| Popis: |
This chapter discusses future and present morality, differentiating between Presentists and Anticipators. Both Presentists and Anticipators reflect some truth about the future. However, there is a lot to be said for Presentists, and for the claim that this book — and the way ethicists have been allured by future visions — is a little bit morally bad. This is because questions of distributive justice — of justly allocating resources — are relevant to what ethicists focus on. And ethicists — especially the applied variety who appeal to the implications of moral theories or principles for specific situations — have been overly preoccupied by the promises and perils of emerging and future technologies. Specifically, while applied ethicists readily delve into the science behind artificial intelligence, gene editing, brain-machine interfaces, and nanotech, they have not bothered learning much about economic theories and the conflicting values and difficult trade-offs directly raised by economic policy. One reason for this is that applied ethicists largely relegate the ethics of economics to economists or political philosophers, where libertarians, socialists, and those in-between fight it out by appealing to large, abstract principles or assumptions about things like the proper role of the state. |
