There seems to be a deep problem underlying these claims: even if humans have loosely aligned intuition about what’s right and wrong, which isn’t at all clear, why would we trust something just because it feels obvious? We make mistakes on this basis all the time and there are plenty of contradictory notions of what is obviously correct—religion, anyone?
Further, if grandma is in such a poor state that simply nudging her would kill her AND the perpetrator is such a divergent individual that they would then use the recovered funds to improve others’ lives (which might have many positive years still available, if such a concept is possible or meaningful) then one might argue that it seems a poor conclusion to NOT kill grandma if one’s concern is for the welfare of others. One could also simply steal grandma’s money, since this is probably easier to get away with than murder, but then you would be leaving an ethical optimization on the table by not ending grandma’s life, which as hinted at earlier is probably in the negative side of qualitative equity.
It doesn’t seem to me that obviousness is proof enough that an intuition is good, but something appearing “obvious” in your brain might be a marker/enrich for beliefs that have been selected for in social environments.
There are certainly times when it’s good to break universal maxims. Yet I don’t think it’s very easy to be a person who is capable of doing that—the divergent individual you’re talking about. Let’s take lying, for example. It is generally good to be honest. There are times when it is really net good and useful to lie. But if you’re someone who becomes very good at lying and habituated to lie, you probably start overriding your instincts to be honest. Maybe a divergent individual who says “fuck off” to all internal signals and logically calculates out the results of every decision could get away with that. But I think those people really run the risk of losing out on information baked into the heuristics.
Similarly, I don’t think those divergent people are really optimal actors, in the long-run. There are certainly times when it’s good to break universal maxims; but even for you, as an individual, it’s probably not good to do it all the time. If you get known as a grandma-pusher, you’re going to be punished, which is probably net good for society, but you also reduced your ability to add resources to the game. Human interaction is an iterated game, and there are no rings of Gyges.
There seems to be a deep problem underlying these claims: even if humans have loosely aligned intuition about what’s right and wrong, which isn’t at all clear, why would we trust something just because it feels obvious? We make mistakes on this basis all the time and there are plenty of contradictory notions of what is obviously correct—religion, anyone?
Further, if grandma is in such a poor state that simply nudging her would kill her AND the perpetrator is such a divergent individual that they would then use the recovered funds to improve others’ lives (which might have many positive years still available, if such a concept is possible or meaningful) then one might argue that it seems a poor conclusion to NOT kill grandma if one’s concern is for the welfare of others. One could also simply steal grandma’s money, since this is probably easier to get away with than murder, but then you would be leaving an ethical optimization on the table by not ending grandma’s life, which as hinted at earlier is probably in the negative side of qualitative equity.
It doesn’t seem to me that obviousness is proof enough that an intuition is good, but something appearing “obvious” in your brain might be a marker/enrich for beliefs that have been selected for in social environments.
There are certainly times when it’s good to break universal maxims. Yet I don’t think it’s very easy to be a person who is capable of doing that—the divergent individual you’re talking about. Let’s take lying, for example. It is generally good to be honest. There are times when it is really net good and useful to lie. But if you’re someone who becomes very good at lying and habituated to lie, you probably start overriding your instincts to be honest. Maybe a divergent individual who says “fuck off” to all internal signals and logically calculates out the results of every decision could get away with that. But I think those people really run the risk of losing out on information baked into the heuristics.
Similarly, I don’t think those divergent people are really optimal actors, in the long-run. There are certainly times when it’s good to break universal maxims; but even for you, as an individual, it’s probably not good to do it all the time. If you get known as a grandma-pusher, you’re going to be punished, which is probably net good for society, but you also reduced your ability to add resources to the game. Human interaction is an iterated game, and there are no rings of Gyges.