocating begging the question by postulating that some things are bad tout court (that would be mindkilling indeed).
One, do you believe that those five links also take a similarly mindkilling form and that mindkilling is justified because it is standard practice in ethics?
The first one is just a description of the most common ethical methodology. The other papers I’m linking too are excellent, with the exception of the third one which I do consider to be rather weak. But these are all great papers that use the procedure I quoted from you.
I fail to see how it can be a strong argument that X is invalid as a subset of ethical principles, which is how it appears to have been used above.
This doesn’t necessarily follow, but if I discover that the set of principles I endorse lead to conclusions I definitely do not endorse, then I have reasons to fundamentally question some of the original principles. I could also go for modifications that leave the overall construct intact, but that usually comes with problems as well.
I’m not sure whether I understand your last paragraph. It seems like you’re talking about impossibility theorems. This has indeed been done, for instance for population ethics (the second paper I linked to above). There are two ways to react to this: 1) Giving up, or 2) reconsidering which conclusions go under Z. Personally I think the second option makes more sense.
That’s common practice in ethics.
You need something to work with otherwise ethical reasoning couldn’t get off the ground. But it doesn’t necessarily imply that people are not being properly rational (irrational would have to be defined according to a goal, and ethics is about goals.)
One, do you believe that those five links also take a similarly mindkilling form and that mindkilling is justified because it is standard practice in ethics? If this is true, does the fact that it is standard practice justify it, and if so what determines what is and isn’t justified by an appeal to standard practice?
Refuting counter-argument X by saying that if X was your full set of ethical principles you would reach repugnant conclusion Y is at its strongest an argument that X is not a complete and fully satisfactory set of ethical principles. I fail to see how it can be a strong argument that X is invalid as a subset of ethical principles, which is how it appears to have been used above.
In addition, when we use an argument of the form “X leads to some conclusion Y for which Y can be considered a subset of Z, and all Z are bad” we imply that for all such Z, you can (even in theory) create an internally consistent ethical system, even in theory, where for any given principle set P such that P is under some circumstance leading to an action in some such set Z, P is wrong. I would claim that if you include all your examples of such Z, it is fairly easy to construct situations such that the sets Z contain all possible actions and thus all ethical systems P, which would imply no such ethical systems can exist, and if you well-define all your terms, I would be happy to attempt to construct such a scenario.
I don’t think this form of argument is mindkilling. “Bad thing” needs to refer to something the person whose position you’re criticizing considers unacceptable too. You’d be working with their own intuitions and assumptions. So I’m not advocating begging the question by postulating that some things are bad tout court (that would be mindkilling indeed).
The first one is just a description of the most common ethical methodology. The other papers I’m linking too are excellent, with the exception of the third one which I do consider to be rather weak. But these are all great papers that use the procedure I quoted from you.
This doesn’t necessarily follow, but if I discover that the set of principles I endorse lead to conclusions I definitely do not endorse, then I have reasons to fundamentally question some of the original principles. I could also go for modifications that leave the overall construct intact, but that usually comes with problems as well.
I’m not sure whether I understand your last paragraph. It seems like you’re talking about impossibility theorems. This has indeed been done, for instance for population ethics (the second paper I linked to above). There are two ways to react to this: 1) Giving up, or 2) reconsidering which conclusions go under Z. Personally I think the second option makes more sense.