“Astronomical Cake” by Richard Y Chappell

This is a link post. There's one respect in which philosophical training seems to make (many) philosophers worse at practical ethics. Too many are tempted to treat tidy thought experiments as a model for messy real-world ethical quandaries. We’re used to thinking about scenarios where all the details and consequences are stipulated, so that we can better uncover our theoretical commitments about what matters in principle. I’ve previously flagged that this can be misleading: our intuitions about real-world situations may draw upon implicit knowledge of what those situations are like, and this implicit knowledge (when contrary to the explicit stipulations of the scenario) may distort our theoretical verdicts. But it's even worse when the error goes the other way, and verdicts that only make sense given theoretical stipulations get exported into real-life situations where the stipulations do not hold. This can badly distort our understanding of how people should actually [...] ---Outline:(01:42) Moral distortion from high stakes(05:31) The Trolley Problem is No Guide to Practical EthicsThe original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: June 5th, 2024 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oxsKihriSWm3YpcRL/astronomical-cake --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.