Why people can't think morally
This starting place leaves a lot to be desired, however, when engaged in moral philosophy. The most glaring flaw is that individuals manifestly don't start life on equal footing. Their circumstances of their birth vary, as do their environments and genetic histories.
Which seems more morally strange, that two babies, through no action of their own, might be born one to wealth and power, and the other to poverty and struggle, or that at birth, one baby has any sort of ethical claim to participate in the benefits that may be enjoyed by another? Perhaps these two intuitions are the basis for left wing and right wing sympathies, but perhaps the difficulty in both of them is that they lead us astray.
That is, the situatedness of these claims is why we can't get traction in resolving the intuition gap. Imagine, for instance, that these future babies were sitting in Babyland considering how they might organize the world. Would they both agree to structure the world such that one of them (chosen at random) would be well off and the other suffer? Or, if they made the rules, would they change this circumstance? If so, how much? If we take this frame of reference as superior, it gives us a way to reason about how we want to organize the world which would be most satisfactory to those currently in Babyland.
See Peter Singer and Aaron Swartz for more on this. ¶ 9:12 PM
Monday, September 14, 2009
There's an old saw about a fox and a hare sitting down to decide what's for dinner. This mental image, though, is very similar to arguments humans have about ethics. That is, when deciding what claims people have on each other, we traditionally start with actual people. This premise is absolutely emphatic in western law, where the issue of "standing" (that is, actually having been wronged) is critical in any legal action.
This starting place leaves a lot to be desired, however, when engaged in moral philosophy. The most glaring flaw is that individuals manifestly don't start life on equal footing. Their circumstances of their birth vary, as do their environments and genetic histories.
Which seems more morally strange, that two babies, through no action of their own, might be born one to wealth and power, and the other to poverty and struggle, or that at birth, one baby has any sort of ethical claim to participate in the benefits that may be enjoyed by another? Perhaps these two intuitions are the basis for left wing and right wing sympathies, but perhaps the difficulty in both of them is that they lead us astray.
That is, the situatedness of these claims is why we can't get traction in resolving the intuition gap. Imagine, for instance, that these future babies were sitting in Babyland considering how they might organize the world. Would they both agree to structure the world such that one of them (chosen at random) would be well off and the other suffer? Or, if they made the rules, would they change this circumstance? If so, how much? If we take this frame of reference as superior, it gives us a way to reason about how we want to organize the world which would be most satisfactory to those currently in Babyland.
See Peter Singer and Aaron Swartz for more on this. ¶ 9:12 PM
