Imaginative Resistance
A while back at In Socrates Wake I seem to remember there being an interesting post about imaginative resistance. I stupidly didn't save the link, and now I can't find it. Still, some thoughts:
One problem that sometimes arises when discussing philosophy with students, or non-philosophers, is that they don't "get" the point of examples. One raises an issue like the trolley case, and they expect it to be a trick question, with some further option available you've hidden in the description somewhere. The idea that one will have to let some people die seems unimaginable: there must be some third option with a happy ending.
I'd always imagined this to be purely a result of the fact that in real life, options usually aren't limited to two possible courses of action, and even when this is true our chances of knowing it are very slim. (In what follows, I shouldn't be read as saying that this isn't part of the problem)
But the interesting suggestion in the post (that I've failed to link to) was that there is some imaginative resistance here. People don't want to consider hard cases, because it's not nice to think that there can be such difficult decisions. (This means that imagining hard decisions difficult, let alone true moral dilemmas where all available acts are wrong.)
(Relatedly, I've sometimes wondered if the film industry harms clarification of the deontology vs. consequentialism debate. Heroes in films are often given dilemmas between doing the "right" thing and doing the "best" thing. They often choose to follow the right and not the good, but magically and unexpectedly this always brings about the best outcome anyway.)
I suppose one could make the effort to find some actual real life situation of the relevant kind. Perhaps the idea that such a dilemma occured would make consideration of it easier. This might be something to bear in mind when discussing some philosophy, and particuarly ethics.
Can "the folk" really be
Can "the folk" really be blamed for this? I don't know where philosophers got the idea that our intuitions work in things like trolley cases (or for that matter twin earth, etc.), or the equally questionable idea that our moral rules should extend to that kind of case.
Forgive me if I'm
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding you, but aren't there two very seperate issues here?
(a) Whether people have reliably truth-tracking intuitions about thought experiments.
(b) Whether or not people can bring those thought experiments to mind to begin with.
My post, I take it, was on (b), but it looks as though your response talks about (a). Or am I missing something?
Alex
the connection...
is that I meant to be saying that the falseness of b) is perfectly ok, just because a) is false -- that is, it's ok, perhaps even good, that people resist bringing those thought experiments to mind, because it wouldn't do any good, and might actively do harm, if they could.
Why not go further?
I like the idea that refusal to engage thought experiments might be understood as imaginative resistance. But in your post, you consider only cases where the resistance is motivated by discomfort with the toughness of hard cases. What about other reasons for resistance?
Personally, I'm very interested in moral reasons for imaginative resistance. (Liz Camp addresses this topic in the final section of "Perspectives in Imaginative Engagement with Fiction." PDF here.) What if people resist some thought experiments because engaging those thought experiments would force them to construe a moral problem in a morally-degrading way? In those cases, philosophers might actually be obligated to rethink their examples.
I think many philosophers do consider the moral effect of their examples on their audience when they invent imaginary characters and situations. This may be part of the reason that contemporary philosophers are conscientious about the genders of their fictional characters (e.g. Mary the scientist.) Though, of course, the choice of a fictional scientist's gender is unlikely to inspire imaginative resistance. So I guess the question is whether philosophers are making more serious moral choices in constructing their thought experiments. And more crucially, whether philosophers are making wrong choices, and whether resistance represents an appropriate response to that wrongness.
Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the possibility of moral reasons for imaginative resistance to thought experiments. Thanks for the thought-provoking post!
By the way, is this the original I.S.W. post you were thinking of?
Interesting suggestion! So I
Interesting suggestion!
So I think that it's true that philosophers often fill out the details of thought experiments for reasons beyond teasing out the right intuitions. I presume that this is one reason why examples are often simplistic and humourous rather than sinister (e.g. pushing the "fat man" off the bridge in the trolley case). The thought being, presumably, that it seems a bit insidious to discuss the finer details of some grisly example, whereas there's just something vaguely comical about the discussing of what to do with this fat man.
However, I wrote "seems" in that final sentence intentionally, since I'm not sure whether it really is morally wrong to consider such examples. I guess there are two possibilities to consider:
First, it might be intrinsically degrading to bring such questions to one's mind. I suspect that the persuasiveness of this might hinge in part on what we think of Williams' "one thought too many" argument. His worry was that utilitarianism required us to consider options that really ought to be off the table (even if utilitarianism eventually gets the answer right). I take it that this is the same worry here: merely thinking about whether to push fat men off bridges might be the kind of thought that virtuous people don't have. I've yet to see an argument that persuaded me of this line of thought, but I guess that's the literature that I'd inspect for greater perspective on the issue.
Second, it might be instrumentally bad to consider such examples, since it might affect our normal moral deliberation in detrimental manner. People sometimes make similar comments about euthanasia; the thought being that doctors commitment to life will be weakened in other cases if we allow them to sometimes consider killing. I'm not convinced by this argument in the euthanasia case, and so I have suspiscions about the same claim here. Regardless, if we're considering instrumental benefits, then thought experiments presumably also have great instrumental benefit: considering such examples can help clarify our position on many issues, and that presumably leads to morally better people.
But if you have any thoughts against what I say above, I'd love to hear them!
And yes, that's the post, thanks! Now I see it again, the remarks I was considering were in the comment and not the post itself.
Alex