• ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I once had a chemistry professor who used to work as a senior drug researcher at a major pharmaceutical company. He often joked about how the company treated the monkeys used for testing far better than the PhDs. If a monkey suffered a negative reaction there was a major investigation. I’m incredibly surprised Musk can be killing monkeys left and right and hasn’t been thrown in jail.

  • Dr. Dabbles@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The other 8 died, too. In excruciating pain. One of them vomited to death. These people are barbaric and should face animal cruelty charges.

  • DrVortex@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    You are confusing taking a class with actually having ethics. No amount of attending a lecture about ethics will convince you if you do not, as a basic premise agree with the ethical principle that loss of life is a bad thing. And to be very clear, ethical principles are subjective. There is no objectively right or wrong thing as far nature is concerned.

    • girthero@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Ethics class gives you tools to analyze a problem. Any good class is part of the philosophy department and leans on the classic philosphers approaches to analyze the problem. Many engineers would have no exposure to this otherwise and i think its a good part of any Universities’ engineering curriculum.

    • And to be very clear, ethical principles are subjective. There is no objectively right or wrong thing as far nature is concerned.

      Deonotlogists and other Moral Realists and Universalists are shook

      But yeah, let’s imagine moral ontology was solved, and that moral relativism and nihilism are the only ethical theories around…

      • Classy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        That sounds like a fun paradox.

        Is “The only objective moral fact is that there is no objective morality” a truthful statement? Is it rational?

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Classes don’t solve the problem entirely, but they’re a start and without them in this case a company so large and powerful that it has a space program and foreign policy planks is being guided by nothing but the intuition of someone who grew up spending money earned by child slaves and who thinks that scuttling an army’s mission in-progress is pacifism

  • SwampYankee@mander.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Funny story, the only ethics required in my engineering degree was a 2-day unit on our professional code of ethics. We had a 20-question true/false homework on it, and the thing about a professional code of ethics is it’s not super intuitive. Most of the class thought they could gut feel their way through it, but you actually had to read the code because the wording was very specific sometimes. When it turned out that everyone failed the homework, the professor let us try again.

    Ethics!

    • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      Eveyone needs it. Aristotle starts out his Nicomachean ethics stating that virtuous acts are first and foremost for the benefit of the virtuous person.

      Platonic ethics should also really be taught widely, even more so than Aristotle’s because they’re easier to receive. Even if he has some hard to accept views such as that commiting injustice is worse than suffering it, everyone would benefit if children grew up with the notion that everyone does what they think best, and that those who do “wrong” things do so out of ignorance of what is good, rather than what we currently have where everyone knows what is objectively good, and those who don’t do it are willfully wrongdoers and you just need to punish them enough and they’ll become good.

      Although you can have the best educational plans in the galaxy if the educarional system is crap. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but where I’m from all education from primary school to a master’s degree is just a bunch of information being thrown at you with 0 context and reasoning behind it, and when you’re able to reproduce that information on demand (without any context): congratz, you’re educated!

      • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Still can’t believe it happened the first time.

        “Oh let’s just reuse the code and forget the hardware breakers on the machine it’ll be fine.”

        Like I have no ethics training but they even had a (human operated) control rod in the first chicago pile who trusts a radiation gun to a SOFTWARE toggle?

        • qfe0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          It wasn’t collectively known that software was hard to do right at that time. If it always performed as intended it would have made for a less expensive and perfectly safe machine. It’s the textbook case in doing software wrong because there wasn’t one that happened before it.

      • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I only learned about it from the “Well There’s Your Problem” podcast. Can’t believe my school never talked about it. We did hear all about Challenger though as well as a few other disasters where the lesson was “If you cut corners, or take chances, people can DIE”

  • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

    Philosophy should be taught from very early. The hability to think, argue, relate to others and understand others while being capable of express your ideas is extremely important.

  • Floey@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I personally enjoy ethics as a subject, but has it been shown that studying ethics in uni actually leads to people behaving more ethically? I agree that ethics should be applied to science, but science should also be applied to ethics to determine the effective approach.

      • Floey@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        The scientific method can be applied to more than what is distinctly objective. Just like you can probe a scientific instrument you can probe a human, ask them to rank their peers.

        OP is making an ethical judgement, saying that the monkeys dying in the Neurolink studies makes them unethical. I believe the studies fundamentally had unethical elements as the monkeys couldn’t even consent. But if a class taught concepts related to either of these ideas, someone designing or carrying out these studies who had learned these concepts could be seen as not having grown practically from the ethical teachings, you don’t have to accept that the teachings are correct in the first place.

        I hypothesize an issue with simply teaching ethical ideas is that humans are incredibly good at maintaining cognitive dissonance, or even more simply not thinking about how what they learn applies to their own behaviors and convictions.