Guest post: The purpose of the thought experiment
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Just going with what a lot of other people have said.
The purpose of the thought experiment, indeed any thought experiment, is to force you to confront the intersection of your intuition and your reason. It is not to stack the deck and make one choice seem absurd.
It is exactly the thing that we do when we work in idealized frictionless environments of perfect elasticity. If you, as a physics student, refuse to answer the exam question because the real world is messy and not frictionless, you’re missing the point. We idealize the situation in full knowledge that it’s unrealistic. Why? Because it allows us to focus on the interactions and consequences of specific theoretical frameworks. Extracting value from the idealization requires playing along with it.
We construct idealized philosophical thought experiments the same way, in full knowledge that they’re unrealistic and that there are many interesting, relevant things left not captured. The question posed by the Trolley Problem is not, “What ought you do when there’s a trolley hurtling toward civilians?” If that’s how you approach it, you’re doing it wrong. Rather, the experiment asks, “Consequentialist, how far does your imperative to maximize aggregate good go? Are numbers really sufficient to decide? Deontologist, how far does your injunction against treating people as ends go? Can you really never take numbers into account? Virtuist, what happens when there’s no Aristotelian mean? Is one extreme preferable to another? All of you, how does this square with your intuition? If it doesn’t, how so, and what would need to change to make it jibe?” Refusal to engage with the problem is a refusal to engage with these questions. If you, as an ethics student, instead object that the fat man is too massive for you to move, you’re missing the point. Extracting value from the idealization requires paying along with it.
We use imaginative thought experiments rather than just asking the questions directly (even though we often do that, too) because imagination elicits more of our intuition. Things we’re fine with saying in the abstract (e.g., never ever lie!) suddenly collide with sentiments we might not have expected (e.g., a Nazi knocks on your door asking about Jews, and you have a Jewish family hiding in your attic.) This confrontation between conviction and intuition, between conviction and conviction, or between intuition and intuition forces us to see their limits.
It’s interesting that we’ve seen the obverse of this in the Gender Wars, where feminists asking direct questions about the consequences of Self ID on the security of female only, single-sex spaces, were accused of floating wildly speculative, and highly unlikely hypothetical scenarios for no other purpose than to foment hatred of helpless, marginalized, “trans folk.” Never mind that those “unlikely” scenarios had already occurred in prisons, rape shelters, hospital wards etc., and that those outcomes had been predicted in advance by those same feminists. It’s somewhat understandable that trans activists would refuse to engage with the logical consequences of their own demands on women, but that so many government institutions and other regulatory bodies took this same blinkered stance of callous disregard, and so eagerly gave away women’s safety to appease a few male fetishists at the expense of all women is a scandal in its own right. Heads should roll. But they won’t.
Not to mention Utilitarianism, Pragmatism, Determinism, etc. Thought experiments can shed some light on how we think about things (and possibly why), or how we were taught to (or “programmed” to) think about things, and show that there are alternative ways to approach problems. Basically they are tools for reasoning, and can take your brain off of auto-pilot for a little while (if willing). I find it fascinating.
This problem actually helped me think through the utilitarianism view I used to hold and sort out what I really thought. I do think it’s helpful.
I also use idealized scenarios in teaching environmental science. There is always at least one student that brings up a “well, what if…
Nullius, I’ll apologise in advance because I probably won’t explain my point very clearly, but I’ll give it a go.
Hypotheticals are all well and good in a classroom situation where there is time to think about all possible outcomes and weigh them up against each other – time to look at the question in the ‘right’ way – and in many cases the same can be done in real-life situations. My problem is specifically with the Trolley problem because unlike hypothetical scenarios such as the organ donor (killing one healthy man to save the lives of several others) the trolley would require a snap decision in real life, so no time to consider the morals or ethics of one’s actions.
Don’t get me wrong; I understand the premise of the question, but to my way of thinking to ask what one would do in a situation, hypothetical or not, that requires an immediate response and then say that a decision based on the scenario as given is looking at the question in the wrong way makes no sense. The situation doesn’t allow the luxury of time to ponder on which may be the best of all possible outcomes because by the time one has reached a decision the trolley has already done it’s thing and people are dead, and so the answer to the question ‘what do you do’ had just as well be ‘nothing’.
My objection is not to thought experiments or hypotheticals in general. My point is just that, surely some thought experiments and hypotheticals are better than others: more likely to lead to productive thought and discussion.
A thought experiment that provokes fits of giggling from the audience seems like a poorly constructed one.
Perhaps it would be best then if I didn’t bring up the spherical cows.
YNnB:
That’s an interesting observation. It’s almost like they’ve hit upon a way to “cut ’em off at the pass” before feminists & skeptics could move on to using a thought problem. By equating direct questions with hypothetical scenarios, they activate all of the objections people have to thought experiments. That done, they turn their attention to direct questions, calling them too abstract and insufficiently responsive to lived experience. This two-step invalidates both means of interrogating their ideas, leaving us with no debate.
twiliter:
Yes, precisely this!
iknklast:
How do/did you respond to such students to get them to play along with the pedagogical conceit?
AoS:
Do you really think that the only way to think about a situation is to do so with exactly the time constraints that are present in the situation itself? When you have a bad experience and retrospectively wonder what you might have done differently and what you might do differently the next time you find yourself in a similar situation, do you limit yourself to bursts of thought only as long as you had? I sincerely doubt that you do.
Taking a perspective of a kind of nunc stans, an eternal and timeless now, is how we analyze split-second decisions in all manner of contexts. We do it in sports, in combat, in therapy, in politics, and yes, in ethics. We think and practice and drill as much as we can now because we know that we won’t have time to deliberate when the moment comes.
For good measure, “do nothing” is a perfectly valid answer to the Trolley Problem, as long as you actually engage with the scenario. For instance, you may generally lean toward Act Consequentialism but feel that the time crunch and limited information make it difficult, if not impossible, to properly evaluate the moral calculus. Therefore, you may say, any option, including inaction, is morally indistinguishable. This would, of course, require biting the bullet on the importance of numbers, and it would also push you toward ways to mitigate the impact of the time crunch, such as Rule Consequentialism. If you felt particularly philosophical, you might even put forward a modified version of the scenario that surgically removes your own objection and confront that.
Because again, the point isn’t what to do in the scenario. The point is mercilessly examining our own reasoning and intuitions.
Screechy:
Actually, my experience is the opposite. Thought experiments that provoke giggles get people to lower their guard. They approach the exercise with less anxiety, less motivated reasoning, less identity-protection cognition. They often begin with joking answers but can be gently steered into more thoughtful ones.
Nullius, I usually went with it if it was a reasonable objection, but when it started getting into “were you there?” territory, I shut that conversation down by redirecting them to a different aspect of the equation. In Environmental Science, these “yes butters” are important, because it shows the students, who are in somewhat of a bubble in the classroom, what sort of responses they can expect to reasonable environmental suggestions in the real world. I allow the students to discuss it, in other words, see if they can use it as a jumping off point.
Nullius in Verba @7
That’s the case for safety and emergency stuff. Get that muscle memory in place.
When the fire alarm goes off, you don’t want to be wondering, what’s that? What do I do?
The confined space rescue team at MIT sometimes used dismantling a hack as practice.