When we think in ways that hide the consequences of our actions, there’s no way we can make good choices based on consequences.
But when that isn’t blurred we still might disagree about the choices. So if you don’t think DDT affects songbirds you’re likely to think DDT is entirely a good thing. But even when you know, you might decide that perfect fruits are more important than birds.
Moral choices aren’t inevitable when you understand the facts, but without the facts it’s even harder.
There’s often a conflict between immediate things and distant implication. You can see the immediate good effects of DDT, it took years to work out the over-all bad consequences. HA makes the opposite claim about Stalin, the immediate deaths are obviously bad, but it takes effort to see the long-term good that came from them. So, who’s right?
Scientific method is good where it works. Peer review is good for science when the science works. When you can’t do controlled experiments it gets harder to tell what’s going on.
Still, sometimes the language is central. When we say the US military is in iraq “protecting iraqis”, it might work better to reduce the level of abstraction and say we’re there “killing people and blowing things up”. Or maybe we’re “killing people that we think are about to kill the ones we don’t want killed”. When we say “train the iraqi army” we might say “train selected iraqis to kill people and blow things up under our direction”. The clearer we say what we’re doing, the easier it might get to create a better strategy.
When we think in ways that hide the consequences of our actions, there’s no way we can make good choices based on consequences.
But when that isn’t blurred we still might disagree about the choices. So if you don’t think DDT affects songbirds you’re likely to think DDT is entirely a good thing. But even when you know, you might decide that perfect fruits are more important than birds.
Moral choices aren’t inevitable when you understand the facts, but without the facts it’s even harder.
There’s often a conflict between immediate things and distant implication. You can see the immediate good effects of DDT, it took years to work out the over-all bad consequences. HA makes the opposite claim about Stalin, the immediate deaths are obviously bad, but it takes effort to see the long-term good that came from them. So, who’s right?
Scientific method is good where it works. Peer review is good for science when the science works. When you can’t do controlled experiments it gets harder to tell what’s going on.
Still, sometimes the language is central. When we say the US military is in iraq “protecting iraqis”, it might work better to reduce the level of abstraction and say we’re there “killing people and blowing things up”. Or maybe we’re “killing people that we think are about to kill the ones we don’t want killed”. When we say “train the iraqi army” we might say “train selected iraqis to kill people and blow things up under our direction”. The clearer we say what we’re doing, the easier it might get to create a better strategy.