[1999]

These scenarios are idiotic. If you want to wank off about self driving car ethics, here is a much more realistic scenario: should all self-driving cars report their location to 911 dispatch to allow any vehicle to be re-purposed as an emergency vehicle at any time? That might actually save someone.

Also, can anyone identify a useful idea that philosophers have come up with in the last 50 years?

[woodruffw]

If you’ll give me 5 more, the Gettier Problem[1] turned 55 this year. Most work in nonmonotonic reasoning is also under 50 years old.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

[1999]

I guess if you count logicians as philosophers then philosophy is useful. It is probably just "ethics" that deserves my scorn. If ethicysts were really out there studying good and evil in the world, one of them would get murdered every once in a while, like policians, journalists or police.

[woodruffw]

> one of them would get murdered every once in a while, like policians, journalists or police

Just to set aside the fact that "being murdered" is a terrible metric (do you gauge marine biologists by their diving skills, or astrophysicists by their ability to survive in a vacuum?): a good many philosophers were either murdered or narrowly avoided being murdered in the World War II and/or the Holocaust. Any profession that includes a doctrine of skepticism tends to be among the first targeted for persecution, even if that persecution doesn't involve literal acts of murder.

Ethics involves more than just doing good or bad -- it involves figuring out what we mean by "good" and "bad" to begin with, whether these things correspond to actions, individuals, or outcomes, whether they have respective orderings, and so forth. All of these questions lend themselves better to prolonged thought and discourse rather than sample sizes and expensive scientific instruments.

[1999]

I chose the 50-year interval to make it difficult since the last 50 years have been pretty stable and comfortable in anglo countries, relatively speaking.

Here is something ethicists could analyze that would really help convince me that they are taking it seriously: given the cost, the years from your life, the job prospects, and the success percentage, is it ethical to accept someone as a doctoral student specializing in ethics? Maybe they could study different universities and see which make the cut and which don't.

I agree that skeptics are persecuted so if I see group that ought to be skeptics but no one is trying to persecute them, I wonder.

[claudiawerner]

>Also, can anyone identify a useful idea that philosophers have come up with in the last 50 years?

What are you counting as useful, and to what extend must the results from one field be useful in another for such a field to appease you? In mathematics, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem isn't very useful, but various attempts to prove it opened new branches of maths. I also question whether usefulness should be an end in itself.

Your "realistic scenario" can be reasoned with, and that reasoning is called philosophy. But the other aspect of philosophy is critically examining what we think is obvious. Your statement assumes various ideas of metaethics (that there are good and bad things, and we should strive for the good), ethics (i.e that saving someone, no matter who, is a good thing) and political philosophy (that the state should have the right to demand knowledge of the car's position) and leads the way to questions on the philosophy of law (to what extent one's rights to property and full control over a car coincide with the aims of civil society).

[1999]

In order to precisely define the term useful I'd have to wade into the murky depths of philosophy, which I don't want to do.

I was suggesting that philosophers would like to reason about my scenario because it would be a lot more interesting than imagining you could build a car that would somehow be forced to choose between running over i.e. ten elderly people or two children, and speculating about who you would program the car to kill. I know my scenario leads to a lot of interesting questions -- unlike the scenarios proposed by the website.

But I reject the claim that any reasoning about the scenario is necessarily philosophy. That's just what philosophers want you to think. For example, imagine if philosophers studied the behaviour of ducks and called it duckosophy. When a duck observes another duck, is that duckosophy? I would say no. The duck would do that even if humans never existed. The relationship is asserted purely on the side of the philosophers. So, I am a non-philosopher, and I reason about things based on knowledge due to lots of other non-philosophers, I'm not engaging in philosophy, even if a bunch of uninvolved people want to assert so.

[chongli]

should all self-driving cars report their location to 911 dispatch to allow any vehicle to be re-purposed as an emergency vehicle at any time?

That doesn't make much sense. The primary advantage of emergency vehicles is to transport medics to the site of the emergency so that they can administer first aid and stabilize the person for safe transport to the hospital.

Having just any person off the street pick up a critically injured person is not going to go well. In all likelihood, they'll further injure the person due to their lack of training.

[domador]

Actually, there is something to be said for the "scoop and run" method of getting an injured person to a hospital. It's a conclusion that surprised me, but I've come across it in several sources.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002013830...

[chongli]

This research is still within the context of trained medical personnel bringing the injured person to the hospital. If an untrained person attempts to handle someone with a broken neck, for example, there is a high risk of causing paralysis or even death.

[zappo2938]

It is a tradition that all boats respond to distress signals in their vicinity. “A master of a ship at sea, which is in a position to be able to provide assistance on receiving a signal from any source that persons are in distress at sea, is bound to proceed with all speed to their assistance.” [0]

[0] https://www.sealaw.com/maritime-law-cruise-ships-and-assista...

[cscurmudgeon]

Did Schrodinger put a cat in a box?

[1999]

2018 - 1935 = 83

Also, in particular, see the segment from 0:45 to 1:30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbzWYjVrvpI