Because of course, the greatest philosophical question of our time is why humans aren't as coldly rational as machines, and the greatest ethical problem to be solved is how we can fix that.And the big question Greene wants us to ask ourselves before building these systems is: Do we know which parts of our moral intuition are features and which are bugs?
One of the more prominent ones at the moment, I'd say. Fix the fact that we aren't coldly rational? That's not the point - of the problem or of the quote. The point is: can we streamline our consciousness so that people from around the world would yield similar results by default? A very far-fetched question, grant you, and one would argue against such a normalization.Because of course, the greatest philosophical question of our time is why humans aren't as coldly rational as machines
and the greatest ethical problem to be solved is how we can fix that.
I see. So, you think there's enough of a difference between moral intuition and morality to justify poking fun at the confusion when it happens? I'd never think that, both being seemingly directly related to each other.
You can get a lot of people to agree that torturing suspected terrorists is justifiable so long as it gets you actionable information. That doesn't make torture okay. You can get a lot of people to agree that murder is justifiable in the case where the person killed someone you care about. That doesn't make vigilante justice okay. The entire existence of the field of ethics is predicated on the idea that morals are not intuitive, that we need to look closer and think harder, and that we can't just go with our gut. More generally, philosophy assumes that "common sense" is a contradiction because if all reasonable people agreed on everything, we wouldn't have anything at all to discuss. It might be a little mean to poke fun here, but when a Harvard professor has based his entire career on the trolley problem, and he hasn't understood the trolley problem making fun seems nicer than the alternative.
I see. Good points. What makes you think so? Not trying to be obtuse here: genuinely curious in my exploration.when a Harvard professor has based his entire career on the trolley problem, and he hasn't understood the trolley problem
The trolley problem was largely invented to illustrate why utilitarianism doesn't make sense, why it isn't valid to say something is moral because you're saving five lives while sacrificing one. There's something fundamentally different about pushing a fat man onto the track vs. flipping a switch to divert a trolley, and there's a difference between examining why those two cases are different, and examining why most people agree that those two cases are different. The former is philosophy, the latter seems a bit like someone trying to construct a science of why the people who disagree with them are irrational.