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by claudiawerner
2748 days ago
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>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). |
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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.