So I guess it is pick on Unger day...
I also have a problem with Unger’s approach to this subject matter. He makes assumptions about the reader’s intuition, and more often than not I find myself disagreeing. Quite a few of us have had this reaction to his intuitions. I wonder if maybe we react differently because we are more acquainted with thinking about philosophy and ethics; maybe our minds, when thinking about cases like he has us do, instantly evaluate them rather than just intuitionally react to them. Or maybe we have, over time, changed our intuitions through study and discussion.
In the book Unger mentions how people can be psychologically inclined to react one way or another to a set of cases. He says how we often subconsciously want our reactions and intuitions about one case to match up with how we react to the other cases we have been presented. He says that he switches his cases around, he does not present them in the typical way, so he can get our real reactions to them. This sounds like a smart move, but I think that my intuitions would have told me the same thing either way. Also, my intuitions did not sync up with what he presented as the typical response. I am curious as to how he ascertains what the normal, common sense intuition is.
One of my problems I think is that I often think that both options are morally impermissible, as Tom called it a negativist. Especially in these harm cases, but even in the stealing cases, this puts me at odds with Unger. He would probably think me to be rather morally cold in some of these cases! But, overall, I often find him unconvincing and hard to read due to him making such assumptions. I think he would do better to be a little more sensitive to other views, but also, as Kelly said in class yesterday, a book can only be so long.
posted by Jen Ming at
2:11 PM
1 Comments:
As I expressed in class, along with Jen I am a negativist in the sense that I am inclined to think the liberationist view could just as easily spit out that the dissonant pair of intuitions are both morally wrong (as opposed to Unger’s preferred view that they both turn out to be right). In fact, I think in several of the cases in the book, this is actually the way things turn out. However, as Kelly pointed out, it is no weakness of Unger’s arguments to consider only one opponent. The fact that Unger ignores this possibility is a little disappointing, but you cannot truly hold it against him (for it may be outside the scope of his book). However, my negativist views are not the only thing being shrugged off in footnotes. A more traditionally preservationist view, like the one Kelly and Crista seem to share gets the short end of the stick as well. And this view is much more crucial to Unger’s book, as it provides an equal explanatory power to his liberation hypothesis.
The view I am referring to is the “Numeric Form” of the “Fanaticism Hypothesis.” This view, accurately described in his words is that: “When confronting those disorienting middle options, we’re goaded into simply ‘going for the numbers;’ it’s just in that way that we’re prevented from responding in accord with our Values” (96). Unger dismisses this view all too quickly, thinking that he can come up with a Non-numeric switches and Skates example that holds the same clashing intuitions. His attempt at this non-numeric case goes something like this:
"If you do nothing, the empty trolley will kill just one person (or, on a variant, it will take off both of his legs). If you change switch A, that trolley will take off a whole leg, and also the other leg’s foot, from the one guy who’s “overlappingly” tied down to A’s other track. If you chage B, the one heavy passenger, in the light trolley, will lose just one whole leg in the derailing collision. But you send in the heavy skater, and just a foot is lost" (96).
However, it does not take more than a moments reflection to see how this case fails to be non-numeric in an interesting (or relevant) way. Although the number of possible deaths is reduced to one, there is still a number-like trick that inspires a fanaticism that leads us away from our values. Instead of numbers of deaths, Unger has substituted quantity of pain (or sacrifice). The quantity of pain from losing two legs is more than losing one and a foot, is more than losing one, is more than losing merely a foot. So we are, just as before “goaded into simply ‘going for the numbers.’” Trying to imagine a truly non-numeric case, our intuitions would be drastically changed, and there would be no problem for the preservationist.
This is what a truly non-numeric switches and skates case would look like: If you do nothing, the empty trolley will kill just one person. If you change switch A, the trolley will kill one other person. If you change switch B, just the one heavy passenger, in the light trolley, will die in the derailing collision. If you send in the heavy skater, the skater will be the only one who dies.
In this case it is most certainly not permissible to send in the skater (which what the two-option preservationist intuition wanted in the first place). The doing vs. allowing distinction does a lot of work here, and it is worse to kill someone than to tragically watch someone die. In fact, this non-numeric case is more of a moral dilemma than anything else. You will still probably have dirty hands for doing nothing but watching the tied down person die, but if you do anything else you will be directly responsible for murder. This may not be a true moral dilemma, merely a sticky situation, because most people would probably say it’s morally better to do nothing. Who are you to decide that one person (completely strange to you) will die over another (equally unfamiliar)?
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Tommy G!, at 8:54 PM
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