Counterintuitive intuitions

The test patient should shoot the doctor as soon as the tests are done, just in case; better safe than sorry.

I got lost in Brian’s thread, and couldn’t struggle through it. But I think you are reading the purpose of such thought experiments the wrong way. It is not to tell us what we should do in those circumstances. It is to help us isolate our intuitions so that we can find out what general principles we really believe. Hence the “you just know” conditions, which help you not to have stray thoughts. So, think about Thomson’s violinist. The experiment is designed to get you to say that you have a right not to stay hooked up to the violinist. But the violinist has a right to life (no-one will deny that). You are then asked to think whether, in unhooking yourself, you would be violating his right to life. Intuitively, not. But (she claims) the situation is structurally identical to the case of the relationship between the pregnant woman and the fetus. Does it follow that she has a right to abort? Well, no, at least not without lots of further argument. But it does follow that she would not be violating the right to life of the fetus if she aborted. So, if abortion is impermissible, that is not because the fetus has a right to life (which Thomson grants it does, for the sake of argument) but for some other as-yet-to-be-specified reason. So, the thought experiment successfully undermines one argument for the impermissibility of abortion by undermining the principle “Abortion violates the right to life of the fetus”. This seems like a result, to me. I think the paper itself, by use of several more interesting thought experiments, establishes an even more interesting conclusion; that denying the right to abortion commits you to a very strong principle of a duty to aid others in great need. No surprise to good Catholics, but a hell of a surprise to some American conservative anti-abortionists.

I haven’t looked at the Sinnot-Armstrong, and not all thought experiments are as successful and well-wrought as Thomson’s (she’s brilliant) but once you see the rather limited ambition of the thoought experiment it is a useful tool. The BBC site obscured this, but that’s only to be expected; they were trying to have fun.

If the postulated, “… classical utilitarianism implies that it would not be morally wrong for the doctor to perform the transplant and even that it would be morally wrong for the doctor not to perform the transplant“, is a correct application of utilitarianism then that is a rediculous and narrow principle. Among the flawed assumptions here are that conditions as natural and universal as illness and aging, though they be dire, somehow endow their victims with higher priority entitlement to treatments and services.

This straw-patient is not worth operating on!

Test-guy gets to live to.

Ooops… duh. Thanks soru. Now I get it. But so this seems to me a good example of the usefulness of considering hypothetical circumstances.

So, the thought experiment successfully undermines one argument for the impermissibility of abortion by undermining the principle “Abortion violates the right to life of the fetus”.

Strictly speaking, I don’t think it does that, necessarily. Violinist and fetus are different things; try “your mother” instead of “violinist” and the result might be the opposite – what are you going to do then?

Abb1’s example in fact bolsters the success of the case. If you put in “your mother” I get a different intuition myself, but its clear that the right to life has remained constant. So, the right to life is irrelevant to the change in intuition. So if I’m obliged to stay hooked up to my mother it is not because she has a right to life (the violinist has that, too) but because of some special obligation that I don’t have to the violinist. Look for that special obligation, and arguments for it. Forget about the right to life as a grounding of this sort of obligation. Similarly the obligation to carry a fetus to term.

I don’t think they tell us anything very deep; its precisely the expectation that they do or should that leads you to be disappointed with/hostile to them. They are indeed useful pedogagical tools; not just in the classroom, but in our own heads when we are trying to map out the conceptual space. Sure, I agree that some people use them badly, and also that some people who use them well are interested in some of the corners of conceptual space that don’t interest me (and don’t interest most people). That’s ok, no? Would we be better off without them? I doubt it.

I don’t believe I find myself defending ‘pro-life’ people, but I think you may be arguing against a strawman here. Do they actually put forward this generic catch-all “right to life” argument? I doubt it, because (I assume) most of them are also pro-death-penalty and that’s already a contradiction right there. No, I am sure vast majority of them are arguing this one very specific case – aborting a fetus; and they couldn’t care less about your violinist.

Inconsistent? Maybe, but maybe not, because the fetus is different: it’s a ‘child’, it’s ‘innocent’, it was ‘never given a chance’, or maybe pregnancy is special altogether, a ‘miracle’ or whatever.

I think abb1 has a point. I was wondering what would happen if you substituted “your mother”, “your child”, or “your brother/sister” for any of the “fat people” in the examples.

I do not think that John’s example is ‘totally counterintuitive’. It wouldn’t happen in a hospital in a liberal democracy, but the example doesn’t say that. However, there is great concern that China has been selling organs for transplantation that have been harvested from executed prisoners. This is a more interesting case, first because it is probably real. Second, because the expected value argument is even stronger here, if you grant the premise that the prisoner is going to die anyway.

Abb1 has a good point, but complementary to that is the intuititions of the “pro-choice” position. If there is a one-hour operation that can hook the violinist (or your mother) onto someone else instead, do you have to go through with it, or do you have the right to kill the violinist right now?

Imagine a not-to-distant technology in which 12 week old or younger fetuses can be extracted unharmed from the woman seeking an abortion, and implanted unharmed in the volunteer pro-life activists picketing outside.

Now the pro-choice advocates have to decide whether they are really “pro-choice”, or if they are “pro-death” or “pro-abortion” as the pro-lifers claim. Do the fetus’s rights (whatever they are) trump the woman’s right to have the fetus not exist?

I always thought these experiments had value in “bracketing” the issue. You pick obvious cases on both sides – of course you wouldn’t be allowed to kill the guy and harvest his organs – and then work inward to less obvious ones. They aren’t meant to be the final word on the subject.

The point in #21 is specifically addressed by Thomson’s article. Actually, that article addresses almost all of the points people have been making in this thread. The violinist scenerio is just the beginning of the discussion, and Thomson understands perfectly well that you need further argument to get from there to a pro-choice position.

What the violinist argument does show is that you also need further argument to get to an anti-abortion position. Some people in this thread have responsed to Thomson’s argument by saying that the violinist scenerio is different from pregnancy because one’s share of responsibility for getting into the situation is different. But that misses the point. Thomson’s point is precisely that you have to look at issues like responsibility and special duties of care that wouldn’t apply more generally and things like that. You can’t go from “fetuses are people” to “abortion is always wrong” without some additional argument in the middle. Most of Thomson’s article deals with what that additional argument might look like.

And there is also a sense in which Thomson’s article rescues the anti-abortion movement from the charge of incoherence. People on the pro-choice side often ask: if anti-abortion people sincerely believe that abortion is murder, then why are they willing to pass laws with any exceptions? Why aren’t all US anti-abortionists pushing for harsh enforcement regimes like what they have in El Salvador? Answer: an anti-abortion position with exceptions isn’t necessarily incoherent precisely because of that implicit argument in the middle that Thomson’s article calls attention to.

(In real life, by the way, Thomson does not concede the “fetuses are people” premise. Her article explores what consequences you might get to if you do accept that premise.)

I recommend that anyone who is interested in this article go and read it. It’s short, clearly written, and very easily available. It’s a good example of how hypothetical situations can help to clarify a situation instead of muddying it. You’ll probably find this article in every ethics anthology for undergrad philosophy classes written in the last 25 years.

You can’t go from “fetuses are people” to “abortion is always wrong” without some additional argument in the middle.

I suspect that most anti-abortion people justify their position not by any argument, but by a very similar thought experiment: imagine that you discovered a small innocent child growing inside you, totally dependent on you… do you you think it’s permissible to hire a strange man to kill this baby inside you, cut it into pieces and pull it out by metal hooks… suck the brains out with a vacuum cleaner… collapse the skull with a set of plyers…

Phrase it this way and you intuition will leave you no choice…

Ah, but now imagine that a strange parasitic creature crawls into your stomach uninvited in the middle of the night… it sucks your blood and your precious body fluids… it makes you vomit… it destroys your teeths… it makes you ugly, it tortures you, ruins your life… Are you permitted to throw it out? No?? WTF?!!

It’s also worth noting, since it so often isn’t, that an additional argument is needed to get from “abortion is always wrong” to “abortion should be illegal.” There are, after all, difficulties with enforcement of concern to both utilitarians and deontologists.

I think that the example of the patients does show something, but as many commenters have pointed out, the absurdity of the example reduces its credibiliy. I actually think that the example carries a lot of extra baggage which is unnecessary to make the point. Why not just ask the question directly:

1. Is it, or can it be morally acceptable/obligatory to kill one person in order to save several people?

2. If one can save someone or several people by either (a) letting someone else die, or (b) killing someone else, is (a) morally preferred?

These questions can also be generalized so that they don’t involve life and death, but rather other consequences.

The examples alert us to these questions, but anything can alert you to a question. We can have inutions directly about the answers to these questions rather than the specific examples, and I cannot see why the intuitions about the questions in general would be less reliable. If examples are a way of moving our thoughts along about the general principles, then fine, but it is also true that embedding strange examples in the analysis reduces the credibility of the analysis in many people’s eyes, and it doesn’t really add much, and can often be gratuitous. However, understanding the principles that the examples point to is worthwhile.

John Q wrote:

An equally serious problem is that the example is like a bad cryptic crossword clue – you know what answer you’re supposed to get, but not exactly how you got there.

Dan K rightly responds:

Well the usual procedure, when addressing these examples in a classroom, is to propose various principles that, along with the contingent circumstances of the example, do indeed provide an account for how we get there, and then to test those principle by considering other hypothetical circumstances.

Dan K description of what goes on in the classroom is also to be found in print. Nobody who was familiar with, and had an at least rudimentary grasp of, the classic papers by Foot and Thomson to which Sinnott-Armstrong refers would have raised John’s objection.

John,

In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy piece, Sinnott-Armstrong makes reference to two of the earliest and most influential discussions in the philosophical literature of the transplant case – those by Foot and by Thomson. (He also refers to cases of Carritt and McCloskey having to do with the framing of the innocent.) Though Foot and Thomson are anti-consequentialists, and surely they and many others think the transplant case causes problems for consequentialism, they don’t deploy this case in these articles in order to refute consequentialism. Rather, they pose this example, alongside several others, in order to gain a better understanding of the moral significance of various distinctions, among them the distinction between killing and letting die, between intended and merely foreseen killings, between negative duties to avoid harm and positive duties to provide aid, and between the initiation of a threat versus the redistribution of an already-existing threat. Their discussion also has the related aim of trying the unearth the legitimate grounds we might have to affirm the duties to harm and aid that we think we have. Their discussion proceeds in roughly the manner that Dan Kerwick and Tom Hurka describe. Just about everything I’ve just said about the Foot and Thomson pieces can be said about subsequent discussions of the transplant case in the philosophical literature – with which I suspect I’m somewhat more familiar than you are, since I specialize in moral philosophy, and you don’t. Your cryptic crossword remark is simply a travesty of this literature.

Isn’t it a serious flaw in this exercise that the result is so susceptible to even subtle rhetorical tricks, the ways these scenarious are presented, phrased; just like the well-known problem with opinion polls, ‘estate tax’ vs. ‘death tax’ being a classic example? This itself could be the subject of a study of course…

Bi: In real-world cases such as abortion or euthanasia where people disagree, we still need to assess the different justifications that people offer for their views. And sometimes it’s illuminating to appeal to hypothetical rather than actual cases in order to test the plausibility of these different justifications. See, for example, Harry B’s comment #4 above on Thomson’s violinist case, which serves as a test of the claim that abortion is wrong because the fetus has the same right to life as an adult human person.

Abb1 #39: Yes, I agree that’s a genuine problem. Among other things, the order in which cases are presented affects people’s responses, as they try to render their later responses consistent with their earlier ones. And different descriptions of what is essentially the same case will also make a difference to people’s reactions. So it’s important to randomly vary the order of presentation of cases and also to track the ways in which different descriptions elicit different responses.

In fact we have already reformed our form of life in fundamental ways, creating such fundamentally new concepts as ‘planned pregnancy’, ‘accidental pregnancy’, ‘unwanted pregnancy’, ‘pregnancy by rape’, etc., and thus your statement “pregnancy is a normal feature of the human form of life” seems about as informative as, say “violence is a normal feature of the human form of life”.

Mike Otsuka: but why bring up a “what if”, when we can just look to cases like e.g. Abu Ghraib and Hurricane Katrina, where we can clearly see how highly the anti-abortionists value adults’ right to live? Bringing in flying pigs, square circles, and sentient zygotes gains you nothing, at the expense of introducing nonsensical stuff into your arguments.

Hob: is the runaway trolley situated in Hypotheticopolis?

abb1: I don’t believe “pregnancy by rape,” “unwanted pregnancy,” and the rest are some sort of new -fangled concepts. People have been trying to control pregnancy for a long time and have wanted or not wanted to be pregnant for a long time. And, most terribly, rape has been around, and people have known that it could lead to pregnancy, for perhaps an even longer time.

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

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

That’s all.

Well, Michael, as people smarter than me noted above, the point of this exercise is to demonstrate that claiming some kind of a universal, unconditional “right to life” will lead to at least one hypothetical counter-intuitive situation. And this exercise does exactly that, no more and no less, so that strictly speaking it’s irrelevant whether being kidnapped and hooked to a violinist is a normal every-day situation or a highly unlikely one.

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

Mike,
I suppose much of the discussion here is over whether Foot and Thompson’s examples have really yielded much valuable insight. You think so, obviously, but it’s possible to be familiar with the literature and think that this has rather been a huge waste of time without very significant results. It’s not as if its uncontroversial, after all, that such examples are really useful, even among philosophers. And saying so doesn’t make one an enemy of analytic ethics, obviously enough. (Do Hurka and Brighouse use such examples in their own work? Not all the time, at least, and not in the papers I’ve read. They seem to do fine without them, and I’ve profited more from their work that I’ve read than I have from papers using such examples.)

a good counterexample to a principle should not only show that the principle gives the wrong result, but should also give a clear indication what is wrong with the principle

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

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

I, me, mine! I have way more than five times more right to my personal internal organs than all you bystanders. Even though you’re all successful, productive, well-beloved academics with two, three or four college degrees apiece, while I am an illiterate unwashed vagrant with fleas.

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

I agree it’s not a counterexample’s job to explain why a principle does not hold. But if one’s to give a counterexample, let it be a real-life counterexample, instead of something with flying pigs, square circles, and ticking bombs from Abu Muhammad al-Hitler.