Paul Bloom claims that “if you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide.” Some agree, some disagree, and that leads to a very interesting exchange of ideas on empathy.
utilitarianism
The drowning child
Test your thoughts about what we owe others with this philosophy experiment based on articles by Peter Singer.
A better ice-bucket challenge
No one can doubt the decency of people who have support the ice-bucket challenge. Michael Specter doesn’t. And yet he asks if there is a better way to combat disease. “Once again, let me stress that I don’t think it is possible to question the good intentions of those who have anted up for A.L.S. But outcomes are another matter.” Yes, again it’s intentions v. consequences.
Full disclosure
Do individuals have a right for their medical records to remain private after death, or can public interest prevail? Do their family members have a right to privacy? Your great grandmother had a lobotomy. You don’t know this because your family buried this bit of your family’s history. Is it morally permitted for a writer to mention your great grandmother by name in a book he is writing about the history of lobotomy? Jack El-Hai, the author of a book about lobotomy, claims it is.
An Oxford philosopher thinks he can distill all morality into a formula
He is not the first philosopher to think so, but he “is thought by many to be the most original moral philosopher in the English-speaking world.” Larissa Macfarquhar’s profile of Derek Parfit.
(Until July 21, only subscribers had access to this article on The New Yorker‘s website. It may go back behind the paywall when the magazine sets up a “metered paywall” in Fall 2014.)
The math of killing, letting die, and … murder
More on robot ethics. Should your robot car be programmed to sacrifice your life to save two other lives?
Ethics for robot cars
The robot car of tomorrow might be programmed to hit you. Imagine an autonomous car — a robot car that has been programmed to drive itself. It can collect and process more information and do so much faster than a human driver can. Now suppose that car is in a situation in which a collision is unavoidable. The only options are for it to collide with a motorcyclist wearing a helmet or a motorcyclist without a helmet. Which option should it be programmed to take? What would rational, ethical “crash optimization” require?
Why can’t we get along?
The uncertain biological basis of morality. Robert Wright’s review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes” Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them and Paul Bloom’s Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil. Which would do more to help us get along with them — a moral theory we can all agree on or a better understanding of how we are wired to think and feel about them? “If Greene thinks that getting people to couch their moral arguments in a highly reasonable language will make them highly reasonable, I think he’s underestimating the cleverness and ruthlessness with which our inner animals pursue natural selection’s agenda. We seem designed to twist moral discourse—whatever language it’s framed in—to selfish or tribal ends, and to remain conveniently unaware of the twisting. So maybe the first step toward salvation is to become more self-aware.”
Socratically Speaking 