(October 3, 2021 at 6:18 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: Psychological study suggests our moral intuitions are heavily influenced by norms acquired from our cultural environment. Why does this matter?
I just want to add a few minor thoughts.
First, people are heavily influenced by social norms in part to keep out of trouble with the law when making ambiguous decisions. They are not primarily motivated to think for themselves and do what is right in some more abstract way.
Second, in actual situations which require immediate responses, we are not likely to have the time to think at all. You may say this is a good reason to think such things through, in case certain real situations arise. But I tend to dislike hypotheticals exactly because there are always too many unknowns. So I try to avoid ambiguous situations and concentrate on what I know more about.
Third, it seems to me that when moral choices are unclear, you may as well flip a coin to make a decision. There are likely evenly divided pluses in minuses on each side. In other words, we too often assume there are right and wrong answers, and that we can somehow puzzle them out if we think about them long enough.
Those are my intuitions, such as they are.
