I find myself drawn to the idea, accepted as standard in western medicine for decades, that babies can’t feel pain.
You’ve got to be able to plainly see with your own eyes that babies feel pain.
But we have an entire generation of doctors that supposedly didn’t get it.
Modeling that generation of doctors as instead being composed of a few evil psychopaths who pushed the idea that babies can’t feel pain, combined with a sea of evil, complicit cowards that clearly saw the truth but were too fearful to speak up, makes a lot more sense.
There’s still the core of this problem that you haven’t addressed yet, which is: how do we determine what is good in the first place? Even after we agree on all the facts of the matter, what is evil to one worldview can still be virtuous to another. This difference can persist even after both worldviews contain an accurate perception of reality. Orthogonality is a bitch like that. What do you do when your adversary fully understands the truth that what they do causes suffering, then just smiles and says, “so what? That’s the point!”
"how do we determine what is good in the first place?" is a great future article topic. I try to stick to 1 question per article due to length, so you're right - it's not addressed here. However, this article is about when the person knows the truth well enough to make a decision in their personal life, but doesn't apply that truth to their work, rather than those who are uncertain about the truth or have a different moral judgement about that truth.
I find myself drawn to the idea, accepted as standard in western medicine for decades, that babies can’t feel pain.
You’ve got to be able to plainly see with your own eyes that babies feel pain.
But we have an entire generation of doctors that supposedly didn’t get it.
Modeling that generation of doctors as instead being composed of a few evil psychopaths who pushed the idea that babies can’t feel pain, combined with a sea of evil, complicit cowards that clearly saw the truth but were too fearful to speak up, makes a lot more sense.
You have a knack for dissecting the source of why harmful and destructive practices and behaviors continue to flourish.
There’s still the core of this problem that you haven’t addressed yet, which is: how do we determine what is good in the first place? Even after we agree on all the facts of the matter, what is evil to one worldview can still be virtuous to another. This difference can persist even after both worldviews contain an accurate perception of reality. Orthogonality is a bitch like that. What do you do when your adversary fully understands the truth that what they do causes suffering, then just smiles and says, “so what? That’s the point!”
"how do we determine what is good in the first place?" is a great future article topic. I try to stick to 1 question per article due to length, so you're right - it's not addressed here. However, this article is about when the person knows the truth well enough to make a decision in their personal life, but doesn't apply that truth to their work, rather than those who are uncertain about the truth or have a different moral judgement about that truth.