RE: (LONG) "I Don't Know" as a Good Answer in Ethics
November 21, 2017 at 12:07 pm
(This post was last modified: November 21, 2017 at 12:09 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
It's just such a general statement leveraging an emotionally charged proposition that it's good for grandstanding but probably not for beating someone over the head with.
It's impossible to rationally justify the statement that you should -never- strangle your daughter, but it's trivially easy to establish that in a great many, but not all cases, it would be a bad idea. This is why absolutism fails in rational ethics....all relevant circumstances would have to be absolutely the same for an absolute moral statement to hold. A single outlier or edge case discredits a moral absolute.
It's impossible to rationally justify the statement that you should -never- strangle your daughter, but it's trivially easy to establish that in a great many, but not all cases, it would be a bad idea. This is why absolutism fails in rational ethics....all relevant circumstances would have to be absolutely the same for an absolute moral statement to hold. A single outlier or edge case discredits a moral absolute.
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