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Comment by throwaway101223 | Hacker News Reader

> Here's the thing: there is, clearly, more utility in me keeping my finger than in you keeping your measly ten pounds.

How is this clear? This is one of the things I find strange about academic philosophy. For all the claims about trying to get at a more rigorous understanding of knowledge, the foundation at the end of the day seems to just be human intuition. You read about something like the Chinese Room or Mary’s Room thought experiments, that seem to appeal to immediate human reactions. “We clearly wouldn’t say…” or “No one would think…”

It feels like an act of obfuscation. People realize the fragility of relying on human intuition, and react by trying to dress human intuition up with extreme complexities in order to trick themselves into thinking they’re not relying on human intuition just as much as everyone else.

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Professional philosophers understand that many arguments rely on intuition. But they need intuition to create basic premises. Otherwise, if you have no "axioms" in your system of logic, you cannot derive any sentences.

Also, moral philosophy deals with what is right and what is wrong. These are inherently fuzzy notions and they likely require some level of intuitive reasoning. ("It is clearly wrong to kill an innocent person.") I would be extremely surprised if someone could formally define what is right and wrong in a way that captures human intuition.

It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger. (And if you don't believe that, then we can consider the case with two fingers, or three, or a whole hand, etc.).

> It's also not worth debating philosophy with people who will argue that $10 is not clearly worth less than a finger.

Some of these arguments feel like the equivalent of spending billions to create a state of the art fighter plane and not realizing they forgot to put an engine inside of it.

It’s not $10 vs. “a finger,” it’s $10 vs. the finger of someone who goes about using their fingers to threaten people to give them money. If the difference isn’t immediately obvious, I think it’s time to step back from complex frameworks and take a look at failures with common intuition.

The point is, to a utilitarian, it’s a finger, because part of the setup is that the “mugger” won’t use their finger for bad things in the future.

Maybe not part of this specific dialogue, where the mugger repeatedly asks for rhetorical reasons. But in a case where there is only a single instance of a mugging, the assumption is that the mugger will only mug once.

I think the point here is that it's subverting and redirecting Bentham's own utilitarianism against itself. How does the utilitarian decide which one of those has more utility? That's a rhetorical question and it's sort of immaterial how that question gets answered, because regardless of how they decide, the dialogue is structurally describing how utilitarianism is vulnerable to exploitation of this type.

If I offered to pay £10 for each fresh human finger brought to me, what moral system would say the right thing to do is cut off as many fingers as possible‽ Would you sell your own fingers for £10 each? I think it's very fair to say that any person ever would value their own fingers more than £10.

Exactly. This is just "revealed preferences" that can be ordered.

Lots of things in philosophy might have debatable rigor, but this in particular isn't one of them.

I used to feel just like that. Then I learned that academic philosophy studies this phenomenon as "metaethics". There are arguments such as yours that would be considered "moral skepticism". Read up on those (or watch a course like https://youtu.be/g3f-Lfm8KNg); I think you'll find these arguments agreeable.

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