A _philosophy professor_ asked a question about _ethics_.

I'm sorry, deleted my original comment. I totally misread you.

> How is that of any use? It's not like people are going to drop what they're doing and change their morals because ethics professors said so. That would be ridiculous.

Yeah, that's a question a lot of people have, but it does happen. People do read Aristotle and change their mind. People go to them with questions and they influence other academics. Overall, I'd say it's mostly not very successful and they're mostly ignored...

> You can say that against anything, really.

I meant to emphasize argumentation here, but also the lack of consensus. There's consensus in many fields, even in on many issues in philosophy.

I disagree completely. The fact that you can construct such a scenario says something very important about it. That it is not totally morally indefensible and the discussion is not one about a binary choice but one about degree.

I am not. I'm saying that people on HN make some very hasty assumptions about ethics (e.g. the claim made in the parent comment) that ethicists broadly agree are deeply misguided. I'm hoping to encourage a little more caution. Ethics are not defined by what professional philosophers agree on, but professional philosophers are in a good position to point out when lay comments are making simple mistakes in their reasoning. This is such a case.

It's 2020; there's a website for everything. Try going to https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_ethics.html and scroll a couple of paragraphs down to the "An alternative division of meta-ethical views is between:" and dive into the links there.

Worthless slop is worthless. To make it worth something you need to be precise. Yes, it can be, not exhausting, but sometimes tedious. But that attention to detail is necessary in any constructive endeavor be it software, hardware, mathematics, engineering, governing, why do you think philosophy should be any different?

The end results can be worth it. I used to argue a lot with someone, it's only when we agreed to be precise about what we were saying that we got anywhere (to be precise 'got anywhere' = 'started to understand each other's positions and assumptions').

Edit: trying to debate with someone who can only respond with emotionally based certainties and often descends into shouting and blank denials is a wearing and disheartening experience. Also not useful if you're arguing about important things like, I dunno, what to do about pandemics.

No goal post was moved. All my original points still stand. I am simply giving you the scientific explanation of morality... a deeper look than what philosophy has to offer. And why such an arbitrary construct makes philosophy a flawed field of study.

The hierarchy from existence to morality flows along a single branch of a highly complex tree. It flows like this:

   Existence-> atoms -> molecules -> evolution -> biology -> human biology -> neurology -> morality. 

Philosophy doesn't approach morality from this angle, it approaches it from a axiomatic logical angle as if it was a foundational thing when really morality is this very specific and arbitrary biological phenomenon.

>And yes, while I agree with most of your arguments about morality, you’re still making philosophical points. Yet again, you demonstrate an ignorance of what philosophy is in your attempts to brush it aside.

In logical debates, people tend not to make personal comments like "you're demonstrating ignorance" or other potentially disparaging garbage like that. If philosophers were truly logical they would just attack the subject matter rather than the character. I have a thesis how is it wrong? If you think evidence is flawed point it out. Deconstruct my points logically rather than stating your opinions about me and my points. Be more "philosopher" like.

Additionally this whole "you're still making philosophical points" is largely the main problem with philosophy. Someone decided hey lets' take any topic that's remotely interesting and package it up and put it under one field of study and call it philosophy. Great this package is so large that any thing that comes out of my mouth even criticism just happens to touch it.

The fact that my criticisms touch "philosophy" is why the field and word itself is loaded. It's stupid, if philosophy encompasses a bunch of BS but also logic than if I use logic to discount that BS than OF COURSE I'm going to be using "philosophy" because "logic" is part of "philosophy." Why don't you make "logic" part of the definition of "scientology" that way whenever you try to use logic to explain why scientology is wrong you will inevitably be using "scientology" to prove "scientology" wrong and be self defeating. Kind of a dumb way to defeat arguments.

Of course you can. The problem I assume you're encountering is that you're not starting from irreducible basic premises. Thus, you can't logically resolve the already-existing and conflicting inconsistencies.

We are bombarded from birth with very illogical and inconsistent rules about how the world works. All of those things implicitly include "ethical" value systems. They're very hard to reconcile logically after the fact, simply because they're contradictory in nature and we have at that point heavily-invested into building mental models to navigate the world.

This is entirely consonant with deontological ethics, as I understand it.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics

> the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience.

Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in, especially ones that negatively impact the ability to concentrate, remember details, visualize problems, and express concepts in symbolic form.

Same way as I can say something is obviously a heap of sand without pointing out exactly at which point it turned into one from it's beginnings as some grains of sand (Sorites paradox)

Regarding moral relativism, I don't buy it, but that's not something we can argue about in an HN thread...

You are right that pure moral arguments don't change anything, but I don't think the reason is that people don't share morals, but rather have to do with people being extremely good at rationalizing away the immorality, or never questioning it in the first place. Of course, if you think ethics is a relative concept then this reply won't convince you but the argument that might convince you would not fit this format.

Quality of thought as better. Internal consistency is but one measure of quality, given that you also want non-intuitive results (EG: Can't justify genocide accidentally with the way ethics is set up, even if all of the pieces of the argument are internally consistent.)

This topic overall reminds me I should write to an old friend with a phd in Philosophy and the son of a phd in Philosophy, a great mathematician (pity he didn't go for the phd in that) and a really excellent talmudist when he feels like it... he probably has thoughts on what they are saying.

Exactly. Philosophers should be required to take courses in abstract algebra and topology before being allowed to discuss utilitarianism.

Read Kant.

> Quickly skimmed through it, but: awful, just awful. I challenge Bambrough to prove to me that I have two hands.

Clearly you missed the entire thrust of the argument, and Moore's before it.

First response: Is it your position that only those who have taken philosophy courses are qualified to criticize the field? If so, will the real elitist please stand up?

Second response: To serve on a jury in a murder trial, do I have to be a murderer? No, I only need to be able to evaluate evidence. It's the same here. I find it amazing that you were unable to anticipate this obvious reply, given your attachment to philosophy and the critical-thinking skills it imparts.

> The article was clearly arguing in favor of the general public learning to think critically.

But that's not philosophy's goal, that's science's goal. It was philosophy's goal until about 1800 (when scientists were known as "natural philosophers"), but since then a historic split has separated those who favor argument from those who favor evidence.

> But to dismiss the entire field with snark (like it is so commonly done on HN) is just in bad taste and exhibits exactly the lack in critical thinking that this article was taking about.

It is critical thinking, aptly applied, that correctly identifies philosophy as a field predisposed to resolve issues with rhetoric rather than evidence. Were this not the case, if philosophy really were the paragon of critical-thinking virtue you claim, it wouldn't exist separate from science, because science already does that.

That's entirely possible. It's even possible that my assessment is based on ignorance. I am certainly not an expert in the philosophical literature, and even more certainly not an expert in it recently. The last time I looked seriously at the philosophical literature at all was decades ago and maybe things have changed. But I am an expert in science, and computer science in particular (I have a Ph.D.) and so I can say with some authority that the philosophy literature that I looked at back in the day exhibited a profound ignorance of basic results in CS and math, and also a pretty profound lack of common sense. I found a lot of papers that were tackling non-problems that were based on false assumptions, the moral equivalent of fake proofs that 1=0 where the object of the game is to spot the flaw in the reasoning. And spotting the flaw in the reasoning wasn't even challenging. It was just obvious.

It also seems to me that a lot of what is nowadays called philosophy is just pretty transparent cover for religious apologetics.

Now, as you say, I could be wrong. I'm not an expert. If I'm wrong, I welcome being enlightened. But if you want to take that on I think you will find that I am not completely clueless. I suggest you start with citing an example other than Dennett or Maudlin of someone you think is doing good work in philosophy nowadays.

If you surveyed the historic development, you would know that modern computer science is the product of great philosophers who solved what logic is, what information is, and what computation is. And they got it right, because you're looking at it.

> Point in case: Your comment.

What a rude and incensitive thing to say.

I don't have time for a complete response, but as an expert in this field (ethics) I feel compelled to let you know that nearly every professional philosopher (particularly in ethics) disagrees with this position.

Ethics is not simply whatever the majority says it is. You're not going to get anyone in ethics (including those who think ethics are in some sense "made up") to sign off on that.

I think most moral philosophers agree with you on that.

IMO, the way people talk about Utilitarianism feels to me exactly the same as my own feelings when at school, having only been taught 2D vectors and basic trig functions, I spent 6 months trying to figure out what it even meant to render in 3D — in particular the sense of pride when I arrived at two useful frameworks (which I later learned were unshaded 3D projection and ray-marching).

By analogy: while that's a good start, there's a long way from that to even Doom/Marathon let alone modern rendering; similarly while Utilitarianism is a good start, it's only saying "good and bad can be quantified and added" and falls over very quickly when you involve even moderately sized groups of spherical-cow-in-a-vacuum people with finite capacity for experiencing utils. It also very definitely can't tell you what you should value, because of the is/ought divide.

Once your model for people is complex enough to admit that some of them are into BDSM, I don't think the original model of simple pluses and minuses can even ascribe a particular util level any more.

> These disciplines have overall lower standards in comparison to philosophy

Given your earlier statement, may I ask what you consider to be the higher standards of philosophy?

I ask somewhat rhetorically as a former philosophy PhD student who left because I felt the whole field seemed quite indifferent to anything other than careerist journal stuffing.