From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Feb 21 2002 - 23:52:04 MST
At 10:01 PM 2/21/02 -0800, Hal wrote:
>Damien B. writes:
>I must be a crypto deontologist, via residual childhood
>> programming, although I tell myself I'm a rule utilitarian.
>I think one way to reconcile these views is that you can be a lazy
>utilitarian. You don't have time to analyze each and every moral
>quandary down to the last possible ramification of your actions.
>So you adopt general rules of thumb, heuristics which are a good guide
>to ethical behavior.
I believe that's what `rule utilitarian' means--one who uses general
heuristics to shortcut decisions, in the awareness that these rules can and
should be mutable according to circumstance and new information. I was just
noticing that some of my moral qualms seem more firmly wired than that, and
I suspect that this will be true of us all.
Damien Broderick
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