Experimental Philosophy

I’m deeply skeptical about these sorts of thought experiments if we think they are anything more than a place to start discussion. (That’s not how they are always used by, say, Thompson or Kamm, I think.) That’s becuase they are at least very close to the edge of our normal experience and so close to the edge of where we should expect our intuitions to be a good guide. (The original trolley case is the most plausible, but it’s been through so many variations as to make it almost worthless now, I think.) My skepticism here applies not just to ethics cases but the such tests of our ‘intuitions’ in general. But, in the fat man in the cave case, there is an obvious difference from the fat man on the bridge case, namely that the fat man in the cave is going to die either way, while that’s not so with the fat man on the bridge. In this way the cave case is more like one where people in a life-boat draw straws so as to decide who gets eaten. (It’s not just like that, either, but more so than the fat man on the bridge.) But anyway, my general point is that I don’t think we should much trust our supposed intuitions in cases that are very far outside of our normal experience, and that these cases are at least pretty close to it.

Matt,

I agree that the cases are far from the real world, and intuitions about far out cases are less epistemically valuable than intuitions about close to reality cases. I think what’s really bizarre about the cases is the stipulated epistemic certainty. I think it’s in practice almost always bad to kill the few to save the many because you really don’t know that you will save the many (and that you couldn’t save them any other way), and given that not taking things into your own hands is a good prudential practice. So I don’t think we should read too much into these examples.

But in the cave case, I think it’s meant to be part of the case that Big Jack won’t die. It is stipulated that he won’t drown, and I think it is reasonable to believe he will get rescued. But maybe given the way the case is described, we should assume it’s at least possible he’ll die before the rescuers arrive.

On the other hand, if they paid me enough to lie hooked up to the musician for 9 months, I’d consider the offer.

Possibility 5: a non-trivial proportion of people misread the question, and assumed, as Matt did (and I did too, on first reading) that Big Jack dies either way.

I really liked it.

By not offering up his life the fat guy in the cave makes it clear he isn’t fit to live. (Not really but you get the idea.)

And of course if he offers up his life, well, we have to take it.

Still not very charitable but maybe a bit different if kinda of like 3.

But also, I cannot quite put this in words, but it seems the fat guy on the track(you pull the switch to) and the fat guy in the cave somehow shared in the fate and the danger, while the fat guy on the bridge was just minding his own business. I know, I know, that makes no sense but that is how I feel.

I’ve always been puzzled about how, for example, Thomson’s violinist helps us think about abortion. People frequently have to grapple with the ethical status of a fetus (not only when considering terminating a pregnancy, but also when considering behavior like smoking or drinking that is potentially harmful to fetal health). Nobody, so far as I know, has ever woken up in a hospital and found themselves forcibly attached to a world famous violinist. Why not begin one’s consideration of people’s ethical intuitions by looking at the way they think about actual fetuses rather than imaginary musicians? Or would that be sociology rather than philosophy?

Not only do hard cases make bad law, law makes bad ethics, and the way these examples are set up is far more like law than ethics. All of them are either/or choices, and philosophers should be thinking up new solutions to problems, not conjuring up foolish examples which limit the range of options available.

Look at the progression: trolley- trolley/fat man – fat man/cave, for example.

Trolley offers a clear-cut case and most people agree one way.

Trolley-fat man is a harder case but there’s an obvious third choice: You grab the fat man and say, “if we both jump, we can stop the trolley and save those people, and maybe one of us will survive.” And the fat man, who is as miraculously able to do instantaneous dynamic engineering problems in his head as you perceives exactly what you do and you act together (or are fat people incapable of ethical action in the philosophers’ world?).

Fat man-cave offers the most opportunity for creative, collective action to avoid “certain death”– blasting small holes for breathing; using your fuses which will burn underwater as a light to swim out of the cave, DIGGING.

It’s the refusal to see other options that gets us in trouble:

“oh f—, Iraq/n’s a problem, it must be sanctions or war, then!”

“Geez, we’ve sure got a race relations problem in this country: it’s gotta be forced integration or forced segregation for sure, then”

How stupid do these things sound?

Not to mention the idea that fat people are just objects, not ethical persons, which is still pissing me off.

The point of the Thompson case for abortion is that it concedes the fetus’ right to life, and yet, if her intuitions are correct, allows you to kill it.

I did brooksfoe’s thought experiment to try and gain a better insight I why I chose ‘blow up the fat man in the cave’, and I find I only choose yes as moral if there’s at least one other person trapped in the cave with me (excluding the fat man).

Ummmmm. Differences between ‘killing someone’. ‘letting someone die’, ‘saving yourself’, and ‘saving someone else’ maybe?

Standard trolley is a choice between letting 5 people die and letting 1 person die, or possibly killing 5 people and killing 1 person, depending on how you interpret it. So straight utilitarism wins because your actions toward the 5 people and the 1 person are in the same moral category.

Fat Man on tbe Bridge, is a choice between killing one person and letting five die. Fat Man wins and utilitarism (for my naive and uneducated values of utilitarianism) loses because killing someone is in a different — more serious — moral category to letting someone, even seemingly a fair few someones, die.

For the Cave blocked by Fat Man, It seems I’m putting a ‘saving self+others’ in a moral category that trumps ‘not killing another’, whilst ‘saving others’ alone or ‘saving self’ alone are in categories that don’t. Which I guess is sorta 2, but more weasely. Everyone needs plausible moral deniablity, dontcha know :)

I agree with Matt. Hard cases make bad law. Furthermore, several of these hypothetical cases are so far-fetched and unrealistic that it’s hard to think seriously about them. (Pushing the fat man onto the tracks to stop a trolley car you couldn’t stop yourself isn’t even a funny lapse, it’s bone dumb). And all assume knowledge about the future which we rarely have.

The violinist analogy for abortion is worthless, because fetuses have not been magically implanted in the wombs of innocent bystanders.

Academic ethics as a discipline does much more harm than good, to the extent that it does anything at all other than keep philosophers off the streets.

It seems to be a dogma that academic ethics can only be second order ethics, leaving the ethical world “just as it was”. But there are many real, serious first-order ethical questions. The idea that these should be bracketed out so that pure (meta-) ethics can be developed in abstraction, uncontaminated by unformalized reality, is ridiculous. I fully understand why the solar system has rightly been stripped of its ethical symbolism, but it would seem transparently wrong to ban (first order) ethics from philosophical ethics.

Philosophical ethics is one of the academic disciplines which might conceivably function as a positive ethical force in this world, but this has been forbidden.

Oops. Utilitarianism would favor killing Big Jim anyway. What I should have been arguing against was a deontology system whereby I am supposed to value the lives of others as much as I value my own.

But, somehow, the Cowboy Fireman didn’t make the list of though experiments.

FWIW, the reason I think the two trolly cases differ is because I am not willing to assume perfect information. I think that, in the second case, there’s a much higher chance that I will injure or kill the fat man and still fail to save the people on the track.

I’m not sure how reliable “moral intuitions” are for figuring out the right thing to do, although in practice we have to go on hunches and incomplete information.

And I’m really not sure how good these silly cases are for uncovering moral intuitions.

I do like the polling. I vaguely remember somebody doing a poll of the “correspondence” vs. “coherence” theory of truth. I think 75% of people voted for correspondence …

Unless you are a boy or engaged in sport you are morally obligated to eschew shorts, Richard.

Slightly off topic, anyone who hasn’t read the following piece should do so immediately.
It begins: “On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley….“

David Schmidtz has some very interesting things to say on this subject in this paper on his website: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~schmidtz/manuscripts/SingerUnderFire.doc

One relevant quote:

Wherever I go, whether my audience consists of local students, congressional staffers, or post-Soviet professors, when I present the TROLLEY case and ask them whether they would switch tracks, about ninety percent will say, “there has to be another way!” A philosophy professor’s first reaction is to say, “Please, stay on topic. I’m trying to illustrate a point here! To see the point, you need to decide what to do when there is no other way.” When I said this to my class of post-Soviet professors, though, they spoke briefly among themselves in Russian, then two of them quietly said (as others nodded, every one of them looking me straight in the eye), “Yes, we understand. We have heard this before. All our lives we were told the few must be sacrificed for the sake of many. We were told there is no other way. What we were told was a lie. There was always another way.”
I was speechless, but they were right. The real world does not stipulate that there is no other way. (Have you, or anyone you know, ever been in a situation like TROLLEY, literally needing to kill one to save five? Why not? Have you been unusually lucky?) In any case, I now see more wisdom in the untutored insight that there has to be another way than in what TROLLEY originally was meant to illustrate. As Rawls and Nozick (in different ways) say, justice is about respecting the separateness of persons. We are not to sacrifice one person for the sake of another. If we find ourselves seemingly called upon to sacrifice the few for the sake of the many, justice is about finding another way.”

Unless you are a boy or engaged in sport you are morally obligated to eschew shorts, Richard.

This insight inexorably leads to my moral obligation to move out of the Delaware Valley in the summer.

Hypothesis Four: it is significant that the dilemma arises this way: you spot a hole elsewhere and decide to let “Big Jack” out first (my emphasis). Since my error of judgement created this dilemma, it is up to me to make a decision. In the case of the fat man on the bridge I have no such responsibility.

I’m no philosopher so maybe this is shite, but at least it’s “a more charitable explanation of the voting patterns.”

My, lots of hostility to analytic ethics here, so allow me to be defensive.

‘The Trolley Probem’ and similar sorts of fantastical hypotheticals aren’t, in the first instance, meant to show us what we should do if we ever have the bad luck to find ourselves on runaway trolleys, or hooked up to Ashley MacIsaac (who fellow Canadians know probably needs life support), or whatever. If they were meant to tell us what to do in such situations, they’d be, as everyone points out, pretty stupid.

What they ARE meant to do, and what the best of them succeed at doing, is clarify unnoticed distinctions, or bring to light the implications of a particular moral theory, and so contrast our intuitions with our acceptance of the distinction or the theory. So they allow us, for example, to consider the doctrine of double effect, or the distinction between doing and allowing, or the one between acts and ommissions. They show the consequences of a prohibition on treating people as mere means, as well as of a committment to a thoroughgoing utilitarianism. Plus they give us something to talk about at parties when people ask “and what do you do?”

As for the attack on meta-ethics at 19 above, I’ll just say that, first, second order results have first order implications, and second, if there’s been a ban on first order questions, I never got the memo. Certainly those who write up such hypotheticals don’t see themselves as engaged in meta-ethics.

In the original trolley case, a vast majority thinks it is OK to flip the switch and thereby kill the one in order to save the five. (75.6% say yes.) In the fat man case, where the only way to save the five is to push the fat man off the bridge, only a small minority say it is OK to push the guy and thereby kill the one in order to save the five. (24.43%)

The first thing to note this is that although the group of voters taken collectively has very different opinions about the two cases, it seems opinion is split fairly evenly on whether the cases are alike or unlike. Assuming that only a handful of people say that it is wrong to flick the switch, but right to push the fat man, then only a whisker over 50% of people think the cases are unlike. A lot of philosophical energy goes into explaining just why the cases are unlike, but if this poll is right (big ‘if’) that view is one that is only barely a majority view.

I think you are underestimating the magnitude of the difference. Just over 50% of people think that the cases are unlike. The rest disagree about what the proper answer should be even though they think the answer should be the same for each. The philosophical disagreements are both over whether or not the answers should be different and what the answers should be. It is a multi-dimensional difference.

I’d be interested to learn what percentage of people think that the Thompson thought experiments (and that’s just one of them) think that they are similar (analogous) to abortion. In fact, I think I’m going to go run that.

Haven’t read all the comments yet, but it seems to me much hinges on how certain it is to the reader that the remedy (a) will definitely work and (b) is the only option. The fat man on the bridge will not necessarily work — you may push too late (the struggle, etc), the guy may not really be enough block the trolley. OTOH, the fat guy is definitely blocking the way out, and throwing the switch will definitely change the course of the trolley. Even though the stories attempt to create “pure” situations, I think people rewrite the story to include their pragmatic judgments about how things would actually work.

Although I consider myself pro-choice, I also think the violin case very unlike most prospective abortions. The (lack of) force of the violinist case is that your presence in it is entirely involuntary.

Part of the explanation of the difference in response in the two fat man cases is that, in the trolley/bridge case you’re to imagine that you’re a third party, whereas in the cave case you’re to imagine that you’re one of the five who will die unless the fat man is killed. But another part of the explanation of the difference in response is that the fat man is an innocent threat to the five in the cave case, whereas he’s merely an innocent bystander in the trolley/bridge case.

Let’s factor out the first consideration and focus on the second:

People tend to think it’s okay to kill an innocent threat to save yourself, but they’re much less inclined to say it’s okay to kill an innocent bystander to save yourself. Nozick has a case in which you’re at the bottom of a well and an innocent person has been thrown down the well and will land on you and kill you if you do nothing (but will survive the fall, cushioned by your body). Here people think it’s permissible for you to vaporize that person with your ray gun in self-defense. But now suppose that a javelin is fast approaching you and will impale and kill you unless you grab an innocent bystander and use him as a shield. People are much less inclined to declare it permissible for you to grab this innocent bystander in order to save your life.

The fat man in the cave is an innocent threat to the five: he’s (innocently) blocking the five from getting out of the cave.

Now suppose that, in the trolley/bridge case, you’re to imagine that you’re one of the five whom the trolley will run over unless you shoot the fat man so that he falls off the bridge and stops the trolley. I’m fairly confident that, even if voters were placed in the position of being one of the five who will die if the fat man isn’t killed, far fewer would say that it’s okay to shoot the fat man in this case than would say that it’s okay to blow up the fat man in the cave case. This is because the fat man on the bridge is an innocent bystander rather than someone the position of whose body is endangering the five.

There must be something odd about me, because I am pro-choice, but say there’s an obligation to the violinist. Maybe it’s just because I have a sentimental attachment to violins (and thus violinists). Or because the violinist is much more clearly a person.

Personally, I think it’s a shame they didn’t discuss Taurek, who discusses one or five cases like the Trolley Problem, and argues fairness requires tossing a coin. No one faces anything worse than death – it isn’t worse for any of the five that five die (as opposed to that they die). There is no one who suffers a greater harm of five deaths. Tossing a coin, however, gives everyone a 50% chance of survival.

Also, one other point I owe to Parfit, is one might reasonably think it’s better to kill the one in case 3 than case 2. In case 2, that death is (in a sense) gratuitous and unnecessary, because it isn’t essential to your plan that there’s a person on the other line. In case 3, the fat man’s death is necessary, and the essential means to save five. If you were the one killed, would you rather your death did the good of directly saving five, or was merely unfortunate?

Responses to some of the above:

To 12. Thomson assumes the foetus is a person, granting her opponents’ premise but (she supposes) still showing abortion justifiable. That’s a strong argument.

To (maybe 42 and) 44. Even if the violinist thing is involuntary, whereas preganacy not usually, it still justifies abortion in rape cases – and perhaps even contraceptive failure (admittedly, fewer people object to it here)

To 48.

I guess you either have doubts about the personhood status of the foetus, or think that an actual and (we may assume) flourishing life is worth more than a potential one, which we haven’t yet ‘invested’ in.

Soru: “The relevant legal principle is necessity”

No. That is one of them. Anther would be the question of when the state has the to right to oblige you to perform a moral act.

Like some of the others above, I am skeptical of using intuitions as a source of “data” in ethics, or philosophy more generally, but this skepticism does not stem from the cases considered being extreme. It not clear to me why intuitions should in general carry more weight, even in ordinary cases, than conflicting considerations which are not intuitions.

Voting on what is true is also problematic, regardless of whether the votes are based on inutitions or not. It is well known (I think) that if a group of people, each with consistent beliefs, sincerely vote on the truth of a collection of propositions, so that for each proposition p, either p or its negation wins (unless there is a tie, which I assume away), then the result–the collections of propositions or their negations receiving a majority vote–may be inconsistent. Thus, there is no reason to expect that the results of voting will be collectievely coherent, and thus no reason to “resolve” any tensions among them–as opposed to arguing which of the propositions which received a majority vote are right and which are wrong.

Unlike scientists, their experiments do not require sophisticated laboratories, white-robed technicians or even rodents. They occur in the mind, and start with ‘What if…’.
So it seems that Mr. Sokol is less than thoroughly acquainted with one of Einstein’s greatest legacies: gedanken experiments.

Once you realize that your moral theory has weird implications (and they all do), your choice is to either chuck the theory (“I guess pure utilitarianism with a deontological twist ISN’T the best moral system!”) , or accept the weird implication. (“I guess I DO favor non-fatally torturing an infant in order to save three chimpanzees!”)
Or to eschew a classical word for superpositions and new possibilities. Such as “This is crap. Come up with something worth my time to tease at the fine details and distinctions that lay waiting to be explored.” It’s just the ticking bomb scenario, which I belive has been repeatedly and well savaged here and elsewhere over and over.

John Emerson, in a real life case, there would be chances of survival on both options, and hitting the switch would be less disagreeable, since it would merely juggle chances of survival from an accident. So the ex-Soviet professors are not only right in practice, they are right in theory as well.

Ah, bashing analytic ethics, isn’t that fun?

But please remember the context. You start with a judgement that most everyone will accept, e.g. that it’s wrong to kill one innocent person in order to divide up his organs to save five who need transplants. And then you ask why it’s wrong, i.e., why this thing we all believe is true is true. (It’s a theoretical or philosophical question.) And someone proposes: because you’d be killing the one rather than allowing the five to die. And so someone else raises the trolley case, because if killing/allowing to die were the explanation in the first case it would be wrong to turn the trolley, which most people would not accept. So someone suggests: because you’d be intending the death of the one rather than merely foreseeing the deaths of the five. And then someone else raises the loop variant of the trolley case, because if intending/foreseeing were the explanation in the first case it would be wrong to turn the trolley in the loop variant. Etc., etc.

So the point of the hypothetical cases isn’t, at least initially, to get new knowledge about what’s right in particular circumstances. It’s to assess competing explanations of why what we agree is right is right. And is there a better way of proceeding? The competing explanations agree about the familiar, everyday cases, so thinking about those cases won’t help us choose between them. And reflecting on the explanations on their own — does doing/allowing on its own seem more important, or intending/foreseeing? — doesn’t seem to get us far either. So we construct hypothetical cases that the explanations will decide differently — and to do that the cases have to be artificially simple — and see if we can make judgements about them. Maybe we can and maybe we can’t. But, again, what other way is there of proceeding?

Of course you can just decide not to proceed. You can say you’re not interested in what makes right acts right, or in explanations of moral claims. You’re happy with your immediate, unconnected judgements about right and wrong. But then don’t impose your view on other people. Some of us find the question of why the acts we judge right are right profoundly interesting and are trying to pursue it in the best or even only way we can.

There must be something odd about me, because I am pro-choice, but say there’s an obligation to the violinist. Maybe it’s just because I have a sentimental attachment to violins (and thus violinists). Or because the violinist is much more clearly a person.
Same – in fact, I don’t understand people’s intuitions in this at all. Would most people rather die than stay in a hospital bed for eighteen months? (The existence of said beds would seem to indicate no.) Or are people just dicks?

Or are people just dicks?

They are dicks, of course, but the question was: “do you have an obligation?”, not “would you be willing?”. Clearly there is no obligation.

JT: I’m happy to take intuitions about additional hypothetical cases with a grain of salt. I’m even happy to make the grain larger because the cases are merely ypothetical. I just was resisting the view that those cases and our intuitions about them are silly, should be totally ignored, etc.

I indeed would favor the collapse of civilization as we know it, if that were the only way to get rid of analytic philosophy. (The rest of you should thank Mr. Scrivener for forcing me to confess this.) However, I do not think that a step this extreme is really necessary.

When I see people with analytical training talking about ethics, I do not see an intelligen,t contexted discussion of any of the many real ethical problems that there are. What I always see is this same kind of hypothetical quibbling, and normally it’s inconclusive, and often it has the effect discrediting people who actually do primary ethics (talk about live issues). When there’s a conclusion, usually it’s a meta-ethical one, but usually it’s not even that; often it’s a meta-meta-ethical conclusion: “Whether or not deontic ethics requires X in this case, it does not do so for reason y”.

Why can’t ethicists and metaethicists take their examples from plausible real-world cases? Why can’t they address actual substantive ethical questions? Where does the idea come from that it is necessary to abstract ethical thinking from actuality in order to make it valid? Where does the idea come from that actual ethical cases are a contaminant in ethical philosophy, the way they are in physics?

And guys, quit snarking and whining about “analytic-philophy-bashing”. You guys are the winners. You control the departments. Analytic philosophy is your cash cow, but it does have its enemies.

I don’t even object to fanciful hypothetical examples, or abstract meta-ethics, per se. It’s just too prevalent and dominant, and often it’s silly, and sometimes it’s effectively nihilistic.

Would someone who took a solid course in introductory ethics, and accepted its premises and conclusions, end up an ethically better person? As far as I can tell, he probably wouldn’t. But shouldn’t he?

I have a real world situation for you:

A friend of mine has Slavoj Zizek living in his basement.
What should he do?

Analytic philosophy is to real world ethics what Monty Python is to self defense. If someone attacks you with a banana, you can shoot them and eat the banana. They are effectively disarmed and no longer a threat. Exactly how many times in the real world does assault with a banana occur, such that anyone really needs to think about it? I will worry about it the next time Big Jim enters a cave that he is to big to fit into.

insertion: If we treat post natal human non-persons i.e. infants, the severely mentally handicapped and some impaired elderly like “non person pre-natals”….

I think Mike Otsuka’s (somewhat subtle and ambiguous, but based on these thought experiments) distinction between ‘innocent bystander’ and ‘innocent threat’ might give some clues about psychology of a terrorist, or at least some terrorists.

Mine is is an outsider criticism. When I quit reading analytic philosophy, I lost touch with the field. I still remain to convinced that Academic ethics makes any real contribution to ethics.

To this day I have yet to find a positive argument supporting the view that we should accord any epistemic weight at all to pre-theoretical gut reactions about either actual or hypothetical scenarios. Current Anglo-American philosophy simply assumes, without arguing, that intuitions are carriers of some kind of moral knowledge. Why should that be the case is something that is simply beyond me, especially considering that the cognitive capacities of the creatures whose intuitive judgments philosophers take seriously have been shaped by a long process of biological evolution that was never designed to track moral truth–or anything remotely resembling it.

Prof. Thomas Hurka, one of the most astute and original philosophers currently working in the field, complains that there doesn’t seem to be any alternative way of proceeding. Construed as an expression of the sentiment shared by the ethicists who sympathize with this way of doing philosophy, the complaint is valuable insofar as it accurately reflects the existing moral consensus (as Sinnott-Armstrong observed, “the most common way of arguing for intuitionism is to rule out its alternatives”). Understood as a justification of the methodology of moral intuitionism, by contrast, the complaint strikes me as unconvincing. It would certainly be great if humans came to the world equipped with reliable faculties of moral cognition. Yet, lacking further argumentation suggesting that this is actually the case, such a hope cannot be more than that. As Jeremy Bentham (who dismissed intuitionism as a form of “ipsedixitism”) once observed, “want is not supply; hunger is not bread.”