person-who-likes-stuff:

Do you have an internally consistent moral framework, built on consistent principles? (IE if something does material harm, it’s bad, if not it’s alright, obey the Bible, etc.)?

Yes

No

Results

See Results

“internally consistent ethics” would be a nightmare

You’d have to have non-contradictory answers to all the different scenarios in the Trolley Problem. And they’d also have to not contradict with what you actually do IRL, in cases where you have to choose, for instance, whether or not to attack a person and steal their money and use it to help multiple other people who would clearly benefit more than the first one suffered.

Unless you have a really good justification for why the people who are personally your friends and family are inherently more deserving than other people, you would HAVE to be equally willing to help a stranger and a friend. And equally unwilling to harm a stranger.

This also goes for the strangers that you know are harmed indirectly by every decision you make.

If you had to choose whether to purchase a device to make life better for a friend, at the expense of other people whose lives are made worse through the production and distribution of that device? your decision would HAVE to be based on coldly calculating mathematics regarding how much harm is done to each. And, if it’s literally impossible to know any of that, you would still have to try, at least as hard as you’d try if ALL the people involved were your friends and family. Otherwise your ethics are not consistent.

…You’d have to either have a really compelling argument for why dogs are more sentient than pigs, or you’d have to feel exactly the same about the way pigs are treated in farms and any scenario where dogs are treated the exact same way. Plus I suppose you’d have to have an internally consistent rationale for whether killing and eating animals without their consent is ethically different from bestiality. And, if your response to all that was to go vegan? then you’d then have to deal with all the animals harmed in farming the vegetables you eat. There’s no way out.

An internally consistent system of ethics would be a constant, mental-resource-draining stream of simultaneous calculations and probability estimates and you could not keep it up.

Eventually you have to either just go by “what seems right in the moment” (which is neither consistent nor an ethical system)… or treat some of your known irrational, known inconsistent feelings as if they were facts you can reason from in constructing your ethical framework (e.g. “people I know/care about/can see right now are more important than other people”).

It sucks, but it’s the only option.