In spite of the "everyone got a little bit right" premise, TGP is more obviously in conversation with Christianity than a lot of other religions, so it makes sense!
I know morality gets complicated and subjective very quickly, and there are a lot of cases where it's dangerous to say "obviously this is the Correct Answer, any right-thinking human would know that." And when we're talking about real-world situations, it's very easy for there to be problems with the Obvious Answers that aren't apparent until you spend some time investigating.
But deciding that nothing can possibly have an obvious moral answer is a short road to the Chidi Problem. And I feel like "should I set my friend's stuff on fire?" belongs in the narrow band of This One Is Actually Obvious.
instead of noticing all the factors but deciding he doesn't care about the ones that mean he shouldn't do whatever he wants, he never even registers most of them in the first place.
That's my read on it too -- it's not active malice. But it's not all down to "he's not the brightest bulb in the box," either. There's a level of callousness involved.
(I mean, consider "not a girl, not a robot" -- he's not even being asked to deduce or intuit that there's an issue, Janet's saying it directly. But it's not a problem in Jasonworld, therefore Jason feels no need to address it. Even with "okay, I have no idea what that means, but tell me more.")
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ninetydegrees
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on Sunday, March 18th, 2018 06:24 am (UTC)I know morality gets complicated and subjective very quickly, and there are a lot of cases where it's dangerous to say "obviously this is the Correct Answer, any right-thinking human would know that." And when we're talking about real-world situations, it's very easy for there to be problems with the Obvious Answers that aren't apparent until you spend some time investigating.
But deciding that nothing can possibly have an obvious moral answer is a short road to the Chidi Problem. And I feel like "should I set my friend's stuff on fire?" belongs in the narrow band of This One Is Actually Obvious.
instead of noticing all the factors but deciding he doesn't care about the ones that mean he shouldn't do whatever he wants, he never even registers most of them in the first place.
That's my read on it too -- it's not active malice. But it's not all down to "he's not the brightest bulb in the box," either. There's a level of callousness involved.
(I mean, consider "not a girl, not a robot" -- he's not even being asked to deduce or intuit that there's an issue, Janet's saying it directly. But it's not a problem in Jasonworld, therefore Jason feels no need to address it. Even with "okay, I have no idea what that means, but tell me more.")