n0face wrote:

Side-note: Where the fuck is the male pill? It's 2013.

I read somewhere a while back they were developing an injection that would block your sperm tubes with some kind of gell effectively giving you a vasectomy then when you wanted rid you just popped a pill to dissolve it. Sounded like a great idea to me.

Woah, go Science.

Don't think existence of a male chemical contraceptive is an argument for women to stop taking those steps for themselves, if they can still do so safely. It takes two, behbey.

Spoiler:

Your response that it would not be right to throw the saboteur off the
bridge shows that you do not think that his responsibility for the
failure of the train's brakes is reason enough to end his life in order
to save the lives of five other people. This view is consistent with
your belief that morality is not just a matter of maximising the
happiness of the greatest number of people. However, it would be
interesting to know how you think the case of the saboteur differs from
the first scenario where you said that it would be right to divert a
train so that it kills only one person rather than five.

Facewon wrote:

Just did "Should you kill the fat man. Quite like this set of questions. Although the torture question annoys me. It's definitely one that, on paper, makes sense, but when applied to the real world, breaks down: a. because you can't say you have a 75% chance of extracting info, and b. because outside of movies. ticking bombs are rarely ticking in that manner.

That's brilliant. : )

The abortion one was bobbins though. Floaty leading questions. 
Trying to coax an absolute out of people, on an issue that has no determinable outcome.

Like the fat man issue... 'what if' one of those people seeds goes on to become a fat terrorist? Or what if the footballer, in respect of the luck in meeting you, tells the kidnappers to fuck off, and give you a million pounds?...

What's more, what if it was a chick (Taylor Swift...), and not a footballer (lack of empathy in a test of empathy flail) attached to you (and you still get a squillion quid at the end of it, and her eternal gratitude)?...

Yeah.

But the fatman question is quality.

Did you try the fatman one though? Clever idea, that one...

A waste of time then...

I'd like to know where the B&B stands on torture, I'm guessing that there will be a few here that are heavily against it.

I had the exact same 83%, not that it matters a jot seeing as the 'scores' are based on whichever way the author marks them. We already know within our small group that there are vastly different views on pretty much every topic.

So I am marked on whether the author thinks my 'internal consistency' is in line with what he thinks it should be? I presume this is derived from his own views. People can be objective but surely not that objective as to completely ignore their own views?

When people start making quizzes about seed-people I think they should probably just not bother and find something else to do. You seriously cannot say that people have contradicting 'internal consistency' if they agree to abortion but don't agree to being kidnapped from a nightclub and held in a room while medically connected to a footballer for 9 months...

What do you mean, in his own views? The ideas they're testing aren't that abstract. They go on to explain what they mean.

Facewon wrote:

What do you mean, in his own views? The ideas they're testing aren't that abstract. They go on to explain what they mean.

In the author's own view if I agree to abortion but don't agree to being kidnapped but then agree to having seed-people growing out of my carpet i have internal contradictions?

How about just asking the question?

Do you agree with abortion? Yes or No

Under any circumstance? Yes or No

Why do we need fictional kidnapping and make believe seed people scenarios to answer that?

Because the scenarios, when written well, remove a lot of the baggage from our thinking. There's plenty of topics that people have a stance on that they don't have good reasoning for, they have intuitions. It's not necessarily a good or bad thing, but it's worth exploring.

Man, I have to sleep, and I need to put thought in to a response. Hopefully SG is being a night owl, and will put his brain to work.

Tempy wrote:

Abortion one is fairly solid outside typically flowery seed-people terms. The consistency thing is there. I got an inconsistency because I defined a person by a set of criteria that could only exist post-birth, then said abortion in late pregnancy is wrong. That's logically inconsistent. Maybe not morally or subjectively or whatever, but I am being inconsistent, which is a philosophical no-no.

What if the dude taking the test was one of them diehard' football loving badgers, and the baller was the top star at his favourite club?

What if those people seeds all looked like Thandie Newton?

All the abstractions in that question set leaked like an unwanted child...

Oh moto stop being so reductive, it isn't becoming of you. 

They aren't real genuine things, they're analogies to get you to consider the abstracts around the debate of Abortion, and thus expose any contradictions. They're dumb, simplified terms to help people around the intricacies of the topic, if you can't see that then yes, you may as well give up on any notion of Philosophy, as it uses these ultra simplified terms to communicate complicated ideas, because proper high level philosophy talk is impenetrable if you haven't studied it, I should know as I'm studying it and read papers from Stanford is an absolute nightmare because they're so complicated, because oddly enough life is complicated.

The abortion one is quite straight forward, if you can just force yourself past the 'seed-people' analogy (which is OBVIOUSLY about pregnancy, that's the ENTIRE point) It's getting you to understand that, no, abortion is not a Yes/No question, because there are so many factors involved that it'd be absolute hysterical to boil it down to yes/no.

@Dyna Those are variables you can't expect to account for in a simple survey, unless you want to got he route of making a survey so complicated that it encompasses all the variables, in which case you've ruined the original purpose of a simple survey.

Edit: that might come across as a bit hostile at Moto, it isn't intending to. The author of the test casts no aspersions on your moral or ethical rights, at all, only uses simple analogy to highlight logical inconsistencies with what you say. Which is to say, you can't logically say a person needs to display all the traits of a moralistic, decision making, culpable being and then say that late-term abortion is wrong, because as far as we know they don't have that ability in late-term pregnancy (again, rather reductive, but it IS a inconsistency, whether you like it or not)

I don't know, I'm not an expert in logic, or philosophical use of language.

Problem with torture what-ifs is that you can accept the wrongness of an action and do it anyway if there's a compelling reason to. Why ought my personal ethic override the lives of a million odd folk, in the bomb instance? That's a million that could be better than the fatguy and me.