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Do we really need an analogy? What will it teach us that we can't conceive of now? There are benefits to someone doing this, and risks and costs to it, if benef
by navait 11y ago
Do we really need an analogy? What will it teach us that we can't conceive of now? There are benefits to someone doing this, and risks and costs to it, if benefit > (risk)(damage), it's good. If not, it's bad.
Analogies just over-abstract the issue.
- dvanduzer 11y agoLaws / moral codes are always abstractions. They have to be. It's useless to create a new rule that says "Hammurabi wasn't allowed to murder Gilgamesh last Tuesday." But there has always been a tension between the utilitarian criteria you're using, and the absolutist* criteria that others use when evaluating the morality of a decision. In practice, the most effective systems seem to strike a balance. Something like: "First, do no harm. Everything else is details. And the details matter, and the details need to be regularly debated, and the debate itself is an important part of the process." Abstract examples like the trolley problem don't teach us things that we can't conceive of. They can help us boil down and isolate specific aspects of absolutist thinking and determine if we're better off with the statistical approach to deciding if an action is good or bad. * Technically referred to as deontological ethics, but dang, software engineers ain't got nothing on philosophers when it comes to oblique terminology.