(July 15, 2021 at 3:32 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: In the thought experiment- whatever you would consider a valid/logical one, even if it straight up blew.
Outside of the hypothetical, and back to the anecdotal…I could be a very persuasive 100% rational objector to climate action. I do face to face work, I’ve heard it all. Plenty of the arguments can be zeroed out as batshit, but not all of them. Some of the remainder are challenging. Those anti-advocates who offer them are effective. Which is to say that I end up spending a lot of time genuinely asking myself those questions and can’t always answer them.
Just imagine how much better they’d be as opposition if they weren’t human. If they were 100% rational.
No easy rebuttals, hundreds more hours of labor to collect data to offer counter argument.
That's the kind of problem that makes Kantian ethics fail right out of the gate.
Which sucks really. Because I rather like Kantian ethics. Kant really tries (and almost succeeds) at tying up ethics neatly in a logical bow. But alas, what if your rule or maxim is to do bad shit? I don't really fault Kant for not seeing this. After all, who sets out to do bad shit intentionally (just for the sake of doing it)?
Turns out, plenty of people.
Also turns out, you could frame preventing climate change as a completely evil thing... and then, yes, the obvious course of action is to "prevent the preventing" of climate change if one buys into this.
But this particular thing is not an issue in a 100% rational world. It may be the only strength a 100% rational world has over a 99% rational one. In a 100% rational world, the obvious thing to do is scrutinize the case for anthropogenic climate change. Then act accordingly. This (which is what most of us skeptics have already done) would prevent the problem of acting rationally according to bad ideas issue.
