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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Mother of God. Just take up meditation and look deeply into the mind instead of trying to figure out how society can be fixed. You'll learn more.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Let's distinguish the unclear sense in which this form of objection might apply to the project of overcoming epistemic bias, and the sense in which it is widely held to count against using consequentialism as a decision procedure. This view assumed we cannot be relied to overcome certain ingrained biases even if we wholeheartedly endorsed consequentialism. The claim isn't that we should follow certain non-consequentialist moral rules of thumb unless we're confident enough that we've overcome these biases, in which case we SHOULD use consequentialism as our decision procedure.

As I said, this piece of philosophy involves some very large empirical claims that are usually made in an extremely sketchy way and without real evidence (not that there isn't much supporting evidence out there). One would have expected that, instead of feeling comfortable in the consensus that Hooker describes, consequentialists would take the question of whether these biases might be overcome more seriously.

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