[debeguiled]

(02-14-2018 02:33 PM)Aurini Wrote:  

Teutatis, wi30, I agree.

I started taking the test, but didn't bother finishing any of it. What's the context? is the question I kept asking. The questions are devoid of humanity, morality, or narrative. Sacrifice a limb to save a life? Whose life is it? Why are they in the situation that they're in? Are they being inept on the shop floor, and I can thrust my arm into the machine to stop it from killing them? Are they drunk? Are they green? Am I a young man with a family to support? Or an old man, 3 days from retirement?

There's no acknowledgement of responsibility in any of the questions.

In Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan Spock sacrifices himself, while saying "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." What he does is a noble deed, and I would hope that I'd have it in me to make a similar sacrifice. In Fallout 4 they flip this saying around - a prewar military MP uses the exact same statement to justify the fact that they're harvesting the brains of inmates to build Robobrains for their war effort against the Chinese.

Utilitarianism tries to boil down morality to arithmetic. Count the "hedons", and do whatever you can to maximize them. Whenever this has been put into practice the result is Hell on Earth. Even the best case scenario, described in the short story Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, by Ursula K. Le Guin, is deeply disturbing.

I am extremely wary of anybody who embraces this "philosophy".

So maybe it is really a test to see if you are dumb enough to judge yourself based on multiple choice tests from the internet. In that case, you passed.