Thesis on Morality & Autism Spectrum Disorders

Post Reply New Topic

How come your e-mail address is invalid?

I just sent a mail and got this:

Maybe the results will prove what we all know already - if you've met one person on the spectrum, you've met one person on the spectrum.

That's what this site has given me - that we are all individuals

I can't take it up with Phillipa, she's dead. But she did her field no service by introducing rubbish ideas like this. [edited to note that further research indicates that Phillipa is blameless in this. The unbelievable "fat man" variation on Phillapa's "trolley problem" was perpetrated by Judith Jarvis Thomson.]
.
Maybe it's not a problem for most people, I don't know, it's a problem for me, for reasons the researchers should take into account.

I don't want to kill people or let people die. In real life, I will always look for a better solution. When I contemplate a situation like this, I cannot help but think about that: Isn't there something better I can throw in front of the train? Will anything I can physically lift actually effect the train? Isn't this like asking if I can stop the train with my muscular force alone? Maybe if I look for a way to warn the people who are going to be hit by a train, I can actually accomplish something instead of contemplating murders which cannot do any good as long as the laws of the universe remain as they are.

It's not a question of what I think: objectively it is not realistic.

It's like saying "you are standing on a bridge and see a range rover with break failure hurtling toward five people waiting for the light below. Next to you is a large egg, will you toss the egg in front of the car to save the people below?"

Let's say the train is part of a light rail system or tram line, much lighter than typical rolling stock on commuter or long haul rail lines. An example would be the Bombardier Corporation's Flexity line. A Felxity2 car weighs 40.9 Long tons. Regardless of your personal philosophy or ethical system, F=MA applies. A human body, even that of the most obese person in the world simply cannot significantly ret*d a moving train, even if it is a very light train.

You may object that the point is just to ask, "would you take an action that would kill one to save five?" The details, it might be claimed, are not important. But then variations of the question are posed as if the details were important. How can I take it seriously when the details peg my BS meter at the maximum end of the scale?

I completely agree.

I did the survey, but it is poorly conceived and superficial, and thus unlikely to achieve very much. The person who came up with it clearly knows very little about ASD or morality in general.

I don't believe the answers to these questions will offer insight into the moral and ethical characteristics of anybody.

Why would it make a question unanswerable or invalid, if it's hypothetical and couldn't exist in real life?

Here's an example of the validity of a daft hypothesis: I questioned the idea of escape velocity at school. The only way I could explain my objection to the term was to describe a hypothetical situation - "if a rocket was on a launch pad, and the engines were working at a rate that was just (and only just) enough to cancel out the force of the Earth's gravity, and then we gave the rocket a very tiny push upwards, it would escape the Earth without achieving this escape velocity."

My physics teacher made fun of my hypothesis by pointing out that if I tried to push such a rocket, I'd be fried to a crisp, etc., but he did consider my idea, for the sake of argument, and gave me a satisfactory answer. Had I been cleverer I might have said:
"Surely a rocket moving out of a gravity well does not actually need to attain escape velocity to do so, but could achieve the same result at any speed with a suitable mode of propulsion and sufficient fuel?"

The answer is the same, i.e. that escape velocity only applies to ballistic trajectories.

Doesn't "escape velocity" refer to the speed required to "escape" the earth's "sphere of influence?"

I would guess that different sorts of objects have different "escape velocities."

Had your teacher been more thoughtful they would have noted that the inertia you could impart to the rocket with your hand would be sustainable for a second or two at most while the gravitational attraction between the rocket and the earth is contininuous. You could not push the rocket into orbit. Escape velocity is not an optional concept. The way out would be something something like a space elevator, when a sustained push at lower energy can be supplied to the vehicle all the way to orbit. The little details really do make a difference.

The thing to remember is that an object in orbit is weightless because it is falling continuously. The trick is to move it horizontally so fast that by the time it has descended appreciably, it has moved laterally so the distance to the surface has increased because of the curvature of the Earth's (or whatever body you are orbiting) surface.

Another way of understanding this is that escape velocity is when speed and gravitational attraction (or kinetic energy and gravitational potential) equal zero.

You have to move very fast horizontally in order to compensate for falling continuously. If you move faster, your orbit gets bigger and you ascend, if you move more slowly, your orbit gets smaller and you descend. Too slow and your fall no longer misses the surface.

To maintain an orbit, I would guess that the precise "escape velocity" must be maintained at all times.

Right. This is a major reason why satellites in low orbit need fuel to maintain their position and when their fuel is exhausted, their orbits "decay." What's really happening is the very slight drag from the thermosphere is slowing them until they descend a little bit.

Descending a little bit brings slightly greater drag and they descend a bit more... and so on.

Of course, the magic of orbit is that the inertia of the orbiting object is balanced with the gravitational attraction of the primary, so you don't need to expend energy at any great levels to maintain the speed you needed to get into orbit. You just need tiny thrusts to compensate for the long term effect of the very slight atmospheric drag from the very diffuse atmosphere at those altitudes.

Last edited by Adamantium on 27 Feb 2015, 10:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

Yep.....I would have loved to have been in NASA during the moon landings! On that team!

So muck risk--yet so much reward!

Unless ISIS and The Southern Baptists win and we enter a new dark age of hocus pocus ignorance, the best is yet to come.

It will be something for the ESA, NASA and Planetary Resources teams that first capture asteroids and then begin to extract their resources. Lots of fun orbital mechanics problems to calculate there!

NASA promised us we'd be on Mars by 1985.

I hope there's a manned Martian mission in our near-future!

I'd sign up, even though I would hate the food!

Anyway, apparently her mentor wasn't aware of this study....

Sorry for going off-topic LOL

As for her mentor not knowing about it:

There's virtue in going "lone-wolf"--however, in this case, perhaps, she was misguided in her "lone-wolfness."