I recently read a rather excellent article on thought experiments in ethics on the BBC (click here. Read it through and vote in the polls before continuing) and the related discussion on crooked timber (here)
The thought experiments under discussion stirred up a lot of interesting debate but there was a definite undercurrent of mistrust, typified by this fragment:
I disagree here, at least in the context of the specific thought experiments posted. A well constructed ethics thought experiment should pare away the irrelevancies to highlight an easily comprehensible moral choice. In the case of the 'pushing a man onto traintracks to save five others' experiment we shouldn't be thinking about fat men and trains but rather whether it is right to kill in order to save more lives.
There is a very definite parallel between what I do with computer simulations (pare away the unnecessary physics and interpret the results in terms of this simplified model) and what the philosophers do with their thought experiments (create simple toybox situations that serve to underline a specific point).
...I guess there is also a lesson in there somewhere about overinterpreting results.
Oh... and as a reward for getting this far through the post, here is a link to a description of my favourite thought experiment The Chinese Room.
The thought experiments under discussion stirred up a lot of interesting debate but there was a definite undercurrent of mistrust, typified by this fragment:
In too many cases the approach seems to be to postulate a totally counterintuitive situation (for example one in which pushing people onto railway tracks has good consequences) then claiming that people’s intuitions about such a situation tell us something useful.I disagree here, at least in the context of the specific thought experiments posted. A well constructed ethics thought experiment should pare away the irrelevancies to highlight an easily comprehensible moral choice. In the case of the 'pushing a man onto traintracks to save five others' experiment we shouldn't be thinking about fat men and trains but rather whether it is right to kill in order to save more lives.
There is a very definite parallel between what I do with computer simulations (pare away the unnecessary physics and interpret the results in terms of this simplified model) and what the philosophers do with their thought experiments (create simple toybox situations that serve to underline a specific point).
...I guess there is also a lesson in there somewhere about overinterpreting results.
Oh... and as a reward for getting this far through the post, here is a link to a description of my favourite thought experiment The Chinese Room.
