In short, I take his point in 28 that Solum’s example can be understood in two perhaps contrasting ways (and Mike Otsuka’s pt in 27 that relying only on hypothetical examples is a worry). However, I simply don’t see the worry if Solum was only attempting to state a philosophical dilemma whereby our intuitions are tested and, as Jo says, we “state our principles,” so to speak.

While “real world” problems perhaps ought to be the main concern of political philosophers, hypothetical examples are quite valuable. Often these examples best help us understand why it is that we hold the views we have.

In one of Summers’ examples some medium size number of US textile workers were going to be affected in such a way that they would lose 20% of their wages, and so could not afford their spring vacation. This was to be balanced against slightly cheaper clothes for some very much larger number of Americans and a hugely improved life for some number of textile workers abroad. The example was set up so that these were the only effects of then policy; it was a one-off so that it was not part of a larger set of policies which might have cumulative effects; and that no redistribution of the surplus to compensate the losers was possible.

If we observe the distinction I made in 17 we can either treat this as a hypothetical example to test our intuitions about preferences for our fellow citizens against those in developing nations, or as a real-policy maker’s dilemma.

To be fair to Summers he was probably using it as a philosophers’ example, challenging us to state our principles – and then we do need to have something to say. And, actually, for myself when thinking about the strength of our obligations to those in other nations I would accept a prioritarian view, but modified by something like Jake’s principle – it is about three fourths us and one fourth them! In Summers’ case the significant benefits to those much worse off than ourselves (pretending for a moment I’m a U.S. citizen) justify our smaller sacrifice. But don’t ask me for a chain of argument leading to this conclusion.

However, when we treat this as a policy decision we are surely entitled to be sceptical in two ways: first, that we can know exactly what the effects of the policy are, and, second, that we know what the options are. On the menu of options issue, some Amy-like subversion may be helpful. On the effects of policy issue I may differ from Harry in one respect here, although I am not sure. Harry appears to suggest that we should accept best evidence as if we knew it to be true, and act on that basis. I am much more inclined towards a ‘failsafe’ approach to decision making: what bad effects would we be creating if these assumptions were false?

This is partly based on scepticism about the likely truth of these projections. For example, I argued against the introduction of a minimum wage in the UK because I was convinced by every economist I spoke to who said it would increase unemployment among the poorly paid. But when it came in it appeared to have no effect on unemployment at all.

To take the HIV/AIDS example, part of the dilemma was that ‘our best social science’ tells us that if we distribute condoms at truck stops we would save 100,000 lives. My first thought on hearing this is that I had no idea that truck stops were such an important part of African life. But anyway, having learnt that much, you have to ask whether African truck drivers are having unprotected sex through lack of condoms, or for some other reason; whether availably of condoms would make a significant difference to the ratio of protected and unprotected sex, and so on.

Again the example can be taken in two ways. It could have been intended as a hypothetical dilemma to bring out questions underlying what to do when reducing risk to a large number of people comes into conflict with giving benefits to known people, in circumstances where the expected utility calculation massively favours reducing risk. This, I think is a really interesting question, and, in fact, related to issues I have been chipping away at for a couple of years. Or it could be taken as a policy-makers dilemma, where the uncertainties of the situtation crowd in on you, and may tend to push you towards a mixed-strategy (including scrambling for more money) in the hope of at least doing some good somewhere.

(1) I think it would be a disaster if one’s reasoning about what to do in the real world consisted of nothing but reflection on hypothetical cases of the sort that philosophers construct. For one thing, such reflection wouldn’t reveal the crucial facts of one’s situation—including such things as the motives and likely behavior of others. But there come points where reflection on such cases can be illuminating. Suppose, for example, that you conclude that you’d be willing to do x but would not be willing to go so far as to do y in this situation. Then you ask yourself whether the line you’ve drawn between x and y is defensible and conclude that it is for such and such reason. Reflection on hypothetical cases might be useful in revealing whether this reason is sound.

(2) I could see myself giving high marks to an exam question on the trolley problem in which the student made a good case that such hypothetical cases are problematic.

And to a large extent that is our (the philosophers’ fault) because we are not holding up our own in public debates about value questions. So unless we just want to cede these matters to those types, I think we need to cultivate exchanges with people like Larry Summers, but then also acknowledge that they have different intellectual backgrounds, and, well, personality features than the typical philosopher.

strongly agree with this, except for the bit about personality features…. certainly Summers seems to be at the far end of some spectrum, but many philosophers are closer to him than to, I don’t know, let’s say Alan Bennett, on that spectrum….

I think that, insofar as someone like Summers is making an argument about what is to be done in the real world, one ought to question all of the non-controversial assumptions of the argument. If any of the assumptions is factual, then one needs to see whether it corresponds to the way the world is. So I agree that one ought to have questioned Summers’s implicit assumption that one would be forced to make a tradeoff between prevention and treatment in the HIV case.

But here we’re not engaging in hypothetical reasoning.

When, by contrast, someone is engaged in hypothetical reasoning, I don’t think it’s appropriate to question the hypothetical assumptions regarding the facts, since the person raising the hypothetical isn’t claiming that the factual assumptions represent the way the world is.

1. To clarify Jo Wolff’s role in this: Originally, Summers could be scheduled only for an hour, and he accepted the invitation under the condition that he would not be expected to have a paper ready in advance. (He always speaks freely, without notes.) Jo bravely agreed to be his commentator on these terms, which implied in particular that his commentary would have to be quite short to allow time for disucssion. When Summers arrived, it turned out that, although he was 15 min late, he had more time than originally thought. So although his session was still shorter than the others,it was longer than expected. However, all Jo knew about that at the time was that Summers was 15 min late, so that from his standpoint this session would last only 45 min altogether. So it was good of Jo to stick to the original plan and keep it short, and negligent of me not to inform him that Summers could in fact stay longer. I simply didn’t think of doing that at that moment. Mea culpa.

2. On the subject of Summers’s “waltzing in:” Of course, he came because I invited him, not because he forced himself upon this event. And I think he deserves a lot of credit for that. How many people in functions like his engage with philosophers? The problem is that all too often people with actual real-life decision power (and it’s far from clear that his days in that category are over) often engage on value questions with so-called public intellectuals, or opiniated clergy and journalists, rather than philosophers. And to a large extent that is our (the philosophers’ fault) because we are not holding up our own in public debates about value questions. So unless we just want to cede these matters to those types, I think we need to cultivate exchanges with people like Larry Summers, but then also acknowledge that they have different intellectual backgrounds, and, well, personality features than the typical philosopher.

And then there is the Summers type where he depicts what he claims to be a real policy dilemma, but described as if the parameters and options are known with certainty. Here the response ‘can you really be sure things are like that?’ seems to me perfectly appropriate. In fact it seems to me that it is those who neglect to ask it who should get no marks.

But the answer has to be: “no, of course I can’t be sure, but that is how it seems to be after responsible reflection on the best evidence I have available to me in the limited time I ahve to make up my mind”. So, in the context of this conference of course that is an appropriate question to ask, but as a philosophical advisor to a policymaker one has to assume that the policymaker has a good grasp of the situation. Bad policymakers distinguish themselves, among other things, by not having a good grasp of the situation, but there is nothing in our training or expertise that equips us to process the relevant information, much of which cannot be made explicit in the timeframe available but depends on tacit knowledge developed through longterm and intensive engagement in the relevant policy environment.

I’m not defending Summers here, or criticising Jo whose presentation of what he did sounds fine (in what anyone would have found an annoying situation). But “can you be sure its like that?” doesn’t seem the right question.

Purportedly real-world cases are sometimes presented in ways that artificially narrow the range of options available. This may be one complaint that Jo was making. But there’s a different, though related criticism. Sometimes there is no general solution in the terms that a dilemma is presented. For example, Summers presented a case in which (basically – I don’t have notes on the precise details) we have to choose whether to adopt a policy that will result in 10,000 people becoming unemployed but 100 million saving 50 cents each. I just don’t think there is a general answer to these kinds of questions without specifying much more detail. I would want to know (among much else): What else is going on in the economy? How hard would it be for those 10,000 to find other work? Would they be geographically concentrated? Would they lose their health insurance? Are retraining programs available? What are the medium- to long-range prospects for their industry if the policy is not adopted? What would the likely results of the 50 cent savings be for the rest of the economy – greater tax revenues, higher savings, more demand in other areas? Answering these questions might open up different possibilities that were not previously considered. On the other hand, they might not. There really are hard choices that involve trade-offs that don’t go away. Still, the answers to these questions are relevant for determining how the trade-offs should be made in particular cases. There is no general formula to answer the questions in the terms they were originally presented.

I wouldn’t quite put the point as strongly as David does (#13). But there certainly were moments when that description seemed to fit. Specifically, Summers’s reference to the letter from Harvard faculty concerning antiretroviral medication. It really seemed that he was trying to settle old scores – it was just very out of place and he didn’t say enough about the case for it to be useful. (I don’t know the history of this letter, but there is obviously a lot of baggage.)

In reply to a question, Summers said that for many of the policy people in the Clinton White House (he was clear: not all), there was a self-conscious commitment to trying to figure out what was the right thing to do, and then see how much of that they could achieve politically. I must say, I more-or-less tend to believe him. But that made his reference to the faculty letter seem especially odd. Here was a constituency exerting pressure in the direction that they believed to be correct. He just seemed full of resentment toward the very idea that that they would have the gall to try to influence his decision. Like I said, there must be more going on here that I don’t understand.

To be clear: Kirk didn’t cheat. He changed the conditions of the test.

Okay, but just for kicks, would your grading be different if he explained that, in his judgement, the sincere but futile act* of trying to save all of the lives and failing was one he could better live with, compared to the feasible act of choice that deliberately saves some lives by taking another? I mean, if the student tried to make the argument, and it wasn’t ridiculous, then that seems worthy of consideration as a valid answer on a first-year philosophy exam, yes?**
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• Perhaps the student would argue for flicking the switch back and forth frantically in an attempt to derail the train before the point of either impact? Of course the scenario could be framed to hypothesize a perfectly discrete, error free switching mechanism with instantaneous and similarly discrete effect, admitting no intermediate states; and the flawless design and functioning of this superswitch the hapless student has no reason to doubt. Or perhaps the switch is such that, improbably, it can only be flipped once, or is so heavy and cumbersome (but nonetheless perfectly discrete in its two states and the corresponding two states of the track switch) that only one switching is feasible given the trolley speed and location. If the hypothetical were this painstakingly well-specified, then the answer I outline above would be mere avoidance. I’ve sometimes wondered whether there’s somewhere waiting to be discovered an existence proof, one way or another, about whether or not a thought experiment can ever be fully specified in the sense of excluding reasonable “outs” relying on some imperfection in one of the relevant mechanisms of the experiment. Is there a finite, fully specified example in action theory, or do they all admit of cascading “but what if …” assaults on assumptions which require an endless number of tweaks?

** Of course, if the student made something like this argument, it’s hard to see how he could avoid discussing arguments about utilitarianism, and about the ‘causing versus letting happen’ distinction that you’d no doubt have them read, and then I suppose he’d be engaging with the readings this question is testing him about, and there wouldn’t be an issue at all.

Very interesting discussion. The “Amy-like fashion” referred to here is, obviously, not a philosophical approach to moral problem-solving, but a (not entirely uncontroversial) experimental finding about how some young kids actually approached a moral dilemma.

It seems obvious to me that professional philosophers and theorists who either raise Amy-like behaviour for discussion, or even adopt it themselves, may well “get it,” but they may simply not find “it” very interesting or helpful. They may be wrong, of course, but we shouldn’t confuse their contempt for ignorance and incompetence!

More seriously, Mike and Tom: do you think that how we reason through moral dilemmas in real life should follow at least the structure (and perhaps at least some of the substance) of how professional moral and legal theorists analyse the same dilemmas? Do moral and legal theory offer for moral problem-solving something akin to what some (hopeful) Bayesians believe probabilism offers for thinking about choice under uncertainty?

And even if actual problem-solvers aren’t getting it and instead resist the assumptions of a hypothetical they’re confronted with, is there something valuable for moral and legal arguments in studying how people actually approach moral dilemmas, and how their solutions tend to perform on a range of plausible measures?

I note that Jo seems to be using the Gilligan findings at least in part to suggest that the model of moral reasoning suggested by prevalent moral-philosophical and legal-theoretic exercises isn’t the only game in town as a model of how people might fruitfully approach actual moral dilemmas (there’s a very rough analogy here with how some findings in evolutionary game theory may temper worries about violations of subjective expected utility, i.e. sometimes people systematically violate independence or modular rationality, but in some contexts that’s not so bad, and may even work out pretty well).