Experimental Philosophy

by Brian on May 2, 2006

The BBC currently has a discussion of famous thought experiments in ethics, including Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist case, and a few variants on runaway trolley cars. As of this writing, over 12000 people had sent in their votes on the moral status of actions in the examples, and it is interesting to see what this (self-selected, non-random) sample of the folk think. I’ve got some comments on the results below the fold, but I’d rather everyone here went and voted before seeing the votes, so I’ve put them below the fold.

The votes on three of the cases are fairly unsurprising. In Thomson’s violinist case, the vast majority thinks that you aren’t obliged to stay hooked up to the violinist. 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. That’s even among BBC magazine readers, who are presumably paradigmatic of the kind of folk that we have in mind when we talk of the folk.

The big surprise for me was the result of the fat man stuck in the cave example. A vast majority say that it is OK to dynamite away the fat man who threatens the lives of the people in the cave. In that case 76.1% of people say it is OK. That’s an even larger percentage than in the original trolley case, though the difference is not significant. I’d have thought the cave case went with the fat man on the bridge case. Yet more ignorance of what the folk are like on my part I guess.

What could be driving the differences? Here are three hypotheses, in order of descending charity to the voters. (Descending that is from a pretty low starting point!)

Hypothesis one: By having the hypothetical voter imagine the cave from the inside, you get the voter to empathise with the potential victim. This view holds that people are basically utilitarian, and what is to be explained away is the anomolous result concerning the Fat Man case. The anomoly is explained by noting that making people empathise more with one side (the Fat Man standing right in front of you) than the other (the nameless faceless five stuck out of site in a tunnel) you can draw them away from their natural utilitarian inclinations. So it is all a framing effect.

Hypothesis two: It matters that the voter is to imagine themselves in the cave. Many people have the view that it isn’t OK to kill an innocent person to save a third party, but it is OK, morally OK, to kill an innocent person to save their own life. This view says that people hold that the right to self-defence, even against innocents, to be a strong moral principle, even though there is no such right to defend others.

Hypothesis three: If the guy in the cave hadn’t been so fat, there wouldn’t have been a problem. So he isn’t really an innocent. So rules against killing the innocent don’t count in the minds of some voters in this case.

If those are the choices, I’d choose one. But I’d rather think that I’d missed a more charitable explanation of the voting patterns.

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Crooked Timber » » Counterintuitive intuitions
05.05.06 at 5:12 am

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1

grant 05.02.06 at 11:51 am

Ok, so the Fat Man can’t lift the rock, right? So I say beat the moron who had him go first to death, then blow the Fat Man up.

2

Matt 05.02.06 at 12:00 pm

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.

3

brooksfoe 05.02.06 at 12:06 pm

It’s pretty clearly 2. To test hypothesis 2, try eliminating the other people in the cave; it’s just you vs. Big Jack. I bet a majority will hold that you are at least justified in dynamiting Big Jack to save your own life. That would make the contrast with the railroad Fat Guy case even sharper.

4

Brian 05.02.06 at 12:06 pm

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.

5

stuart 05.02.06 at 12:11 pm

How about a fourth possibility – as people work down the page (I did it earlier before seeing this post) they get the experiments explained to them as they go along. For example you answer the first trolley situation, then the second, then the article examines the difference (or lack of it) between the two. Now another question is asked along similar lines, and the explanation of the previous 2 situations might well change what people voted on the final one.

A better designed experiment/article would have the people read and answer each of the four situations, then forward you to a page discussing each and the potential differences/similarities. Of course to get people to read through it all and answer all the questions without engaging them with some of the theory behind it as they go along would likely end with less people getting through the entire article and answering all the questions.

6

robert the red 05.02.06 at 12:14 pm

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

7

Doug T 05.02.06 at 12:14 pm

mett,

I agree with your basic point that thoguht experiments are probably not a great way to design ethical systems. Sort of a philosophical version of the adage “hard cases make bad law.” On the other hand, the use of thought experiments does point out the tendencey of many (most?) people to view ethics not as a rational system for determining good actions, but rather as a system designed to justify existing opinions which we already hold. (And tying it back to law, I’d say judicial philosophy works the same way.)

One nitpick, though–as I read the dilemma, the fat man in the cave wouldn’t die. Everyone else would drown, but his head was laready out of the cave, so he would live through the tide and (hopefully) later be rescued.

I’d also agree with brooksfoe that reason 2 is the main justification for blowing the fat guy out of the way. Abstract reasoning about saving lives is nice, but when my life is on the line, the calculation changes. At least, it does for me since I don’t believe in an afterlife.

8

conchis 05.02.06 at 12:28 pm

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.

9

Matt 05.02.06 at 12:34 pm

Brian,
You’re right on the fat man in the cave as described- I read it quickly and was probably thinking of one of the dozens of slight varations that have trashed up philosophy journals for years.

10

BigMacAttack 05.02.06 at 12:50 pm

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.

11

ben alpers 05.02.06 at 12:50 pm

In my non-philosopher’s opinion,the problem with these type of thought experiments go well beyond their embodying the adage “good cases make bad law” (although they do that). These cases are so far outside the realm of reality that I think it’s hard to take the ethical dilemmas themselves seriously. That is, I have a hard time believing that anyone answering these questions truly believes that their decision will save (or cost) lives. One’s relationship to these thought experiments is much more similar to one’s reaction to a violent film or a video game, which might engage our ethical intuitions, but does so at an infinitely lower level than any real world confrontation with life or death issues (or even than would something like the Milgram experiment in which test subjects at least believed they were dealing with real human suffering). All of which is a longwinded way of saying that were one actually able to set these experiments up (and we should all be glad that we cannot), you might get utterly different results than one gets from presenting them as mere thought experiments in which the lives involved are wholly imaginary. And, I’d argue, you still wouldn’t find out much about everyday ethical intuitions (due to the artificiality of the exercise).

12

ben alpers 05.02.06 at 12:56 pm

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?

13

DS 05.02.06 at 12:58 pm

For balance they should have added at least one more sadistic fantasy, one in which you can vote to kill a skinny person.

14

Tim 05.02.06 at 12:58 pm

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.

15

jim 05.02.06 at 12:58 pm

I don’t see that the violinist case differs from the Fat Jack case, except in degree. In the Fat Jack case, if Fat Jack is to live, I must die. In the violinist case, if the violinist is to live, I must be connected up to wires for 9 months. If it’s OK for me to refuse to be connected up to wires for 9 months so the violinist can live, why isn’t it OK for me to refuse to die so that Fat Jack can live?

16

Rob 05.02.06 at 1:06 pm

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.

17

Decnavda 05.02.06 at 1:18 pm

I agree with jim. The problem with utilitarianism is that it assumes that empathy means valuing other people’s lives as much as I value my own. That is not something I can do. Rather, empathy means recognizing that other people value their own lives as much as I value mine. If I were in the cave, I would blow up Big Jack. If I were Big Jack, I would not hold it against the people in the cave blowing me up. Fortunately, as tim points out, real life rarely actually puts us in “its either you or me” situations. Saying that it is okay for me to kill you to save my own life does not imply that it is okay for me to let you live in poverty just so I can drive a bigger car.

18

SKapusniak 05.02.06 at 1:23 pm

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 :)

19

Aaron 05.02.06 at 1:28 pm

I am deeply sceptical of people that say they are deeply sceptical of thought experiments. Scepticism like that reserved for those who, two hours into a meeting, say in a pretentious voice ‘are we really asking the right questions.’ There is no need for any real substance in the claim and a lot of people will think you sound smart while you sit back and watch the BS fly.

Why are these thought experiments far from our everyday reality? Obviously the abortion thought experiment is supposed to be directly relevant to public policy, or is it that abortion is not relevant because you will never be pregnant? The other thought experiments are aimed at getting at familiar conflicts between individual rights and collective interests. My public health care system does not allow me to use my wealth to buy the best available health care. It justifies this based on the argument that allowing private health care will undermine the aim of equal access to the best possible system of public health care. What actually happens is that because of limits to resources and the need to prioritise an old rich man with cancer do not get radiation or surgery as soon as a poor young patient and the delay sometimes means that the old dude dies of cancer that could have been cured. The opposite can be true in a private system. So we limit an individual’s right to save his own life for the sake of a collective good.

I largely agree with the empirical claim about the effects of a private system, and definitely agree with the normative position that all should have access to decent publicly funded health care. But you can bet your a$$ that if I am ever a rich old dude I will, given the chance, use my money to save my life. The examples used in the article can certainly help us to organise our reasoning and development arguments to show that I am simply inconsistent or that my future plans are defensible in some way. Are not these thought experiments directly relevant to the question, ‘should we let a few old farts die so that we can make the most effective use of health care dollars?’

20

John Emerson 05.02.06 at 1:29 pm

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.

21

John Emerson 05.02.06 at 1:34 pm

For some jobs (e.g. railway switchman) one of these cases is almost certainly one of the things discussed in job training. Other similiar cases are faced by policemen, firemen, soldiers, and sometimes MDs. I don’t see the need for silly examples.

22

Decnavda 05.02.06 at 1:35 pm

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.

23

Kelly 05.02.06 at 1:43 pm

Brian –
Well, with regards to Fat Man, the reason that I voted to blow him up was largely because he could be talked to about what was going to happen before it happened. Although there’s not much say he gets, he at least has an awareness that his life will be over to save overs.

It also ties in to why I opted (today, I should note that I flipflop on this one) to flip the switch to kill one person instead of five – seems like basic triage, spending time/effort towards saving the most lives.

That said, I wouldn’t push anyone off a bridge – that isn’t triage, it’s…grabbing someone off the street and killing them so that their organs can save 5 people waiting in the hospital.

Just me, and just today, though. ;)

24

NickS 05.02.06 at 1:45 pm

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.

25

Richard Bellamy 05.02.06 at 1:47 pm

I concur with those who say that taking this situations out of the world of reality doesn’t give us “pure intuition”, but just muddies things up.

Hypo 1: Crazy John says (credibly) that he will kill a stranger unless you wear long pants. Are you morally obligated to eschew shorts?

Non-Hypo 2: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says (credibly) that he will attack Israel unless you conform with his ideosynchratic view of good and evil. Are you morally obligated to eschew Ahmadinejadian evils?

I am not suggesting that these hypos necessarily have different answers. They may or may not. I am suggesting that knowing my definite answer to Hypo 1 does not (and should not) help me at all in solving Non-Hypo 2.

In law school/ philosophy class, the teacher always will say, “Don’t fight the hypo!” But sometimes real morality REQUIRES fighting the hypo.

26

hb 05.02.06 at 1:52 pm

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 …

27

Glenn Bridgman 05.02.06 at 1:56 pm

“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.”

The catch here, of course, is the problem of nihilism. Practicing only 2nd-order ethics insulates you from this.

28

Carter 05.02.06 at 1:58 pm

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

29

Felix 05.02.06 at 2:01 pm

More on Fat Jack in the cave: In the comments to the BBC poll, someone says “As for Big Jack, he’s history, primal instincts would take over from philosophy, the only decision to make is where to put the dynamite.”

Perhaps part of what’s going on here is that in Q. 3 (would you push the Fat Man) you would be under no particular emotional pressure to push him; we imagine ourselves considering whether to do it on the basis of abstract moral principles, which we evaluate as good or bad in a general way. In Q. 4 we know that when the water starts rising we’re damn well going to kill Jack whatever our ethical intuitions tell us (or one of the others in the cave with us will) and so we read the question not as “is it right?” but as “is it forgivable?”

30

Alex R 05.02.06 at 2:13 pm

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….

31

Anderson 05.02.06 at 2:13 pm

These cases are so far outside the realm of reality that I think it’s hard to take the ethical dilemmas themselves seriously.

Make very sure, then, that you do not read Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit.

32

asg 05.02.06 at 2:17 pm

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.”

33

asg 05.02.06 at 2:17 pm

aaaaaargh preview screwed up paragraph separation. One more time with the 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.

34

Richard Bellamy 05.02.06 at 2:22 pm

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.

35

Richard Bellamy 05.02.06 at 2:33 pm

Regarding the necessity of “another way”, I think that part of the resistance is the implicit recognition that by the time you get to the hypo, the immorality has already happened.

Hypo A: You have just killed an innocent child just to watch him die, and are now so remorseful that you will never do it again. Are you morally obligated to turn yourself in, or can you morally wipe your fingerprints off of the murder weapon?

Yeah, well. You’ve already missed the bigger moral problem, and are now quibbling over the unimportant details. You were morally obligated to not kill the child in the first place!

Just like there’s a moral requirement to make sure the trolley is equipped with emergency breaks, and there’s a moral obligation to make sure there are emergency exits in the cave, etc.

Maybe its also the general moral obligation to not allow oneself to be checkmated — to always leave a way out.

36

Kevin Donoghue 05.02.06 at 2:35 pm

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.”

37

abb1 05.02.06 at 2:46 pm

Hmm…
What about sacrificing one known nice guy to save 5 known assholes – would you flip the switch?
What if the violinist is your brother?
What if Big Jack is your old friend? Nah, “Big Jack” sounds like some obnoxious fella. What if it’s an old nun or something?
What if the fat guy is your sadistic boss?

38

Matt D 05.02.06 at 3:02 pm

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.

39

Tony 05.02.06 at 3:16 pm

I find it implausible that most people are really engaging with the scenarios as presented. My inclination, at least (and I was a major in analytic philosophy not so many years ago) was to fight them by thinking of holes. What might I have missed? What alternatives might there be?

This changes everything in the case of the fat man. Lurking in the background is a concern that pushing the fat man down will kill him without stopping the trolley.

40

Sebastian Holsclaw 05.02.06 at 3:19 pm

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.

41

abb1 05.02.06 at 3:30 pm

Nah, with the fat man it’s simply because he is a free agent himself and can make the decision without you, unlike all other cases.

Except maybe the “Big Jack” case. And in the “Big Jack” case you probably should try to convince him to make the sacrifice. And if he won’t consent, then he’s an egoistic lowlife who doesn’t deserve to live anyway, so light up that fuse!

42

Chris 05.02.06 at 3:44 pm

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.

43

Josh 05.02.06 at 4:04 pm

When my sister was in high school, she was a loud and militant vegetarian. A stooge in her art class said to her, “So let me get this straight. Do you believe that if a cow and a person were drowning, you would save the cow?” She said, “Is the person you?”

44

Thomas Nephew 05.02.06 at 4:17 pm

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.

45

Richard Bellamy 05.02.06 at 4:18 pm

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.

As my old professor used to say, “One man’s counterintuitive conclusion is another man’s reductio ad absurdum.”

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!”)

The hypos don’t really help you decide which way to go there, so never gets past the “Isn’t that odd” level of interest.

46

Mike Otsuka 05.02.06 at 4:55 pm

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.

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Seth Edenbaum 05.02.06 at 4:59 pm

The only important question is when and whether the state should become involved.
In what case should an actor be held responsible for a ‘crime?’

The seach for absolute non-conflict is absurd.

48

Kenny Easwaran 05.02.06 at 5:05 pm

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.

49

soru 05.02.06 at 5:16 pm

In what case should an actor be held responsible for a ‘crime?’

The relevant legal principle is necessity:

If you can persuade the judge that you were the subject of a philosophical experiment, that defence might just work against a murder charge. Otherwise, it is strictly for conjoined twins.

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Ben 05.02.06 at 5:19 pm

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)

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Matt D 05.02.06 at 5:19 pm

I agree with the first part, but I’m not sure about the second– surely the idea of looking for relective equlibrium isn’t totally absurd? These hypos don’t need to give us the answers, after all, so long as they help us to see what’s at issue in the philosophical problems they’re aiming at.

In any case, I think we can agree that even if they fail to answer the philosophically interesting questions, the hypos aren’t simply in the style of (insert Dennis Hopper voice here) “There’s a bomb on a bus set to explode if you go below 50 miles an hour. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?”
Which is good, because if they were, then that would cast us all in the role of Keanu Reeves.

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Ben 05.02.06 at 5:21 pm

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.

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adam 05.02.06 at 5:36 pm

I’m pro-choice and pro-right-to-disconnect-yourself-from-famous-violinist, but the two cases are clearly not morally equivalent. If they were, then you would also have a right to abandon an unwanted infant in a dumpster. The moral difference may be that in the case of abortion and unwanted infants, you have done something to create the situation.

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Seth Edenbaum 05.02.06 at 5:43 pm

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.

55

Yarrow 05.02.06 at 6:10 pm

As several people have implied, a sceptical utilitarian can consistently:

throw the switch and theoretically kill one person to theoretically save five people’s lives;

not throw the fat man off the bridge since that will definitely kill one person and only theoretically save five people’s lives.

dynamite Big Jack, which definitely kills one person in order to definitely save five people’s lives.

The probabilities implied by “theoretically” and “definitely” need not be justified to affect our intuitions.

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jt 05.02.06 at 6:24 pm

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.

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John Emerson 05.02.06 at 7:44 pm

The reason analytic ethics rouses hostility is because it’s bad money driving out the good. The hostility is deserved.

It was one of the Vellemans who said on the net that philosophical ethics should be second-order ethics, and that ethicists are just laymen on first-order ethics. And I don’t believe I’ve seen anything substantive of any value come out of analytic ethics, and I don’t believe that I’ve seen a case when second order conclusions actually made it possible to improve first-order ethics. At best second-order ethics makes analytic philosophers feel less guilty about having any ethical principles at all — when ethical principles really aren’t very scientific or logical when you get right down to it.

What would the Soviet professors have said if they were told that the context was a switchman in a railyard, and what was in question was how switchmen are to be trained? My guess is that they would have dealt with the concrete case in a matter of fact way, whereas they objected to the hypotheticals because they almost always have the effect of forcing someone to choose the lesser ethical evil, and were used by the Soviets precisely for the purpose of discrediting ethical approaches to political and social life.

In other words, this isn’t about trains at all. It’s a way of embarassing naively ethical people while rewarding rational ethical agnostics who are willing to toy with any kind of ethical skepticism or nihilism just for the sake of argument. And someone down thread will be sure to tell me that someothing like that is the essence of philosophy.

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agm 05.02.06 at 11:35 pm

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.

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T. Scrivener 05.03.06 at 3:20 am

Emerson complains about analytic ethics for not being practical enough. The problem is that he is that he is either completely out of date or being very unfair, the majority of analytic ethics is first order, not second order. Contrary to his claims Analytic Philosophers usually don’t feel at all uncomfortable making first order ethical claims even if they are non cognitivists or whatever.

That’s my defence of analytic ethics. Emerson strongly dislikes analytic philosophy and I’ve been waiting for a long time for an opportunity to provide a general defence of it. Here it is. The values of analytic philosophy would mean that in an ideal world everyone would recognise that it is intrinsically valuable, since this is not paradise here is a defence of analytic philosophy in terms of extrinsic benefit. Excepting the possibility of a general collapse of civilization Analytic philosophy should not, will not and cannot die. It’s linked to the sciences, to pure mathematics, quantum physics, cognitive science, neurology, computer science, theoretical biology, linguistics, yea, even chemistry. Ever heard of the concept of an ontology in computer science? Quantum logic? Analytic philosophy is all linked together, concepts in it’s most theoretical areas are relevant even here. As analytic philosophy turns increasingly to the sciences it will burrow itself in deeper. My advice is that if you want better computers in the long run, don’t fight it.

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agm 05.03.06 at 4:11 am

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.

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Harald Korneliussen 05.03.06 at 5:32 am

Ashley MacIsaac needs life support? What happened?

Since I am a man, it’s more fair to look at the violinist example from the outside. If someone was kidnapped and connected to a comatose violinist, would I be angry at them if they disconnected? No. I’d think they did the wrong thing, and I’d feel pity for them, but I couldn’t get angry at them.
On the other hand, if it was that person who knocked out Ashley MacIsaac in the first place, then I’d be upset. I’d also be pretty appaled if the innocent connection victim had to personally slit MacIsaac’s throat to get out, and did it nonetheless. There’s a difference between not providing assistance and actively hurting someone.

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Harald Korneliussen 05.03.06 at 5:40 am

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.

63

abb1 05.03.06 at 6:07 am

Yeah, right: the ex-Soviet professors are smarter than you because they heard terrible things about Stalinism. Believe me, the ex-Soviet professors are just grandstanding.

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Tom Hurka 05.03.06 at 6:27 am

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.

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jt 05.03.06 at 7:13 am

In response to Tom:

It seems reasonable to think about other cases in trying to decide between theories, but what doesn’t seem reasonable is to put too much weight on vague, or even strong but uncritical intuitions about such additional cases; so a better way of proceding would be to consider such intuitions, but to take them with a grain of salt. It is important to be willing to reconsider one’s intuitive judgements as well as one’s philosophical theory. To the exent that this is what analytic philosophers do, I apologize if I am attacking a straw man.

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theogon 05.03.06 at 7:31 am

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?

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finnsense 05.03.06 at 7:39 am

Surely the answer lies in the fact that our moralsense doesn’t require consistency. These thought experiments test our “sense” of morality not our reasoning. I did them without thinking about why and in each case followed the majority, who one suspects did the same. They just looked at how the situations made them feel.

The kind of explanation we should look for is an evolutionary one. Why would it be a better strategy evolutionarily speaking to find pushing the fat guy off the bridge morally repugnant while blowing him up in the cave not so? The answer is pretty obvious and it’s number 2. Generally it’s not okay to kill innocents on purpose unless it’s to save your own life.

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abb1 05.03.06 at 7:45 am

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.

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Richard Bellamy 05.03.06 at 8:42 am

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.

But it’s all just playing slippery slope. We want to have laws against doctors killing the innocent patient (murder), but we don’t want to have a law against trolley conductors playing utilitarian. Not to go all Scalia or anything, but sometimes moral intuitions can’t be logically defined.

The problem with accepting that it’s all majority vote intuition, without any logical underpinnings is that you can criminalize stupid crap like cursing in front of a woman, or gay sex. Hey, we’re all just going on intuition here!

If you insist on consistent logic for all criminal laws, you end up not being able to criminalize murder without criminalizing trolley-driving, too.

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Tom Hurka 05.03.06 at 9:42 am

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.

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Seth Edenbaum 05.03.06 at 10:17 am

T. Scrivener,
You’re not describing philosophy, but formal logic. Analytic philosophy says they’re the same thing, discounting other philosophies. That claim is bullshit.

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John Emerson 05.03.06 at 2:04 pm

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?

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yabonn 05.03.06 at 2:09 pm

What i would like to know is what you would choose :
– to have arms 3 meters long

OR
– to have 12 ducks following you everywhere all the time, quacking.

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Seth Edenbaum 05.03.06 at 2:44 pm

I have a real world situation for you:

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

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abb1 05.03.06 at 3:45 pm

This stuff is not the rocket science, but I think I learned something from Mike Otsuka’s comment upthread. It was fun to think about this while walking home from work; what more could you wish for?

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james 05.03.06 at 4:10 pm

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.

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Simonjm 05.03.06 at 9:28 pm

Adam.

Exactly, I don’t know if any analogy is perfect but J.Thomson’s analogy is flawed and to correct it say instead, by going to a concert you have a small but real chance that you will cause both you and the world famous violinist to be kidnapped and the violinist attached to you for 9months as in the original analogy. You consented to going to the concert even though you had full knowledge this may happen, with the result of which you have put an innocent life in this situation and at your mercy.

BTW the violinist was healthy before you decided to go to the concert.

You put the violinist there so unless you wish to undermine personal responsibility you are obliged to stay attached.

So Adam we should be able to dump an infant in the dumpster anyway as Peter Singer has pointed out we inconsistently apply the personhood criteria as they don’t have functional personhood. So if we to in fact treat post natal human non-persons i.e. infants, the severely mentally handicapped and some impaired elderly we could kill experiment and use them as body banks.

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Simonjm 05.03.06 at 9:30 pm

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”….

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T. Scrivener 05.03.06 at 11:20 pm

As far as bullshit goes, this has to win a prize:

“T. Scrivener,
You’re not describing philosophy, but formal logic. Analytic philosophy says they’re the same thing, discounting other philosophies. That claim is bullshit.”

Seth would be well advised to read about the fields I mention ( the philosophy of mathematics the philosophy of biology, ontology, the philosophy of computer science, the philosophy of psychology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of quantum physics, the philosophy of chemistry etc). Most of these don’t really concern formal logic any more than any other field of analytic philosophy. Here’s a hint Seth, actually read what you want to criticise, why not start here.

http://www.hyle.org/- Philosophy of chemistry journal.
http://www.duke.edu/philosophy/bio/papers.html- Philosophy of biology papers.
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ppox/research/index.html- Philosophy of physics research.
http://pcs.essex.ac.uk/- Philosophy of computer science
http://www.hfac.uh.edu/cogsci/spp/spphp.html- Philosophy of psychology
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/MainMath.htm- Philosophy of mathematics

Emerson, for someone so amazingly confident, doesn’t seem to understand even the basic vocabulary. The debate between teleological and deontological models of ethics is primarily a debate in normative ethics, not one in meta-ethics. Meta-ethics is the study of the epistemology, metaphysics and language of ethics, it almost always doesn’t directly concern what we should and should not do, like the debate between teleological and deontological ethics.

The suggestion that the kind of ethical thought represented by these thought experiments doesn’t have any implications for praxis is simply wrong. Based on thought experiments much like these I believe that:

– The charge of manslaughter is over used, many, even most of those charged with manslaughter shouldn’t be charged with anything ( moral luck thought experiments)
– Unless a special request is made organs should be harvested automatically from the dead.

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abb1 05.04.06 at 2:05 am

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.

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Seth Edenbaum 05.04.06 at 7:51 am

Scrivener,
…to which we can add the philosophies of automobile, shoe, and television repair, the philosophy of dentistry, and the philosophy of broadcast journalism and sports team management none of which have much bearing on Philosophy proper, and all of which will have more general intellectual value when contextualized as history.

All communication beyond that of pure mathematics becomes historicized son, and that’s a fact. Sense perception is not an idea, it’s a limitation: deal with it.

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John Emerson 05.04.06 at 8:51 am

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.

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washerdreyer 05.05.06 at 8:17 pm

Some people above criticized the experiments for only providing binary options. I don’t think this diminishes their value. Rather, I think the problem is that they only provide the binary evaluation, “Should you do X?” (or, in the first one, “Are you obliged to x?” which is, if anything, more problematic). There are other more interesting and more discrete issues than the binary choice provided.

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Pablo Stafforini 05.06.06 at 9:29 pm

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.”

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