Topics Ethics

Question Many thought experiments in ethics involve truly bizarre scenarios (Frances Kamm, for instance, talks about putting $500 into a machine which mechanically saves children). Do the panelists think that overly contrived examples, too far removed from ordinary experience, lead us in the wrong direction and should not be used? Or should a rigorous philosophy of ethics account for all scenarios, including ones which almost certainly will never occur?

Accepted:
October 11, 2007

Comments

The answer depends on what you take morality -- that which moral philosophers are seeking to pin down -- to be .

Some philosophers take morality to be a timeless system of norms and values that covers all agents in all possible worlds. Others take morality to be a pragmatic construction that helps human contemporaries to settle their differences peacefully. (These are not the only two options, to be sure, but they are indicative of a spectrum of extant conceptions of morality.)

On the former conception of morality, even the most bizarre imagined intelligent life forms can furnish examples and counter-examples. On the latter conception, even the question what our obligations would be if there were only 5 million human beings living on this planet might be rejected as irrelevant and distracting on the ground that the world is not, and will never again be, so thinly populated.

Note that the difference between the two conceptions of morality I have distinguished concerns the larger life world or life context in which actions, decisions, and social institutions are embedded. Thus, the second conception of morality does not easily exclude very unlikely imagined scenarios placed into our familiar life context. The case from Kamm you mention is, I think, of this type. You can imagine child-saver machines to be available in the world as we know it and, by thinking about such a scenario, learn something about our obligations to distant children. In particular, Kamm's imaginary scenario helps us think about the obligations really existing people in affluent countries have toward really existing poor children abroad by separating our doubts about the reliability and effectiveness of available vehicles for aid (such as UNICEF and Oxfam) from our doubts about whether affluent people really have strong such obligations. I am guessing here that Kamm introduces the imaginary machine as a way of focusing on the latter doubts: as a vivid way of asking her readers to assume, for the sake of the argument, that the money we might give would certainly be effective in saving needy children.

While agreeing with everything in Thomas's characteristically clear-headed response, I would add just one note that may bear on your worry. There are philosophers who think that if a thought-experiment is too far from our ordinary experience, then our intuitions about what we should say about the case may be unreliable. For example, to take a case from Judith Thomson's famous paper on abortion, do we really know what our moral views would be if people seeds floated around in the air and could give rise overnight to embryos by lodging in the fabric on your couch? It's also been claimed that some of the more bizarre thought experiments in the personal identity literature suffer from this sort of flaw. We're being asked to decide what would be true if certain very strange circumstances held, when our usual range of experience may not provide us with a thick enough understanding of the relevant "possible worlds" to know what we should say. That said, as Thomas's reply points out, some apparently bizarre thought experiments are simply meant to help us to ignore irrelevant issues rather than to make sense of worlds well beyond our ken.