Moral philosophy, casuistry and the ethics of organ donation

I’ve heard a moral philosopher argue that thought experiments can provide counter-examples that disprove theories. That is, if it seems that theory X should handle the stylized facts in thought experiment Y, and it can’t, then we can reject theory X. This isn’t fitting data in a curve-fitting sense, but rather in the falsificationist understanding of empiricism. What’s hard to know, I think, is how we determine what counts as a case that a theory should handle. This is hard in science, and it can only get harder in science fiction. (Notwithstanding the fact that I find Parfit’s transporter story deeply compelling… )

I share your discomfort with “experiment”. Whatever this is, it’s not much like doing one. No getting crushed when you see the confidence interval around the parameter estimate, not to mention no, “Oh SHIT, I just spilled bromine on my hand!”

I partially agree that intuitions should not be used as ‘conversation stoppers’ in order to falsify an entire theory, for the point of a whole theory is that coherence between the various elements that make it up strengthen each one, giving each a higher general level of credence that we could accord to an intuition generated by a thought experiment alone (I take it that this comes from the Quine/ Goodman idea of coherentism that is the basis for Rawlsian wide reflective equilibrium). An intuition can, however, be important in theory alteration/ rejection if it fits into the theory and brings with it a higher level of coherence between the various elements than existed before the intuition was introduced. Thus, if we have two competing theories, and a thought experiment provides intuitive ‘evidence’ that coheres with one and not the other, this might provide the basis for rejection of the other theory.

Fortunately, these cases are not proposed to make law, just to help people figure out what the truth is, often about principles which, if they truly are principles, will cover hard cases as well as other cases. They are among a range of inputs into reflective equilibrium. I’ll do a post specifically on that soonish. (The purpose of spelling it out for Rawls is not entirely clear to those of us too young to remember those days — I’m not sure that he is implying that anyone does anything else, he may just be trying to be explicit about and codify a practice that he sees around him but has not been well articulated).

I taught the violinist yesterday, and spurred by JQ and the previous thread, and emboldened by the fact that the class is unusually big so that students might be willing to be more forthright under protection of anonymity, I probed the handful of students who thought it was NOT ok to unhook from the violinist. They gave interesting reasons, starting with the observation that they thought they couldn’t live with the guilt of killing another person and moving to a bedrock commitment to the idea that sometimes its just bad luck that you’re in a position where doing what you want will kill someone, and that’s not ok. What was interesting was that later on a couple of students who had NOT identified as people who thought they should stay hooked up, revealed in other comments that, in fact, they did think this.

I should have, and now JQ has reminded me I will, test them with the organ donation case.

I’m completely persuaded that “thought experiment” is a misleading term, and am happy to try and shift the language.

Building on Chris’s point a bit, it’s worth noting both the terminology and the practice of “thought experiments” in science as well. That’s how Einstein’s “twins in a spaceship” is often presented (including, I think, by Einstein himself) and things that are pretty much like a philosophy thought experiment is common in the history of science all over the place. There are difference, of course, but they use and structure is similar enough that I don’t think much is gained, and something is lost, from insisting on different terminology. (For useful discussion on this, see Thomas Kuhn’s very interesting article “A Function for Thought Experiments” in his book of essays, _The Essential Tension_. )

It’s also useful to note that different philosophers put different amounts of weight on the intuitions gained from thought experiments and just how useful they are and how they should be used is controversial. How Francis Kamm, for example, uses these examples is rather different from how I would use them. (I think Thompson, methodologically, was closer to Kamm than I would be, but can’t say for sure.)

Gettier cases, for example, give us strong pro tanto reasons to reject the view that knowledge is justified true belief.

That kind of thing has also never struck me as quite the knock-down argument it purports to be. Real-life concepts, including “knowledge”, should be expected to have fuzzy edges. There may be no definition that does not fail in certain, highly artificial, pathological cases.

For what it’s worth, I think the answer to the first question is “Yes” and to the second is “Probably not”. But a positive answer to the first question would seem to justify a “presumed consent” answer to the second, as applied to organ donation after death

I’m not quite sure why this is the case. Morally speaking, I don’t see a difference between opt-in and opt-out donation systems. In either case, the individual has absolute freedom to express his pre-mortem wishes about post-mortem donation, and these wishes can’t be gainsaid in either direction.

A positive answer to the first question could be said to strengthen the argument for compulsory donation – if you think that the state should be in the business of enforcing moral obligations*. But I don’t think it does much for the opt-in/opt-out question.

*Which could be tricky with regard to, say, the moral obligation not to cheat on your husband.

Where are the limits? It can be impractical, even dangerous, to test those limits in actuality, and that makes it important to test them in the imagination.

Except that (as exemplified by the idea the the Gettier paradoxes have put paid to knowledge as justified true belief) that’s not generally how they’re used, or so it seems to me. Instead of being used to explore the limits of a definition or concept, they are often purported to have, in Chris’s words, given a strong pro tanto reason for rejecting one concept altogether and/or embracing an alternative. Even giving credit for the hedge embodied in that “pro tanto”- which it also seems to me is not always acknowledged as forthrightly as Chris did – I’m not sure enough effort gets put into justifying the legitimacy of that move. (And beyond that there’s the issue raised by Witt- it’s not only scientists who have a responsibility to be aware of possible misuse of well-intentioned professional work.)

It seems the procedure with the violinist example goes something like this:

1. Decide what are the morally relevant characteristics of abortion.
2. Set aside all the extraneous details about abortion, and create a new example that shares those characteristics and a different set of extraneous details.
3. See if people’s moral judgment of the new example is the same as it was of abortion.
4a. If their judgments are different, conclude you have not picked the right set of morally relevant characteristics. Look at how people talk about the morality of abortion to see what else they might be looking at. OR
4b. If their judgments are different, conclude that people are failing to apply their moral principles consistently.

I think one problem John Q. (and I, and lots of other people) have with the thought-experiment exercise is that it seems to involve 4b rather than 4a. These “experiments” seem to be intended to convict people who don’t use the moral framework of analytic philosophy of inconsistency, not to investigate the moral frameworks people actually do use.

Look at what Chris B. wrote:

First consider a combination of views that is widespread among American conservatives…: that there is no right to abortion, and that we do not have extensive and demanding enforceable obligations to strangers. People who hold that combination of views ought to be deeply discomforted by the violinist example … Neither example PROVES that this combination is inconsistent, but both examples press the person who adheres to it to give us more explanation of the differences between the cases.

Why is the burden of proof here on the person who doesn’t share the philosopher’s analysis? Surely it’s the responsibility of the philosopher to figure out what consistent principles lie behind people’s moral beliefs, not the responsibility of people to prove to the philosopher’s satisfaction that their beliefs are consistent. So instead of that last sentence, why not write, “both examples press the philosopher to figure out what are the important characteristics of abortion that the examples miss?”

You’re right. My bad.

On the other hand, if your general principle has a really unacceptable implication then that’s a strong pro tanto reason to revise/abandon it

hmmm – if your general principle has a really unacceptable implication in a real-life or plausible hypothetical case, then IMO you have a stronger-than-pro-tanto reason to revise or abandon it. On the other hand, if it appears to have an unacceptable implication in a bizarre, sciencefictional or otherwise weird case, then surely to the extent that the principle appears plausible normally, you also have a strong pro tanto reason to say that the hypothetical case isn’t a relevant one, or (which is my usual objection to moral thought experiments) that the process of abstracting away “irrelevant” details has actually taken away entirely relevant details which would have needed to be provided in a more realistic hypothetical and which would have decided the case one way or another. The most common example of the second case is the tendency to assume things are known with certainty, in contexts where all of our common moral intuitions have been specifically developed to deal with a world in which things aren’t.

Surely it’s the responsibility of the philosopher to figure out what consistent principles lie behind people’s moral beliefs, not the responsibility of people to prove to the philosopher’s satisfaction that their beliefs are consistent

Sounds like psychology to me. And when we do look, what we find is that people don’t have consistent principles (Marc Hauser’s work, for a start).

Dsquared said more or less what I’ve been trying to say but, not unexpectedly, said it far more clearly and succinctly.

These “experiments” seem to be intended to convict people who don’t use the moral framework of analytic philosophy of inconsistency, not to investigate the moral frameworks people actually do use.

I think this gets to the crux of it. In the context of practicing professional analytic philosophy it may be entirely appropriate to do just that: Ruthlessly identify and weed out inconsistencies, hold arguments up to the light and scrutinize them for holes, etc.

But many of these discussions take place outside of those professional boundaries. The participants often do not share the same ground rules, or expectations about why they are discussing something. We (okay, I) may feel that on a given issue, we have personally come to a workable compromise amongst several morally competing considerations, and there is nothing particularly to be gained by ruthlessly lifting up and passing judgment on our inconsistencies. We may even feel that the the process of scrutiny is itself harmful.

I think I’m starting to repeat myself. Off to work.

22: The most common example of the second case is the tendency to assume things are known with certainty, in contexts where all of our common moral intuitions have been specifically developed to deal with a world in which things aren’t.

This is a very good point. Because the trouble with thought experiments is that, when you’re running them, you know you’re in a thought experiment.

_if it appears to have an unacceptable implication in a bizarre, sciencefictional or otherwise weird case, then surely to the extent that the principle appears plausible normally_

Well we’ve been here before in other threads, but it isn’t as if the drive to such cases isn’t often a natural outcome of the dialectic. If we have superficially plausible principles A and B which can’t both be true but which generate the same conclusion in a wide range of normal cases, then of course we’re going to start searching for examples where there’s a divergence in what they prescribe.

I am curious to know what the parameters are, in your view, of a thought experiment. Does your objection apply to literary or concocted examples or counterexamples that have no outlandish features?

If we have superficially plausible principles A and B which can’t both be true but which generate the same conclusion in a wide range of normal cases, then of course we’re going to start searching for examples where there’s a divergence in what they prescribe.

there’s searching and there’s searching though. I’d tend to argue (in the course of my longstanding proxy war against Michael Walzer) that the world is a very big and very strange place, and that I don’t really think that people often make a particularly good-faith effort to find a real-world case where there’s divergence rather than inventing a fictitious one. I mean, if it really is the case that there’s no real-world or plausible-hypothetical case in which principles A and B give different answers, then is it not worth considering whether the quest for a defining experiment between them is really worth the effort, particularly when (as with me and Steve’s view on the Gettier case) it’s possible that the two principles are just not really logically sharp enough to bear the weight of extrapolation placed on them?

D-squared, I’m confused by your response re Gettier cases. You respond to it by saying that “knowledge” is a fuzzy term w/o sharp boundaries. But isn’t that just one of the things one might _conclude_ from the Gettier case? If we thought before (as at least some people have) that “knowledge” was a term with necessary and sufficient conditions, and that those just were “justified true belief”, then one response to Gettier-type cases would be to decide that it’s a fuzzy term. That people went off on (what seems to me to be) a wild goose chase looking for a new set of necessary and sufficient conditions is perhaps interesting, but it wasn’t required by the nature of the case. But I don’t see how your response to the case is anything like a challenge to the use of thought experiments.

Steve- that’s a perfectly legitimate concern, and I think it’s reasonably put towards many philosophers. As I mentioned above, there are lots of different ways of using such tools, with some people using them as one step in a process of reflective equilibrium and others being willing to draw conclusions much more quickly from them. This is highly controversial even among philosophers. (Francis Kamm, as I mentioned, is perhaps the most highly developed practictioner of such examples and for drawing conclusions almost directly from them, and her work is extremely controversial, for example.)

Since it hasn’t been mentioned yet (unless I missed it…), let me suggest that many students (like me) have their first experiences with thought experiments via exposure to Newton’s “it makes sense that stuff can remain in static orbit around the Earth indefinitely, and here’s why” thought experiment, and similar experiments (e.g. Diderot’s “every animal is made of tiny bees” dream/thought-experiment in biology^1^). One goal there is to extend one’s intuition smoothly from consensus cases to a case which, without the structure of the thought experiment, might strike some folks as implausible.

My first real experience with thought experiments outside science instruction/curriculum was reading Harry B’s book Justice as a freshman undergrad, but several thought experiments showed up in high school AP physics and biology. The transition in thinking required felt more jarring/disorienting than it would have if I’d never heard the term “thought experiment” before, and a lot of the expectations I had implicitly developed from thought experimentation like Newton’s needed to adjust for me to perceive the value. (Maybe this is off-topic, but one thing I liked about Justice is that it met me where I was at, acknowledged the potential difference in expectations, and clarified how to find value in philosophical thought experiments. Rereading chapter 2 a couple nights ago, one thing that surprised me was how it little it explicitly said about physicists’ thought experiments — it clarifies the distinction, and necessary mental reorientation, implicitly quite well.)

I’ve been trying to figure out some intelligent way to connect all this to the ongoing discussion and am failing at the moment. I guess thought experiments in the sciences tend to extend to positive results, whereas thought experiments in philosophy tend to negative results. (I don’t mean this as a value judgment, just that these latter sorts of thought experiments function by exposing or illuminating potential contradictions or inconsistencies, whereas the former sort of thought experiments function by making the potentially implausible seem more plausible).

Perhaps it’s not so clean/neat/clear/correct a distinction, especially given that the first modern philosophers and the first modern physicists tripped over each other’s feet on their way out the door.

I guess the reason this seems vaguely relevant to me is because it lets me soapbox against otherworldly hypotheticals, which (it seems to me) good physics thought experiments assiduously avoid. For example, with some rephrasing, it seems possible to avoid “assume things are known with certainty.” I have to confess, in some thought experiments, a few details seem thrown out there in the way I might have thrown in unexpected irrelevant details when pitching a sample problem to my high school students — hey! shiny! keep paying attention! Like, why a trolley running into n people, vs. a grenade thrown into a crowd of n people? Someone’s between you and the grenade: do you shove the person onto the grenade so they absorb the blast, or let them leap away with you, dooming the n others standing by the grenade? In the case of the trolley, we have to assert and reinforce the knowledge with probability 1 that the fat man will stop the trolley. In the case of the grenade, there’s no base implausibility to overcome (and irritating physics-major students won’t grumble about suspending conservation of momentum! :)

(The grenade situation happened to my grandfather in Korea, according to my father’s retelling of the events; the guy in front of him jumped on the grenade, rendering the question moot.)

What happens, in terms of general responses, if we first run the experiment with a woman to be pushed, and then switch to a man? Something different than if we first run the experiment with a man to be pushed, and then switch to a woman? Fat vs. thin? How sensitive is the result we get to these kinds of perturbations?

^1^Which still rankles for its arbitrary use of Mademoiselle as the airheaded Simpleton foil, but I guess that’s 1769 A.D. for you.

Isn’t Walzer’s ‘Just and Unjust Wars’? and, from what I remember ‘Spheres of Justice’ as well?

45: yes good point (he also tends to use plausible hypotheticals rather than science fictional ones). maybe there’s a distinction there between common practice in political philosophy versus moral philosophy – I remember reading Reasons and Persons and thinking that the Star Trek stuff was very interesting but you’d have real problems persuading anyone to actually adopt a different policy on climate change by appealing to their intuitions about what would happen in a matter transporter.

@Salient:

“I guess the reason this seems vaguely relevant to me is because it lets me soapbox against otherworldly hypotheticals, which (it seems to me) good physics thought experiments assiduously avoid”

But this isn’t really true, is it? Maxwell’s Demon is about as otherwordly as it gets.

More generally, most physics thought experiments involve a fair amount of idealization that make them somewhat otherwordly. Why should readily accept that our physical intuition smoothly extends to these idealized realms, while our moral intuition does not?

Sorry but how are Gettier’s examples supposed to show that our concept of knowledge is ‘fuzzy’ (‘without clear boundaries’). The application of the concept to those cases is perfectly clear, isn’t it? — it just doesn’t coincide with the ‘justified true belief’ analysis.

“One thing I don’t like about the term “thought experiment” is the implication that the results of such thought experiments constitute data.”

You completely fail to understand the point of thought experiments. They are a rationalist exercise, not an empiricist one. They don’t generate data points, they test logical consistency under the logic of the reductio ad absurdum.

“The way I’d prefer to approach such problems involves an iterative loop.”

Wow, that’s a great idea!. FYI: There was this guy named John Rawls who called it “reflective equilibrium.” There is no reason whatsoever that a thought experiment can’t be part of a process of reflective equilibrium.

I’m amused that we have two economists slamming philosophy for its unreal examples, oversimplifications and counterfactuals that lead to bad policy in the real world.

(Yes, it’s rude for me to implicitly blame JQ and DD who engage the real world in realistic ways that would lead to quite good policies. But it’s no more rude than tagging Harry and Chris. The violinist problem is not like the “complete certainty, seconds to decide” trolley/wager-demon/episode of House examples, and one might think that the intuitive dislike of hypotheticals formed around the latter kind might not be relevant to the better, pedagogically useful kind.)

should the person at fault be compelled to donate blood/organs to save the life of the innocent party

No, just kill the wounded one and then there is no need to sacrifice a perfectly healthy human.

pedagogically useful kind

whoa. how did the word “pedagogically” get in here? I am not necessarily wonderfully happy about the habits taught to students by the use of thought experiments for pedagocial purposes but that’s a vvv different debate isn’t it?

‘bit unfair’ obviously. Need to learn to use teh preview.

dsquared@24 has nailed it.

the process of abstracting away details rests on artistry . the decision about which details to inlcude and which to exclude is much closer to a creative act – and is understood as such in the hard sciences, hence einstein and feynman’s (and many others’ ) reverence for that intuition – than to any rational process. inevitably, as in all art, the character, suppositions and values of the person doing the abstracting all have some definite but unquantifiable bearing on the outcome, making the outcome an easy target for accusations of cherry-picking and pre-determined conclusions.

i also think that most people realise this, either explictly or intuitively, and that recognition is the source of everyone’s (1) unease with the label ‘experiment’. experiment carries with it implicastions of clarity, quantifiability and repeatability that, in these contexts are inappropriate and inaccurate, specifically because the process of abstraction is so much an art and so little a science.

disclaimer: i’ve probably added nothing to the discussion that someone else already hasn’t. at best i’ve summarised what others said. i haven’t had a chance to read all the comments – i got (as you can see) as far as #24.

that said, there’s no guarantee that, having read them all i’d suddenly be inspired to original commentary.

d

(1) by ‘everyone’ in this sentence, i mean everyone who is uneasy with the use of ‘exeriment’ to lable these activities. :)

In the U.S. there is a continual shortage of blood and organs and donation is generally opt-in. In our host’s hypothetical, obligatory donation would be problematic. A blood-type mismatch is quite likely and, depending on the nature of the injury involved, an organ match would be highly unlikely.

Given the fungibility of body parts when the supply is scarce, and noting that most of us have a spare kidney and can live with half a liver, and that we can be comfortably milked of blood, compulsory compassionate donation after a collision isn’t inconceivable, though if a spleen or a gall bladder or only one kidney was damaged there wouldn’t be much point to a transplant.

Once upon a time, after reporting a minor accident to my insurance agent, I mentioned that I’d been donating blood, He recounted how, when he was in Vietnam, the medics directly transfused his blood into someone who’d been badly wounded. The patient died and their blood types turned out not to match, although it’s not clear that it made any difference.

John,

I’m all for empirically plausible examples. Your example isn’t. As a practical matter, injuries sustained through severe blunt trauma are unlikely to be meaningfully alleviated by the injurer donating blood or an organ (or fraction of an organ), for several reasons. First, the blood and blood products required for life-sustaining/saving interventions would far outstrip the safely procured capacity of a single donor, and the time/effort required to fractionate, process and test the blood products (plasma, primarily) from the “donor” would be prohibitive. Second, (I’m a transplant physician) there are few plausible clinical scenario in which the life of the injured would be saved through the donation of an organ by the injurer. Certainly, if the injured suffered a blunt trauma which resulted in substantial damage to the liver or (vanishingly rare) both kidneys, the collateral damage in the injured would probably contraindicate immediate transplantation.

A more apropo scenario is whether isolated organ failure which emerged in the course of the hospitalization, but which was causally once-removed from the primary injury, still generates such a moral obligation to donate. The concerns described by Jim @ 69 are relevant, but even if surmountable (a vanishingly rare scenario), professional ethics intervene: As a group, transplant professionals try to be cognizant of and avoid cooperation with potential donors whose motives are manifestly conflicted. Transplant professionals have obligations to ensure optimal medical and psychological outcomes for donors. Donors haunted by guilt don’t tend to do well, psychologically, and donors are still our patients. The “right to donate” is a forebearance right, and therefore does not impose an obligation on transplant professionals to facilitate a donation in these circumstances.

Finally, I’m surprised, 60+ comments in, that no one has mentioned the literary parallel to the example:

PORTIA.
Tarry a little; there is something else.
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are ‘a pound of flesh’:
Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice.
GRATIANO. O upright judge! O learned judge!
SHYLOCK. Is that the law?
PORTIA.
Thyself shalt see the act;
For, as thou urgest justice, be assur’d
Thou shalt have justice, more than thou desir’st.
The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, i

The history of medicine in the 20th C. certainly makes the case that organized medicine is an impoverished surrogate for either the scales or sword of justice in these situations. Instances where medicine does serve as such a surrogate invites the Whirlwind….more [justice] than thou desir’st.

The next thing I’d say is that, with respect to human reproduction, our ‘form of life’ has changed quite a lot in the last fifty years.

This is perhaps so (I’m not completely sure, but it might be) but it’s always important to remember w/ the Thompson piece that it was published in 1971, almost 40 years ago, and in a time when abortion was illegal in many parts of the US. Given that, we should be a bit surprised if the assumptions and targets were exactly the same as they would be were it to be written now. That often seems to be ignored. (I know that it’s not something my own students thought about at first when I’ve taught it.)

Ok – at the risk of picking fights with front-pagers – never a good thing on any blog – I feel I want to say:

a) I think my comment about Dsquared at 64 was unduly generous, since a quick review of the thread reminds me that Harry’s discussion of pedagogy was actually going on in this very thread.

More substantively: I think that in philosophy its quite hard to pull apart the probative and the pedagogical aspects of things in the way that Daniel seemed to be suggesting we should.

b) Can I just dissassociate myself from Chris’s 71. Just because he’s on my side doesn’t mean he’s on my side and so on. Again more substantively: I think that John’s response to Jim and the Indians is spot on (and his concessi0n on George the research scientist worth noting). And I think it points us to something which seems significant, and which Chris’ rejoinder runs the risk of obscuring: namely, that the sort of certainty that’s objectionable in some thought experiments in moral philosophy is certainty which is stipulatively introduced by the author of the example.

I reckon this is important for two reasons at least.

1) It explains why there’s a difference between using these kinds of cases and examples from history and fiction. Because in history and fiction there’s more often if not always a bit of recalcitrant real world data/interpretative looseness that allows an interlocutor to put a bit of a spin on the example

2) I think it’s this kind of stipulative certainty that gives rise to the idea that thought experiments are often used as conversation stoppers. (So, in particular, its not just or even partly because of the word experiment and ignorance of the Duhem/Quine thesis)

c) Since there’s been some mention of reflective equilibrium, I’m surprised that no-one’s mentioned the difference between ‘wide’ and ‘narrow’ reflective equilibrium.
‘Narrow’ is more or less the procedure John outlined a bit. ‘Wide’ allows you to seek a fit between not just moral principles and intuitions, but also a iwder range of beliefs. (I think Rawls may mention coherence with ones metaphysical beliefs).

Lots of people think that Wide RE is a more plausible methodology than Narrow RE. And I imagine that one reason for that is that it enables people to say ‘Well, I think that intuitions about cases like X are likely to be unreliable for the following reasons’ and then specify the reasons. Which NRE doesn’t.

4) In response to Matt. I think ‘fifty years’ was wrong in retrospect. The things I had in mind were a) massive reductions in perinatal mortality and concurrent reductions in family size b) widespread access to reliable and effective contraception. I don’t think changes in our moral beliefs count as ‘changes in a form of life’. So maybe 100 years would be better.

Apologies for the long post.

To what extent is the Violinist/Fat man on the tracks/etc the firm in perfect competition of philosophy (or vice versa)?

68: But if there would be a real shortage of blood, I don’t see there would be lots of opposition to the idea of saying it’s necessary for a certain group of people to donate. I don’t think it would come to coercion as it’s something where most people in that group would just show up on request.

Something similar is actually happening in the UK at present with bone marrow. The frequency of different blood groups is different in different ethnic groups, but there’s no relevant difference for donation purposes between the blood of an A+ black man and an A+ white man. But bone marrow, unlike blood, contains compatibility marker proteins which are highly racially correlated.

So, if you need a bone marrow transplant for, say, leukaemia, you’ll probably need to get it from someone of the same broad ethnic group. And there is a real shortage of donors – both generally (it’s a more invasive process than blood donation) and especially in the Afro-Caribbean and Asian groups. So there are several charities targetting these groups specifically to try to get donation rates up – with fair success, and no opposition to this targetting that I’m aware of.

DD@63, what 64 said. Or is that the confusion? Philosophers use these contrived stories in order to focus the mind of the audience on specific points. Kind of like camera angles in film. It’s not as if all they do is (1) imagine a contrived example (2) ?? (3) publish/profit. Remember, the way you present stuff in an article has little resemblance to the order in which you work it out, and most of the work doesn’t get mentioned.

I agree with you that there are people out there who never get past the artificial case, and unfortunately some of them write legislation. And a large number of the artificial cases are bad, and we probably agree on which ones. And Reasons and Persons does use some contrived examples to push the reader into accepting increasingly uncomfortable positions as utilitarian, when real-world analogues are available. But Parfitt goes deeper into the issues and doesn’t advocate for loony policies. It’s all about clarity of explanation and pedagogy, at least for the philosophers. What pundits and pubcrawlers do with the examples they kind of maybe recall from university days is their own responsibility.

81: but isn’t it fairly easy to address this by asking “does this sort of situation ever actually occur in real life?” In real life, people do have brtns. They do have to decide whether or not murderers should be executed, or whether organ transplants should be compulsory, or whether it’s right to endanger innocent people in order to prevent a greater harm later on.

But real people don’t get stuck behind fat people in mineshafts (or at least I am unaware of any case in which this happens) or involuntarily tethered to critically ill violinists. Isn’t it enough to say “if these theoretically contradictory moral principles can only actually come into conflict in circumstances that never occur, then there’s no problem in regarding them both as moral and mutually compatible for everyday purposes”?

84: that’s not an example of two moral principles which can only come into conflict in an unlikely or non-existent situation. You can bring the “don’t steal people’s stuff” and “take care of the sick and injured” principles into conflict in a realistic situation; the hoverboard isn’t a central part of the problem. But things like The Fat Man Problem are silly, because they’re unrealistic and there’s no more realistic situation that embodies the same conflict of principles.

Here’s a slight revision of the Violinist Problem which benefits from being a bit more feasible.

You are a military conscript, serving as a pilot. Your next mission is a raid on a heavily defended enemy position: your specific job is to attack the anti-aircraft guns protecting it from high altitude, allowing your fellow pilot to get past them and hit the target itself at low level. You’ll then fly on to neutral Spain, because you won’t have enough fuel to get home; you’ll be interned in a Spanish prison for a few months before being returned home.

As you approach the target and see the flak coming up at you, you consider the alternative option: simply abandon the mission and return home, claiming that you suffered from a mechanical problem.

The risk to you, if you continue the raid, is small (but not non-existent), since you’ll be high up and difficult to hit; your fellow pilot, thanks to your diversionary attack, will also have a very good chance of survival. But if you don’t carry out your part of the mission, your fellow pilot, a much easier target at low level, will certainly be shot down by the undistracted gunners and killed.

Do you have a moral obligation to fly the mission?

On your own point, I think like others here you misunderstand the point of there examples if you think it is to bring out a conflict in the implications of competing principles that would never be apparent in everyday life. I can’t see that’s true of any of the examples we have been discussing…

I’m also not sure why it is more ‘science-fictiony’ for me _as a man_ to imagine being connected to the violinist then being pregnant with an unwanted child. Certainly neither are situations it is physically possible for me to ever be in.

I realise I’m not winning any friends with this but I honestly don’t see what is so implausible about either JJT’s violinist or Jim and the Indians. I can easily imagine myself in either situation, reluctantly having to make a decision. Do others really find it impossible to imagine being in these situations?

The analogy where having sex is like playing Russian roulette or driving drunk seems unfair; sex is much more ordinary, far less exotic than that. It’s not unreasonable to abstain from playing and driving drunk because of the rick involved, but it does seem unreasonable to abstain from sex to avoid getting pregnant.

I don’t think the difference between pregnancy by rape and any other unwanted pregnancy that significant.

Vivian at 95 said, apropos Jim and the Indians, ‘The idea that philosophy ought to give us a clear conscience on a simple decision rule – desensitizing us to tragedy – how very uncompelling.’

That’s exactly the point of the Jim and the Indians thought experiment, as invented by Bernard Williams in a piece called ‘A critique of utilitarianism’. Williams’ conclusion is that (1) utilitarianism perhaps gives the right answer in this particular case (Jim should kill one of the villagers); but (2) it gets that answer far too easily, by ignoring most of what matters in human life.

Could it be possible that what is really going on here is that these examples make many people uncomfortable because they draw attention to genuine problems with views to which they are strongly committed? And an entirely natural (if not perhaps entirely admirable) reaction is to try to find ways to avoid having to think about such problems, by casting around for ‘factual’ grounds to rule them out? just thought I’d throw that out there…

“Jim and the Indians” doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly egregious thought experiment in-the-pejorative-sense, as it’s not a particularly implausible hypothetical situation, it’s just that in similar real-world situations we specifically don’t actually make moral judgements of the Jim character at all (cf “Sophie’s Choice” – if someone came out of that film and their reaction to it was to make a definite assessment of whether Sophie had done the right or wrong thing, you’d actually consider that person to be a bit weird). The correct (as far as I can see) response to that thought experiment is to say that whatever Jim chooses, the blame and war crimes charges are assigned to the villain. But that’s the response that will lose you all your marks in the pedagogical situation, for “avoiding the issue”. As well as stipulating perfect knowledge here, the person setting up the thought experiment is also stipulating what the morally relevant judgement to make shall be, which is another little funky card-sharp’s move of the sort that Wittgenstein warned against.

I’ve never cared much for Jim and the Indians, but as vivian emphasizes the point of it is not to help us know what we should do, or to make determinations of where blame should be lodged, but to make vivid/illuminate/highlight a value consideration — personal integrity or something like that — that both consequentialism and Kantianism have quite a hard time making room for. Does this mean we should reject those theories or revise one or another of them, or not revise but explore to find resources that had previously been hidden from view? The final option is what people, mostly, have taken. Describing the example without discussing the context or the point is misleading and unhelpful to students (so the pedagogical stuff comes up over and over again).

I’m a bit surprised to see Wittgenstein invoked the way that D-squared does here since Wittgenstein’s work is full of all sorts of cases that can only be called “thought experiments”, many of which involve unusual scenarios designed to push our intuitions in certain directions. I think they are perfectly legitimate, both in Wittgenstein’s work and in others, though of course I have my doubts about some and about how they are used by some philosophers. But a lot more care would be needed, I think, to invoke Wittgenstein in this fight than has been done so far.

I don’t think I’ve misremembered it; the point I was trying to make is that in lifelike situations, there’s actually no morally relevant judgement to be made about Jim’s actions.

further to #108, I don’t think that it is at all odd or requiring of much care or justification to bring Wittgenstein in on the subject of the general proposal that appeals to intuitions in unusual cases outside ordinary experience shouldn’t be used (or should only be used diffidently and with care) to criticise common intuitions in ordinary cases.

I am unequipped by both training and temperament to participate in this on a professional level. But I think that, people do, not uncommonly, make moral decisions by persuading themselves that they are in a Jim-and-the-Indians situation. To take an example from my own field of expertise:

As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow: and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order . . .

Jim-and-the-Indians is IMO just a special case of William-the-research-scientist. When I was young the argument was phrased “Work within the system for change!”

What roac said.

As far as “working within the system for change” and the research scientist problem, why is the issue always set up as: choose between youthful idealism and adult responsibility (which is not, in fact, the dilemma that people encounter most frequently in the course of their lives)? And why is the responsibility involved only to family and dependents–what about responsibility to, for example, subordinates–the question, should I take a position of responsibility that will involve my demoralizing and exploiting a half-dozen people whom I previously cared about (or is that the only way to do the job)? Framing the issue in terms only as “you have a family and have to take care of them” has nothing to say when this is a more pressing question.

I’ll try again then – I don’t think I was very clear. Williams’ point is (as I understand it) that a utilitarian a) has to give Jim the advice to kill the man and b) has to say that this is obviously the right answer and that any reluctance or regret on Jim’s part is just sentimentality or some other “irrational” emotion that needs to be discounted.

My response to the thought experiment[1] is that actually, consequentialists would probably not gainsay Jim and would more or less never make the criticism which Williams attributes to them. And that this is because real-life hostage situations are pretty much the epitome of a case in which it’s very difficult to work out what will actually happen and in which it’s both unfair and unproductive to gainsay the people who had to make the difficult decisions (even in cases like the storming of the Nord-Ost theatre, where it looks in retrospect to have been really definitely a bad decision). So, actual consequentialists in judging a real-life Jim who had demurred from shooting the sacrificial victim would not be to criticise him for squeamishness, but rather to defer to his judgement because he was there and they were not. In so far as you would criticise Jim from a consequentialist perspective, it would be for ignoring the requests of the other victims, who had both better information and more at stake.

So my point is that it’s true that the proposed way to decide “looks too slick and formulaic and detached”, but it only does so because Williams has, by stipulation, turned this from a situation of massive and (literally[2]) undecidable uncertainty, into one which is simply a choice between two certainties. So in other words, the thought experiment has the effect of making utilitarianism look like an unattractively simplistic decision rule precisely by removing all the uncertainty and complexity which exists in the real world and which consequentialism is meant to help deal with.

Or in other words, while sadism and massacres are entirely conceivable, subjective certainty about the intentions of the other player in a two-person ultimatum game is actually a lot less conceivable.

[1]I’m finding it really hard to avoid mentioning that there’s quite a lot of pretty casual racial stereotypes in it, by the way; I mean, I realise it was the 1970s and that Williams wasn’t actually a racist, but I pretty much cringe every time I type “the Indians” and “Pedro”.

[2] cf Barkley Rosser Jr “All I Have To Say Has Already Crossed Your Mind” – two-person games of this sort are very often logically equivalent to problems that are formally undecidable in the Godelian sense.

Henri and Vivian, there is a difference between saying a woman who has voluntary sex has responsibility for the consequences and saying she should not have such sex, much less that sex should be removed from society (the latter is particularly bizarre, as not everyone seeks to avoid having children, and the ones who don’t are seeking to move into the situations Vivian describes or should be). After all, the standard we use for the man is that the fact that he engaged in voluntary sex creates a decades-long legally-enforced responsibility. The assertion that it would not be reasonable to expect him never to engage in sex is not considered to neutralize this.

But I’m reluctant to pursue this line of discussion further in this thread. We’re going from examination of Thomson’s violinist and what it says about thought experiments in philosophy to realistic argument. While I’m not adverse to this, I don’t want to be accused of threadjacking.

In my previous comment, I meant Allison, not Vivian. Apologies.

It seems odd to have Wittgenstein wheeled on in defence of consequentialism here

I really don’t think that bit was either weird or unclear. I wheeled Wittgenstein on in order to make a point about thought experiments. I would have brought him in on the same wheels whatever the thought experiment under discussion, including one aimed at defending consequentialism rather than attacking it.

He’s using the thought-experiment to dramatise two ideas which are central to his ethical thought

yes but I think the way in which he achieves this dramatic effect is a bit of a cheat. The complexity is removed, by him, by stipulating a choice between two certainties. I’ll try a third time since I’m clearly not expressing this clearly:

1) in normal ethical situations, there’s almost always a huge amount of factual uncertainty about what the actual consequences of our actions will be.

2) Williams is trying to argue (among other things) that even if you remove this merely factual uncertainty, there’s a whole lot of extra ethical complexity which accounts for our lived experience not being really well described by consequentialism or Kantianism, as Sam C says.

3) But (this is the point I’m trying to make), can you really remove all the factual complexity? Isn’t it reasonable for either Kantians or consequentialists to say that their ethical systems were developed for a real world in which everything’s uncertain, and that the subjective feelings which are described by novelists are actually a result of the uncertain world we live in?

4) So IMO, Williams is actually doing exactly what John identifies as the problem with thought experiments – he is using them to drag out an intuition (the intuition being that there is something flat and unrealistic about the pat answers given by deontological or consequentialist ethics), but the intuition in question is being drawn out by an utterly unrealistic situation (ie, one in which the main character has perfect knowledge of the consequences of his actions).

5) just to reiterate, while it isn’t at all an unrealistic hypothetical to suppose that you might be in a hostage situation with a sadistic maniac, as John Q says above, it is very unrealistic to suppose that you could be in such a situation and able to trust that he would keep his promises.

Are there in moral philosophy any canonical arguments that moral judgments must be founded on consistent “principles” applicable across a wide variety of cases, or is this just something that is routinely assumed?

Without knowing much about this I think that the method of examples does tend to beg the question from the point of view of the issue Steven mentions, by assuming that one is in a position to form a judgment on the basis of these schematic descriptions.

Okay, agreed.

Duncan, she does try to withdraw it, for example, specifically in the line you quoted before: “Surely the question of whether you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you have, shouldn’t turn on the question of whether or not you are the product of a rape.” Here, she has recast the question, not as whether the woman’s right to control her body trumps the right to life, but whether the right to life exists at all and how strong it is. She has gone from weighing competing moral claims to reducing the argument to a single moral claim (whether a fetus has a right to life and how strong it is), which she previously stipulated and now holds in question. This despite the fact that her central argument is designed to hold that the right to abortion exists regardless of such a right. Here is how she states her project at the outset: “I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? ” (elsewhere she grants that being a person entails a right to life). By changing the question, as we move away from rape, to whether or how strong a right to life the fetus has, she is able to avoid the status of the competing moral claim: is the right of the woman changed by the fact the sex is consensual? A true examination of the competing moral claims would have to address both claims, and Thomson does not. All of a sudden, the right to life of the fetus is the only question. This despite the fact that the strength of her argument is that it grants a very strong right to life and comes down in favor of abortion anyway.

As for who her opponents are, the article makes sweeping assertions about abortion opponents to the effect that the views she is attacking are the prevailing ones. For example, “Opponents of abortion commonly spend most of their time establishing that the fetus is a person, and hardly anytime explaining the step from there to the impermissibility of abortion.” In fact, there is one point where she does not do this: where she acknowledges that most abortion opponents do not oppose it in case of threat to the mother’s life. But that just makes more clear that in the other cases she intends her sweeping generalizations.

I disagree with you that Thomson’s influence is likely to be partly responsible for contemporary anti-abortion arguments, but this is unverifiable and of no consequence anyway. So what if it is?

I can’t be responsible for what “people you have spoken to” may have said. But saying taking responsibility means not having an abortion is a side in the debate. That is not the same as begging the question. You can still dispute it; they have not created a analogy where their conclusion is hidden in the premises.

I actually didn’t say that you agreed to have the violinist attached to you, though that may be a common assumption of how lotteries work, only that you knew this was a possible consequence. For the man, engaging in sex is sufficient to establish a responsibility so strong it is enforced by law. It makes no difference whether the man agrees to paternity. Engaging in sex is considered to entail responsibility by its nature. Many other commonly-accepted forms of responsibility do not entail express or even implicit consent.

But part of the nature of thought experiments like this is one can always reject both the analogy and the conclusion. Several have rejected the violinist example itself as too unrealistic, and it is certainly more unrealistic than a lottery. What I believe I have shown is that it does have the virtue that one can introduce variations and get different results, thereby isolating the factors that seem morally relevant. But one can always hold that you must keep the violinist on your back (in the original version, I mean) or that taking a known risk does not entail responsibility for the consequences if those consequences are not explicitly agreed to (though this would eliminate huge swathes of responsibility that we normally accept. I’m sure Wall Street bankers would love that moral standard). I think the fact that I am able to turn Thomson’s own metaphor against her case is an argument for the legitimacy of the thought experiment. It was intended polemically, but can survive its original polemical purpose.

126: Isn’t it reasonable for either Kantians or consequentialists to say that their ethical systems were developed for a real world in which everything’s uncertain, and that the subjective feelings which are described by novelists are actually a result of the uncertain world we live in?

You’ve been at the heterophenomenology again, haven’t you?

Anyway, I’m taking the gist of what you’re saying to be more or less as follows:

(1) We experience ‘moral discomfort’ (as “described by novelists”);
(2) We hypothesise that our moral discomfort has factual complexity as partial cause;
(3) We additionally hypothesise that our moral discomfort has faulty ethical theory as partial cause;
(4) We have the option of testing out alternate ethical theories to see if they reduce our moral discomfort.

So far, so good: we can apply something like Mill’s method of differences. And framed in this way, I think the question comes out like this: will any conceivable set of thought experiments / example cases help us arrive at the best possible ethical theory faster than the alternative: more lived experience? If so, what should that set of experiments / test cases look like?

Very late to the party, but for the record:

Some thought experiments are good. Some are bad.

Use the good ones. Avoid the bad ones.

Which are which, though? It comes down, not to whether the situations are realistic or not, but to whether the tendency of the conclusion is to help or hinder good moral thinking.

This will be contextual, too, of course: probably almost any thought experiment can be helpful in the right conversation, but probably almost any thought experiment can also be detrimental (to a student pedagogically; to human life if taken literally by the wrong bureaucrat).

A boring answer, yes! But honestly I don’t see the fundamental difference between a “thought experiment” of the type that the original post encourages us to think of as inherently problematic, as compared to any other type of philosophical argument.

Is Rawls’ “original position” a thought experiment of the type to be avoided on principle? What about Plato’s cave? Or the classic about the Nazi asking you if there are any Jews in your attic? What about “How would you feel if you were a woman who was raped?” — posed to a man? Who decides among these cases? And why bother trying to find some general characteristic that will distinguish any or all of these from the plugged-in violinist?

Why not talk about philosophy, instead of talking about how one ought to talk about philosophy? The whole conversation is just too meta. IMO.

I’m tempted to try to come up with a thought experiment that would demonstrate the foolishness of trying to distinguish “bad” thought experiments from “good” philosophical arguments. But it’s late and my brain isn’t very creative right now. Anybody got any thoughts?