@msteenhagen @greggcaruso Maarten's formulation gets closer to one I like. I sometimes hear people say #ethics is about "what we should do". I don't like that formulation because that fully defines all actions, leaving no free will. I prefer it to be "not doing what we shouldn't do". So, in my world, what's good is not the province of ethics. Once you know what you oughtn't do, you should be free to just choose.

So the mixing in this problem seems odd to me. You're faced with something that you ought not do but with very measurable probability it'll happen, so ethically it sounds like a thing to be avoided. The good is irrelevant to me. No amount of people getting chocolate cake justifies a killing.

However, where I would draw a line would be to satisfy a need, which to me seems different than merely doing good. The #trolleyology problems belong here. To save five lives, perhaps there are times where risking another is necessary. But you do that by entering some mode where you reason that there are no viable paths to success that don't have an ill effect, and in that case you open a special-case exception that is never a general rule.

Of course, this still doesn't explain why it's OK to drive a car. Harm's far from a certainty in a car, but non-trivial. It's a risk we seem to accept as a society because we value the benefit, or so we're told. Drinking alcohol is another such. And not just because of driving cars. Some people get weird when they drink. There are some practices we have that I think would not withstand modern ethics. Digging the Panama Canal probably wouldn't pass environmental impact muster any more.

But I worry about this especially with modern technology where we turn over all kinds of things to machines. To not waste many paragraphs describing relevant scenarios, I'll just abbreviate by saying: #TheSocialDilemma, and ending with a couple of final observations.

There's a kind of one-two punch that high tech uses a lot: First we insist that for new tech it is so important to find out what it does that we shouldn't burden it with ethics because that will slow progress too much, so we say we'll think about it later. Then when the tech is better developed, we point to how integrated it all is, and how disruptive it would be to society to remove it, even if there are ethical issues. That dodge is used almost ubiquitously, and I think it's wrong.

Most things in the world don't need tech to run ahead so much. Sure, we wouldn't get as many things. But we might be happier with the things we get. Cutting society out of the decision-making and telling them they just have to take it seems unethical because they're the ones who have to live with it, and they've not been given a real choice at a time when it matters.

#philosophy #ethics #technology #freewill #justice #society

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