A study of ethicists finds they’re no more ethical than the rest of us

I think that the modern higher educational experience has done away with a "variety of ideas" in favor of "the single set of idea almost all academics politically align with".

I am motivated to save a drowning baby in the pool next to me but I can't care enough to donate a dime to save a starving baby in africa. We all would save the drowning baby when the opportunity arises yet most of us haven't donated a single dollar to Africa. Why? Because one situation is relevant to survivability of the local clan/tribe, the other is not. Saving the baby near me benefits my tribe while the baby in Africa is irrelevant to my survivability. Thus natural selection has only evolved a sense of panic when I see a dying baby with my eyes and not when I hear about one dying in africa. This contradiction in our moral drive offers evidence that morality is evolved and not logically consistent.

Although we possess these moral drives, there is no evolutionary pressure that requires us to know why these drives exist or why they are inconsistent, and why they fail to solve more complex moral problems. Knowing why or how does not lend to our survivability that's why we evolved a moral drive without the correct reasoning to understand it.

Hence humans are left with instinctual drives that influence our behaviors, but we are left to our own devices to figure everything out why they exist in the first place. The biggest mistake you can make as a human is to assume that your moral drive has origins that are beyond biological. Most of us assume this is the case, but from a logical standpoint... it is not.

Our intuition of what is right and what is wrong is just an arbitrary set of illogical instinctual drives and it is completely pointless to make sense of these things in a consistent way other than to know that the drives are arbitrary rules that increase survivability.

Ethics represents our attempt to codify these arbitrary drives that are fundamentally inconsistent into a set of rules that are internally consistent. It's an utterly pointless and uninteresting endeavor. Ethics doesn't truly exist as a fundamental framework of the universe, we are making literally making it up.

Because we are making it up, an ethicist is just spouting a bunch of made up nonsense. There isn't truly a moral right or a moral wrong in the universe and thus the philosophical study of ethics is pointless. The actual study of morality is a scientific endeavor into how evolutionary pressures of group dynamics and individual dynamics formulates behaviors that help with survivability. The field of evolutionary psychology is the closest thing to a legitimate study of ethics.

An ethicists is one of those pointless "sciences" where humans in attempt to systemize everything they see jump to incorrect conclusions. Our old theory of humors in medical science or the chinese theory of Chi flows in our body and yin and yang are attempts to find systems where systems don't exist and are now relegated to junk science. The study of ethics is in the exact same camp.

If I push an innocent fat man in front of freight train (the man is fat so he's heavy enough to stop the train dead, but he dies as a result) to stop the train from running over 20 people tied the tracks am I a murderer or a savior? Am I moral or am I immoral?

I'm saying the answer to the question is irrelevant because there is no RIGHT answer. Any answer a regular person or an ethicist comes up with is ultimately as made up and as arbitrary as the moral instincts that drive our behavior.

The hard questions have no right answer because the question is loaded to begin with. We never evolved a moral instinct on whether I should push the fat man or leave him be. This isn't physical law or logic. Morality is an arbitrary biological phenomena.

If the ethicist tells you, you should push the person to save 20 people, and another layman says you shouldn't murder an innocent, fat bystander, neither answer is more wrong or correct than the other. The difference here is that the ethicist spent years studying something that ultimately has no answer or meaning.

Thus the ultimate argument is, there is no need for a company to hire an ethicist for hard moral problems. Your layman judgment is as good as the ethicists because it's all made up anyway.

The only probable benefit an ethicist can possibly provide is logical consistency. Making sure your current decisions are inline with your past decisions. But is that really a benefit when each decision doesn't have an exact moral answer to begin with? It's not. If I encounter the train problem 50 times at different stages of my life, and I choose to push the fat man 25 times and ignore him another 25 times the question is still loaded and both decisions are still arbitrary and it's still unclear what decision was right or wrong.

Moral instincts were never meant to be consistent, the codification of morality into law was something we made up in attempt to make sense of our moral emotions but is ultimately irrelevant.

Keep in mind I'm not saying that we should get rid of all our morals because it's all pointless. We're human and ultimately humans are moral and we should act human when the moral questions are straightforward and easy. I'm just saying that when the questions become complex you don't need to create an entire field called "ethics" around it because it's all ultimately made up and meaningful study on a made up phenomena is fruitless.

2. You don't think flipping a coin is adequate and I agree it's not adequate. The problem is, no one has the adequate way of solving the problem. It doesn't exist... the best we can do is as good as flipping a coin. To claim that god exists when we don't know whether he exists is the same instinctual human drive that lays the foundation for the need of an ethicist to come in and answer questions no human knows the answer to.

I don't equate it to painting art. I equate it to fraud or delusion. The artist makes no claim that his creation is real, he exists for entertainment. The incredulous attempt to claim that an ethicists answer is better than a layman is fraudulent. You truly think an ethicist can tell me the right answer to whether you want to murder the fat man to save 20 people? To make a judgment on murder and killing and claim that his answer is better than my answer when no answer exists is not only arrogant but flat out wrong.

Nobody wants to flip a coin on moral decisions such as murder and life. But sometimes for hard ethical questions that's the best outcome. And for someone to claim that they can do better than a coin flip. Well... that's fraud or delusion.

The need for answers causes humanity to make up answers. It's the basis of religion, and only in recent times does the discovery of science, logic and the scientific method are we able to break from this mold and realize our self delusion. Yet this knowledge is hard to obtain and self delusion still permeates our behavior. You're right in the sense that there will probably always be people who think they "need" ethicists just like there will always be people who "need" religion. It's just another lie we tell ourselves to get us through the day.