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thenousman OP t1_jcvco9a wrote

Reply to comment by yikeswhatshappening in A Case For Withholding Knowledge by thenousman

I agree with your first point. I do not claim to have made a comprehensive nor exhaustive defense. I’m a student and it’s just a blogpost, so take it for what it is. That said, I do plan to comeback to this and build upon it after I’m more familiar with the various positions and literature. And I will revise it to be more explicit and precise.

I dispute your second point, though, as it is a thought experiment and you should try and assume it to be the case, for the sake of argument. If it were the case, such that…then what are the moral implications of such and such…anyway, that’s the usefulness of thought experiments (though some people disagree and think thought experiments are useless; but I’m not one of those).

Third point, revisit my response to the second point above.

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yikeswhatshappening t1_jcvf41i wrote

You don’t have to be comprehensive, which I would also suggest is both impossible and not useful. But if we are working out of an established framework, it is always good practice to disclose that. And arguing one view without considering alternatives hardly forms a “case” for anything.

Sure, we can make up scenarios all we want and use deductive reasoning. But if we agree this scenario is not realistic then this sort of makes my point, which is that this stops being “a case for withholding knowledge” that we can use in the real world and becomes “a conversation on reddit about withholding knowledge” for a fake scenario about a sun flare form the future. We can grant the assumptions and discuss the moral implications and it’s all good fun, to be sure. It just doesn’t have real world utility if our deductive process is starting from a place not congruent with the real world. That’s all.

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thenousman OP t1_jcvo4xd wrote

Yeah, I totally get that it is an unlikely scenario, especially in our (and humanity’s) lifetime.

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