I see two gaps I think could be addressed, and if I either manage to stop procrastinating and get some work done today, or just super procrastinate and don’t do it at all, I will try and elaborate further today.
The first is that abstract moral questions don’t line up well with practical reality. Is it ok to kill 100 innocent people makes a big assumption about innocence that someone acting in the real world could easily deflect with “sure killing a innocent people is wrong, but are they innocents?” Often in reality the debate is over the details assumed in the questions. To me that’s a point against moral expertise.
However, I would say there is room for process expertise, how you approach answering the questions, if not answering the correctly. Does one’s process involve thinking things through from different perspectives, considering the outcomes, considering eg what would happen if everyone behaved like this, what information is needed to change one’s mind about the validity of the outcome, etc. this is more analogous to expertise at doing math, where you don’t know what the variables are all the time, and so don’t know what the statement evaluates to necessarily, but you can be expert in moving things around and analyzing how different values should affect the outcome.
You can't pin down the Drake equation without any evidence of extraterrestrial life. If you have zero evidence of life outside Earth, you would still have not narrowed down the standard error of the Drake equation to anything 'scientific,' ie, testable. In the same way, you can't say that directing energy policy top down, or via the market, is better. While simple costs and benefits are easy to calculate, the 'externalities' or 'long run costs' can vary by a factor of 100 and aren't testable.
Very interesting, and well written.
I see two gaps I think could be addressed, and if I either manage to stop procrastinating and get some work done today, or just super procrastinate and don’t do it at all, I will try and elaborate further today.
The first is that abstract moral questions don’t line up well with practical reality. Is it ok to kill 100 innocent people makes a big assumption about innocence that someone acting in the real world could easily deflect with “sure killing a innocent people is wrong, but are they innocents?” Often in reality the debate is over the details assumed in the questions. To me that’s a point against moral expertise.
However, I would say there is room for process expertise, how you approach answering the questions, if not answering the correctly. Does one’s process involve thinking things through from different perspectives, considering the outcomes, considering eg what would happen if everyone behaved like this, what information is needed to change one’s mind about the validity of the outcome, etc. this is more analogous to expertise at doing math, where you don’t know what the variables are all the time, and so don’t know what the statement evaluates to necessarily, but you can be expert in moving things around and analyzing how different values should affect the outcome.
You can't pin down the Drake equation without any evidence of extraterrestrial life. If you have zero evidence of life outside Earth, you would still have not narrowed down the standard error of the Drake equation to anything 'scientific,' ie, testable. In the same way, you can't say that directing energy policy top down, or via the market, is better. While simple costs and benefits are easy to calculate, the 'externalities' or 'long run costs' can vary by a factor of 100 and aren't testable.