Other Prepare to hurt your brain

Thanks, I'm doing it at university.

On a less socially corrosive note, the article's well-written and interesting.

 

out of curiosity: why did you choose philosophy?

 

Partly because I couldn't imagine specialising in a 'real' (i.e. concrete) subject, as I get bored of specific fields very quickly, and mostly because philosophy has always struck me as a more fundamentally important and over-arching type of inquiry than the sciences or the arts. I'm plagued by philosophical concerns on a pretty much day-to-day basis, because I think too much, and I wanted to get to grips with it in a professional regard, instead of through wikipedia and televised debates.

I must admit, though, so far it's disappointing in the regard that almost every lecture is distorted by the lecturer's preconceived opinion on the problem at hand. For example:
I read a chapter on Free Will in a stephen law book, and it laid out every argument and counter-argument, then concluded "thus there is no evidence for free will, and the pressure is on the Classical Free Will theorist to disprove the determinist view."

Then I attended 6 lectures on Free Will, which did the same thing but concluded, "there is no conclusive evidence against free will, so until it is somehow disproven, it is acceptable and logical to assume we have free will."

Stupid dogmatic experts...

 

Surely that's going to be a problem with any non-empirical field of study, though?

 

The answers obvious, its no, its not okay for the simple reason that the 5 people being saved are probably chain smoking, beer swelling, hoodie wearing, goat dating chavs who are demending treatment on the NHS. Where's as the 1 healthy guy is exactly that healthy and a better investment for the gene pool.

The only way this would be a good idea is all 6 were given rifles and dropped into an abandoned city if they kill the healthy guy they get the organs if he kills them we get rid of 5 chavs which you have to admit sounds fair enough.

it would also help with the recession as it could be televised as a PPV event which would help generate extra revenue.

 

I would only be ok with the first if it were proven that the people who needed saving needed it out of the pure bad luck that they had (No Chavs, or anyone who has abused their body). Any other reason i would say no and that they deserve to be removed from the gene pool.

 

Yay for an attack on utilitarianism using a bad example.

A better example would be the street car example.

If you were a street car operator and you were traveling down a hill. Your brakes fail and you are forced to choose one of two paths; the first is a path with 25 school children, the second a path containing 6 adults. Based on the decision one of the two groups will die regardless of outside factors. Which path do you take?

Edit:
I read the article and discovered this was an alternative choice. Either way it still stands.

 

*listens to the crickets*

 

Neither I'd skid the car sideways and take out both groups that way I'd get more points.

/Ryu starts waving the petition to start the original Death Race 2000 as the British national sport

 

I quite like the idea of absolute moral obligations, which would insist that the only way you can avoid culpability and remain a good person would be to take your hands off the wheel and not decide at all.
That way, one group still dies, but it's not your fault, it's just 'teh whay of teh wurld'.

@Fod, yeah it always will be, but I don't like the way they always tack arbitrary conclusions onto their inconclusive dialogues. A more professional approach would be to admit uncertainty:

I think you can extract and apply the core logic from that p.o.v. without actually being a sceptic. And it's an awesome logic.

 

Don't say that man, i actually have a tub of them at the end of my bed, and its not funny any more, i need some silent ones!