Thesis on Morality & Autism Spectrum Disorders

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^ That is strange. Linking morality to segments of population is always political.
As in - the morality of jews - the morality of blacks - the morality of atheists - etc ?

This. I couldn't access the survey, but based on the discussions of the questions, the thing my mind jumps to is that THIS ONE IS LOADED.

I guess my response to most of those questions is either "Sacrifice myself and hope everyone else gets out alive," or "Do the thing that results in the least loss of life, then go find a nice isolated spot to kill myself because I cannot live with being responsible for the loss of any innocent life."

Somehow, I see this being based on certain well-known clinical stereotypes, and being used to draw a titillating, sensational, and patently untrue picture. Don't go there, guys. Don't go there.

It was pretty loaded, full of you sacrificing one life for a few lives.

I don't believe it was something with which one could assess a person's moral/ethical values.

The situations were implausible. I believe, in "real time," that all of these things had a potentially alternative result which did not sacrifice any lives.

Question for admin: is her registration email address different to the one she revealed here? If not, does that mean that it was a valid address when she registered?


Yes another unexplained mystery.


I can only speak for myself. I'm curious about whether or not the OP was deliberately trying to cock us around, and if not (as I suspect), what was she trying to do?


So you don't think there's any downside to going off-topic? I often go off at tangents, and when I do, people are likely to feel frustrated and to see me as unhelpful, and they might share their experience of me with others, which might reduce my popularity ("what is it with him? Ask him if it's raining and he'll end up explaining string theory to you"), so it worries me when I do, I can understand their frustration with me. Doesn't directly annoy me here. But we're dealing with a NT (I think), assuming she ever comes back to read this thread. The physics is very interesting, but it is off topic. If the OP turns out to have been deliberately trying to cock us around anyway, I wouldn't feel too worried about returning the compliment of course. But I think we may have handed her a tale that she could use to give us a bad press. Doesn't matter much, I doubt she reaches a very large audience, but as a general way of doing things, I think the "tangent" method of answering questions may be inviting contempt. Of course we're used to it here, we don't mind so much.

It wasn't going off-topic, though. If you tell me I can stop a train, tram or trolley car by throwing a fat person in front of it, I can tell you that you are ignorant or delusional.

If you want to restrict the topic to moral dilemmas about possibly achieving some kind of good by killing innocent people, and you don't want a discussion of the reality that throwing people in front of trains is not among the possible means of arresting the motion of those trains, then don't pose a hypothetical based on that idea. Simple as that.

I think that "throwing a fat person into the path of a train in order to stop it" was so implausible, so ridiculous, that I'm thinking maybe the surveyor was trying to pull our legs a little bit (in retrospect).

Sadly, no. It's a ethical dilemma of long pedigree. I first heard it 30 years ago.


The thing in use elsewhere:
http://www.philosophyexperiments.com/fatman/

Is One of the Most Popular Psychology Experiments Worthless? (from the Atlantic magazine)
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi ... ss/374931/

Trolleys, in the old days, went MUCH slower than trains. I don't believe they exceeded 30 mph. The also stopped frequently, so they don't gather momentum. They are also much smaller in mass than trains.

Trains generally travel at least 60 mph most of the time when they are between stops. They do not stop frequently, like trolleys used to do. They gather momentum. They are much larger in mass than trolleys.

MAYBE, a fat person could stop a trolley--they CERTAINLY cannot stop a speeding train--unless he's Superman!

Well wtf. Thanks for looking into this for us. I'm really cheesed off now and won't be doing surveys for anybody else through here in future without asking about it through the institutions beforehand.

Nope. Even the little ones are very massive compared to even the most obese person.

You are starting to think like a philosopher! You're scaring me!

Philosopher? That will never happen, Sir!

Just shoot me if it does happen!

I hope you don't think I would seriously advocate using any person in that manner.

I would call that premeditated murder!

Also, every single online forum I have ever been a member of, from back in the days of listserv (remember that, old timers) to Yahoo groups to all that's available today - people have been going OT in threads. I don't think that has anything to do with being NT or autistic.

I did get a bit enchanted by the physics discussions even though I have no interest in physics. I couldn't help but be a little proud at how clever and interesting autistics tend to be.

yay!

We haven't had trolleys in New York City since about 1956.

Wow, I didn't realize this topic had so many replies. I didn't have time to return to check these boards until now. I also realize that I made a mistake in my email address, which should have been [email protected].

I am sorry if this survey caused anyone any distress.

All of the wording, questions and dilemmas were taken from previous studies and used for that reason.

The expected results were to be something positive for the autistic community but unfortunately it was misunderstood.

Again, I apologize for any distress these questions may have caused.

Courtney

I didn't have a problem with the unreality of the questions, these are not supposed to be real situations that happen regularly in real life, in many cases the things that ackshuly happen in real life if put into this kind of question form would seem even weirder and more unlikely if one didn't know that they had ackshuly happened.