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One of the most insightful Internet comments I’ve read. Science Fiction can illuminate questions of moral reasoning by abstracting away all of the pesky complic
by spoonjim 6y ago
One of the most insightful Internet comments I’ve read. Science Fiction can illuminate questions of moral reasoning by abstracting away all of the pesky complications that make the answer to most real moral dilemmas “it’s complicated.”
- jrochkind1 6y agoI appreciate the compliment, but your analysis makes me worry! The pesky complications that make things complicated is part of moral reasoning, abstracting them away to simplicity can be a dangerous recipe for immoral and instrumentalizing reasoning! I think of it instead like SF can give us an "alien anthropologist's" view of ourselves, seeing ourselves from a different perspective for a momentary forgetting of assumptions that may not be serving us or... maybe we were over-simplfying abstracting away the complexities when we shouldn't have been! Then like in a planet of the apes moment, "But it's our planet after all!" SF can be complexifying as much as simplifying!