My answer to the Trolley problem...opinions?

[SpecialEdition]

I'm not so fond of subjective morality because it raises a host of questions in meta ethics. Such as if morality is subjective, then is it actually important? What is its actual role? Are humans neither good or bad? Is reality neither good or bad? And those are just a few questions. Really it just raises a number of uncomfortable questions in my eyes. It really is just a preference or belief.

Who is making the judgement? Human beings against other human beings....It's all subjective at some point.

 

[sprinkles]

Irony? Well madam (or sir or whichever gender you ascribe to), irony is the lowest form of wit. Tis just below the pun and the limerick. Good day to you.

Also I wasn't really thinking of something that one would actually use but rather a runaway trolley that is out of control and will presumably destroy itself at some point anyway.

 

[CogentPursuit]

You threw in a number of different things here, lol. So, you think the goal is the greatest happiness and health of everyone because that enables a better growth to civilivation. However, you also say that happiness is secondary to life. I suppose that's fine. However, if happiness is secondary, then that supposes that we can live a good enough life without happiness. That's a tough pill to swallow. Personally, I can conceive of a life not worth living, be it so completely full of pain and misery and loneliness with no possibility of change.
You further said that continuity of society is more important than the individual. That's not logically inconsistent, but continuity of one's society leads to a stagnant society. And if you suppose that is more important than any one life, and you take life to be more important than happiness, then you must take society to be more important than happiness. So this idea allows for a society that is cruel. Now if you take the greatest happiness of all involved like a utilitarian, then you have a contradiction. Some responsibility to society and some responsibility to happiness.

Happiness, civilization, society, freedom, are all tools for maintaining life. A civilization without freedom and happiness leads to civil unrest, rioting, revolting and destruction. Too much freedom and they destroy each other. Too much focus on happiness and it isn't sustainable.

 

[Eventhorizon]

Which is an odd stance to take when realizing the point of the question is to consider the nature of morality. Your to focused on the exact replication of reality, not the consideration of morality

Morality should always take reality into account.

 

[dogman6126]

I'll break it down for you:
you will serve yourself first? Yes.
but at what point does the value of your ends/needs outweigh the value of other people's ends/needs? In a situation where my life is not at risk but I have to choose someone else's life to put at risk, I will act in favour of myself and my needs if it means someone is going to die anyway. I choose to not take responsibility and feel zero guilt about that.
Then if you take that to be an objective truth, it should apply to everyone in the same respect. then you would conclude that your view applies to others. So then you say you have no feelings about being moral according to other people's standards, but you would have a standard that applies to other people. That's hypocritical. The only way out of this is to take it to be a subjective morality, and even that sometimes applies to other peoples standards. So either you have to take your first statement as not being true, accept yourself as hypocritical, or accept a view of morality verging on anarchy. A kind of personal relativism. WTF Are you talking about. I am not talking about an objective truth, I am talking about a decision I would make, and how I don't feel obligated to follow someone else's standards of morality and how they feel about how they would act in that situation and at no point have I stated anywhere that my decision or thought process SHOULD apply universally because it won't. Many people will make a decision to act in one way or another and someone's life will be given up because of it. They might crunch the numbers and decide based on that. That doesn't mean I will judge them as having been moral or not. It means I think they got themselves involved in a situation that they never ought to have had to face in the first place and now they have to live with the guilt of choosing to end someone's life which comes with a lot of consequences. I simply choose to not be involved at all.

I'm afraid we are talking about different things.
I would have to ask how you derive responsibility for a thing. Whether or not you will feel guilty and to what extent you will feel guilty about the thing?

 

[dogman6126]

Put flamethrowers on the front rocket launchers on the back and spinning saw blades on the wheels.

hehehe....can we also put a bomb on the trolley so after awhile, it blows up too? that would be nice.....

 

[dogman6126]

I do reject objective morality. As you said, they are simply perceptions that change from culture to culture. There are certain values that remain consistent, but (IMO) this is only because societies would struggle to exist without some very basic boundaries.

When you say certain values that remain consistent, that verges on an objective morality. A fundamental truth. This is one of the problems with cultural relativism. It does develop certain rules that must exist if a society is to exist. That approaches a normative morality (objective morality)

 

[SpecialEdition]

I'm afraid we are talking about different things.
I would have to ask how you derive responsibility for a thing. Whether or not you will feel guilty and to what extent you will feel guilty about the thing?

I feel personal responsibility for almost nothing. I will perform duties I am tasked with if I am being paid to do so, or I will do favours if asked to do so and it fits within something I find reasonable, but otherwise I don't feel responsible. If I take action towards something and involve myself, the situation, in part, is my responsibility. But at no other time do I feel I must do something or feel something.

Guilt is not something I feel very much to begin with and that goes along with empathizing/sympathizing with other people also.

 

[sprinkles]

When you say certain values that remain consistent, that verges on an objective morality. A fundamental truth. This is one of the problems with cultural relativism. It does develop certain rules that must exist if a society is to exist. That approaches a normative morality (objective morality)

Everyone agreeing on something doesn't make it objective. Consistent is not the same as objective and it's possible to even have consistent illusions, delusions and outright falsehoods.

Normative morality and objective morality are two different things.

Edit:
Or in other words
normative = something is because we consistently say it is
objective = something is because it is, and it still is even if everyone says something different

 

[sprinkles]

When you say certain values that remain consistent, that verges on an objective morality. A fundamental truth. This is one of the problems with cultural relativism. It does develop certain rules that must exist if a society is to exist. That approaches a normative morality (objective morality)

Moreover, what objectively says that society must exist? The fact that we find it in our interests to remain alive is a big hangup when it comes to objectivity because it is all based around personal feelings of avoiding death and suffering which happen to be subjectively oriented i.e. we avoid them because they make us feel bad, not because of any observable law outside ourselves.

So of course there arises a morality to preserve social order because we are biased to preserving social order because it's in our personal interests to do so. However when it comes to determining objectivity, even this must be fair game. All propensities must be examined including the urge to survive and exist as a species. Can we quantifiably say that we need to exist, that it's an objective requirement which is not based around internal desires? I don't think we can.

 

[Y0u]

erm, presupposing a number of not only highly unlikely but logically inconsistent variables. To say travel back in time, you where driven to make that jump in time because of the unfortunate circumstance. By traveling back in time to alter it, you create a paradox similar in design (but lesser in severity) to the grandfather paradox. Not to mention a fundamental problem of most theories of physics deem reverse time travel impossible.....At least until someone can prove wormholes of the right type true. And then supposing they are traversable, and controllable.

The paradoxes are totally moot if you are literally atomically not the same -- but with the same, or nearly, neural patterns and DNA -- and time isn't (necessarily) linear; relativity... You can remember entering the same stream twice.

The proof is in the pudding.