Prashant Parikh
Jul 23, 2017 · 1 min read

Nice piece but I’m surprised you’re so averse to math. Anyway, I agree with you that many utilitarianisms ignore particularities (e.g. whether the fat man is you yourself). I think moral situations do require taking particular attributes into account. On the other hand, numbers do matter: what if you were saving 5 million people instead of 5?

My own view is that the right moral theory is a situated one and is one that is gappy, that is, it need not have a solution to all moral dilemmas.

    Prashant Parikh

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    Prashant Parikh does research in philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence and writes occasionally on art and politics.