Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people."
Joshua Greene, an assistant professor of psychology at at Harvard University with an interest in moral philosophy, has evidently found that a stimulating quote. It inspired the title and much of the reasoning of his essay The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul. (Hmmmm. A Harvard man officially tasked with teaching psychology who writes about moral philosophy? Why would he interest a Jamesian like myself?)
Greene discusses trolley cars in that essay, and regular readers of Pragmatism Refreshed will not be surprised to learn that this bit drew my attention. [I'll assume my reader already familiar with the standard trolley-car hypothetical. Follow that last link if you want a refresher.]
Greene ups the ante: "What if the trolley is headed for a detonator that will set off a nuclear bomb that will kill half a million people?" he imagines asking a stubborn deontologist. "Suddenly the welfare of society as a whole starts to sound important again."
His point is that the initial refusal of many of his students to (imaginatively) sacrifice somebody to an oncoming trolley for the good of two or more somebodies is an emotional reaction, one bred into us by evolution, where immediate interpersonal relations are the only ones that really counted for our selfish genes. The emotional reaction gives way and "cognition" kicks in once numbers get really large.
So should we conclude that we owe it to ourselves as a species to get over our inbred emotional responses and do the right thing as our cognition indicates? That deontology is a phase in our existence we ought finally to outgrow? Green does not draw that conclusion. After all, taken without qualification that line of reasoning tells me also that I should "feel uneasy" about loving my children more than any other children. No parent [almost no parent?] feels uneasy about that, and Greene states the reason well. "It seems that one who is unwilling to act on human tendencies with amoral evolutionary causes is ultimately unwilling to be human." There must be a line between "correcting the near-sightedness of human moral nature and obliterating it completely...." Giving up on parental love would obliterate human nature. On which side of the line would one put the deontological refusal to stop the runaway trolley, even if it dooms two victims rather than one? Is that the humanness we must preserve or the near-sightedness thereof we should correct?
Greene leaves that question open. But the fact that he suggests deontology still has some life in it, even after treating it as an emotional response at odds with cognition, suggests that the secret in his soul may be the same as the secret in Kant's.
Showing posts with label trolleys. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trolleys. Show all posts
16 October 2010
21 March 2010
Moral objectivism
Let us talk for a moment about moral objectivism. I don't mean "Objectivism" with a capital-O, by the way. Anyone who wants to talk about that may be excused.
No, "objectivism" with a lower-case letter is simply the view that some fact is what it is whether or not it is perceived as such. And "moral objectivism," naturally, is the view that there are moral rights and wrongs that are "objective" facts in the same way that yellow and green are objective facts, whatever that way is. We don't have to be sure that we understand "knowledge of the yellowness of the wall" before we can move on to the more complicated questions of morality. We can simply point to that sort of knowledge and say that however we might end up describing it, it will be the paradigm of what we mean by objective knowledge. The implicit contrast is to a proposition such as "french vanilla is the most delicious flavor of ice cream," which we might take as paradigmatically subjective.
When a moral objectivist claims to know that, say, throwing the switch of a certain specified runaway trolley is wrong, he is claiming to know something analogous to the yellowness of the paint on the wall, not something analogous to the deliciousness of ice cream.
The point I'd like chiefly to make today is this: the question of objectivity is different from the question of relativity. A wall may be "relatively" yellow -- it may look yellow in certain lighting conditions or in comparison with another wall. These relative situations are themselves objective facts, i.e. they are what they are regardless of my tastes. So let's not confuse "relative" with "subjective" or demand that something be an absolute before you call it objective.
I'm just mulling things over....
No, "objectivism" with a lower-case letter is simply the view that some fact is what it is whether or not it is perceived as such. And "moral objectivism," naturally, is the view that there are moral rights and wrongs that are "objective" facts in the same way that yellow and green are objective facts, whatever that way is. We don't have to be sure that we understand "knowledge of the yellowness of the wall" before we can move on to the more complicated questions of morality. We can simply point to that sort of knowledge and say that however we might end up describing it, it will be the paradigm of what we mean by objective knowledge. The implicit contrast is to a proposition such as "french vanilla is the most delicious flavor of ice cream," which we might take as paradigmatically subjective.
When a moral objectivist claims to know that, say, throwing the switch of a certain specified runaway trolley is wrong, he is claiming to know something analogous to the yellowness of the paint on the wall, not something analogous to the deliciousness of ice cream.
The point I'd like chiefly to make today is this: the question of objectivity is different from the question of relativity. A wall may be "relatively" yellow -- it may look yellow in certain lighting conditions or in comparison with another wall. These relative situations are themselves objective facts, i.e. they are what they are regardless of my tastes. So let's not confuse "relative" with "subjective" or demand that something be an absolute before you call it objective.
I'm just mulling things over....
16 November 2007
Trolley Car Moral Philosophy
Its a venerable thought experiment in moral philosophy.
An out-of-control trolley car is hurtling down its tracks. It is about at a switching point (or whatever the proper terminology is) and could follow one of two routes. Along path 1, it will crash into and certainly kill one person. Along path 2 it will crash into and certainly kill two people.
No one is near the switch except you. You have no job with the trolley company, so you have no responsibility to an employer that might complicate things, you just happen to be the only person on the spot.
Suppose, as you look closely, you discover that the switch is in the position that, unless you change it in a hurry, will mean that when the trolley car gets there it will follow path 2. Do you change it? to follow path 1 and kill only one person?
If you're a radical utilitarian, like Peter Singer, you would. One death is better (or less bad) than two deaths, and that's all that matters. On this basis, Singer maintains that the affluent effectively commit murder simply by not donating money to the starving. But most people also have a contrary intuition at work in the trolley intuition.
Most people would think that if you took action, and MOVED the switch, you would be KILLING (not just "letting die") the one person into whom the trolley would then crash. If you don't do anything to the switch, two will die -- those deaths will be accidental, and they would be the same deaths that would have occurred had you been nowhere near the switch that day.
I submit that in such a situation, you might well say "it is not for me to make this decision," and you wouldn't touch the switch at all, so as not to be guilty of kiling the one. Of course, Singer thinks you'd be guilty of killing the other two by inaction. But that's the point, isn't it? Perhaps utilitarianism is an abstract theory that overrides the normal and healthy intuitions about one's own personal responsibilities and what philosophers often call "agency."
If you don't agree, consider another runaway trolley. There's no switch this time. You're standing next to the track and a fat person is standing next to you, absorbed in his newspaper or otherwise unaware of what's going on. You're a body builder, so you figure you COULD stop the trolley and save the two people in its way further downhill, but only in one way -- by grabbing the fat person and throwing him on the track. The train will hit and kill him, but the weight of his corpse will then slow it down and let the two others survive.
The calculus in sheer numbers is the same. Killing one to save two. One death is still presumably less bad than two. Only in this case it is more obvious that you're killing that one -- you're picking him up and throwing him on the track. Do you see a problem with that? I would hope you do.
And, yes, I suppose last month's trip to San Francisco made me more hospitable to hypotheticals that involve trolley cars than I had been.
An out-of-control trolley car is hurtling down its tracks. It is about at a switching point (or whatever the proper terminology is) and could follow one of two routes. Along path 1, it will crash into and certainly kill one person. Along path 2 it will crash into and certainly kill two people.
No one is near the switch except you. You have no job with the trolley company, so you have no responsibility to an employer that might complicate things, you just happen to be the only person on the spot.
Suppose, as you look closely, you discover that the switch is in the position that, unless you change it in a hurry, will mean that when the trolley car gets there it will follow path 2. Do you change it? to follow path 1 and kill only one person?
If you're a radical utilitarian, like Peter Singer, you would. One death is better (or less bad) than two deaths, and that's all that matters. On this basis, Singer maintains that the affluent effectively commit murder simply by not donating money to the starving. But most people also have a contrary intuition at work in the trolley intuition.
Most people would think that if you took action, and MOVED the switch, you would be KILLING (not just "letting die") the one person into whom the trolley would then crash. If you don't do anything to the switch, two will die -- those deaths will be accidental, and they would be the same deaths that would have occurred had you been nowhere near the switch that day.
I submit that in such a situation, you might well say "it is not for me to make this decision," and you wouldn't touch the switch at all, so as not to be guilty of kiling the one. Of course, Singer thinks you'd be guilty of killing the other two by inaction. But that's the point, isn't it? Perhaps utilitarianism is an abstract theory that overrides the normal and healthy intuitions about one's own personal responsibilities and what philosophers often call "agency."
If you don't agree, consider another runaway trolley. There's no switch this time. You're standing next to the track and a fat person is standing next to you, absorbed in his newspaper or otherwise unaware of what's going on. You're a body builder, so you figure you COULD stop the trolley and save the two people in its way further downhill, but only in one way -- by grabbing the fat person and throwing him on the track. The train will hit and kill him, but the weight of his corpse will then slow it down and let the two others survive.
The calculus in sheer numbers is the same. Killing one to save two. One death is still presumably less bad than two. Only in this case it is more obvious that you're killing that one -- you're picking him up and throwing him on the track. Do you see a problem with that? I would hope you do.
And, yes, I suppose last month's trip to San Francisco made me more hospitable to hypotheticals that involve trolley cars than I had been.
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