Laugh if you like, but death on the tracks is funny

by John Holbo on November 30, 2013

Every year or so we make jokes about trolleys. As an accomplished cartoonist of the subject, and a professional philosopher, I should probably weigh in to set you all straight. How not?

I really said it all (and more!) in this old post about Occam’s Phaser. Do not multiply zap-guns beyond necessity!

Philosophers aren’t bloodthirsty autists, you silly people. They are mildly whimsical. But that’s important. The genre of the analytic philosophy (Anglo-American, call it what you like) thought-experiment is a mildly humoristic one, in that it tends to Rube Goldbergism. Of course the point is always to solve for variables! You never tie another victim to the tracks, or fatten one up, for any other reason than that he/she is strictly needed in that place or shape. Nevertheless, the more outlandish the set-up gets, the funnier it gets. And I think it’s fair to say that philosophers quietly award themselves style points for (plausibly deniable!) whimsy, above and beyond conceptual substance.

The problem with that, I should think, is that mirth is an emotion that may affect our moral thinking. Specifically, it makes us more utilitarian. See this more recent article as well [sorry, Elsevier paywall]. The trolley scenarios are, or may be, used as intuition pumps for utilitarian purposes. (They may be used for other things, of course.) But it is an underdiscussed fact that they may inherently do so, in part, because trolley tragedies can’t help being a bit funny.

UPDATE: for those who can’t read the experiments, basically watching comedy clips makes you more utilitarian. But the experimenters don’t seem to have considered that the trolley cases themselves are short comedy clips, of a mild sort. I should publish this important finding of mine. Seriously. It’s actually important to think about.

{ 47 comments }

1

SoU 11.30.13 at 7:57 am

so… who, in your opinion, has the most style points? and don’t say Belle at the other thread because i think she was being ironic.

2

John Holbo 11.30.13 at 8:25 am

It’s important that no one gets too many style points, because if you ever got more style points than substance points, the gig would be up. No one ever gets more than 1 style point – 2 at very most. So no one’s thought-experiments immediately spring to mind as the most stylish. But lots of people’s examples get 1 or 2 points for whimsy, without that ever actually appearing on the scoreboard.

3

Ed Herdman 11.30.13 at 8:28 am

In the previous thread John Quiggin kindly dug up a link for me from his blog detailing some criticism of a thought experiment by Matthew Yglesias which seems relevant – here: johnquiggin.com/2003/05/29/economists-v-philosophers-round-v/#more-1427

Is there a way to move beyond “analytic” moral philosophy to a more nearly empirical philosophy? Doing a virtual reality simulation of any event we wish to study, or even some kind of direct analysis of the brain, doesn’t seem to me likely to actually move beyond the basic methodological fault; you still can’t control the causal path towards the response – is it the person’s moral intuition being studied, or is it the intuition shaped by the experiment design? Perhaps the common terminology about “priming intuitions” should arouse some suspicion. Even in the case of the deep brain scan and stimulation there is the apparent implication that we are supposed to feel favorably towards some kind of response – perhaps the classic natural fallacy. This is not to say that finding those intuitions is not helpful; should we attempt to use a calculus comparing whether it is better to have thought experiments favoring utilitarianism, or remain less informed about what peoples’ intuitons are? (I hope this is a false choice.)

With Matt Yglesias’ experiment (linked above), I have two normal responses:
– This is a precise way of finding out exactly what happens in that case. But why should anybody accept that treatment of the newly bereaved and the memory of the deceased? In the case the actual event is unfolding, most of us should probably protest and prevent the experiment from being carried out. If it does happen and I am not a party to it, then it may simply not be any of my business, but surely still the calculus depends not at all on the circumstances. It seems that the intent of the piece is just to ask whether and how a person will choose a bet arranged by somebody else for them, when their incentives are slightly different than usual, in which case:
– This is a potentially really imprecise way of trying to find out what people will do because attention (and sympathy) is being spent on a human story which is supposed to be irrelevant to the original problem. How is it acceptable that the human story should be irrelevant? But could this balloon into a too-large constraint on deploying thought problems – should we disfavor all problems which are associated with casinos because of the association of casinos with exploitation (even when the management isn’t torturing new widows)?

One tension there, I think, is between precision and trying to motivate people.

With the original trolley problem, however, I feel we’re back to the question “what would be appropriate to discover intuitions without trying out some strange combinations of problems to try and tease out the various responses?” Some of the responses people seem (in light of the previous discussion about the tendency of the problems) to have to the perception of right conduct change based on factors that seem unpredictable – so for a specific aim in moral philosophy (or moral psychology) this process might be more or less unavoidable.

It is interesting to note that one of the original “moral dilemma problems” (which I am aware of) that seems to directly anticipate the modern lineage appears intended to represent a more everyday type of dilemma – the Heinz dilemma – but it still has as a motivator the probability of Heinz’s wife dying.

Perhaps all this misses another point. It would be nice to have empirical evidence about human interactions, but where does it fit back into the human process? Maybe a better question is whether trolley problems (and the like) are an appropriate way of preparing for the possibility of real dilemmas, or judging people who have faced real dilemmas. Surely people who find themselves in tragic situations should be afforded some degree of acceptance if their actions in a tragedy were not informed by calculation or even by careful consideration of how they acted beforehand. It also seems jarring if there is an implication that the broad tendency of professionals or “experts” (in the case a court might find one to be an expert) to be held to a higher standard while others can be excused even given the reasonable expectation that those others might have prepared just as the professional did.

4

bill benzon 11.30.13 at 10:10 am

And I suppose that’s the trouble of the Chuck Jones of the Road Runner cartoons. While there’s a certain elegance in reducing your cast of characters to two, and only two, Road Runner and Wile Coyote, and even more elegance in all but eliminating dialog – though one always has the opportunity to read the Acme label on whatever contrivance the coyote puts together – in the end, there’s more style here than substance. So Chuck Jones is merely are cartoonist while the trolley people are merely philosophers.

Where do we find someone with both style and substance in equal measure? Borges? Calvino?

5

Adam Roberts 11.30.13 at 10:50 am

Might there be a more fundamental issue here? The case can surely be made that that Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment bias that philosophy is a matter either inherently serious (big questions, human dignity, Kant/Hegel/Heidegger) or actively gloomy (Schopenhauer, Sartre) — that maybe this whole tradition was a blip. Plato’s dialogues are often charming and even funny, aren’t they? Maybe Kierkegaard isn’t the outlier; maybe he’s bang on the line of the main tradition. Maybe the truth at the heart of things is comic, rather than tragic or serious or ‘scientific’ or whatever. Pegging a philosopher for ‘whimsy’ is actually just a diminishing, or more actively disobliging, way of saying s/he is talking about ‘irony’, isn’t it?

I’m not sure this is quite what John is saying in his post (something the reverse, in fact); but it’s what occurs to me.

6

Belle Waring 11.30.13 at 11:22 am

It would be nice to have empirical evidence about human interactions, but where does it fit back into the human process? Maybe a better question is whether trolley problems (and the like) are an appropriate way of preparing for the possibility of real dilemmas, or judging people who have faced real dilemmas.

This strikes me as a very curious thing to say, and did as well in the thread below when you compared the analytic philosopher to the EMT running a hypothetical post-accident scenario. No one else I know has ever suggested that people will be concretely made better off by trolley-problem ethics because it will help them do the right thing in a difficult situation. The whimsical element John mentions above is the outward sign of this deep inward non-utility.

Surely people who find themselves in tragic situations should be afforded some degree of acceptance if their actions in a tragedy were not informed by calculation…. It also seems jarring if there is an implication that the broad tendency of professionals or “experts”… to be held to a higher standard while others can be excused even given the reasonable expectation that those others might have prepared just as the professional did.

Again, I am baffled. We will extend charitable acceptance to people who may have done the wrong thing in a tragic situation, provided that they never gave the matter any thought until the tragedy arose? Separate from whom we now turn our attention to a class of professional…ethicists, who will have known what to do…but, then again, we will reflect that the ordinary man might have done better to make himself an ethical expert before he set out to become a…person who…works at railroads? Confronts dilemmas? I am not pretending not to understand you for comic effect. I genuinely don’t understand you, but am also milking the situation slightly for comic effect. I am not trying to be an asshole (naturally it doesn’t follow, usw)

As far as I am concerned, we are talking about an arcane class of analogies which may obscure more than they illuminate, so perhaps they should be taken out of use (I think this is naturally happening anyway.) Should philosophers who study ethics endeavor to discover what is right, and to convince others of their views, and ultimately perform right actions? Yes, but this is not what “trolley-problems” as a name, refers to. That thing is more like…um…philosophy, really, I guess we would call it?

7

Belle Waring 11.30.13 at 11:25 am

Adam: I do think that’s right also. Nietzsche is another hilarious philosopher. (That sounds…off, but it’s true.) GAY! SCIENCE! It has poems and songs and everything.

8

bill benzon 11.30.13 at 12:32 pm

I loved my Nietzsche back in the day, and I did like all those poems and songs, but I’ll be he was a gloomy Gus in conversation. It’s like I remember reading Hesse’s Steppenwolf with all the talk about laughter as good philosophy, or something like that, but not a single laugh line in the whole book.

9

Bruce Baugh 11.30.13 at 2:24 pm

Whimsy generally strikes me as a failed humor state, but then I prefer both kindly shared good-natured enjoyment and nihilistic black comedy to whimsy; I don’t like Lewis Carroll’s work either, and never did. (I was happy when I encountered Ray Bradbury’s remarks on preferring Oz to Wonderland because so many people are just so pointlessly mean in the latter.)

I was fascinated when I first encountered studies showing how much worse people are at multitasking than they’re likely to believe they are, and then when I encountered things like Dunning and Krueger’s research, I started wondering just how much of life falls into this kind of self-deception. Admitting my bias above, I’ve often wondered just how much satire and whimsy is similarly based on an altogether misleading self-assessment and lack of insight into how some or all of the audience is taking it.

10

dsquared 11.30.13 at 3:43 pm

My problem with trolley examples is that “solving for a variable” is actually the initial mistake from which all the others follow (or as Wittgenstein would say, the first move in the conjuring trick). If morality were like mathematics, in which valid schemata could be built up lemma by lemma, or if situations were really common in which there was one and only one morally relevant decision to make, or if we usually had certain knowledge about the consequences of our actions, then dealing with fictitious problems in which all irrelevant details had been abstracted away would be an intellectually productive exercise. In fact, there are hardly any such situations – it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that there are no morally irrelevant details – and so I think that the whole enterprise of trying to do moral philosophy in this way is a massive dead end, probably of negative pedagogical value. Ceteris paribus is not a good way of reasoning outside of economics and probably heavily overused even there.

11

nnyhav 11.30.13 at 3:59 pm

I think Pynchon’s Proverbs for Paranoids apply:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

12

Alison P 11.30.13 at 4:06 pm

We don’t live in a universe where we can know the consequences of our actions in advance. We aren’t even close. If we could know this, and if somehow this intellectual certainty was coupled with an emotional response which was misaligned and uncertain, then a ruthless ability to make hard choices against sentiment, love and mercy might be at the centre of morality. Being hard-hearted would be vindicated.

Hard-hearted people have a lot of power in our society. And in turn I think that’s why philosophers dwell so much on an imaginary world where the hard-hearted are vindicated. Why they talk about that world more than this one we actually live in.

13

PJW 11.30.13 at 4:30 pm

14

AJ 11.30.13 at 4:39 pm

A few comments:

1. Virtually any idea in philosophy -can- be made part of a comedic situation (one could, for instance, take Monty Python’s football playing philosophers and adapt that sketch).

2. An idea being presented for comedic effect may not in itself change anything about the core idea itself.

3. The trolley problems can be used to motivate the idea of human ‘irrationality’. Philosophical thought experiments are seldom, in themselves, sufficiently powerful as to lead to real world implications. One needs some empirical social science for that .

15

Substance McGravitas 11.30.13 at 4:44 pm

and so I think that the whole enterprise of trying to do moral philosophy in this way is a massive dead end

How do you make laws without some sort of trolleyfication?

16

Jim Buck 11.30.13 at 6:20 pm

…the ordinary man might have done better to make himself an ethical expert before he set out to become a…person who…works at railroads?

Ken Loach’s movie Navigators presents a group of rail workers with an ethical dilemma, involving a runaway trolley (of sorts). A former British Rail maintenance gang, has been put into the hands of private contractors. Safety procedures, which prevented the real-life emergence of those cartoonish trolley scenarios, have been stripped away: no detonators, strapped to the rails, to explode with a bang– as that trolley approaches; no Look-Out, stationed on the line ahead, to blow horn, and wave flag. And so, one of the rude mechanicals is hit by a train. The ethical dilemma, presented to the remainder of the gang is:

1) Do they summon an ambulance to attend to the badly injured man, in situ? Where it will be obvious that they have been disregarding safety regulations? If they do that, their employer may lose the contract, and they may lose their jobs.

2) Do they move the victim to a situation which supports a narrative of him having chosen to flout safety procedure, without any culpability attaching to anyone else?

lol!

17

Andrew F. 11.30.13 at 6:22 pm

If morality were like mathematics, in which valid schemata could be built up lemma by lemma, or if situations were really common in which there was one and only one morally relevant decision to make, or if we usually had certain knowledge about the consequences of our actions, then dealing with fictitious problems in which all irrelevant details had been abstracted away would be an intellectually productive exercise. In fact, there are hardly any such situations – it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that there are no morally irrelevant details – and so I think that the whole enterprise of trying to do moral philosophy in this way is a massive dead end, probably of negative pedagogical value.

Well, the use of trolley problems doesn’t imply that one adheres to any particular metaethical position. One could use trolley problems to argue that our answers to substantive ethical questions are irredeemably inconsistent in some cases, for example – and if one do so effectively, that would be an extremely productive intellectual exercise.

But I also need not believe that a substantive ethical system can be built like a mathematical system to find use in hypothetical problems. Do we think moral judgments should be logically consistent? That is, if I claim that characteristics x, y, z, justify action A, and then I’m presented with a different situation containing characteristics x, y, z, but I decide instead that action A would here NOT be justified, then either I need to jettison logical consistency or I need to elaborate my original explanation.

In either case, you’ve arguably obtained a greater awareness of why action A may (or may not) be justified in your view – at the least you’ve obtained a richer explanation. To give one example of hypotheticals being useful in moral philosophy, many readers certainly walk away from a reading of Thomson’s article on abortion with a richer understanding of some of the moral issues. Moreover, to grab an example from another field, hypotheticals are commonly used in law to test understanding of a particular set of rules, and to good effect.

And even while valuing logical consistency, I may also concede that moral judgments may involve variables beyond my current awareness, or may incorporate variables that can differ in value depending on non-moral factors. I leave myself open to the possibility of surprise and revision.

If you want to argue more extremely that hypotheticals are nearly impossible because almost every detail is morally relevant, and so to vary any detail results in a situation that also varies in a morally significant way, then you’re still left with explaining why certain details are morally significant and how those details are morally significant. And what better way to build up such an incredibly rich ethical system than by beginning with hypotheticals alike in some ways, but not in other ways, and then explaining why the differences lead to different judgments? For example, let’s say there were a trolley car…

18

Jim Buck 11.30.13 at 7:24 pm

let’s say there were a trolley car…

In the domain of real trolley cars, contingencies have usually been iterated–and regulated for. And so, rail workers–instead of behaving like hypothetical fodder–should have been trained to lie down flat, in the four-foot, as that trolley is diverted towards them.

Why not talk about the ethical dilemmas of drone technology, instead of revisiting Perils of Pauline?

19

Anon 11.30.13 at 7:29 pm

Holbo, is “whimsy” really the right word here? Yes, there’s philosophical humor in finding a relatively arbitrary right shaped piece to fit in the right place. But doesn’t whimsy, in contrast, have a certain who-gives-a-damn-if-it-fits-ness?

Funny people are often unwhimsical. There’s a deep connection between humor and philosophy, but it tends to be of the stand up comedian variety: at bottom very serious, very critical, and often a little angry. Humor cuts, whimsy doesn’t.

For example, Belle Waring @7,

Isn’t Nietzsche most whimsical at his unfunniest, and most funny at his least whimsical? The poems and songs are counterevidence to the perfectly true claim that Nietzsche is hilarious.

I wonder: who are good examples of the whimsical? Are any of them philosophers? Sample quotes?

20

Rakesh Bhandari 11.30.13 at 7:38 pm

What about the zany? Sianne Ngai:
“I’ve got a more specific reading of post-Fordist or contemporary zaniness, which is that it is an aesthetic explicitly about the politically ambiguous convergence of cultural and occupational performance, or playing and laboring, under what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the new “connexionist” spirit of capitalism. As perhaps exemplified best by the maniacal frivolity of the characters played by Ball in I Love Lucy, Richard Pryor in The Toy, and Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy, the zany more specifically evokes the performance of affective labor—the production of affects and relationships—as it comes to increasingly trouble the very distinction between work and play. This explains why this ludic aesthetic has a noticeably unfun or stressed-out layer to it. Contemporary zaniness is not just an aesthetic about play but about work, and also about precarity, which is why the threat of injury is always hovering about it.”

21

Anon 11.30.13 at 7:50 pm

Rakesh @20
“the zany…comes to increasingly trouble the very distinction between work and play”

That sounds about right, which is why I’d put the zany–or screwball comedy–between the funny and the whimsical. Screwball comedy shares a certain indifference to any criteria or sense of rightness, in this way bordering on the playful and unserious, but it shares a critical edge with funniness, which always laughs at someone or something’s expense. The zany maybe even goes over the critical edge into a no-to-everything absurdity, or destructiveness for destructiveness’ sake (Harpo Marx, e.g.).

22

Ed Herdman 11.30.13 at 8:15 pm

@ Belle Waring:
>No one else I know has ever suggested that people will be concretely made better off by trolley-problem ethics because it will help them do the right thing in a difficult situation.
“Concretely better off” is actually a nebulous standard, especially if we judge it by selecting our favorite ethical system to judge success, or just the standard of “not utilitarian.” John Holbo’s arguments against the utilitarian biasing of trolley problems suggests the point that looking at the problem through other means will be biased also – so Kohlberg gets the feminist critique, and studying the -isms by themselves forces the student of ethics into a paradigm where they choose an ethics and reject the others, getting a clearly labeled, biased system. I view the comment as informative (know what the trolley problem militates towards) but not necessarily fatal. The bias itself isn’t what I feel is problematic – rather I think the premature closure of some choices in modeling ethical thought is. I think the tendency of the trolley problem to promote looking at ethical problems in a more situational way, rather than dogmatic one, is still promising, even if trolley problems themselves have tended towards over-specificity (arguably just a matter of degree). Critiquing the trolley problem’s chances of being successfully generalized seems to be along the exact same lines as the general critique of utilitarianism, so the real question here is whether the rather modest aim of the average trolley-slinging philosopher to gain insights about human behavior should influence any system we use – and of course it need not just militate towards utilitarianism. Insofar as the trolley problem accidentally promotes a framework, we’re still back to the question of whether it is better to try to study problems in ignorance respective to an arena of human reactions.

>>Surely people who find themselves in tragic situations should be afforded some degree of acceptance if their actions in a tragedy were not informed by calculation…. It also seems jarring if there is an implication that the broad tendency of professionals or “experts”… to be held to a higher standard while others can be excused even given the reasonable expectation that those others might have prepared just as the professional did.

>Again, I am baffled. We will extend charitable acceptance to people who may have done the wrong thing in a tragic situation, provided that they never gave the matter any thought until the tragedy arose? Separate from whom we now turn our attention to a class of professional…ethicists, who will have known what to do…but, then again, we will reflect that the ordinary man might have done better to make himself an ethical expert before he set out to become a…person who…works at railroads? Confronts dilemmas? I am not pretending not to understand you for comic effect. I genuinely don’t understand you, but am also milking the situation slightly for comic effect. I am not trying to be an asshole (naturally it doesn’t follow, usw)

I don’t resent this at all; it is a strange comment! So here I am trying to explicate what I think is possibly a bad potential outcome of not just trolley problems but also more generally of the project of rational premeditation of ethical conduct to inform judgement in any case where “ethical expertise” is defined in a way that is uncharitable towards the person in the arena of life. Perhaps the problem disappears if we agree (as we probably do) not to strictly use one system or another – I agree it’d be simply baffling to imagine that I would want to push towards absolute ethical relativism or some other non-starter.

>As far as I am concerned, we are talking about an arcane class of analogies which may obscure more than they illuminate, so perhaps they should be taken out of use (I think this is naturally happening anyway.) Should philosophers who study ethics endeavor to discover what is right, and to convince others of their views, and ultimately perform right actions? Yes, but this is not what “trolley-problems” as a name, refers to.

From the beginning of my association with trolley problems, and the project of moral psychology more generally, I was struck by the feeling that there is some way in which that project seems unlikely to shift gears from the naturalistic fallacy – but my point here is mainly that perhaps this isn’t impossible. I am definitely agreed that taking the trolley problem itself as the model of rational decision-making is unwise given that was not its intention at the beginning – this is still distinct from the question of whether we still do have to learn about moral intuitions in different circumstances (as others have averred, a thing probably useful in itself, i.e. when deciding how to recreate and even pass judgment on somebody else’s likely pattern of thought in the case of a past tragedy).

@ Andrew F:
>If you want to argue more extremely that hypotheticals are nearly impossible
I think it’s obvious that the way we grasp the world demands routine construction of hypotheticals, even if we do not understand them as such – the process of human perception being unable to obtain immediate experience of many things.

23

Jane 11.30.13 at 10:53 pm

“basically watching comedy clips makes you more utilitarian”

Given that if someone is made an object of ridicule it’s easier to treat them with less humanity, to a layman, it doesn’t seem surprising that people who are already in a good mood would make a utilitarian choice when faced with a fresh, slightly comedic situation. Is it because we’re less inclined to imagine bad outcomes when we’re in a good mood? Less inclined to see the harm in our choice? Or is it because, if we feel good about ourselves, we think we can do no wrong?

I think putting a ‘fat man’ on the footbridge is more cynical than whimsical; philosopher’s tend to know human nature better than most and probably count on it when devising their tests. How many people would throw a thin man off the bridge or themselves when both choices would also be right, from a utilitarian perspective.

24

Metatone 12.01.13 at 12:06 am

I think toy problems always tend to be largely loved inside a discipline and seen as rather annoying exercises, full of sleight of hand and likely to mislead by those outside a discipline.

This holds true, in my experience for: philosophy, economics, physics, maths and even chemistry to some degree. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true in other fields as well…

The unfortunate part is that toy problems are often useful for teaching people who aspire to mastery in a field, because they help put in place building blocks of thinking that they can then use in a different way later on. Unfortunately, for those out of the field, the toy problems often end up instituting some bad assumptions, which don’t get corrected because they go off to do what ever it is that is their field and so don’t get involved in the education that takes the building blocks and fixes them up.

(Of course, one may note that in economics the fixing up of the building blocks never really got instituted and that is a big part of current issues inside the profession.)

As for the trolleys in particular: like so many teaching devices, their use-value depends on the qualities of the teacher using them… (and it should be admitted, to some degree the qualities of the student being taught.)

25

Belle Waring 12.01.13 at 2:15 am

The objection that the songs and poems in the Gay Science are the least funny things ever is a totally valid one. It is the Hesse “let’s stipulate that everyone’s laughing a lot ha ha ha” but nothing funny is happening. Humor is not stage directions. I was just super-tired. Allow me to change my plea to: Nietzsche is so hilarious! GAY! SCIENCE! Minus the songs! And poems!

26

QS 12.01.13 at 2:41 am

Isn’t Nietzsche most whimsical at his unfunniest, and most funny at his least whimsical?

Precisely right. There’s nothing funnier than Nietzsche howling about “bad air.”

27

John Holbo 12.01.13 at 3:04 am

“it doesn’t seem surprising that people who are already in a good mood would make a utilitarian choice when faced with a fresh, slightly comedic situation.”

I probably should have clarified this. The second set of experiments separated out mirth from a more general ‘elevation’ – which often actually has the opposite effect. Feeling good can make you feel exalte, hence more likely to say anti-utilitarian things like ‘let justice be done, though the heavens fall’. Mirth, by contrast, makes you utilitarian. Apparently.

“I think putting a ‘fat man’ on the footbridge is more cynical than whimsical; philosopher’s tend to know human nature better than most and probably count on it when devising their tests.”

Are you proposing that philosophers have intentionally tainted the experiment with irrelevant anti-fat sentiment, to bolster general public support for utilitarianism? That would be fiendish, I grant. But I don’t think that’s what really happened.

It’s exactly right that a lot of the places where Nietzsche is trying to be funny, he is utterly unfunny. And he is at his funniest when he’s telling a long, not obviously funny shaggy dog story. “Thus Spake Zarathustra” is just a shaggy dog story. See also: the arc of his whole philosophy. That whole hugged-a-donkey episode was just comic set-up, for example. The same goes for Hesse. “The Glass-Bead Game” is incredibly funny, overall. But Hesse’s frequent stipulations of hilarity are exasperating stage-directions, yes. You can’t give the audience stage-directions, as if they were providing canned laughter for a sit-com. It doesn’t work.

28

Sherman Dorn (Tampa) 12.01.13 at 3:43 am

I used a sort-of trolley-like example this semester in my history of childhood course. I’m not exactly how we got there, but the students had moved from Viviana Zelizer’s discussion of the changing value of children to a reductionist “there should be a law” view of morality, and I pointed out that legal consequences in the U.S. are determined at least in part by luck, or rather I told two stories that forced them to confront that (I get blitzed, start driving 80 mph, and am immediately stopped by a local cop; second case, I make the same decisions, except I hit a pedestrian before a cop can stop me).

In this case, I don’t think “intuition pump” is the right term. When alcohol’s involved, it should be intuition siphon.

29

AJ 12.01.13 at 4:00 am

> I think toy problems always tend to be largely loved inside a discipline and
> seen as rather annoying exercises, full of sleight of hand and likely to mislead by
> those outside a discipline.
Absolutely.

In many ways, I find a lot of (most?) economics problems (and the corresponding solutions) to be toy problems. Take, for instance, Gary Becker’s puzzlement at the fact that unemployment rate in the United States high -concurrent- with there being a lot of open positions. No one but an idiot economist would have any trouble understanding what is going on.

The only reason it is even a puzzle for Becker is that he insists it on viewing it in terms of economic models of supply and demand. Well, if there is a demand for X, then supply for X should increase. This works if you are selling potatoes. Unfortunately, human capital does not work like potatoes.

Gary Becker – Dumb, dumb, dumb,

30

Jane 12.01.13 at 2:20 pm

John, thanks for the clarification of the experiments aims.

31

Anon 12.01.13 at 2:35 pm

There’s one part of Nietzsche’s songs I do find really funny, the title: Songs of Prince Vogelfrei. Skynard!

Not Jonathan Livingstone Seagull funny, but funny.

32

John Holbo 12.01.13 at 2:47 pm

Anon, probably you know this but I didn’t when I first read Nietzsche. Vogelfrei means free bird but, by extension, outlaw. From Wikipedia:

“As you have been lawfully judged and banished for murder, so I remove your body and good from the state of peace and and rule them strifed and proclaim you free of any redemption and rights and I proclaim you as free as the birds in the air and the beasts in the forest and the fish in the water, and you shall not have peace nor company on any road or by any ruling of the emperor or king.; … ”

Not that Skynard wouldn’t have thought that was seven kinds of awesome and appropriate, so lift your lighter high, dude. But really Prince Outlaw is a better translation than Prince Freebird, perhaps.

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Anon 12.01.13 at 4:17 pm

Didn’t know that, thanks! Prince outlaw seems appropriate, but since Nietzsche loves all that seafaring, out on the water, lost horizons, free, free spirits imagery, I think it would lose too much. Probably best untranslated.

Also, Vogelfrei is funny because it doesn’t sound in the least like what it’s supposed to evoke. It’s not soaring or graceful or light. It sounds like some sort of awful battered food. Or the sound you make when you choke on it.

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Anon 12.01.13 at 4:32 pm

Belle @25,

Hope I didn’t seem too nitpicky or contrary for contrary’s sake. I thought it was relevant since Nietzsche is a good example of how philosophical humor often lacks whimsy.

I still think it’s important that philosophers–despite being funny–are maybe less whimsical than most, or maybe their unique kind of humor is. It might tell us something about about how philosophy is funny ha ha, and how it’s also funny but not ha ha funny, and how it’s also just not funny at all–all at the same time.

Comedy and tragedy at the same time, as Socrates said, I think? Or tragedy minus time?

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bianca steele 12.01.13 at 4:50 pm

Death on the tracks
Ain’t no big surprise
Can’t stop the train
Less’n the creek’s gonna rise
Five people gone
Unless it’s one, and he’s fat . . .

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bob mcmanus 12.01.13 at 8:59 pm

<blockquote<Gossip performs an important function in the moral realm. In Moralities of EverydayLife, John Sabini and Maury Silver contend that "gossip brings ethics home by introduc­ing abstract morality to the mundane . Moral norms are abstract . To decide whether some particular, concrete , unanalyzed action is forbidden, tolerated , encouraged , or re­quired, principles must be applied to the case." Gossip provides a setting in which individuals, in concert with others , are able to understand their moral principles and practical (i. e. , prudential) guidelines by connecting them to concrete situations and characters . Through gossip , that is , one comes to realize the extent of abstract moral rules on one hand, abstract views of the vices and virtues, on the other, through a conversation over cases . Gossiping enables us to articulate abstract moral and practical views in detail , thereby, in a sense , helping us to discover our moral perceptions at the same time that we commit ourselves to them. Soaps , because they prompt gossip , also promote this social process , and that is a large part of their attraction . …Noel Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image

No, Zimmerman/Martin or the travails of Breitbart are not gossip, which requires both empathy and judgement. We must care about the subjects of gossip. Why is there such a dearth of gossip in the big blogosphere, which is really how our moral calculators are developed? Why do we prefer trolley problems and political analysis?

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stringph 12.01.13 at 10:08 pm

I always thought trolley problems were a branch of epistemology. You are told, or are supposed to know, that if you pushed the fat man off the bridge, his mass would absorb the trolley’s momentum to the point where the 5 other people would survive .. now how would anyone be in a position to have that knowledge?

It’s hard to put together an epistemologically reasonable trolley problem without positing a whole suite of repeated experiments where someone is either killed (either once or repeatedly;) or subjected to the risk of severe injury by whatever threat is to be the motor of the problem, so that you can be sufficiently sure of what the consequences of any given choice will be. In other words, without being a psychopath.

As pointed out obliquely in the NYT book review, this sort of repeated exposure to deadly risk more or less only happens in wartime, hence the real examples of deciding about bombing-here-vs-bombing-there or bombing-vs-not-bombing.

If someone gives you a trolley problem in peacetime then the correct response is almost always ‘do nothing and hope for the best’ because you don’t know much about trolley mechanisms or the physics of fat people, but you do know things are usually set up not to kill innocent bystanders if at all possible.

The correct answer of the original (‘Spur’) trolley problem is also ‘do nothing’ because there has to be a reason why one track has 5 ‘victims’ on it while the other just has 1; obviously the evil genius who put the plan together (could such a situation exist in the absence of one?) wants you to pull the lever, which could then unleash any combination of unsuspected horrors.

No trolley problem is an island, complete in itself…

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Kaleberg 12.02.13 at 1:38 am

The trolley dilemma seems to have been constructed to get a laugh out of anyone who passed freshman physics. If there is some guy so massive that he can divert a trolley, even if it kills him, how the hell am I going to push him off a bridge? If I’m that strong, maybe I should just jump down and divert the trolley myself, then go buy myself some long underpants and a cape.

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Ed Herdman 12.02.13 at 1:44 am

They don’t teach leverage and centers of mass in freshman physics?

(Yeah I see the implausibility of getting him up and over the railing – unless we stipulate he has a center of mass just above the railing – but come on, let’s have a bit more fun at the expense of the dumb thought experiment!)

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Ed Herdman 12.02.13 at 1:48 am

Also, stringph’s comment reminds me of my response to some people who asked me “what would make you believe in God?” Remember Captain Kirk – “what does God need with a starship?” The potential downsides of being a believer could be much worse than the benefits – sorry, Pascal. On the other hand, is it really worthwhile to paralyze yourself with this kind of calculus beforehand?

stringph’s comment helps us out here, a little – in the context you may have a good guess about whether action or non-action is better, but of course the TP wants to strip that context away.

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Mayson 12.02.13 at 11:47 am

Friend of mine came out of a blackout a few months ago, running full-tilt-boogey on the train tracks in town, with a train headed his way. After a severe bollocking by the train driver, and a beer I bought him to ward off the shakes, he checked into rehab, and hasn’t had a drink since. I still laugh whenever I see him.

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Ian 12.02.13 at 7:38 pm

Care to unpack “bloodthirsty autists” a little more?

I can’t escape the implication that ordinary “autists” (presumably people with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, though this is like calling mentally retarded people “retards”) would be merely indifferent to the suffering of those tied to the tracks, while the bloodythirsty ones would take active pleasure in the spectacle.

The smug offensiveness of this slur (which, incidentally, is medically ungrounded) is doubled by the fact that one of your co-bloggers has a child with ASD. I don’t know if we have a precise term for someone who would write something like this, but “asshole” will do in a pinch.

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AJ 12.04.13 at 2:34 am

> The genre of the analytic philosophy (Anglo-American, call it what you like)
> thought-experiment is a mildly humoristic one, in that it tends to Rube Goldbergism.

While on this topic, it is important to look eastward given CT’s worldwide coverage. The Aam Aadmi Party in India seems to have taken this idea of a mildly humoristic thought experiment a little bit too seriously. In blurring this distinction between the funny and the dead-serious, there is probably no other party’s website that comes even close. Actual lines from their website (http://www.aamaadmiparty.org/page/how-are-we-different):

“Today we give our vote to a candidate, he or she wins the election, and then they disappear from our life. Today most elected representatives make no time to listen to the problems of their constituents. And in the current electoral system, the people have no choice but to suffer this candidate for 5 years. We want to create an alternative. We will enact a Right to Reject law wherein the common man does not have to wait for 5 years to remove a corrupt MLA or MP from office. People can complain to the election commission anytime to recall their representative and call for fresh elections.”

On the first reading, I was, like, that was funny. On the second reading, I was, like, whoa! these guys are serious. A very, very quirky statement of how they are supposedly “different” and what the party actually is. I mean – come on, Aam Aadmi guys. At least pretend to have an economic philosophy.

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Mao Cheng Ji 12.05.13 at 1:47 pm

Not one, but Three Fat Men overthrown! Not by a philosopher, by a gymnast.

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AJtron the Invincible 12.06.13 at 3:02 pm

The Aam Aadmi Party’s “Why we are different” page reads like Arvind Kejriwal or somebody else posted a high school student’s unedited, typo-ridden Polisci essay (mostly consisting of bullet points) by mistake.

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AJtron the Invincible 12.06.13 at 3:03 pm

I mean the “How are we different” page, of course.

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AJtron the Invincible 12.06.13 at 3:17 pm

For clarity – the POV is that AAP does not have an economic philosophy.

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