• 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.

    • 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

    • 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?

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • aracebo@unilem.org
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    1 year ago

    My law/ethics prof was a big old NIMBY. Apparently, utilitarianism is when “neighbor allows cell tower in his yard and it block my view”

    • Zetta@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Yea stopping animal testing sounds great, but animal testing is the backbone of drug and medical breakthroughs. So at least for now that’s not possible

      • kier@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There is.

        Do it in humans.

        Humans can understand the risks involved. Other animals cannot.

        If we’re going to fuck something up, it better be on our own species.

      • Siv@lemmy.praxis.red
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        1 year ago

        Recognition that animal testing is actually pretty fucked up would be a good start toward funding research into alternatives, such as biological computer simulations.

        We can simulate complex/chaotic systems, like weather, in nearly real-time, so biosim research is mainly a funding and staffing problem at this point.

        Probably we’ll still need animal testing for the final phase before human trials, but we can at least reduce the need for it to bare minimums.

    • Lt_Cdr_Data@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I absolutely would. I’d not line up to be among the first, but controlling devices via a brain interface is an inevitable step of technological evolution.

      It will provide such an immense performance boost, that many professions may become unattainable without having one. Possibly within our lifetime.

        • Droechai@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          If it can reroute my neurons to lessen my ADHD and autism traits I would gladly pay with 3/4 of waking hours filled by ads. At least that would give me 1/4 more working brain than I currently have

        • ComradeR@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Is about to kiss the love of their lives “And now, I wanna show our newest sponsor! Hello Fresh have the best options so you can make your own dinner and blah blah blah…”

        • nik282000@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Dreams? What about when it locks up and plays a virtual 200db 5khz tone for the rest of your life?

  • iByteABit [he/him]@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    We don’t in my country, and I’m 100% sure people would complain if there was one. Even if they attended it, it would go completely over their heads probably.

    A shitty capitalist society with deeply rooted individualism can’t be treated unless it’s done from the root of the problem.

  • 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.

    • rjs001@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      Not really possible to be scientific in that regard because of the fact that it wouldn’t be possible to quantify “behaving ethically” and there isn’t really a way to determine that in an objective manner

      • 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.

  • 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.