Dilemmas & Ethical Decision-Making - Ladson

Can Moral Disputes Response

The beginning of the article by Alex Rosenberg tainted the rest of it for because I thought the author came off as being naïve. In the second paragraph he states that Republicans and Democrats may different on policy but share goals such as a healthy American population. I disagree. While some politicians probably govern out of a desire to help society, especially at a local level, I believe a large portion, maybe even a majority portion, do it for more selfish reasons – power, recognition, vindication, etc. So much of politics can appear to be about what’s in it for the politician and the people they know, versus what is best for the general American population.

By the time I got to the end of the article, I thought, “So what?” To the people who believe that honor killing is justified, I don’t think you can find “objective ground”, so if the objection is an “emotional response” or “cultural prejudice”, it doesn’t matter. There needs to be some other approach to try and prevent or decrease honor killings, if that is the goal.

Self-Driving Cars Programmed to Kill Response

It is interesting that economic researchers are the people who led the research about the general public’s reaction to a self-driving car programmed to sacrifice the owner. I had to wonder if the study actually gauged the perceptions of the “general public”. The article said they asked workers through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. I wish they would have asked a broader slice of the population. The fact that they asked people through their employer might skew the answers: a person outside the workplace might be more likely to admit they would not go along with a specific scenario if it meant sacrificing themselves to save others.

Men and Women Different Scale Response

The dilemma presented in this story was one of the few presented in this week’s reading where I had a definite answer: I would not kill this young Adolf Hitler who hasn’t “done anything wrong yet”. I would try and use this time to find another way to prevent his actions.

Self-Driving Car Articles Connection to Outside Material

A self-driving car dilemma based on real life: Would You Trust a Self-Driving Car in a Snowstorm? Snowstorm could easily be replaced with high humidity, intense rain, tornado, dust storm, all depending on what part of the country or world you are living. I know the articles for this week are about moral dilemmas of how they should be programmed or whether they should artificially learn, but it seems like we still have some practical, mechanical things to sort out, even if these self-driving cars are on their way and we are not ready for them, as suggested by this article in The New York Times.

Self-Driving Car Programmed to Kill You to Save Others Article Connection to Men and Women Different Scales Article

When I read the self-driving car article, I thought I fit into the utilitarianism group and not the deontology group. When I read the article on men and women using different scales in moral dilemmas article, I realized, at least in this scenario, I was a deontologist.  I was not motivated by consequences of saving the greatest number of people, but instead on the act of killing being wrong, even in the murdered would be Adolf Hitler.