hinduwoman

I think that hypothetical moral questions are only interesting intellectually. After all, you cannot know what you are really going to do until you are faced with the situation.

for example, if anyone asks me if I would be an atheist even at the moment of death I would answer yes. But actually, I don't really know if at that moment overwhlemed by fear or pain I would not pray to God.

Autonemesis

I thought your Subject line was a joke, and a funny one at that, but after reading the text of your post, I think you didn't intend it to be. Maybe I'm reading it wrong...

David Gould

I think they are very important in working out exactly what you believe.

I am doing a self-esteem course at the moment and one of the things we are looking at is a theory about the six pillars of self esteem:

the first one is 'awareness' - awareness of self and of others.

the second one is to live purposefully - and if you are not aware of your values, beliefs, needs and wants, purposes are hard to build.

one of the others is integrity - you have to live true to the things you value and believe in. If you do not know what they are, how is this possible?

Now, hypotheticals can make you aware of how you would want to act in a given situation and thus enable you to make the choice to act with integrity or not when such situations occur.

Hinduwoman, if you want to remain an atheist to your death and do not want to betray your values on your death bed, how would you know what that value is unless you had thought about it or something analgous to it first?

99Percent

I think you should allow for honest mistakes in your moral decisions since you cannot possibly know everything. You might later find out a fact that if you had known it before you would have probably made a different decision. The important thing to remember is to be as truthful as you can, to yourself and others or else doubt about whether you made the right decision later will inevitably creep in and your selfconfidence will deteriote.

In the case of immediate danger of which you have no control you really cannot be a moral person as your life is at stake and any rationality disappears. So if you get into a position where you are about to die and there is nothing you can do about it, I think you can very well betray your original beliefs and pray to a god. If you do survive you can say with confidence that it was a life and death situation and that is why you betrayed your beliefs. I don't see anything wrong with that position. At least that doesn't worry me. For example if I am in danger but there is a way of saving myself however difficult it is I would rather try to save myself than pray. But you have to be honest about your current situation, to yourself, or you will regret it later.

However to simply believe in a god out of free will I think that is just plain absurd and irrational.

echidna

Yes, I agree hinduwoman. Another example might be a friend of the family I remember. The old one we all like to be so brave with is “of course if I were ever left incapacitated from a stroke I’d ask them to turn off the machine”. I remember a friend of the family boasting this once with all confidence until it actually happened. Now he lives quite dependently on his wife.

Hypotheticals work well for our conscious rational selves, but ignore our subconscious more basic drivers.

I generally preface my hypothetical answers with “I’d like to think that I would …”, but for the tough ones you can never really be sure.

tronvillain

Hypothetical questions are quite useful in investigating your moral intuitions, though it is possible that you may behave differently in the actual situation.

DRFseven

True, but that's why they're being asked; to provoke thought and maybe change some parameters of reason.

YHWH666

Methinks hypotheticals can be useful. While it’s hard to predict what you’d do in a life or death situation, they can still convey an idea.
And they don’t have to be realistic either. People use analogies for lots of stuff.
Sometimes in order to explain special relativity scientists make hypothetical situations with rocket ships that travel at half the speed of light. While they aren’t very realistic situations they help explain some principles of physics.

In a thread here a while ago the question was asked, “Would a materialist submit to star trek style teleportation?” I said yes. In real life I might chicken out at the last minute, it was still helpful in conveying interesting ideas about self and consciousness.

hinduwoman

This is quiet serious. Jokey posts gets a nice
icons.

hinduwoman

I suppose that hypothetical questions do clear the mind. But still, if in actual situations one does the something else, then future hypothetical questions become moot.