RE: Can we trust our Moral Intuitions?
November 5, 2021 at 1:47 pm
(This post was last modified: November 5, 2021 at 1:48 pm by Alan V.)
Climate change is a major example of our human successes leading to a big failure. That's the kind of paradox which is intrinsic to any naturalistic system in my opinion. There are always pluses and minuses to every possible action, in differing proportions. So the more we are successful, the bigger the problems we have because of our successes.
From my point of view, we can argue in favor of some moral course of action only when, in the cost/benefit analysis, the benefits obviously outweigh the costs. Helping people is usually taken to be the gold standard for moral behaviors, but when you are helping some but hurting others (including future populations), you are faced with morally ambiguous situations. Climate change has progressed to the point where helping some people without taking climate change into account is necessarily hurting other people. That confuses our moral intuitions, which are usually based on idealism rather than the rather stark trade-offs of the real world.
That's really all I am saying. Climate change was just an obvious example.
From my point of view, we can argue in favor of some moral course of action only when, in the cost/benefit analysis, the benefits obviously outweigh the costs. Helping people is usually taken to be the gold standard for moral behaviors, but when you are helping some but hurting others (including future populations), you are faced with morally ambiguous situations. Climate change has progressed to the point where helping some people without taking climate change into account is necessarily hurting other people. That confuses our moral intuitions, which are usually based on idealism rather than the rather stark trade-offs of the real world.
That's really all I am saying. Climate change was just an obvious example.
