I think a lot of people have been quietly traumatized by propaganda around authority and consequences. There's an unlimited amount of this content on social media platforms.
If you can't quickly run the min/max on consequences for pulling a subway emergency brake, you probably shouldn't be allowed to ride the subway without some kind of exception on file.
> But since the "it's ok" position was harder to communicate, I think part of what happened was what we could call "expressivity bias", where an idea that was harder to express lost out, combined with it just being very hard to integrate diverse viewpoints under time pressure in a stressful situation.
This sounds like something a philosopher would say. I'm not a psychiatrist but individual and group psychology is more complicated. Most people tend to assume somebody else will take initiative. Also, you can show incontrovertible evidence to a crowd and they may still express apathy (e.g. the Kitty Genovese case).
I think this is not as interesting a philosophical problem as he is making it out to be. If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck', then you hit the brake. You don't work out some complicated moral calculus.
> I think this is not as interesting a philosophical problem as he is making it out to be. If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck', then you hit the brake.
If it's expected/uninteresting for someone to hit the brake when someone shouts at them to do so, then is it not interesting to consider why the opposite happened in this case? ("I pointed to the person next to it and shouted [...] They didn't, so I ran down the train")
> You don't work out some complicated moral calculus.
Which I think is think is one of the author's points, that "morality problems often suggest a frame of mind where we have time to fully reason out the likely effects of each of our options" and that doesn't match reality.
Anyone who rode the L train this morning on their commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan knows whats up.
The fact that this is a "problem" is telling.
I think a lot of people have been quietly traumatized by propaganda around authority and consequences. There's an unlimited amount of this content on social media platforms.
If you can't quickly run the min/max on consequences for pulling a subway emergency brake, you probably shouldn't be allowed to ride the subway without some kind of exception on file.
> But since the "it's ok" position was harder to communicate, I think part of what happened was what we could call "expressivity bias", where an idea that was harder to express lost out, combined with it just being very hard to integrate diverse viewpoints under time pressure in a stressful situation.
This sounds like something a philosopher would say. I'm not a psychiatrist but individual and group psychology is more complicated. Most people tend to assume somebody else will take initiative. Also, you can show incontrovertible evidence to a crowd and they may still express apathy (e.g. the Kitty Genovese case).
I think this is not as interesting a philosophical problem as he is making it out to be. If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck', then you hit the brake. You don't work out some complicated moral calculus.
> I think this is not as interesting a philosophical problem as he is making it out to be. If you are standing next to the brake and someone says 'hit the brake his arm is stuck', then you hit the brake.
If it's expected/uninteresting for someone to hit the brake when someone shouts at them to do so, then is it not interesting to consider why the opposite happened in this case? ("I pointed to the person next to it and shouted [...] They didn't, so I ran down the train")
> You don't work out some complicated moral calculus.
Which I think is think is one of the author's points, that "morality problems often suggest a frame of mind where we have time to fully reason out the likely effects of each of our options" and that doesn't match reality.