Think of the McDonalds hot coffee incident, for example. If you use an one-liner version of it, the jury’s verdict seems counter-intuitive; but then, as you process more and more information about the case, you’ll begin to understand why they reached this verdict.

In the end you may find out that you haven’t really learned much about anything other than this very specific case. You just have to go abstract, at least to some extent.

Anyway, how about let’s not talk about the simple binary abstractions “right” and “wrong” here. Let’s talk about this: how motivated are you fuckers to fight me in order to get hold of my liver? You and your gang may outnumber me, but I’m sure gonna break some bones and gouge out some eyeballs before I go down, in an effort to push your sigma(utility) down into the negatives. And you bitches best watch your backs too, ‘cause if I see you moving on my neighbor with your steely grins and your shiny scalpels out you’re apt to meet up with my friend, Mr. Lou Slugger.

It’ll probably be something along the lines of what Mike suggested in the other thread in regards to “the fat guy on the bridge” vs. “Big Jack”.

Surely it would be unwise to insist that a good counterexample to a principle must satisfy this criterion.

Example A might be well-suited as a counterexample to principle p because it clearly shows that this principle yields the wrong result. But it might be ill-suited as a test of which of competing principles q or r explains the right result. Example B, though ill-suited as a means of showing that principle p yields the wrong result, might be well-suited to adjudicate between principles q and r. There might, moreover, be no other example that is well-suited to perform both tasks simultaneously. Tailoring an example so that it tests well for one thing might ensure that it tests less well for another thing. That’s in the nature of controlled experments, including thought experiments. Example A would not reveal exactly why principle p is false, because it would not settle the question of whether principle p is false because it conflicts with true principle q or because it conflicts with true principle r. It would be bad to offer Example A and then to shut down one’s inquiry. One should go on to consider example B. But that fact wouldn’t make Example A a bad counterexample to principle p. That one needs two examples rather than a single one to get at the full truth is no objection to either example in the set of two.

By contrast, if the object is to get students thinking about their moral intuitions, then “cryptic” problems require more thought than clear ones, which is presumably a good thing in pedagogical terms.

I grant that there are good and serious objections to the use of artificial, hypothetical examples, though, like Tom Hurka, I don’t know of any better way to assess competing explanations of why it is that we think that certain acts are right or wrong.

But there are bad as well as good objections to the use of such examples, and I was simply objecting to John’s claim that an “equally serious problem [with the transplant case] is that the example is like a bad cryptic crossword clue – you know what answer you’re supposed to get, but not exactly how you got there.”

As I understand him, John’s cryptic crossword point is that the transplant example is a bad objection to consequentialism because the example doesn’t settle the question of whether it’s wrong to carve the one up because (i) that would be killing an innocent, (ii) that would be violating the person’s right of bodily integrity, or (iii) that would involve the explicit and active agency of the doctor. (Puzzlingly, John also now maintains that, insofar as the purpose of this example is to shed light on our moral intuitions, it is a virtue that this example doesn’t settle this question.)

If you or anyone else can show how this makes the transplant example a bad objection to consequentialism, I’d be grateful.

You say that the cryptic crossword aspect of the transplant example is a benefit rather than a cost if you’re trying to understand your moral intuitions. I can’t figure out why you think this. Would you please elaborate a bit? And could you also explain how this cryptic crossword aspect renders the example problematic as an objection to consequentialism? As far as the question of whether this example embarrasses consequentialism is concerned, all that would seem to matter is whether it’s true both that we ought not carve up the one and that consequentialism says we ought to. The alleged fact that one knows that it’s wrong to carve up the one, but not which of several competing explanations regarding its wrongness is the right one, would seem neither here nor there insofar as the truth or falsity of these two claims is concerned.

(Incidentally, you said, in #35, that these sort of thought experiments might have pedogogical value: for example, it might be useful to present these examples to students to teach them how worthless they are. I then pointed to the much more positive, and not merely pedogogically valuable, insights which Foot’s and Thomson’s discussion have yielded. So it’s disingenuous for you to reply by saying in #46: “as I said before, I’ve got no problems with the use of examples like this in pedagogy”.)

Now, I personally don’t see much value in refuting the “unconditional right to life” claim, because I don’t think anyone is seriously making this claim (well, some buddhist monks, maybe?), but if someone want to deal with it, I don’t see any problem.

You have to choose between World A and World B. In World A, people only have good intentions and only bad consequences occur. In World B, people only have bad intentions and only good consequences occur.

Which one do you choose?

That said, I didn’t intend to be saying something especially “informative.” More like a reminder of something we all know, that’s too obvious to be stated, except when philosophical imaginings lead us to temporarily forget it. The point is, finding yourself pregnant isn’t just like finding yourself hooked up to a violinist in a hospital. People don’t normally find themselves hooked up to violinists. Women do normally find themselves pregnant. And have been for the entire history of the human species.

Let me make my point another way. Suppose that as part of our biological life, we periodically grew tentacles that hooked us up to other humans, from whom we obtained some sort of regenerating substance allowing us to continue our lives. Suppose that we’d evolved that way, that we all depended on this process, that we all had to be on the “receiving” end of the process at various points in our normal biological lives, etc. What would we then say about the case of someone who wakes up to discover himself to be “host” to another person in this way? I don’t have clear intuitions about this scenario as so described.

That’s all.

But I was first presented with the organ bank example as a knockdown argument against consequentialism. And Sinnott-Armstrong introduces the example as follows

Another problem for utilitarianism is that it seems to overlook justice and rights. One common illustration is called Transplant …