Re: For Julian - There are at least 3 choices
- From: "Julian" <julianlzb87@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 7 Jul 2006 05:49:33 -0700
Hollywood Lee wrote:
The recent round of silly hypotheticals on violence reminded me of a BBC
article on famous thought experiments in ethics at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4954856.stm One experiment
is the trolley case and the fat man variant;
--------
A runaway trolley car is hurtling down a track. In its path are five
people who will definitely be killed unless you, a bystander, flip a
switch which will divert it on to another track, where it will kill one
person. Should you flip the switch?
The runaway trolley car is hurtling down a track where it will kill five
people. You are standing on a bridge above the track and, aware of the
imminent disaster, you decide to jump on the track to block the trolley
car. Although you will die, the five people will be saved.
Just before your leap, you realise that you are too light to stop the
trolley. Next to you, a fat man is standing on the very edge of the
bridge. He would certainly block the trolley, although he would
undoubtedly die from the impact. A small nudge and he would fall right
onto the track below. No one would ever know. Should you push him?
---------
The thought experiments have been the subject of much criticism and
debate, some of which can be found at Crooked Timber
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/02/experimental-philosophy/ and
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/05/counterintuitive-intuitions/
The criticisms are similar to ones I have made about epistemic certainty
regarding outcomes of actions or inactions that rarely exist in real
life, the constrained time frames, the inability to deal with conditions
precedent, and on. But the best (and most Buddhist) comment from the
first Crooked Timber article reads as follows:
--------
"Wherever I go, whether my audience consists of local students,
congressional staffers, or post-Soviet professors, when I present the
TROLLEY case and ask them whether they would switch tracks, about ninety
percent will say, "there has to be another way!" A philosophy
professor's first reaction is to say, "Please, stay on topic. I'm trying
to illustrate a point here! To see the point, you need to decide what to
do when there is no other way." When I said this to my class of
post-Soviet professors, though, they spoke briefly among themselves in
Russian, then two of them quietly said (as others nodded, every one of
them looking me straight in the eye), "Yes, we understand. We have heard
this before. All our lives we were told the few must be sacrificed for
the sake of many. We were told there is no other way. What we were told
was a lie. There was always another way."
I was speechless, but they were right. The real world does not stipulate
that there is no other way. (Have you, or anyone you know, ever been in
a situation like TROLLEY, literally needing to kill one to save five?
Why not? Have you been unusually lucky?) In any case, I now see more
wisdom in the untutored insight that there has to be another way than in
what TROLLEY originally was meant to illustrate. As Rawls and Nozick (in
different ways) say, justice is about respecting the separateness of
persons. We are not to sacrifice one person for the sake of another. If
we find ourselves seemingly called upon to sacrifice the few for the
sake of the many, justice is about finding another way.""
----------
Those silly hypotheticalists are what the word pathetic was invented
for.
--
http://ptlslzb87.blogspot.com/
.
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