[lit-ideas] Re: OffTheirTrolleyology
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:06:04 +0100 (BST)
--- On Thu, 14/10/10, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
From the NYT obit of P. R. Bosanquet-Foot, b. Lincolnshire, d. Oxford.
"[t]he paradoxes suggested by the Trolley Problem and its variants have engaged
not only moral philosophers but neuroscientists, economists and evolutionary
psychologists. It also inspired a subdiscipline jokingly known as trolleyology,
whose swelling body of commentary 'makes the Talmud look like CliffsNotes.'"
They are surely not paradoxes in any logical sense but simply dilemmas; and not
very real-world ones at that - both in their excessive simplicity and
presentation as 'thought-experiments' for testing moral theories, they lack the
character of most moral problems which arise from a situation in all its known
specifics and where the detail of those specifics may alter the answer, and
where most of us do not attempt to deduce the answer from any general moral
theory:- e.g. the problem alters if the fat man looks like he will die soon
even if not pushed whereas the other five are children; or if the fat man is a
local hero who last week saved five children from drowning by using his body as
a float and the other five are persons just released on a technicality having
been charged with heinous crimes. Etc.
The main lesson to be learned from studying various general moral theories is
that, unless we are quite odd or dogmatic, they all seem to produce odd and
dogmatic answers that fly in the face of our sensible ethical intuitions:-
whether it is the Kantian who cannot lie to an assassin that they person they
seek has left the building to the utilitarian who believes killing an unhappy
person is fine and dandy if overall it increases the happiness of the greatest
number.
No wonder the readership for moral philosophy is not that large and that
Popper, something of an ethical obsessive who believed the world of moral
demands was humankind's greatest invention, steered clear of publishing much in
this field for fear of producing only "hot air".
Donal
London
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