Sven Ove Hansson
Department of Philosophy and History, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, SE
* Corresponding author: soh@kth.se
1 Department of Philosophy and History, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, SE
The ethical discussion on automated road traffic has largely been devoted to implausible situations where the vehicle is out of control, but there is still a choice which of several pedestrians the car should run over. Human drivers almost never find themselves in such situations, since a vehicle out of control cannot be steered in one or the other direction. The same applies to automated vehicles.
Neuroethicists have devoted much attention to scenarios in which all the information in a brain is copied into a computer. This idea is based on a false analogy. In a computer, stored data can be separated from the hardware, but the brain is a biological structure in which this cannot be done.
A major reason why these scenarios are popular is that they are easy to imagine. However, what is easy to imagine can at the same time be too implausible to be worth taking seriously. Space travel faster than the speed of light is another example of this.
Unrealistic scenarios are problematic in ethics since they divert attention away from plausible scenarios that are in urgent need of ethical investigation. There are important ethical issues in the field of road safety that have attracted little attention from ethicists. There are also many clinically important ethical issues in neurology and psychiatry that have not been much discussed by neuroethicists. Why study the ethics of something that is almost certainly not going to happen, when there are so many real-life ethical problems that need careful analysis?
Some moral philosophers claim that examples can be useful in the development of ethical theory, even if they are utterly unrealistic. And of course, they can be, if we want ethical theories to cover all imaginable kinds of creatures and situations. But as I see it, moral philosophy should instead focus on theories and principles that are applicable in actual human societies. This means that scenarios with no plausibility in real life cannot serve as adequate tests of a moral theory. Adjustments of a moral theory to make it fit various science fiction scenarios can make it less suitable as a guide to moral decisions in real life.
Technology assessment has a long tradition of developing realistic scenarios for the future development of technologies and their social embeddings. Ethicists wishing to focus on the moral problems of actual human life have much to learn from this tradition.
Sven Ove Hansson
Department of Philosophy and History, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, SE