By Eric Schwitzgebel
The Splintered Mind Blog
Originally published August 13, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
For physics and biology, we have pretty good scientific theories by which to correct our intuitive judgments, so it's no problem if we leave ordinary judgment behind in such matters. However, it's not clear that we have, or will have, such a replacement in ethics. There are, of course, ambitious ethical theories -- "maximize happiness", "act on that maxim that you can at the same time will to be a universal law" -- but the development and adjudication of such theories depends, and might inevitably depend, on our intuitive judgments about such cases. It's because we intuitively or pre-theoretically think we shouldn't give all our cookies to the utility monster or kill ourselves to tile the solar system with hedonium that we reject the straightforward extension of utilitarian happiness-maximizing theory to such cases and reach for a different solution. But if our commonplace ethical judgments about such cases are not to be trusted, because these cases are too far beyond what we can reasonably expect human moral intuition to handle well, what then? Maybe we should kill ourselves to tile the solar system with hedonium (the minimal collection of atoms capable of feeling pleasure), and we're just unable to appreciate this fact with moral theories shaped for our limited ancestral environments?
The entire blog post is here.
