Topics Ethics

Question What role do hypothetical situations play in philosophy? For example; most of us consider it to be a moral axiom that paedophilia is never morally justified. But we can think of a hypothetical situation, for example person X being forced to engage in acts of paedophilia by a demented individual who threatens to kill a child if person X does not engage in lascivious acts with the child. Now this hypothetical situation is wildly speculative and extremely unlikely to ever occur in the real world. So does it disprove the axiom that paedophilia is never morally justified or not?

Accepted:
December 8, 2010

Comments

I think the answer depends very much upon what one thinks one is doing philosophically. But the important point here is that moral claims in particular, and many of the philosophical claims that get evaluated using these invented examples, are meant to be more than just true as things actually are. So, for example, the claim that it is wrong to torture babies just for fun is meant to mean not just that all the actual baby torturing that is done just for fun is wrong, but that any baby torturing that is done just for fun would be wrong. Counterexamples to that claim, therefore, do not have to involve actual cases.

As the philosopher Timothy Williamson has pointed out, moreover, many of the sorts of hypothetical counterexamples philosophers use either do have real-world instances or else such instances can easily be created. There are, for example, some very famous examples concerning knowledge known as "Gettier cases", and, at the start of one of his papers, Williamson cleverly sets up a situation (without letting on that he is doing so) that is, in fact, a Gettier case. It's hard, as he points out, to see that his setting up an actual such example has any philosophical significance. And, sadly, I do not think the situation described here is either wildly speculative or extremely unlikely. Such situations have in fact occurred. I cannot remember where, but I vividly recall reading some years ago about a father who was forced at gunpoint to rape his own ten year old daughter in front of his entire family.

Nonetheless, the ordinary concepts we human beings deploy to understand and navigate our world developed under very specific historical and environmental conditions, and it would not exactly be a shock if those concepts had a tendency to "break down" if we imagine the historical and environmental conditions being very different from what they are. If so, then that might make one skeptical of really obscure and implausible sorts of examples, e.g., ones that depend upon the supposition that someone has magical powers, etc, etc.