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If you think I showed a lack of understanding in relation to "this issue", please, do explain why. In case you were confused, I was referring to the disposing of a useful but dangerous tool instead of learning how to use it properly.

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>From everyone else's point of view, you missed the point of what "objective morality" means, and from your point of view, everyone else is bumbling around acting like it's impossible to determine if starving is preferable to being safe and well-fed due to some veil of philosophical technicality. But the real issue is that you're talking past each other.

Yeah. That's about the sum of it.

How does a neighborhood improve while it’s demographics remain the same?

Wow, the only good response to this issue I've seen, thank you lol

If you're only familiar with thought experiments or intuition as a pedagogical tool because you've only taken a philosophy 101 class then this makes sense, but they're also used in philosophical arguments all the time, and not only for stuff that's thought to be objective.

> But hey, understanding something is harder than rejecting it.

I absolutely agree. You should give that a try for this issue.

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>optimal ethical determinations

Optimal how? The thing you seem to be missing is that you must choose a yardstick to assess any decision, action, situation, etc, as better or worse than another option. How can you possibly rank things as more or less optimal unless you've picked an attribute to care about? Your appeal to common values across cultures and species--even setting aside the inherent weakness of cherry-picking examples--hinges on a false equivalence between consensus and objectivity.

The fact that there is no objectively correct yardstick to use is the whole problem. It's not about, like, logistics, or the difficulty of accurately predicting outcomes in a complex system to be able to confidently pick the best actions, or anything like that. Those are all problems that come up after you've picked a yardstick.

I'm not saying your yardstick is a bad one, or an uncommon one. But you did pick it because you like it best for whatever reasons, compelling as they may be.

It seems like what you should be arguing for is something like an "Official Morality", not an objective one. I think failure to distinguish between the two is what leads to a lot of the friction in discussions like these. Reading your comment as an argument that it is possible to create a moral policy that is best suited to promote the things most people need and care about totally avoids the disagreements you're encountering. From everyone else's point of view, you missed the point of what "objective morality" means, and from your point of view, everyone else is bumbling around acting like it's impossible to determine if starving is preferable to being safe and well-fed due to some veil of philosophical technicality. But yhe real issue is that you're talking past each other.

"Different groups and cultures may have different responses to thought experiments."

...and this is supposed to make them LESS valuable?

Tangent but I was thinking about it last night lol

The thing that interests me right now is the isolation of the consciousness from outside causes. You could argue that there is no barrier such that outside stimuli influence the brain and the chemicals it creates and thus how we choose. But it's this idea of consideration, of thinking. A pause to consider pathways. We can be influenced but does this ever determine the outcome? Does a time of deliberation within the mind ever create a break in causality, and thus free will? Or is deliberation equally something with a direct cause?

Like have you ever thought of something and been set on a certain understanding, thought about it, and a new understanding upends your perspective? Was that determined to happen? What was the influence upon this sudden intuition? Could it be that this change is not from a causal chain but emergent from the mind?

What's been on my mind is energy. We can imagine possibility. How does the mind have this creativity if it is set in stone? Is the ability to imagine myself in a lego castle determined? Is it possible to imagine something we have not perceived? If a mind creates an alien species like in Peter Watts Blindsight, did he achieve this from causes influencing him or was it the potential of his brain to create new ideas? Even if his creature is made of things he has seen, how can this lead to him combining patterns, thoughts, and ideas into something that is not real? Is there a break from one thing to another such that free will exists and that we choose our path through consideration of possibilities that do not yet exist but are imagined?

Random idea: in the show Dark (all the spoilers) >!the loop is destroyed through a loophole where time is completely stopped, and so cause and effect is effectively stopped. A break. Does time exist within the mind, and therefore does cause and effect exist there?!<

"Thought experiments" are less about RESOLVING ethical dilemmas, and more about CLARIFYING the real underlying issues of those dilemmas.

It's like calibrating a measurement device. You need to explore the limitations on it to know how to correct for biases and errors.

What makes it the correct one?

Why shouldnt we, if the hypothetical interpretation is the correct one?

Assuming that human life and the continuation of humans is a reasonable assumption to make. And an assumption that nearly everyone makes.

A social or moral desire being "emergent products of evolution" does not make them objective. It's not even true that all morals are emergent products of evolution.

To give an extreme example to quickly cut to the core here, "We shouldn't press the button that kills all humans" is not an objective statement. It presumes that human life or the continuation of humanity are inherently valuable.

Your position that there is objective morality would be easily proven if you can give an example of an objectively true moral statement.

>What I mean to say is people say "There is no objective morality" like that is some kind of given, obvious statement.

Well, maybe it wasn't always, but I'd say Godel did some pretty compelling work on a highly analogous problem. "There is no objective morality" ought to be understood as simply claiming that you can't prove premises using an argument that initially accepts them as a given.

Remember, you're also bounded on the other side by self interest. Free-standing self interest is widely understood as being amoral, not moral... but of course, people can also disagree with that - and some philosophers have! Indeed, many have posited that it's immoral, while a minority have posited that it's moral!

How very objective.

If small changes to wording in thought experiments change entirely how we respond to said thought experiments those changes are by definition relevant. That in itself is interesting and worthy of study.

The vast majority of improvements made to neighborhoods come from financial incentives. People aren't opening new shops and restaurants and businesses for the heck of it, they are doing it because there is money to be made when people with higher incomes move there. If people with low incomes all stayed those things wouldn't open because there wouldn't be money there to support them... And in terms of improvements to the houses themselves, a massive number of those happen because they see the neighborhood growing and think that they can buy low then eventually sell high. Even of people who are just improving and upgrading things because they want to have improved things, a whole lot wouldn't do so if those improvements weren't reflected in the value of the house. Spending $100k remodeling your kitchen and bathrooms makes a lot more sense when it increases the home value $80-100k. Not nearly as many people would do it if it was just a sunk cost that you never recouped.

You can deconstruct all frameworks to be meaningless if you want to. But we don't. Our minds and desires are emergent products of evolution with certain common desires leaning toward survival, homeostasis, propagation.

Some outcomes are going to be better than others for this. Some desires and goals are going to be better than others for this.

Could we deconstruct these goals as philosophers and render propagation of our species and our ecosystem and our societies as relatively meaningless? Sure. But we don't. Not really.

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> First, often people respond to them differently across demographic groups, particularly different cultures,

No shit, as with anything and everything? Even semantic memory is still inevitably sprung from a life of experiences.

> and second; small, irrelevant changes in how thought experiments are worded can change entirely how we respond to them.

And that's a plus, not a negative thing?

Just like in normal "physical" experiments, figuring this out allows you to notice nuances and variables that you had never thought mattered or even just existed.

You can't criticize people with the hindsight of their future self having discovered them to be non-trivially wrong. Ironically this is the kind of insight that the Gettier problem eventually leads you to.

> and their assessment of free will and responsibility differ from the one found in other parts of the world. Women have different intuitions about moral dilemmas such as the Trolley cases from men.

Literally the observational point of the entire experiment-making. In fact, thanks god you had such simplified thought experiments to begin with, because no way anything more convoluted would have given you a better time.

Beyond the most obvious "you should always be careful with X" platitude, this article is absolute trash.

> Of particular interest is the recent emphasis on conceptual engineering, i.e. on attempts to reform philosophically significant concepts.

That's known as ordinary language philosophy and it's like a hundred years old by now.

"Unmentioned by Glass, though, is the 𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬, especially in the US context. So often, it’s not just rich people moving in – it’s 𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞. When that happens, 𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 inflects and compounds the power of capital."

This is the author's words that he wrote himself. He is placing emphasis on race himself. I am referencing the words that the author wrote.

You simply want it to not be an issue when the author brought it up as an issue. You say it is not even the important part of the article, despite the author repeatedly mentioning it. You are trying to convince me to not see the words in the article that the author wrote. You accuse me of attacking a strawman when I seek to discuss the author's exact words. Speaking of straws, I think you're grasping at them.

There is noting else that can be said on this topic.

I don't believe that.