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Journal by khallow
Several times this month already, I've been reminded of one of the paradoxes of ethics theory. The theory routinely deals with difficult edge cases, like the Trolley Problem where one is asked to chose between subtly different negative outcomes with inaction being one of the choices.
While there's a bit of that in the real world (such as accident edge cases for automated driving), the usual ethics case with the highest body count is choosing whether or not to screw over a huge mass of people (example). It's not remotely hard though the water routinely get muddied, when the targets are demonized first or tools that should be used to fix things are actually used to make it worse (such as FDA regulations helping to enforce the scarcity of Epipen competitors).
That's why I think the true ethics problems of this era aren't the hard Trolley problems, but rather how to reign in huge ethical lapses and failures made because someone gets something out of it. They are easy to figure out, but they keep happening over and over.
While there's a bit of that in the real world (such as accident edge cases for automated driving), the usual ethics case with the highest body count is choosing whether or not to screw over a huge mass of people (example). It's not remotely hard though the water routinely get muddied, when the targets are demonized first or tools that should be used to fix things are actually used to make it worse (such as FDA regulations helping to enforce the scarcity of Epipen competitors).
That's why I think the true ethics problems of this era aren't the hard Trolley problems, but rather how to reign in huge ethical lapses and failures made because someone gets something out of it. They are easy to figure out, but they keep happening over and over.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.
-- Ogden Nash
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Thursday March 23, @04:24PM
Ethics is easy. We know there are unethical people, and we know that the people who are charged with reigning them in are also unethical. Money is an easy target, but those targeting it are equally unethical, so dismantling capitalism isn't the answer because unethical people will just take their greed off the balance sheet and stuff it in to warehouses and gulags.
If ethics were society's most pressing problem, we'd be having a hard time finding things that are wrong. We're nowhere near running out of moral failures. Would that we could power the grid with them. Maybe we can, but somebody got paid to say otherwise.
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