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Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Kill one, save five
In today’s UK Guardian newspaper Peter Singer reports on an intriguing thought-experiment by a Harvard psychologist, under the byline: ‘would you kill one person to save five others?’ The point of the experiment is to complicate that straightforward ethical utilitarianism (I daresay we can all agree that it would be better for only one person to die than five) and see what this tells us about our moral decision-making. This is the imaginary dilemma:
You are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is heading for a group of five people. They will all be killed if it continues on its current track. The only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley on to a side track, where it will kill only one person. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say you should divert the trolley on to the side track, thus saving a net four lives.
‘Most people’ includes, as it happens, me here. But, aha, here’s the twist:
In another dilemma, the trolley is about to kill five people. This time, you are standing on a footbridge above the track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the people in danger, but you realise you are too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you is a very large stranger. The only way you can prevent the trolley from killing five people is by pushing this stranger off the bridge into the path of the trolley. He will be killed, but you will save the other five. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that it would be wrong to push the stranger.
There are varieties of these sorts of imaginary dilemmas at the ‘MST’ or Harvard Moral Sense Test. The conclusion of Joshua Greene, the psychologist who devised the experiment, is that we judge ‘impersonal’ actions like pulling a lever in a different way to the way we judge ‘personal’ ones.
But it seems to me there’s a problem with the way this second dilemma is framed. We make ethical judgments on the basis of a very wide-ranging, nuanced and complex sense of the world around us; we do this, in big or small ways, all the time. It’s one of the things that being a human being entails. This second dilemma seems to me as bizarrely unreal as the first (what’s the deal with these five people that they can’t get themselves out of the way? Are they Penelope Pitstop and her four sisters tied to the track by Dick Dasterdly?) But put that on one side; even if we accept the premise of the second dilemma it does not present us with a comparable moral dilemma as the first.
You are too light to stop the trolley. How can you be sure the stranger is heavy enough? You can’t. How can you be sure that, pushing him off the bridge, he will land in the right place to stop the trolley? That he won’t, say, miss the tracks altogether, or hit the tracks but bounce off, or hit the tracks but at an oblique angle such that the trolley will simply push him out of the way? You can’t. The first dilemma involves a certainty, or near as dammit, in that pulling the lever of a railway junction will divert a trolley. This second dilemma involves a balance of probabilities: you are being asked to kill a stranger not in order to save five people, but on the offchance that doing so will save five people. That’s not good enough for anybody with a reasonably healthy moral sense. Hence, no: it’s not moral utilitarianism, it’s a balance of risks. You say to yourself: ‘killing this fatso might help those people; but then again pushing him off the bridge may very well result in killing not five but six people. I’m not doing it.’
To derive conclusions from this second experiment about the ‘personal’ versus ‘impersonal’ nature of ethical decisions seems to me to leap to conclusions. Or so it seems to me.
Comments
Singer’s point in the article is that our intuitions are incoherent: how close you are to the person you kill isn’t apparently morally relevant, but nonetheless affects our intuitive judgements (probably for evolutionary reasons). So, we should distrust intuition as a source of morality, since the fact that an intuition evolved (in a different environment from the one we now inhabit) doesn’t justify acting on it.
Adam’s point about uncertainty in the second example doesn’t seem to me to affect this. We are to imagine ourselves (by whatever method) certain that the possible action will have the described consequences. If we still think that pushing the fatman is different from flipping the switch, we need an explanation (Singer’s debunking evolutionary explanation, or a defensive appeal to the distinction between intended results and forseen but unintended results, or...).
In general, responding to a thought experiment by challenging its setup tends to miss its point. In this case, what Singer is getting at is the fact that moral views we already hold (1 death is less bad than 5 deaths) have strongly counter-intuitive consequences in imaginable circumstances.
He has much better examples of that fact than trolley problems (which have a long and tedious history in moral philosophy): suppose that as you were walking to work today, you passed a child drowning in a shallow pond. Should you wade in and save her, even at the cost of ruining your suit? Of course. But for much less than the cost of a suit, you really could save a child who is now dying. The only difference between the cases is that the second child is far away, probably in sub-Saharan Africa. We think very badly of the person who walks past the drowning child to save his suit; but we don’t think badly of the person who buys a suit instead of giving the money to UNICEF. What could make the moral difference? Surely not just distance. Singer argues that nothing makes such a difference. The person who doesn’t donate most of her wealth to UNICEF is just as bad as the person who walks past the drowning child, on exactly the same principle: if we can prevent something very bad, without sacrificing anything of equal moral importance, we have an obligation to do so.
I’ve gone on enough. See here for the best possible response to trolley problems…
Ah, but what if the trolley operator is a brain in a vat? On Twin Earth?
I assume most people secretly thought pushing the person off the bridge was the way to go, but didn’t want to appear to be biased against fat people.
I simply can’t think about that without thinking about this:
http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/Tissues.htm
Maybe he’s fat. But maybe he’s just nine feet tall and prodigiously muscled—as I rather imagine you to be, Adam—and they’re scared that trying to push such a fellow off the bridge to his death might antagonise him.
That’s a nice link, Pica. It may be a requirement of psychological thought-experiments that they are flavoured risible.
Adam, that’s another plausible possibility. In short, I think there’s too much static in this particular thought-experiment for us to be able to draw reliable conclusions from it.
Another question: Just to be absolutely sure, shouldn’t you add your weight to the big guy’s weight, i.e., push him off in such a way as to end up on the tracks yourself? That’d be a net gain of three.
I think the ‘static’ is people changing the question instead of answering it: part of the point of thought experiments is that they’re narrowly constrained. That’s not a particularly good way to go about answering moral problems, but it can be a good way of distinguishing moral intuitions.
Slice the brain-in-a-vat, stew, slice, egg&breadcrumb and fry nicely. Stay off the trolley tracks. How hard is that?
I believe Sam misses the point. Without suits we would not have proper order, discipline, uniformity, control. Without all this, a drowning or wasting child would have neither a decent world nor necessary world order to aspire too. Therefore, save the suits, damn the children, and we can all be model social beings. This seems entirely intuitive to me—one need scarcely reason it out (as I just have). Thus we may sleep sound at night knowing our intuition and reason are perfectly aligned. So much the worse for Sam.
And even if not—makes no difference—we can also reason away any inconvenient intuition, and vice versa. Moreover, thankfully, we can always reason away any inconvenient reason, and intuit away any inconvenient intuition. There are those who call this pathological, it’s true; however, we need simply intuit their irrationality, or, if pressed, prove it. A simple matter (in mental cleansing).
Intuition, rationality? It scarcely matters. It scarcely matters what we know, or if we know, when it scarcely matters what we know, or if (when we simply go and do: Damn the torpedos, and children, full speed ahead, in suits).
This message brought to you by all those who believe that the monster you are is better than the monster you are not, and that all life is simply a choice between monsters. (Of course, no one can reasonably be surprised that those scoundrel fear-mongers, the ruling Democrats and Republicans, look at each other and think this.) This message also brought to you by those who think monsters are rather more likely to be someone other than themselves.
Get with it, Sam. Seriously, chill out with this gruesome business. Or how can you expect to get along in this world you claim to reveal? We’re supposed to not talk about it. We must not. We must be properly mentally cleansed. Because let’s say that what you say is true. How then will we safeguard our suits—or, for that matter, our tee shirts and jeans—and live and pass as regular and normal another day?
I intended to respond sincerely to what I supposed was Adam R’s sincere point about a long-running argument in moral philosophy. But I seem to have wandered into a world of in-jokes (at least, that’s my best guess at what Tony Christini is on about). Fair enough, I’ll duck out again. Incidentally, can I be the last person, as well as the first, to link to Brain in a vat on a runaway trolley?
Sam C: some weird hiccough in my server (probably) means that I’ve only just seen your original comment, even though it was the first logged. Odd. Sorry to have seemed to be ignoring you.
Your example of spoiling my suit to save a drowning child, but not giving the money I would have spent on a suit to UNICEF, is a much cannier one than the tired old rail-trolley one. It’s still a little lopsided, I suppose, in that saving one child is a clearly delimited action, whereas the starving children of the third world is a horribly open-ended phenomenon. Donating money is not me saving a specific child, in a situation that has impinged directly on my consciousness: it is saving ‘child’ or ‘children’ in an abstract sense (not abstract for them, of course, but for me). I’d day it’s possible to understand why that departicularised second case has less purchase on my conscience than the drowning kid I can actually see. But then again, I ought to give more money to charity than I do.
I think the first two comments were up for moderation, or something, when I posted the link—so we were all operating in a vacuum. Now I wish I knew a better, more arcane joke about the trolley problem.
I keep thinking, dimly, that this goes back to religious ethics somehow: throwing a switch is an invitation for God to intervene and save the imperilled man, whereas pushing someone in front of a trolley is a big ol’ Sin, just as stealing stockpiled food to feed your family is a sin. The results probably don’t seem revelatory to me for that reason. (I also don’t think they tell you anything about what people would actually do, if only because the scenarios are so abstract and finessed. I think the ethical impulse to avoid having to make such decisions is stronger than any preference for the impersonal.) But I seem to be abnormal anyway, because I’ve always felt a little queasy about throwing the switch. If there’s just one guy on each side, by this logic, it wouldn’t matter if you threw the switch or not, which is just nonsense. It isn’t at all clear to me why it becomes so much less nonsensical that people can make firm judgments about it when you introduce a numeric discrepancy.
But I think it fascinates people for precisely this reason: there’s something endlessly enthralling about pitting Hard Reason against Irrational Emotion and seeing who will win, and why. Yet I seem to be immune to the fascination: it looks to me like a fight between a dog and its own ass—comedy gold, hence the brain in the vat, but not very decisive.
Has anyone here read Williams’ _Moral Luck_? I’ve been curious about it for years…
Yes, it’s not much revelatory in and of itself, or perhaps not powerfully impacting, because as Sam notes: “thought experiments...are narrowly constrained. That’s not a particularly good way to go about answering moral problems, but it can be a good way of distinguishing moral intuitions.” It’s a technical point that while quite useful is also quite obvious, one would think, along with a number of other such points closely related to it. It’s quite valid and useful enough to be used to make utterly compelling cases, and is used constantly, to varying degrees of effect.
There are arenas, I suppose, where these calculations might be more than thought-experiments. I’m assuming, for instance, that there have been times when a group of people sat down somewhere and said: ‘if we go to war we will kill x number of people, but if we don’t go to war y will die’. But then again, I guess it’s rarely or never been a simple ‘y is bigger than x’ sum; there are always lots of other factors complicating the circumstance.
Actually, I don’t think that there ever has been a war in which the decision makers “sat down somewhere and said: ‘if we go to war we will kill x number of people, but if we don’t go to war y will die’”. Such supposed calculations are always after the fact.
The comments above about whether the ‘very large’ stranger is fat or just muscle-bound are quite telling. Clearly, when we read this sort of abstract scenario, we try to fill it out with a bit more sensuous reality - and that’s where we ‘go wrong’.
To say that ‘your intuition is wrong’ in these cases without qualification begs a lot of philosophical questions. It’s clear that people will behave better overall if they do follow their intuitions. The drowning child and the suit example proves this. Most people’s decision not to make a charitable donation is well-informed and rational - so if they were to try to behave rationally and consistently, they would end up not saving the drowning child either. Emotion-driven morality is all most people have.
George Eliot is great on this kind of dilemma. Usually she is all for irrational moral intuitions which bind us closer to those close to us, and rather appalled by utilitarian calculations, which she assumes will lead people to do less rather than more for others:
‘the emotions ...are but slightly influenced by arithmetical considerations...Doubtless a complacency resting on that basis is highly rational; but emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational ...it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish [leaving] a clear balance on the side of satisfaction. This is the inherent imbecility of feeling, and one must be a great philosopher to have got quite clear of all that, and to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellect, in which it is evident that individuals really exist for no other purpose than that abstractions may be drawn from them – abstractions that may rise from heaps of ruined lives like the sweet savour of a sacrifice in the nostrils of philosophers, and of a philosophic Deity. ‘
The moral dimmension of her realist novelistic practice is premised upon the idea that it’s good for us to feel out, rather than just reason out, our morality. But I’m rereading Romola at the moment, and there Tito is able to do the most appalling things despite, and even because, of his sensuous, soft inability to witness suffering. Intuitive morality suddenly seems to shade into epicurean self-indlugence. It’s a very disturbing book becuase of this, not least because the very novelistic techniques that make us feel how hideous Tito’s morality is play on those same moral intuitions.
I live one of these thought experiments every day - my toddler likes playing with wood bugs, and her ‘play’ is often fatal to them. However, she gets very upset if I take them away from her. I am sure that on a utilitarian calculation her pain at having them taken away is greater than anything a woodbug is capable of, and I am quite happy for her to eat much more sensitive animals for dinner. And yet I find it almost impossible to let her kill the woodbug - I have to try to shield myself from the knowledge that she’s got hold of one.
Brigid Lowe said: ‘It’s clear that people will behave better overall if they do follow their intuitions. The drowning child and the suit example proves this. Most people’s decision not to make a charitable donation is well-informed and rational - so if they were to try to behave rationally and consistently, they would end up not saving the drowning child either.’
Sorry, but this sounds insane to me, for several reasons.
First, people following their intuition frequently do appalling things, including ignoring dying children just because they’re ‘someone else’s problem’, and including killing children because they’re Tutsi rather than Hutu or vice versa.
Second, the point of Singer’s drowning child example is precisely that if we applied the principle we already intuitively use in that case consistently, we’d do a lot more to help people who need help than we actually do.
Third, I don’t see how decisions not to give to charity are ‘well-informed and rational’ - they strike me as straightforwardly corrupt: exactly the ‘inherent imbecility of feeling’ (thanks for that quote, by the way - I’m ignorant enough that I’d appreciate a reference for it).
(Adam R - received and understood, and thanks for letting me know - I’d supposed I was just very boring).
I’m with the person who says scream, “Get the f**k off the track, dumb ass!”
What would I do? I would not touch the lever or the fat man (inaction all the way). I’d like to see my brain activity because I feel emotionally uninvolved and uneffected by the impersonal and personal situation. I would walk away from either situation without guilt or a sense that I “should have” done something. The people on the track are responsible for themselves, not the person who happens to be near the switch or the fat man.
And besides, it is not a personal trade-off, like chose your mom over the rest of your family. Are five people more valuable than one person? WIthout knowing who the people are, the value of each life cannot be determined. Consider the saying, “he’s not half the man I am.” The whole idea of “I can save four people” seems ridiculous to me. Part of the dilemna is a control issue. People who are control freaks also try to be saviors in my experience and observation. They will get involved not so much because of moral obligations but because they want to play a part in the end result.
Like others pointed out, individual contributions to society differ so it is wrong to assume that saving five lives over one is a victory. Unless, it is one person you know over five strangers. Then emotions kick in and you save the one you love even if that one person is a loser.
If five grunts die in the war as compared to one leader, which is a greater loss?
If you could go back and murder Hitler and erase the holocaust, would you? Even if it meant losing your own life?
If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody around does it make a sound?
’people following their intuition frequently do appalling things’
I should have said ‘moral intuitions’ - I didn’t mean that people always being guided by their feelings, over their reason, would result in a net gain. But I don’t know how you can tell that people ‘ignoring dying children just because they’re ‘someone else’s problem’, and ‘killing children because they’re Tutsi rather than Hutu’ are following their intuition rather than their reason. The rationalisation ‘someone else’s problem’ sounds like a genuine reason to me (which isn’t to say it’s a MORALLY sound reason).
Likewise, I don’t see why a decision can’t be both ‘well-informed and rational’ AND ‘straightforwardly corrupt’, given that ‘corrupt’ as you use it here is a morally loaded term. Selfishness is wrong but not irrational, in my view (and David Hume’s, for eg). You can argue that morality follows from reason, but it’s a very difficult argument to make, I don’t think the case is closed!
‘if we applied the principle we already intuitively use in that case consistently, we’d do a lot more to help people’
Intuitions don’t ‘use principles’ and so you can’t apply them consistently, that’s a category mistake. You can’t just use intuition as the stuff to motiavate a coherent and rationalist morality, and at the same time view intuitions as ‘wrong’.
The quotation is from ‘Janet’s Repentance’, in Scenes of Clerical Life. Obviously Eliot is being ironic when she refers to the ‘inherent imbecility of feeling’; she thinks feeling is the best organ of knowledge. But she does, as I suggested, worry about the limits and corruptibility of an emotional and intuition-based morality - she knows you have to sort out truly ‘moral’ intuitions from what you call ‘corrupt’ ones, and to that degree I completely take your point.
I keep seeing Peter Singer as Holden in Blade Runner saying “Doesn’t make any difference what desert—it’s completely hypothetical.”
Brigid Lowe said: ‘It’s clear that people will behave better overall if they do follow their [moral] intuitions. The drowning child and the suit example proves this. Most people’s decision not to make a charitable donation is well-informed and rational - so if they were to try to behave rationally and consistently, they would end up not saving the drowning child either.’
“Moral” intuitions alone still don’t cut it for acting well in face of issues actually (or “seemingly") at a distance, I’m afraid—as so very many day-in, day-out issues are—nor do any other kind of intuitions—emotional, intellectual, philosophical.... The point it, absent reason applied to often hidden or remote facts, intuition of any sort often produces the opposite results actually desired. Political candidates, etc, take advantage of this all the time, of course, along with other PR figures, passing themselves off as seemingly trustworthy, beneficial fellows in talk and in the flesh, encouraging people to think their policies (or products) will also be good; whereas, of course their policies and the facts are often exactly the opposite of what they portray or imply. Without actual research and analysis, a person’s intuition is useless and dangerous if relied upon. Even in the most private interpersonal situations people have far more than “Emotion-driven morality” that you say is “all most people have.” They have experience, from which they may recall facts, that they have often analyzed in some basic fashion or can do so in the moment, and thus apply what they logically know, or can forecast, in addition to whatever they may intuit. The example of the man and the children holds, with good reason, that those who intuit that the man in the suit is not responsible at least in some part for the plight of dying children at a distance are wrong. The example holds that intuitions are likely to be drastically misleading in certain cases, quite the opposite of what you say it “proves.” The more seemingly “distant” the issue, private or public, the more vital it often is that facts be known and analyzed, to some extent at least, before a person can safely turn to their decent impulses for help in making choices.
“The moral dimmension of [George Eliot’s] realist novelistic practice is premised upon the idea that it’s good for us to feel out, rather than just reason out, our morality.”
“Just,” or solely, being a key qualifier, since of course both are necessary, variously. And George Eliot, as you know, practised a high degree of both intuition and analysis in her novels. The overtly didactic/analytic stretches of her masterpiece Middlemarch are justly famous. Though she is surely a highly intuitive novelist, she is also justly renowned as a highly didactic/analytic one, and as I’m sure you know is even criticized for being too didactic (unjustly criticized, as far as I’ve seen or read). In Middlemarch at least, it’s equally as easy to demonstrate in Eliot’s work that she highly values both reason and intuition (or impulse) judiciously used. She’s far too great of an artist, and far too thoughtful in her art, at her best for it to be otherwise.
If it came to it, I’d add my mite to Brigid Lowe’s side of this instructive and pleasant difference of opinion, perhaps because, like her, I’m a Victorianist, and am close enough to the Victorians to feel an affinity with their dominant novelist aesthetic of ‘sensibility’. Which is to say, that novels that make you feel (for instance, make you cry when Little Nell dies) are a positive human good. They’re a mini-gym for your organ of feeling, the exercise of which makes you better able to feel for your fellows in actual life and therefore makes you a better, more empathetic and more ethically aware human being. To this end the implied opposition between ‘reason’ and ‘intuition’ that Tony C brings in seems to me a red herring: both reason and sensibility ought to be pulling in the same direction. That we tend nowadays to find the death of little Nell mawkish and unpalatably sentimental is a different matter, and says more about our presentday cultural logic.
Examples work more forcibly upon the human mind than precepts, as somebody (Fielding?) once said; and a real human will profit more, ethically speaking, from reading Adam Bede than from memorising and repeating to themselves “I ought never to act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.” That’s because ethical decisions are not ‘maxims’, and are not situated by ‘maxims’, but by the whole web of existence. Or so a Victorian might say. Mutatis mutandi for the thought-experiments above. Or, to put it another way, Sophocles’ Antigone posits a worthwhile ethical dilemma; the runaway railcart that’s going to run over Penelope Pitstop and four others, much less so.
I wonder if part of our problem here is equivocation on ‘intuition’. For Singer, ‘intuitions’ are dispositions revealed by snap (ethical) judgements. It turns out that different snap judgements instantiate* different and inconsistent general principles. So, if we value consistency, we ought to try to change our dispositions. And, as Brigid Lowe pointed out earlier (although I didn’t get the point at the time) the change could go either way: we can make the instantiated principles consistent by saying that we shouldn’t help the drowning child, as well as by saying that we should help the distant one.
But ‘intuition’ can also mean ‘feeling’, ‘emotion’, ‘immediate reaction to a particular whole situation’, even ‘irrational claim’. Read like that, it looks like Singer is an ethical rationalist: someone who thinks, like Kant, that morality is entirely a matter of rational consistency in one’s maxims of action, with no role for feeling.
I think this is a misreading of Singer. He distinguishes between what we ought to do, and what we’re motivated to do (and openly admits that he can’t bring himself to do as much for those in need as he thinks he should). There’s a role for reasoning in redirecting and shaping motivation, in this case by pointing out our inconsistencies and hypocrisies.
Another Victorian, Mill, might have said something similar. Utilitarianism is a strategy for rational critique of rich, situated practices. He could have agreed with Adam R that ‘a real human will profit more, ethically speaking, from reading Adam Bede’ than from carrying out cost-benefit calculations, but insisted that this was a point about moral education and motivation, not about what one ought to do.
* not ‘use’, as has been pointed out.
I’m with George Eliot, as her art appears to me at its best, as it “highly values both reason and intuition (or impulse) judiciously used.”
“To this end the implied opposition between ‘reason’ and ‘intuition’ that Tony C brings in seems to me a red herring...”
That’s the opposite of my point.
This is my point:
“...both reason and sensibility ought to be pulling in the same direction.”
I was reacting to Brigid Lowe’s seeming to privilege sensibility over reason in general. I also disagree with privileging reason over sensibility in general. Though certain cases and moments call for reason and not intuition, and vice versa.
By the way, your thought experiment below holds true, as a type, even if it may be somewhat difficult to prove at the level of declaring war. The fact is, during war officers in particular are sometimes forced to make these types of decisions. And there are plenty of other somewhat similar kinds of examples—triage during war or a disaster. Also, usually to a different degree, teachers often feel compelled to make triage type decisions when they are not infrequently overwhelmed by the needs of their students in classrooms, and there are plenty of other such examples in situations that face personel managers, coaches, also parents as Brigid Lowe points out. We face these sorts of crossroads constantly that factor into our decision making, moral and otherwise.
“There are arenas, I suppose, where these calculations might be more than thought-experiments. I’m assuming, for instance, that there have been times when a group of people sat down somewhere and said: ‘if we go to war we will kill x number of people, but if we don’t go to war y will die’. But then again, I guess it’s rarely or never been a simple ‘y is bigger than x’ sum; there are always lots of other factors complicating the circumstance.”
This, and everything else in the last post, is exactly what I was getting at. I think I must have been stealing thoughts (or intuitions!) - straight out of Adam R’s brain – or maybe we’re both just ‘feeling with’ Dickens and George Eliot.
When I say that “emotion-driven morality” is “all most people have” there is an emphasis on the word ‘driven’. Feeling for other people - empathy or sympathy - is the thing that makes you do moral things: most people do not find a Kantian deontological scheme worth getting off their arses for.
But Tony C is of course right that Eliot would not argue that intuitions are sufficient – just the foundation of the moral process. And it’s obviously true that the bigger and more technological the world gets, the more essential it is to extrapolate in theoretical ways from our felt moral intuitions. The problem is not that anyone ‘intuits’ wrongly that they need do nothing about the ‘plight of dying children at a distance’, but that they have no intuitions at all, properly so called, about such a distant event.
You could argue that the emotional gym invented by the novel (just as the size of modern society was becoming a real problem) is designed precisely to see how well we can hone our powers of emotional and moral-intuitive projection, so as to be able to feel and act for people beyond the immediate scope of our emotional lives.
And now I’m going to quote Eliot at you again, this time from Mill on the Floss…(I guess it’s getting obvious that I’ve written a book about this…)
‘the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims…to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method…without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow feeling with all that is human.’
Tony: I reread what you said, and you’re right, I’d got it front-backwards. Sorry about that.
When I said ‘everything...in the last post is exactly what I was getting at’ I meant Adam R’s post, but Sam C and Tony C have done such excellent clarificatory work in their posts since then that it now looks like we all agree with each other - a triumph of reason over a sort-of-intuitive disagreement. Singer probably didn’t even invent the title of his article himself, but the attention-grabbing use of the word ‘wrong’ there invokes a whole big confusion over what kind of normativity is involved. But I take the point about the difference between saying we cannot trust our intuitions to be consistent, and saying they are morally ‘wrong’ and therefore not worth attention – I understand Singer better now, thanks.
I let my toddler kill a sand eel today - it was on its last legs already, but still… Id’ be grateful for any intuitive or rational perspective to help alleviate my guilt…
I’ve quoted this below at the Valve before, but it seems worth doing so here again, as it shares much in common with Brigid’s most recent Eliot excerpt:
This compilation of quotations (I’ve put together) from one of the foremost scientists, etc, of our time, Noam Chomsky:
“If you want to learn about people’s personalities and intentions, you would probably do better reading novels than reading psychology books. Maybe that’s the best way to come to an understanding of human beings and the way they act and feel, but that’s not science. Science isn’t the only thing in the world, it is what it is...science is not the only way to come to an understanding of things.” “If I am interested in learning about people, I’ll read novels rather than psychology.” “I think the Victorian novel tells us more about people than science ever will...and we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” “We learn from literature as we learn from life; no one knows how, but it surely happens. In fact, most of what we know about things that matter comes from such sources, surely not from considered rational inquiry (science), which sometimes reaches unparalleled depths of profundity, but has a rather narrow scope.” “It is almost certain that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called ‘the full human person’ than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do. “[However] I’ve been always resistant consciously to allowing literature to influence my beliefs and attitudes with regard to society and history.” “There are things I resonate to when I read, but I have a feeling that my feelings and attitudes were largely formed prior to reading literature.” “Look, there’s no question that as a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes–-Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so long ago I don’t remember a thing about it, except the impact. And I don’t doubt that, for me, personally, like anybody, lots of my perceptions were heightened and attitudes changed by literature over a broad range–Hebrew Literature, Russian literature, and so on. But ultimately, you have to face the world as it is on the basis of other sources of evidence that you can evaluate.” “If I want to understand the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be cautious about literary renditions.” “Literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn’t provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions.” “I can think of things I read that had a powerful effect on me, but whether they changed my attitudes and understanding in any striking or crucial way, I can’t really say.” “People certainly differ, as they should, in what kinds of things make their minds work.” “I don’t really feel that I can draw any tight connections [personally].”
http://www.socialit.org/excerpts1983to1988.html
I just want to add that I’m uncomfortable with the word “emotion” as it’s used in this thread. Novels are more, fundamentally more, than “emotional gyms.” (And morality may well be hardwired in our brains to be primary to emotion, to an extent, as well.) If we want to broaden the word from emotion to say “impulse,” it seems to me that novels are still far more than “impulse gyms.” They have to be if they are to reveal “the full human person,” for starters, let alone “the full human condition” (which includes not insubstantial insight into society, facts, and some concepts or ideologies, etc, healthy or decayed, useful or destructive, and all shades in between). Novels are gyms of facts and concepts in addition to being gyms of various impulses far beyond the emotional – aesthetic impulses not least, and principled moral impulses that may cause any variety of emotional impulses to conflict (with each other and other impulses, such as the aesthetic, or intellectual).
So, if we want to stick with the gym trope, it’s more accurate, I would say, to think of novels as knowledge gyms – a term which includes emotional knowledge and knowledge of impulses of all sorts, and conceptual knowledge, and factual knowledge, etc. Novels are special types of knowledge gyms of course, for the label could be applied to all sorts of texts. Novels are, I suppose, personally-based knowledge gyms, intra- and inter-personally based, and situated in narrative (as the larger body is known in all its extraordinary diversity). Or “human condition” knowledge gyms.
I don’t think the emotional component makes novels distinctive as a form any more then it makes emotionally compelling and insightful nonfiction distinctive as a form.
Rather, “the full human condition” imaginatively and aesthetically rendered—that is, the full human condition rendered as aesthetic make-believe, at narrative length (and however often fact-based and fact-filled)—is what makes novels distinct as a type and form of knowledge from any other type and form of knowledge.
Well, what of the human condition?
Just a couple quotes:
In Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing, edited by Philomena Mariani, “The Novel’s Next Step” is the title Maxine Hong Kingston gives to her reflections on a type of novel needed for current times. She writes:
I’m going to give you a head start on the book that somebody ought to be working on. The hands of the clock are minutes away from nuclear midnight. And I am slow, each book taking me longer to write… So let me set down what has to be done, and maybe hurry creation, which is about two steps ahead of destruction…. All the writer has to do is make Wittman [hero of her novel, Tripmaster Monkey] grow up, and Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield will grow up. We need a sequel to adolescence - and idea of the humane beings that we may become. And the world will have a sequel…. The dream of the great American novel is past. We need to write the Global novel.
Kingston further suggests, “The danger is that the Global novel has to imitate chaos: loaded guns, bombs, leaking boats, broken-down civilizations, a hole in the sky, broken English, people who refuse connections with others.” And she worries, “How to stretch the novel to comprehend our times - no guarantees of inherent or eventual order - without having it fall apart? How to integrate the surreal, society, our psyches?”
It seems to me that her concerns should be taken very seriously but that writers have exhausted trying to do something along the lines of what she suggests, “imitate chaos.” The result in part has been what James Wood aptly dissects and excoriates as “hysterical realism.” I find Rebecca West to be perceptive writing in The Strange Necessity when she notes that regarding reality, when it comes to art, “one of the damn thing is ample,” that an inclination to imitation, excessive imitation at least, is ill-advised.
And in Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said states:
It is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual [including artistic] mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed “counter, original, spare, strange” [Gerard Manley Hopkins]. From this perspective also, one can see “the complete consort dancing together” contrapuntally…
Said adds that
Much of what was so exciting for four decades about Western modernism and its aftermath—in, say, the elaborate interpretative strategies of critical theory or the self-consciousness of literary and musical forms—seems almost quaintly abstract, desperately Eurocentric today. More reliable now are the reports from the front line where struggles are being fought between domestic tyrants and idealist oppositions, hybrid combinations of realism and fantasy, cartographic and archeological descriptions, explorations in mixed forms (essay, video or film, photograph, memoir, story, aphorism) of unhoused exilic experiences. The major task, then, is to match the new economic and socio-political dislocations and configurations of our time with the startling realities of human interdependence on a world scale…. The fact is, we are mixed in with one another in ways that most national systems of education have not dreamed of. To match knowledge in the arts and sciences with these integrative realities is, I believe, the intellectual and cultural challenge of the moment….
End quote Said.
And so, the “imaginative, aesthetic, human condition knowledge gyms” that are novels face both ever more serious, also exciting, challenges to reveal, sustain, and further the human condition—in full, or otherwise.
I raised Adam’s objection in my head before I reached that point in his post. There’s a huge difference in certainty of outcome. If the question is worded such that the murder of the one man inevitably saves the five, and there is no other way to do so, then yes my instinct says you do chuck him over the bridge. Now it’s probable that the latter scenario would cause you worse nightmares afterward, but that’s a different matter.
Shit. Shit. Shit. How did I miss this one?
I think that everyone missed the “Are these schoolchildren really innocent?” aspect of the question. IE, how many more schoolchildren would you be willing to have blown up by a terrorist, rather than wrongly use torture, if you found out that they were not innocent schoolchildren at all, but instead annoying, pre-delinquent, slutty, dorky schoolchildren?
In this case, suppose for example that the fat person had bad posture, body odor, thick greasy lips, a pencil thin mustache, and a swastika tattoo, and was wearing a Dungeons and Dragons Tshirt with swastika button. Or on the other hand, imagine that it was your wonderful but somewhat obese mother who’s always been so nice to you.
I don’t think that there’s a single person in the world who would wear both a D&D T-shirt and a swastika button. You might equally plausibly imagine that it was a very fat brain in a tank.
The brain in the tank is at the controls of the train, I think.
See, this is the most unimaginably awful person in the world—a D&D Nazi. Really, some people might push him in front of the train anyway.
I think the idea of physical contact should be taken into consideration in this scenario. The violation of someone’s personal space and the idea of physical contact gives one a lasting connection with the person. The connection would establish a more concrete relationship with the person and make one feel more responsible for the person’s death. The time lapse between when one pulls the lever and the death of the single person creates a time frame where something else could be done, while if one simple pushes the person there is no cushion of time for additional action.
I believe in this scenario, as in many, the presence of uncertainty is the main influencing factor. People act when the outcome is reasonably predictable. The moral issue does not necessarily come into play in the lever situation because in the worst case scenario 5 people die, so even if pulling the lever is a failure, no additional deaths will ensue. If there is, say, a 1 in 10 chance that pulling the lever would divert the train to a third track and kill 10 people instead of the track with the one person, the decision becomes a moral one because of the lack of certainty.