No More Trolley Cars
 

When I replace Brian Leiter as the Hitler of the philosophy world, one of my goals will be to eliminate jokey, ludicrous hypotheticals. I am thinking especially (but not only) of "trolley car" or "brain in a bottle" mind experiments. While I do not actually anticipate the entire elimination of all such examples, at the beginning severe measures will be required. Blood should run in the ivy gutters, and the severed heads of egregious offenders should be mounted on the philosophical archways. Once the infestation has been brought under control the temperate use of hypotheticals may again be allowed -- but only in fear and trembling , and not promiscuously like picking up some whore in a bar.

I have some understanding of the motivation for the use of these absurdities. Physicists use them a lot, and most philosophers wish that they were physicists. (It remains uncertain whether physicists would have used them as much as they did, had they foreseen the long term consequences). And of course, these examples do allow philosophers to tease out all the specific aspects of a certain problem by inventing imaginary cases which resemble real-world cases in some ways, but not in every way. The ludicrousness of the examples comes mostly from the fact that the types of restricted examples philosophers need for their arguments are not always to be found in the real world. And so on.

Nonetheless! The problem I have with this kind of discourse, above all in ethics, is that it reminds me of Wilde's Algernon chatting about his ethical responsibilities toward Aunt Agatha's cucumber sandwiches. Why should ethical discourse be thin, detached, and giggly? There are very good reasons to leave thick ethical considerations out of physics and chemistry, and it even makes sense to bracket them out sometimes when discussing economics and politics. But ethics, as a form of practical reason, seems to be inescapably and pre-eminently a thick, embedded discourse. Or to put it differently, taking the ethics (sensu latu) out is the key operation when a science is being thinned and disembedded -- but should you take the ethics out of ethics?

Does a pure, unapplied ethics even exist? Isn't ethics, as Putnam has recently said, a form of application, or a kind of practical philosophy? (Or couldn't we even say that all practical philosophy is ethical, since it is shaped by human ends?) While some generalization across cases presumably can be useful, actual ethical behavior always takes place in embedded contexts, and the particulars of the embedding are often the very things that make ethical behavior difficult. In other words, the ethical world is thick and often grave, and for that reason, Algernons who want everything thin may not be the best people to recruit into ethics:

Apparently my trepidation is shared by some in the biz:

The thought of leaving a significant personal moral decision in the hands of a moral philosopher in the analytic tradition would of course send a shudder through any professional philosopher. I myself also wouldn't be aided a great deal with the decision by a physician who has dealt with similar cases in the past, except insofar as she could provide me with additional facts about the consequences of past decisions....The people I would turn to for aid in such a decision are those friends of mine whom I regard as having a certain kind of wisdom and insight about the human condition. (Jason Stanley)

I agree with Gerald Dworkin and Jason Stanley that moral philosophers are not "better than the average person in coming to correct answers about first-order moral matters".....The point is that expertise in critically examining your deliberations, though useful, is not the same as expertise in carrying out those deliberations, which (as Jerry put it, and Jason seconded) is likely to require "sympathetic feelings, experience with the subject matter, and intuitive insight". (David Velleman)

Is a randomly picked moral philosopher better at figuring out a normative issue than the average person ,as defined above? How would we test this? If we knew the correct answers to the moral issues facing us we could do a survey. But, unless the question is very narrowly framed, we might find as much disagreement with the “correct” answers among philosophers as among average people. (Gerald Dworkin).

This leaves me puzzled as to the status of moral philosophy. It's not a descriptive science, because it's normative. I think that Hilary Putnam is correct when he calls ethical philosophy a kind of practical philosophy, but clearly Leiter, Dworkin, and Velleman are denying that philosophical ethics is a form of practical philosophy, or that it should be an ethical teaching. Seemingly ethical philosophy is "about ethics" but not ethics -- a critique of the language ethical actors used when trying to explain, argue, or generalize their ethical practice, or a sort of meta-practical-philosophy. However, the recognition of the relative irrelevance of what ethical philosophy does seems to amount to a recognition that ethics is untheorizable, and that the way ethical actors speak about their actions is itself merely a rough expedient and cannot adequately express the reality of ethics, so that critiques of ethical speech serve mostly to show its inadequacy, without producing usable ethical principles. (Cf. Wittgenstein's rejection of the possibility of a propositional ethics.) To me this puts philosophical ethics on very weak ground indeed, because it allows the possibility that a great ethical teacher (Gandhi, Tolstoy, Mother Theresa) might quite properly flunk a class taught by the Marquis de Sade, if Sade had done his ethicist homework and Gandhi, for example hadn't.

Ethical problems come in two kinds (which, however, are hard to separate), but philosophical ethics doesn't help much with either kind. First there are questions of principle. For example, should unmarried men and women remain chaste? Or: what obligation do the rich have to the poor? Second, there are questions of application. For example, granted the right-livelihood principle, at what point must a man quit his job even at the cost of plunging his children into destitution. Or: granting the just-war principle, at what point and to what degree is there an obligation to actively oppose a war being wrongly fought by one's own nation. I cannot see that philosophical ethics can be much help in solving either type of question. The former kind of case is normally decided by society-wide transformations of various kinds, and the second kind of problem is normally decided by individual soul-searching (or as far as that goes, thoughtless snap judgment).

The alternative to thin, hypothetical trolley-car problems would be thick, real-world problems, which could be treated on a case study basis on the model of law and medicine (see Toulmin). Using this method you can never perfectly isolate a single aspect of a question, but selected cases will be the ones which do raise interesting questions. Furthermore, ethical situations are, in reality, always thick and complex, and the case-study method (as opposed to the trolley-car method) does teach the student how to approach the thick real-world ethical situations where ethics actually does its work. find it hard to justify using implausible imaginary cases when interesting and difficult real-world cases are cheap and plentiful.

The professional second-order ethicists seem to espouse bipolar expressionist / positivist boo-hurrah irrationalism like Wittgenstein's:

The people I would turn to for aid in such a decision are those friends of mine whom I regard as having a certain kind of wisdom and insight about the human condition. (Leiter)

"Expertise in carrying out those deliberations.....is likely to require sympathetic feelings, experience with the subject matter, and intuitive insight". (Velleman, citing Dworkin)

So first-order ethics is a rationally inexpressible and undiscussible art about which philosophy can say little. Second-order ethics.... I still don't know what second-order ethics is supposed to be. Possibly it's just finger exercises for philosophers, in which case I suggest that second-order ethics be replaced by arguments about sports. For ethics, Toulmin's case study approach seems much better. As things stand, this is just one more case in which positivist rigorism and precision make discussion impossible.

So why does Algernon ethics exist at all? I have two guesses. First, philosophy is founded on fear and suspicion of the actual, the particular, the historical, and the thick. The hope is always to reduce complex, tricky things to simpler things which can be intellectually mastered, since actuality is icky. Second, in liberal individualist societies, and especially in accredited, partly state-funded educational institutions in liberal individualist societies, ethical teaching ("first order ethics") is suspect. Each individual judges his or her own ethics for himself or herself, and "telling people how to live their lives" is forbidden. In a liberal individualist world, school ethics must be about ethics; it can't be ethics itself.
 

Appendix:

If I am right that artificial examples intended to isolate specific aspects of an ethical question (and second-order ethics generally) are not very useful, why is this true?   (My answer will obviously be just a sketch.)

To begin with, ethical understanding requires, above all, the ability to understand and deal with particular historically emergent, contextually-embedded ethical situations, and unrealistically decontexted exercises are not good training for ethical practice. There is no reason to believe that these situations can be analyzed into a manageable number of "ethical atoms", and furthermore no reason to think that whatever ethical atoms there might be could be combined into predictable or intelligible wholes. That is to say, given exactly the same ethical atoms, the different ways they're combined  in two situations might be the most important thing that the ethical agent needs to understand.

Second, one of the reasons why ethical problems are difficult is that they are weighty and fraught with painful consequences. Learning to behave ethically, in large part, involves learning to deal with painful choices. Jokey trolley-car problems are are the antithesis of actual ethics.

Third, the big, real-world ethical questions are all embedded in larger political, social, historical, cultural, and religious contexts, and involved disagreements about the relative status of various kinds of good which are not illuminated by artificial examples: freedom vs. equality vs. compassion vs. order vs. solidarity, and so on. These larger questions are usually settled by revolutions and civil wars.

Bibliography:

Dworkin: http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2006/02/moral_expertise.html#more 

Leiter: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/02/gerald_dworkins.html 

Putnam, Hilary, The Collapse of the Fact / Value Distinction, Harvard, 2002, p. 35.

Putnam, Hilary, Ethics Without Ontology, Harvard, 2004, p. 28.

Sen, Amartya, Rationality and Freedom, Harvard 2004.

Toulmin, Stephen, and Jonsen, Albert, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, Berkeley, 1988.

Trolley problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

Velleman: http://www.idiocentrism.com/surgery.htm  (original link dead).

Wittgenstein: http://www.idiocentrism.com/wittgenstein2.htm

I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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