Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

MordunnDregath t1_jcf0tmf wrote

I am reminded of something I once read, about physicists and spherical cows:

>Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum."

This is what most moral philosophy feels like to me: a detailed examination of a highly complex topic, which begins with "imagine something that doesn't exist." The practical applications of such an approach are nearly always flawed, on a fundamental level, because we're working from a place of fantasy.

43

mirh t1_jcg3oer wrote

There's absolutely nothing wrong with thought experiments, and even with spherical cows (to the extent that the approximation is still usable).

The problem comes up when you try to focus monolithically on just a single facet of a topic (like this article), forgetting not just the common grounds and results of a discipline.. but even omitting the most basic common sense that even a random joe would have.

7

MordunnDregath t1_jcg5n6m wrote

But that's the point, isn't it? A dialogue like this hinges on a few assumptions about the characters involved, including the contradictory position that the author expects from the audience: that we will treat these characters as both facsimiles and accurate representations of the philosophies under discussion.

Yet it all falls apart when we go "Why wouldn't the Utilitarian simply respond to the Deontologist with 'I don't believe you?'" There's no point in continuing this conversation past that realization.

5

mirh t1_jcl7lvw wrote

I wasn't trying to redeem this fruitless article.

It's just that I wanted to avoid another kind of debacle too.

1

IsamuLi t1_jcg0y13 wrote

Yep, but that's what happens when you want your conclusions to hold in every possible world.

6

dopaminetract t1_jcg4ogh wrote

If a point requires an unrealistic hypothetical, it's important we ask why a realistic one wasn't used, instead. Were there so few practical scenarios to reach for that you were forced to use something impractical?

5

simcity4000 t1_jcg0auz wrote

>This is what most moral philosophy feels like to me: a detailed examination of a highly complex topic, which begins with "imagine something that doesn't exist."

The thing is that when we try and conceptualise morality we're always attempting to describe something that 'doesent exist' outside our conception of it.

1