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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   32394 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Julie and Mark, who are sister and brother...

Replace this with "Julie and Mark went drunk driving. Nobody was hurt and they got home safely and sooner than they would have if they had to walk".

The fact that a dangerous activity sometimes works out doesn't make it a good idea. In order for this to prove what it's supposed to prove, the hypothetical would have to be "Julie and Mark committed incest, it all worked out, and they had good reason in advance to think it would work out". This hypothetical is impossible unless 1) it's a limited cultural practice that doesn't favor incest in general or 2) Julie and Mark are not human.

The point is precisely to show that care/harm doesn't take those two caveats into account.

Sufficiently sophisticated utilitarianism is indistinguishable from deontology. And vice versa.

Oh yay... another chance for me to share this gem of a paper.

Maybe it is the other way around – deontology is a veiled utilitarianism when precise evidence is hard to get or understand. :)

Which part of "and vice versa" was unclear?

"It is risky behavior that often, but not always, causes harm" is basically an objection about harm.

This is not so obvious with the incest example but it's very obvious about drunk driving. People don't have some independent moral aversion to drunk driving that is unrelated to the chance of harming someone. Harm need not happen 100% of the time for the objection to be properly characterized as harm-based.

Hey, look, you’ve rederived the categorical imperative.

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