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This is consistent with a few previous studies along the same lines, but also shouldn't be that surprising. Ethical knowledge or reasoning not only isn't suffic

This is consistent with a few previous studies along the same lines, but also shouldn't be that surprising. Ethical knowledge or reasoning not only isn't sufficient for ethical behavior (weakness of will exists!), it might not even be necessary. It's easy to believe, e.g. with Hume (more or less) that we have a pretty good natural sense of right and wrong in day to day behavior. But this doesn't mean ethical philosophy is useless. We might have a pretty good innate sense of what we ought to do on a day-to-day basis as individuals, but there are lots more complex situations---in politics, in business, in science (bioethics, e.g.)---where our innate sense of right and wrong leads us to conflicting judgments or might mislead us altogether. Those situations are where we need professionals. Not in asking whether we ought to steal candy from babies or cheat on our spouses. (Bias/credibility check: credentialed political theorist, has been paid to help companies figure out ethical things.)

Judgmentality 8y ago
How do you get paid as a consultant for ethics? Sounds like a really interesting job and I'm curious how you found your way into this position.
- paultopia 8y ago
  Not my main gig (which is professoring at the moment), but: sort of the same way one does any kind of consulting thing: know people at companies that have a problem that needs solving, and be known to have the relevant expertise!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
crimsonalucard 8y ago
Our intuition of right and wrong is the result of millions of years of evolution that helps the survivability of individuals and groups. This is the key criteria: survivability. Other than that, our intuition on right and wrong was never meant to be logical, internally consistent and most of the rules are arbitrary and situational at best. These moral drives we feel do not exist outside of the human experience. They are instincts created as a product of natural selection. I am motivated to save a drowning baby in the pool next to me but I can't care enough to donate a dime to save a starving baby in africa. We all would save the drowning baby when the opportunity arises yet most of us haven't donated a single dollar to Africa. Why? Because one situation is relevant to survivability of the local clan/tribe, the other is not. Saving the baby near me benefits my tribe while the baby in Africa is irrelevant to my survivability. Thus natural selection has only evolved a sense of panic when I see a dying baby with my eyes and not when I hear about one dying in africa. This contradiction in our moral drive offers evidence that morality is evolved and not logically consistent. Although we possess these moral drives, there is no evolutionary pressure that requires us to know why these drives exist or why they are inconsistent, and why they fail to solve more complex moral problems. Knowing why or how does not lend to our survivability that's why we evolved a moral drive without the correct reasoning to understand it. Hence humans are left with instinctual drives that influence our behaviors, but we are left to our own devices to figure everything out why they exist in the first place. The biggest mistake you can make as a human is to assume that your moral drive has origins that are beyond biological. Most of us assume this is the case, but from a logical standpoint... it is not. Our intuition of what is right and what is wrong is just an arbitrary set of illogical instinctual drives and it is completely pointless to make sense of these things in a consistent way other than to know that the drives are arbitrary rules that increase survivability. Ethics represents our attempt to codify these arbitrary drives that are fundamentally inconsistent into a set of rules that are internally consistent. It's an utterly pointless and uninteresting endeavor. Ethics doesn't truly exist as a fundamental framework of the universe, we are making literally making it up. Because we are making it up, an ethicist is just spouting a bunch of made up nonsense. There isn't truly a moral right or a moral wrong in the universe and thus the philosophical study of ethics is pointless. The actual study of morality is a scientific endeavor into how evolutionary pressures of group dynamics and individual dynamics formulates behaviors that help with survivability. The field of evolutionary psychology is the closest thing to a legitimate study of ethics. An ethicists is one of those pointless "sciences" where humans in attempt to systemize everything they see jump to incorrect conclusions. Our old theory of humors in medical science or the chinese theory of Chi flows in our body and yin and yang are attempts to find systems where systems don't exist and are now relegated to junk science. The study of ethics is in the exact same camp.
- paultopia 8y ago
  So then, when you're in an evolutionarily unfamiliar situation where these instincts of yours don't work, does anything go? If you're a drone operator shooting missiles at people through a video game, and it's too abstracted for you to feel bad, is that perfectly hunky dory? Or, I dunno, maybe you might want to work on figuring out a way to think about that kind of decision?
  - crimsonalucard 8y ago
    Read what I wrote carefully. I'm saying there is no way of figuring out a RIGHT way of making the decision because there is no real concept of RIGHT. If I push an innocent fat man in front of freight train (the man is fat so he's heavy enough to stop the train dead, but he dies as a result) to stop the train from running over 20 people tied the tracks am I a murderer or a savior? Am I moral or am I immoral? I'm saying the answer to the question is irrelevant because there is no RIGHT answer. Any answer a regular person or an ethicist comes up with is ultimately as made up and as arbitrary as the moral instincts that drive our behavior. The hard questions have no right answer because the question is loaded to begin with. We never evolved a moral instinct on whether I should push the fat man or leave him be. This isn't physical law or logic. Morality is an arbitrary biological phenomena. If the ethicist tells you, you should push the person to save 20 people, and another layman says you shouldn't murder an innocent, fat bystander, neither answer is more wrong or correct than the other. The difference here is that the ethicist spent years studying something that ultimately has no answer or meaning. Thus the ultimate argument is, there is no need for a company to hire an ethicist for hard moral problems. Your layman judgment is as good as the ethicists because it's all made up anyway. The only probable benefit an ethicist can possibly provide is logical consistency. Making sure your current decisions are inline with your past decisions. But is that really a benefit when each decision doesn't have an exact moral answer to begin with? It's not. If I encounter the train problem 50 times at different stages of my life, and I choose to push the fat man 25 times and ignore him another 25 times the question is still loaded and both decisions are still arbitrary and it's still unclear what decision was right or wrong. Moral instincts were never meant to be consistent, the codification of morality into law was something we made up in attempt to make sense of our moral emotions but is ultimately irrelevant. Keep in mind I'm not saying that we should get rid of all our morals because it's all pointless. We're human and ultimately humans are moral and we should act human when the moral questions are straightforward and easy. I'm just saying that when the questions become complex you don't need to create an entire field called "ethics" around it because it's all ultimately made up and meaningful study on a made up phenomena is fruitless.

Judgmentality 8y ago

How do you get paid as a consultant for ethics? Sounds like a really interesting job and I'm curious how you found your way into this position.

paultopia 8y ago
Not my main gig (which is professoring at the moment), but: sort of the same way one does any kind of consulting thing: know people at companies that have a problem that needs solving, and be known to have the relevant expertise!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

crimsonalucard 8y ago

Our intuition of right and wrong is the result of millions of years of evolution that helps the survivability of individuals and groups. This is the key criteria: survivability. Other than that, our intuition on right and wrong was never meant to be logical, internally consistent and most of the rules are arbitrary and situational at best. These moral drives we feel do not exist outside of the human experience. They are instincts created as a product of natural selection. I am motivated to save a drowning baby in the pool next to me but I can't care enough to donate a dime to save a starving baby in africa. We all would save the drowning baby when the opportunity arises yet most of us haven't donated a single dollar to Africa. Why? Because one situation is relevant to survivability of the local clan/tribe, the other is not. Saving the baby near me benefits my tribe while the baby in Africa is irrelevant to my survivability. Thus natural selection has only evolved a sense of panic when I see a dying baby with my eyes and not when I hear about one dying in africa. This contradiction in our moral drive offers evidence that morality is evolved and not logically consistent. Although we possess these moral drives, there is no evolutionary pressure that requires us to know why these drives exist or why they are inconsistent, and why they fail to solve more complex moral problems. Knowing why or how does not lend to our survivability that's why we evolved a moral drive without the correct reasoning to understand it. Hence humans are left with instinctual drives that influence our behaviors, but we are left to our own devices to figure everything out why they exist in the first place. The biggest mistake you can make as a human is to assume that your moral drive has origins that are beyond biological. Most of us assume this is the case, but from a logical standpoint... it is not. Our intuition of what is right and what is wrong is just an arbitrary set of illogical instinctual drives and it is completely pointless to make sense of these things in a consistent way other than to know that the drives are arbitrary rules that increase survivability. Ethics represents our attempt to codify these arbitrary drives that are fundamentally inconsistent into a set of rules that are internally consistent. It's an utterly pointless and uninteresting endeavor. Ethics doesn't truly exist as a fundamental framework of the universe, we are making literally making it up. Because we are making it up, an ethicist is just spouting a bunch of made up nonsense. There isn't truly a moral right or a moral wrong in the universe and thus the philosophical study of ethics is pointless. The actual study of morality is a scientific endeavor into how evolutionary pressures of group dynamics and individual dynamics formulates behaviors that help with survivability. The field of evolutionary psychology is the closest thing to a legitimate study of ethics. An ethicists is one of those pointless "sciences" where humans in attempt to systemize everything they see jump to incorrect conclusions. Our old theory of humors in medical science or the chinese theory of Chi flows in our body and yin and yang are attempts to find systems where systems don't exist and are now relegated to junk science. The study of ethics is in the exact same camp.

paultopia 8y ago
So then, when you're in an evolutionarily unfamiliar situation where these instincts of yours don't work, does anything go? If you're a drone operator shooting missiles at people through a video game, and it's too abstracted for you to feel bad, is that perfectly hunky dory? Or, I dunno, maybe you might want to work on figuring out a way to think about that kind of decision?
- crimsonalucard 8y ago
  Read what I wrote carefully. I'm saying there is no way of figuring out a RIGHT way of making the decision because there is no real concept of RIGHT. If I push an innocent fat man in front of freight train (the man is fat so he's heavy enough to stop the train dead, but he dies as a result) to stop the train from running over 20 people tied the tracks am I a murderer or a savior? Am I moral or am I immoral? I'm saying the answer to the question is irrelevant because there is no RIGHT answer. Any answer a regular person or an ethicist comes up with is ultimately as made up and as arbitrary as the moral instincts that drive our behavior. The hard questions have no right answer because the question is loaded to begin with. We never evolved a moral instinct on whether I should push the fat man or leave him be. This isn't physical law or logic. Morality is an arbitrary biological phenomena. If the ethicist tells you, you should push the person to save 20 people, and another layman says you shouldn't murder an innocent, fat bystander, neither answer is more wrong or correct than the other. The difference here is that the ethicist spent years studying something that ultimately has no answer or meaning. Thus the ultimate argument is, there is no need for a company to hire an ethicist for hard moral problems. Your layman judgment is as good as the ethicists because it's all made up anyway. The only probable benefit an ethicist can possibly provide is logical consistency. Making sure your current decisions are inline with your past decisions. But is that really a benefit when each decision doesn't have an exact moral answer to begin with? It's not. If I encounter the train problem 50 times at different stages of my life, and I choose to push the fat man 25 times and ignore him another 25 times the question is still loaded and both decisions are still arbitrary and it's still unclear what decision was right or wrong. Moral instincts were never meant to be consistent, the codification of morality into law was something we made up in attempt to make sense of our moral emotions but is ultimately irrelevant. Keep in mind I'm not saying that we should get rid of all our morals because it's all pointless. We're human and ultimately humans are moral and we should act human when the moral questions are straightforward and easy. I'm just saying that when the questions become complex you don't need to create an entire field called "ethics" around it because it's all ultimately made up and meaningful study on a made up phenomena is fruitless.