FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
11d ago
I mean, I believe in moral intuition and I suspect in this case most people would have a strong moral impulse to do just this, even though they'd discard it as impractical. I think it's hard to retreat to moralistic intuition and five minutes later say "but this moral impulse you must squash."
Where it gets complicated for me is, do you have an obligation to save a bee that gets stuck in a spiderweb? There's no reason to assume the bee is more worthy of survival than the spider. But here my moral opinions strongly strike out in favor of "kill the spider, save the bee". But in that case I know that other people have the opposite response.
I mean, if genes/IQ is real, it's probably small but compounding, a factor on a thousand stacked decisions, like a random walk biased upward or downward, second or even third order. In that case, most causes of bad things happening in their life would seem to be largely unrelated to IQ, since every step has a better causative explanation than IQ, but IQ would still be the determinant of where the chain ended up. (Admittedly, that's very hard to falsify.)
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