A broken down maintenance locomotive (RGU) with two workers on board, and with its brakes disabled was being towed uphill when it broke away. It was heading towards a working section of track which had running passenger trains;

The service manager then reviewed the situation. He had no means of knowing how far the RGU would roll. He concluded that routing the RGU onto the Charing Cross branch gave the best opportunity to avoid a collision with a passenger train. It also provided two opportunities for trying to derail the RGU and the certainty that the RGU could be stopped at Kennington. The opportunities to derail the RGU were provided by trailing points which could be set against the RGU’s route at Mornington Crescent and at Charing Cross. Routing the RGU into a reversing siding at Kennington provided the opportunity to stop the RGU by sending it towards a set of buffer stops (figure 1).

The service manager knew that there were staff on the RGU when it started to run away. When he was deciding what to do, he did not know that they had jumped off at Highgate. He appreciated the possible consequences for anyone on the RGU if it was derailed or ran into buffer stops. He decided that a collision between the RGU and a passenger train was likely to have worse consequences.

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What do you mean by “a national history”? Would the Mahabarata qualify?

I beg to take issue with your terms ‘lies’ and ‘entered into’. Legends are not lies, they are sincere beliefs — unwitting works of art around a core of fact or meaning.

Aiui, a compiler looks through much material — which includes legends — and culls out whatever seems dubious. So the writer/s of the Penta/// would not have to “enter [something] into”, they could just refrain from removing a legend or legends that were already part of popular belief. (Or the legendary or exaggerated bits of a true event. For example, JC may have miraculously fed 50 or 500 people, which grew to 5,000 in the oral or informal letter stage, before Mark fixed it in an official written form.)

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One thing that I loved about Prager was that unlike all of the serious Christians I knew, he didn’t regard the sins I wanted to commit as immoral, only as unholy. The other Jews I met held similar views.

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This is not simply an arbitrary “I believe the authors of Exodus but not the authors of Mark or the Koran.”

Legends grow in the oral telling. Mark and the Koran came further into the age of written records, so the Jewish legends had more time to grow, before being fixed in a written form.

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How do you know it doesn’t?

That’s a somewhat serious question – assuming that the creators of the OCEAN (and HEXACO) models did use some sort of PCA to create or reinforce their models, did they in fact discover that the first principal component was sex, then go on to describe the second through sixth (or seventh, for HEXACO) principal components for their model?

I don’t have anywhere nearly enough background in psychometrics to know where to begin looking up that question. (Other than to check Wikipedia, of course.)

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This isn’t the case you described. The case you described is one in which two incompatible objects both have the same property (wrongness). The claim in question is that X is wrong and ~X is wrong, where X and ~X describe actions. This is different from the claim that X is wrong and X is not wrong. The latter is a logical contradiction; the former is not. To see this, replace wrong with “leads to at least one death.” Two incompatible actions can both lead to at least one death, as in trolley cases.

This is almost assuredly a case of X(a) and ~X(b) for a != b (respect the rules of war in situation a, violate them in situation b).

This is not what Walzer thinks — he really thinks there are moral dilemmas in one and the same situation. He’s not the only one, either — see this article for discussion.

For the record, I agree with you that Walzer is wrong. But yes, he is claiming (explicitly) that there are cases where we ought to perform both X and ~X; and no, in so doing he is not guilty of violating the law of non-contradiction.

Consequentialism is no worse off than any other moral framework from this objection [that we shouldn’t care about respecting our intuitions about a non-factual domain].

I agree. I’m not an anti-realist; and I think if you are all normative ethical systems are equally badly off.

My argument is not that consequentialism is the best moral, merely that the arguments against it have failed to distinguish it as worse than the proposed alternatives.

I apologize; I presumed that you were endorsing consequentialism. If you’re merely arguing that my arguments haven’t failed to defeat it, then I agree, my question is not in order.

The “problem” of disrespecting moral intuition is a flaw of all moral frameworks, you need to demonstrate that consequentialism is quantitatively worse in that regards. You have not done so.

I agree with you that I have not done so. My argument is more limited: simply that the existence of several varied intuitions at odds with consequentialism is some reason to reject it. It’s defeasible reason, and to determine what overall reason we have to (not) accept consequentialism we’d have to look at other important intuitions as well as non-intuitional considerations. I see my argument in this thread as merely one part of a much larger project.

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Our belief that actions X and ~X cannot both be morally wrong is itself presumably based on intuition (e.g., this claim isn’t something amenable to empirical investigation).

Inference from observation of reality, in which nothing has simultaneously traits X and ~X. Invariably, assertions to the contrary reveal a form of equivocation where ~X is not, in fact, the logical negation of X. The prior for logical coherence in the universe is strong enough that, to whatever degree one believes morality exists, an assertion that it does not need to be logically coherent needs extraordinary evidence. I have never seen such evidence.

And this claim has in fact been denied by some people

Illogical people are not a persuasive argument.

Michael Walzer thinks that in cases of “supreme emergency” in wartime sometimes both violating the rules of war and respecting them are immoral — “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

This is almost assuredly a case of X(a) and ~X(b) for a != b (respect the rules of war in situation a, violate them in situation b). That is not a contradiction. Furthermore, that looks a lot like consequentialism…

There are other moral systems that are logically coherent in this sense. Why favor consequentialism over those?

The existence of other logically coherent systems is not a defeat of consequentialism. My argument is not that consequentialism is the best moral, merely that the arguments against it have failed to distinguish it as worse than the proposed alternatives. The “problem” of disrespecting moral intuition is a flaw of all moral frameworks, you need to demonstrate that consequentialism is quantitatively worse in that regards. You have not done so. Probably because it is absurdly difficult to do, but being absurdly difficult to do is not licence to assume the result.

As before, if there are no facts in this domain, why care about respecting our moral intuitions?

That is a fully general counterargument against caring. It doesn’t defeat consequentialism, it defeats morality. If you don’t care about consequentialism for this reason, then you shouldn’t care about moral intuitions either. Consequentialism is no worse off than any other moral framework from this objection.

Inasmuch as it does make sense to take intuitions into account, I can just run my original argument in this thread. That is, even if we agree there are no moral facts to capture, if we’re trying to reach some kind of “reflective equilibrium” with our intuitions, then inasmuch as our intuitions conflict with consequentialism about very different actions in very different cases (e.g., cases i-v), it will be difficult to “properly tune” consequentialism in such a way to respect all of these.

It is very difficult to properly tune any moral framework to respect all human moral intuitions. That’s why ethics is hard.

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Thanks; that helps. Two points:

(1) Our belief that actions X and ~X cannot both be morally wrong is itself presumably based on intuition (e.g., this claim isn’t something amenable to empirical investigation). And this claim has in fact been denied by some people: e.g., Michael Walzer thinks that in cases of “supreme emergency” in wartime sometimes both violating the rules of war and respecting them are immoral — “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

I suspect your response to this would be to say that you’re not making some kind of disputable metaphysical claim in saying that X and ~X cannot both be wrong. Rather, we have reason to accept this as a constraint on moral wrongness for, as you say, “pragmatic reasons.” Perhaps. I am tempted, however, to keep pushing on this and say that this presupposes the existence of certain pragmatic norms/reasons, the content of which could only be known via intuition. (For instance, why think that we have reason not to pursue contradictory goals?) More generally, evolutionary debunking arguments aimed at moral normativity seem to me to be just as effective (if they are effective at all, of which I am skeptical) at debunking pragmatic normativity (and epistemic normativity, for that matter, or claims about what we ought/have reason to believe).

(2) There are other moral systems that are logically coherent in this sense. Why favor consequentialism over those? You suggest that consequentialism can account for our overall moral intuitions better than these systems. But here I have two sub-worries:

(a) As before, if there are no facts in this domain, why care about respecting our moral intuitions? If I think my intuitions are (fallibly) reliable guides to a domain, then I should take them into account for evidential reasons. But here there are no facts, so there is no evidence.

(b) Inasmuch as it does make sense to take intuitions into account, I can just run my original argument in this thread. That is, even if we agree there are no moral facts to capture, if we’re trying to reach some kind of “reflective equilibrium” with our intuitions, then inasmuch as our intuitions conflict with consequentialism about very different actions in very different cases (e.g., cases i-v), it will be difficult to “properly tune” consequentialism in such a way to respect all of these.

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