this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
40 points (100.0% liked)
askchapo
22766 readers
501 users here now
Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
-
Posts must ask a question.
-
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
-
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
-
Try [email protected] if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yea that makes sense, I just always approach this problem strictly from an ethics pov because that's what the authors intended
Well yeah but I think that’s the materialist criticism of the problem itself.
Like, the question implicitly imposes the view that the morality of a decision is centered on the decision tree we follow to reach that decision rather than upon a consideration of its consequences.
I don’t quite agree that consequentialism is what I mean by this but it’s something pretty close to consequentialism. Holistic material consequentialism maybe?
Like to the trolley problemists it’s usually a question about the moral agency of the bystander: is it right for that person to choose who lives or dies seems to be the contention. And when a materialist counters that “that’s not really what matters in terms of consequences” then the trolley problemist insists upon a vacuum of consequences which really just a denial of materialism itself.
If you have to eliminate certain consequences of a surgeon being allowed to murder people to save others, then we simply aren’t talking about a surgeon being allowed to murder people to save others.
Yea I'm definitely not simply talking about a surgeon being allowed to murder people to save others. This new viewpoint is supposed to dissuade people from answering "as a materialist". I'm sure most, if not all of us agree that pulling the lever IS the correct thing to do, but arguing from a materialist perspective is completely divorced from reality
How many of us up there would actually think in the moment only about the material consequences of our choices? It completely disregards all the human emotions involved in the decision process. Maybe some people are just built different but this is why I don't like the materialist approach
It's interesting to think about but doesn't actually answer the question
No well I think most of us will think “fuck 5 are about to die, only one guy over there, fuck I need to save these 5 people, time to pull that fucking lever” which is materialist.