as I am approaching this question from the side of
Kantian thought, see the latest in my “new theory of space, time
thread”…
My approach over there has been via Kant and his three questions…
- what can I know?
- what ought I do?
- what my I hope?
and my current statements are about the second question…
what ought I do? Carleas is offering us one possibility
in this question of “what ought I do”?
can we consider morality/ethics in terms of monetary prices?
that is certainly one way to approach this problem…
what standards should I use to engage with or act with…
can I build a morality/ethics system via understand it
by monetary prices? How much does being ethical actually costs us?
thinking about it in terms of money does raise the question into a new
way of thinking about……….
what ought I do? ought I be ethical and what exactly does that mean?
and how do we judge that?
by our actions, we make judgements all the time… we send money
to the red cross… that is a judgement… and a ethical decision…
upon what criteria should we make such a judgement or ethical decision
upon? should we use money or the bible or our own judgement?
the question that Carleas really raises is this, upon what criteria should
we make judgement or ethical standards upon? should we use authority
or money or some other standard to make ethical decisions upon…
if is the “fat man problem” then we are using Bentham theory of utilitarianism…
the acts we make must be for the greater good… we decide upon the number
of people who benefit and if the greater number benefit, that should be
our actions… so under the “fat man” problem, we decide base on the
greater number who benefit… so clearly we toss the fat man into the
path to save a greater number… one dies so that four may live…
but the problem becomes this, we can use several different, alternative
and equally convincing theories upon which to decide this problem…
for example, if the “fat man” were an Einstein… would we toss
Einstein into the path to save 4 rather ordinary people?
who becomes more important, the number of people or
the “relative” value of each person and once again, we run
into the problem of how do we judge or create
a criteria to decide which one is the answer?
each path is blocked by another consideration of equal value……
Kropotkin