Fun Stuff > BAND
Folk Music and the Environment
John Curtin:
In the first instance, if you were a foetus would you wish to be aborted if your mother made the decision rather than the doctor?
In the second case, I was demonstrating how redefining (as Zerodrone did) the rule as "do that which does not cause displeasure" creates new problems and replaces the rule with utilitarianism.
a pack of wolves:
I wouldn't wish anything in the first instance, it's a foetus. In some bizarre hypothetical universe where that was possible then of course I would, it's my mum.
Fair enough in the second case, but the example falls apart as being problematic as soon as you go back to the original definition.
John Curtin:
So, wait, you'd be ok with the idea of your mother having you killed? If that's the case, more power to you, but I'd say there are enough people who would have a few problems with that for it to not be dismissed as statistically insignificant. Understand that I'm not putting forward my own ideas on abortion here; I'm just providing an example of how the golden rule fails where there are competing interests that can't both be satisfied. The specifics of the situation needn't matter: consider a case of conjoined twins, one of whom must be killed in order for the other to survive. The golden rule isn't a useful idea to help decide which one will live.
And the reason zerodrone altered the definition was to avoid the problems with the original definition that we'd already been through. Neither the golden rule nor utilitarianism are without major problems.
a pack of wolves:
The golden rule isn't the only useful thing in the situation of those conjoined twins but it's still relevant. For example, as in your abortion example it would lead me to leave that decision entirely in the hands of the twins. For the twins themselves it could lead each to not be selfish and to decide who should live based on who has the best chance of survival, or possibly using a method based on a 50/50 probability depending on what they'd want the other to do for them. There's more there than the golden rule but it promotes pretty reasonable activity in a situation like that. You wouldn't want your brother to sneakily ensure that they were the one to live by some underhand method, but you might want them to be selfless so that could be the route you go down.
I disagree that anything mentioned so far necessitates changing 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you' to 'do not cause displeasure in others'.
KvP:
There's a hidden premise in your first problem that states that the fetus is in fact a moral agent and a "child". All we have to do is deny this and the decision is simple. We abort the fetus. If I had a fatally parasitic organism attached to me I'd damn well desire for it to be removed.
Re: your second dilemma, your definition of utilitarianism is a juvenile one that makes no distinction between the displeasure of a murderer finding out that he can't kill people and the displeasure of a person who is being murdered. There is no dilemma at all, unless you do not understand utilitarianism. The notion that a murderer's pleasure can be of greater weight than the pain of the murdered is so daft as to be offensive.
The golden rule requires a measure of empathy. That a masochist might enjoy being hurt, he's still expected to understand that he is exceptional, and can't make an excuse that he'd want to be hurt when he's hurting others.
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