The other day I was challenged by two of my colleagues with some thought experiments. Admittedly, I was hesitant to engage them; I am lately dubious of the value of thought experiments in ethics, even if I readily admit that there have been some good ones. Thought experiments require you to presuppose a hypothetical scenario, then think through what would follow in this scenario, given your position on some philosophical question. Is the outcome intuitive? Is it logically consistent? Whether it is or isn't is supposedly a test of the viability of one's position.
Take, for instance, the Violinist, a thought experiment devised by Judith Thomson (incidentally, a favorite philosopher of mine). The thought experiment is designed to test whether abortion is wrong. Let us grant for the sake of argument that a fetus has the right to life. As Thomson explains,
You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
Thomson concludes that if we think it is permissible to unplug oneself from the violinist, then abortion is permissible, even if we agree that a fetus has the right to life--and even if the fetus is sentient.
I think this is a good thought experiment. But I don't think all thought experiments are good. Here are the two thought experiments that were presented to me, followed by a discussion of what I think is wrong with them. I've changed some of the words, but I hope I've summarized them with rough accuracy:
1. The Determined Egg-buyer*
Suppose Jones is determined to buy eggs at a supermarket. He has the choice of buying normal eggs, which were more than likely produced in exceedingly cruel conditions, or "humane" eggs. What ought Jones to do?Some background: first, I am a vegan (and if you are reading this blog you probably know that). I am also very dubious of the rhetoric of "humane-ness" and would rather see the entire animal industry abolished. Products that are advertised as "humane" are still generally produced in ways that I find objectionable, or mutually support other practices vegans regard as unethical. For instance, there is nothing preventing farmers from disposing of their "humanely" raised hens if they become infertile, or selling their male offspring for slaughter. Note that in this case, the nature of the "humane" conditions was not specified, so I presume they were something like what counts as "humane" in real life.
By my lights, then, Jones is already set on doing something wrong. So the question now is, given that he is determined to do something wrong, what ought he to do?
When challenged with this thought-experiment, I suspected something was awry, but I couldn't get a handle on exactly what. I responded by questioning its relevance to ethical practice, and that, even if it wasn't my interlocutor's intent, thought-experimental questions of this sort have often been levied at me in what are obvious attempts to beg off from the question whether one should be vegan. But I now realize in retrospect that there was something else wrong with the thought experiment: it's incoherent. For we are asking what the right thing for Jones to do is given that he is bent on doing something wrong. So what is the right way to do the wrong thing? Well, if there is a right way, it wouldn't be wrong, would it? And if it were the wrong thing, it can't be right--or else it would not be wrong. The thought experiment is laden with an absurd supposition: that there is a right wrong thing to do.
Now, one could counter that wrong actions can sometimes be right: for instance, it may be wrong, by default, to kill people, but it could be right in certain circumstances, for instance, if killing someone saved more lives than would otherwise be saved by sparing him. But this proposal strikes me as confused; the confusion, specifically, is between right/wrong actions and candidate right/wrong actions. Technically, there's really only one right thing to do: it's the thing you ought to do in the circumstances you inhabit. If killing someone to save more lives is in fact what you should do, then it is the right thing to do--not a wrong thing that is also right. It would be wrong in some other circumstance, perhaps, but not this one.
2. The Extremists
Suppose there are some violent extremists who are bent on doing brutal things to people: going into towns, flaying people alive, decapitating them, cutting off limbs, and so on. You have the power to make them commit their depredations less painfully: for example, they might be persuaded to murder most of their victims before mutilating their bodies instead of after. What do you do?To be clear, I am to take it as a given that these people are going to continue doing wicked things. I am also to take it as a given that I am their leader and can't walk away from the whole thing.
Incidentally, when I said that I would just as soon not be their leader, I was described as "lacking moral conviction." Huh. Well, to help my interlocutor, let's just assume that someone has implanted a sophisticated restraining device in my brain that will paralyze my limbs if I try to run away. Let's also assume that I've been rendered immortal and cannot escape the whole thing by simply putting a bullet in my head. What then?
Well, supposedly, since I am their leader, I can guide them into committing brutality in ways that cause less suffering. How would I do this?
Their brutality falls into two categories: negotiable brutality (NB) and non-negotiable brutality (NNB). I can do something about NB, but not NNB.
So how do I persuade the extremists to stop committing NB acts? Here's where the thought experiment becomes a real problem for me. I take it that these people act the way they do--and that real life people act this way in real life--because they do not regard their victims as people. They regard their victims as scum, as less-than-human, such that they do not consider it a crime to treat them in the way that they do. In my position as leader, I would try to persuade them otherwise: in particular, I would tell them that acts of NB are wrong because they are not treating their victims as people, and that because their victims are people, they merit respectful and compassionate treatment, even after death. If my subjects see the force of my argument and catch on, then they will stop committing NB. But if they in fact recognize the force of my arguments, then plausibly, they would stop committing NNB as well. Endowed with the power to see that NB acts are wrong, they would see that NNB acts are wrong as well, and they would stop committing both.
Of course, this is disallowed by the contours of the thought experiment. I can't get them to stop committing both NB and NNB, even if it's what I'd opt to do in real life.
I suppose the alternative is that I can administer punishment whenever they commit NB, and in so doing discourage them from doing so (let's assume that if I try to punish them for NNB acts, my restraining device activates again and I can't move). And given the parameters of the thought-experiment, I suppose this is the only option, and I'd have to take it.
My question, now, is What have we learned from this? That a little less brutality is better than a little more?
Is this something we didn't already know?
As I said to my interlocutor, it follows very trivially that I would opt for less brutality. My interlocutor then asked me if I would be willing to accept such a task in real life. My answer was no; in real life, I wouldn't facilitate the sorts of things these people are doing; in real life, we should set the bar higher.
***
Now that I've made an effort (to the extent that I could) to answer my interlocutors, here's my question: given that your questions do not (to my mind) help inform practical life, why do they matter? And why should we care?
Some candidate answers are: (1) inquiries of this sort are intrinsically valuable; (2) to not engage in these inquiries is contrary to the spirit of philosophy; (3) even if they don't inform practice, inquiries of this sort are beneficial in some other way; (4) said inquiry sharpens critical thinking skills; (5) refusal to engage in said inquiry is impolite.
As regards (1), I believe nothing is intrinsically valuable. In fact, it's rather central to my own ethical views that there is nothing of intrinsic value. Maybe I'm equivocating here, and "intrinsic value" is supposed to mean something like "intrinsically enjoyable". Well, I don't know--this is probably something that varies from person to person. Ought it to be intrinsically enjoyable? Does it merit intrinsic enjoyment? I can tell you that criticizing the very spirit of the inquiry is certainly intrinsically enjoyable. But that's a side effect of said inquiry.
Regarding (2): there's a certain opinion that a lot of people bring to philosophy of which I am increasingly dubious. Call it the no-stone-unturned (NSU) view of philosophy. On the NSU view, a philosopher should be willing to answer any question, to examine every supposition, to entertain any hypothetical situation that can be thrown his or her way. This, according to proponents of the NSU, is exactly what philosophy is, it's exactly what philosophers are supposed to do, and it's what draws the line between freedom of thought and dogmatism: the willingness to consider anything. A romanticized view, to be sure.
The problem is that the NSU comes with its own dogmatism: its proponents maintain that one can and should be willing to examine any presupposition of hers. What they do not question is whether their own take on the spirit of philosophy is, itself, the right one, to the extent that calling the NSU into question is itself a form of heresy.
Obeisance to the NSU has implausible implications: the NSU does not put limits on what sorts of questions are relevant to a given discussion. By the NSU advocate's lights, I am required to consider every sort of bizarre question and hypothetical scenario that one can confabulate. What if my toothbrush turns into a poisonous snake (hey, it's conceivable)? What if I give a homeless man a dollar and, through the butterfly effect, he becomes the next Hitler? The answers to these questions are totally insulated from practical considerations about whether I should brush my teeth or help the homeless. Moreover, I can confabulate an infinite number of hypotheticals like these, and it would take a lifetime for me to answer them. Yet if I am to examine every presupposition of mine, then this is exactly what I must do.
One might here be tempted to reply that I have given an unfair characterization of the NSU advocate. The NSU advocate recognizes that inquiry ought to be constrained to some degree by relevance. But if that's the case, she is no longer committed to the NSU. By allowing considerations of relevance to enter into whether a given line of inquiry is worth engaging, she gives her interlocutor the philosophical right to say "I'm sorry, but can you please explain how this question is relevant to the issue at hand?" If she cannot come up with a reasonable answer, her interlocutor can justifiably decline to entertain the question.
So what counts as relevant? Obviously this depends on what both parties agree is the aim of their inquiry. With regard to normative ethics, I believe our job is to attain practical wisdom; the know-how to live our lives well. Practical wisdom is therefore embedded in the contingencies of human life; thus, thought-experiments are relevant to the extent that they mirror such contingencies.
The philosopher who coined the term "ethics" thought much the same thing. Of course, it's not because he coined the term that I think he is right; I think he is right because what he says is plausible: if ethical inquiry is about what we should do, then that inquiry itself should be answerable to practical life. One should be able to ask "How will this question help us?" and expect a reasonable answer. I am doubtful that the two thought experiments I described above really do this.
Regarding (3), I will concede that, at least in my case, there was some benefit to having the thought experiments posed to me. Namely, they served a diagnostic purpose: to discover what I thought was wrong with them and get a sense of where my interlocutors and I fundamentally depart. Specifically, I suspect that we both have very different conceptions of what it is for an act to be right. Thought-experiments of the sort posed by my interlocutors often (though by no means always) presuppose, perhaps implicitly, the following:
(i) No matter how bizarre the circumstances, there is a right answer to the question of what one is to do.
(ii) Right actions are discrete and temporally local events, neatly cut off from the rest of a person's life.
I disagree with both presuppositions. As it pertains to (i), not every scenario allows for us to do the right thing. This is an idea found in Aristotle and in many other figures in the history of philosophy (Hobbes, Hume, and Rawls, to name a few). And I think it's an idea that's very admissible to common sense: when people are thrust into situations of deprivation, social instability, or psychological illness, we can't reasonably hold them to standards of moral agency. To do so would be naive.
(ii) is where my interlocutors and I more strongly disagree. What would it be for a man determined to buy animal products, or for the leader of a violent terrorist organization, to act rightly? The question suffers a presupposition failure: were Jones to do the right thing, he would not be buying animal products to begin with; likewise, for me, the extremist leader, to do the right thing, would be to not assume leadership of these people at all. For even if I can tone down their brutality in some marginal way, I would still be abetting and encouraging their behavior in the long run; and were I a righteous person, I would already understand this and not be affiliated with them to begin with. If I were brought up among them, I would leave and oppose them from the outside, trying to stop everything they do and not just some of it. Of course, this would require some revelation on my part: I would have to become cognizant of the sheer evil of the people I live among. But assuming I have been brought up by them, I doubt I would be capable of that revelation.
With this in mind, I realize now, It's not that the parameters of the two thought experiments are ones that I simply do not like, or would rather not consider due to narrow mindedness or because I am afraid I will not like the answer; rather, the parameters of both thought experiments rule out an answer to the very question they are asking: what is the right thing to do?
The answer to (4) is an empirical matter. Some thought experiments may challenge us intellectually and help promote sound reasoning skills; others probably do not. I think a case can be made that otherwise impractical thought experiments are usually better suited to younger students of philosophy who are still getting a handle on the sort of reasoning that philosophy requires (again, when I talk about "thought experiments", I specifically have ethics in mind). Once one gets further in her philosophical career, they become vestigial. They may still have a helpful role in illuminating certain ethical questions (see the violinist example above); otherwise, one's time is probably better spent thinking about other things, and using the reasoning skills that she developed at an earlier age for more fruitful purposes.
Finally, there is (5): Is it impolite to refuse to entertain certain kinds of inquiry, when said inquiry is, as far as I can tell, unfruitful for ethics? I suppose that depends on how one goes about refusing (her tone of voice, her mannerisms, etc). Granted, if someone does not wish to engage in a certain topic or answer a certain question, it is no less impolite to press them on the matter. It is, of course, important to me that I make my feelings on this subject known, whether or not I offend anyone, and for good reason: it is potentially harmful when ethical questions don't answer to practical life. For instance, in my experience as a vegan who has engaged with non-vegans, it is often used as a way to dodge criticism, or avoid careful scrutiny of one's own practices. If the goal of philosophy is to get to the heart of an issue, then it is absolutely appropriate to call out discourse which is contrary to that purpose.
By no means is it the case that those who engage in or encourage such forms of discourse always (or even often) do so maliciously or in a disingenuous spirit. This is important to remember, and something of which we more practically-minded ethicists should continuously remind ourselves (I have ethicist-friends who share my skepticism, and frustration, about the NSU approach to ethics). In exchange, those posing questions should be perfectly willing to tell us why their question is valuable if asked to do so. Because remember, no stone left unturned.
*Initially the question was posed to me to test a paradox in deontic logic, but it became a question about my actual ethical views.
