By Julia Galef
* Trolleyology: a discussion of variants on the famous “trolley problem” in moral philosophy, and how they help us tease out the principles underlying our moral intuitions.
* Finally, there’s a name for this phenomenon I loathe so much in movies and TV: Straw Vulcan.
* Another way the minds of industrialized Westerners work differently than the rest of the world.
* The terrible consequences of playing Dungeons & Dragons… brought to you by everyone’s favorite fundamentalist cartoonist, Jack Chick.
* The animated history of evolution, by an artist who uses an entire city as his canvas.
* Common misconceptions about everything from food to history – Wikipedia sets us straight.
Ah, yes, Dark Dungeons, the Chick tract that inspired at least two jokey treatments:
ReplyDelete* Mystery Science Theater 3000 meets Dark Dungeons
* Parody of Jack Chick using argumentum ad baculum
Enjoy!
Don't you know you're suppose to add a warning to TV Tropes links? People lose entire days of productivity there.
ReplyDelete"Don't you know you're suppose to add a warning to TV Tropes links? People lose entire days of productivity there."
ReplyDeleteHahahaha! I've already lost almost 2 hours of my life in that site!. It's madness, I tell you.
Ha, I know, sorry guys! That site has eaten up more of my time than I'm comfortable admitting.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that logic is never what "logic" refers to in Star Trek. In my experience, in real life people are usually alright at making inferences that follow by necessity from certain facts. What they're bad at is what we call "induction". In Star Trek, just about anything that would be considered "thinking," as opposed to "feeling," goes under the label "logic."
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I do think that pitting thinking and feeling against each other is alright in certain manners and certain contexts. Just because you can think and feel at the same time does not mean that you cannot have more or less of one or the other. And it's true that thinking too much can make you worse off, depending on what you want. For example, if you want to be happy, you might want to stop thinking about whether Christianity makes sense and just trust your feelings that Christ is Lord and has a plan for you.
I think if you want to make the Westerner play the game correctly, you have to offer them more than $100. For people in the developing world, $100 is a lot of money. In the West, it's pizza and a movie. Up the ante to $100,000. I think the results will be very different.
ReplyDeleteMatt: "Don't you know you're suppose to add a warning to TV Tropes links?"
ReplyDeleteAh, and there's an XKCD strip for that, too: http://xkcd.com/609/
Gotta love the Straw Vulcan trope.
ReplyDeleteI actually enjoy watching popular movies & TV shows to get a handle on what one might call "folk philosophy." If one can learn to be anthropological instead of misanthropic, folk philosophy offers great enlightenment on how the Muggles think.
Though I admit, Avatar made me damn near apoplectic.
Interesting (accidental?) juxtaposition of links, Julia. TV Tropes and Trolley Problems have a lot in common, and as a writer, I have a professional disdain for both types of "ingenious scenarios." I am a definite "trolleyphobe." I have yet to see anything come out of these dehumanizing fantasies that justify their use. The moral philosophers who employ them better be sure that they aren't engaging in high-brow torture porn ala the Saw series.
ReplyDeleteSo here is my meta-trolley experiment again. The trolley is headed down a track in a such a way that incest or child rape or some other equally morally taboo event will occur. Do you really think there is useful information to be "teased out" in asking people to consider if one case of child rape is allowed to prevent many? Or do you recoil at the very consideration and question the true motives of someone who would devise such an "experiment." If you do find the experiment questionable, then you must explain what is the difference between my trolley problem and the others.
Just because murder is more palatable than incest, it doesn't mean it's fair game to contrive these situations that have no real application and that are inherently desensitizing. Normalizing murder, even in a rarefied academic setting, is not ok with me.
" if you want to be happy, you might want to stop thinking about whether Christianity makes sense and just trust your feelings that Christ is Lord and has a plan for you."
ReplyDeleteAh, the short term benefits of self-deception.
Yeah, TVTropes is the crack to Wikipedia's cocaine.
ReplyDeleteYep, that's exactly what happened to me and all my friends who played D&D. And we all took it that seriously, too. Imaginative play and creativity is bad and must be discouraged. The only thing he left out is that it could lead you to go to college or, even worse, graduate school! That's what happened to almost all of us.
ReplyDeleteOneDayMore: "Just because murder is more palatable than incest, it doesn't mean it's fair game to contrive these situations that have no real application and that are inherently desensitizing. Normalizing murder, even in a rarefied academic setting, is not ok with me."
ReplyDeleteI think eliminating inconsistencies is a valuable result, one that the trolley hypothetical can help people achieve in their positions. It's a real result, and a much more realistic one than the result that any possible trolly-hypo-induced murder ever actual occurs.
If you're serious about your dislike of "normalizing murder," why are you spending time here at all when there are so many books, movies, tv shows, and computer games to rail against? And since you are here, why are you focusing on the trolley hypo rather than the D&D or Star Trek content? After all, for most people (given their scientific literacy levels), the Star Trek setting is much more plausible than the hypo (given how particular its assumptions are - the fat man has to weigh enough, you have to have full knowledge of the situation including the weight necessary to stop the train [since o/w you could self-sacrificially jump], the time constraint is such you can't warn the workers successfully, etc.).
Note that nowhere in the article on the Trolleyology was there a variant where the subject was required to consider the consequences to himself of whatever he decided. Such as being charged with murder if he whacked the fat guy.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, consequences to self are almost the first thing we would think of in any real life scenario, and yet self-sacrifice is the only such consequence ever added to the make believe one.
The point being that the exercise is flawed to that extent and more, as even or especially if such homicide was justifiable, we might just off the fat man anyway because his obesity has reached his epidemic proportion.
"So here is my meta-trolley experiment again. The trolley is headed down a track in a such a way that incest or child rape or some other equally morally taboo event will occur. Do you really think there is useful information to be "teased out" in asking people to consider if one case of child rape is allowed to prevent many? Or do you recoil at the very consideration and question the true motives of someone who would devise such an "experiment." "
ReplyDeleteWell, as an aside, taboo is a massively over-neutral word in this context. But no, I don't think the philosophers are engaging in "torture porn" as you put it. The things these scenarios "tease out" are several:
-Scope (in)sensitivity;
-Conflict between deontological and consequentialist principles;
-Conflict between maximizing utility and keeping one's own moral integrity (a la Bernard Williams' criticism).
Your very objection to the scenarios is teasing something out of you, in fact. I think your intuition is along the lines of my last bullet point.
Ian, are you really using "muggles" to deride the folk who practice "folk philosophy"? You're usually so much more thoughtful than that. I'm going to assume you were just being flip. We do agree, though, that Reason is an egalitarian virtue, right?
ReplyDeleteTimothy,
I rail against trolley problems more than I do the popular culture for a number of reasons:
1) Moral Philosophers aught to be interested in the ethical ramifications of their work. They aught to know better.
2) Moral Philosophy becomes a part of the popular culture much more quickly and thoroughly than any other branch of Philosophy. Today's ethical dilemma is tomorrow's episode of Grey's Anatomy. The crying baby scenario sited in the article was actually used in the finale of MASH!
3) Trolley Problems will do more to normalize murder than the SAW series. You see, SAW is presented as entertainment, and therefore carries less normative weight than does the work of vaunted philosophers.
Also, I'm raising this issue "here" because we are supposedly all interested in Critical Thinking, yes? So my challenge still stands. Is my Incest Trolley Problem a legitimate thought experiment or not? If not, how do you distinguish it from the other Trolley Problems?
Ian,
ReplyDeleteBecause they release comments in packets, you and I are out of phase and now have a bifurcated discussion. So, I'll respond now, and then pause for for the next round in hopes that we can sync up.
It's hard for me to talk about the Incest Trolley problem without getting grossed out, but I'm sure you can imagine that there is a way to construct an Incest Trolley Problem so that it has all the fine qualities you see in the other Trolley Problems
Scope -- determine if father-daughter incest is more palatable than mother-son. Etc, Etc.
Conflict -- between deontological and consequentialist principles. Are nine rapes better than ten?
Conflict between one's own "moral integrity" and minimize harm. Would you rape for the greater good?
My guess is that anyone who wants to defeat the Incest Trolley Dilemma would have to approach it from the "plausibility" and "contrivance" angle. But then you are leaving yourself open to the very weakness of Trolley Problems. They are utterly contrived and implausible.
And why heck a trolley? They are accidentally testing people's preconceptions of physics and (how random) the behavior of trolleys. I mean, for crying out loud, why isn't the dilemma "there is a wingamajig that will kill five people if you don't flabber the wichamahook. But as everyone knows, flabbering the wichamahook will kill at least one person. Do you flabber the wichamahook or not?" I'm going to call that the "Gibberish Trolley Problem." If the Gibberish Trolley Problem isn't also a legitimate thought experiment, then you have a whole new batch of problems.
I think the fact that the trolley problem is becoming more popular amongst psychologists than philosophers points to the fact that it is philosophically unsound but serves as a nice Rorshach test. I think it is liable to all the criticisms as the Rorshach test. AFter all, a kick in the shins can also result in interesting fMRI results too.
And don't get me started on the outrage of the cute graphics used in the article. Unlike the cute graphics in Scientific American, we are not talking about buckyballs, we are talking about humans. I need to be convinced that we aren't, in the name of Philosophy, telling dirty little jokes with murder as the punchline. I hope these experiments are yielding something really useful. So far I've only heard cocktail party chatter and a few good ideas for Star Trek episodes.
Someone please, tell me the difference between the Gibberish Trolley Problem, the Incest Trolley Problem and all the others.
Hopefully I won’t break the word count here =O
ReplyDeleteAgain, you’re just trying rationalize a purely preferential dislike. If someone set out with a strong desire to stop murder “normaliz[ation]” then it’s unlikely that person would focus on the trolley hypo: Your argument really doesn’t support a claim that the trolley hypo will plausibly adversely affect murder normalization. If you believed the mechanism it uses to affect the world is pop culture, its effects would be negligibly small compared to what’s already there. Do you have any evidence that the Mash episode actually causally affected real-world behavior?
More particularly, point (1) is true for everyone – everyone should be concerned with their work’s ethical ramifications (although as to your connotations there, whether it has the real-world ramification you’re ostensibly railing against is exactly what we’re debating); (2) “much more than any other branch of philosophy” doesn’t say much really at all; (3) is ridiculous. Horror movies have a plausible causal mechanism for affecting murder, since someone could become so infatuated with them that he or she fantasizes about living it out, and then does so. The trolley hypo has no such mechanism (and having finished reading the article, the trolley hypo has had the benefit of prompting neurological research that found the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to affect ropensity to utilitarianism – a very tangible benefit). There’s no room for immersion and fantasization as there is with movies. If you sincerely believe point (3) then it’s where your real misconception lies.
I remember here in NYC a year or two ago, a 16yo killed a NYC anchorman (weatherman?) he met on craigslist. The killer had a strong fantasy life of being some weaponsmaster, posted all these myspace photos of himself posing with swords etc., and he loved violent horror and action movies. It’s possible he was like that because he found the movies so alluring, but it’s also possible he found them alluring because he was like that. The movies have a possible (although not likely, imo) mechanism for affecting real-world murders. Is there some concrete case where a philosophy hypo, perhaps through a medium of a Mash ep or whatever, influenced a person so strongly it’s unclear whether it causally precipitated the person’s murderous behavior?
Just to indulge you and show there are no consequences to murder rates or deviant-sex rates from these hypos, I will answer your question if you flesh out what the tradeoff you want me to answer is. It’s not really clear. What *is* the hypo whose legitimacy you want me to evaluate?
I see your response to Ian now. You state, “I hope these experiments are yielding something really useful,” but the article documents how West Point cadets are using it to understand how they’re supposed to behave in contrast to al qaeda, for example. It’s another tangible result besides the increased neurological knowledge we now have because of these hypos.
ReplyDeleteOne obvious problem to the Gibberish Trolley Prolem is reading comprehension – it takes 2 or 3 readings to see what you’re saying. And the bevy of hypothetical you’re offering – gibberish, incest, etc. – shows you really do see, despite what you say, the value in posing hypotheticals, in this case, posing hypothetical hypotheticals to examine what it is that makes a hypothetical useful. If you object to the murder trolley hypo for the reasons you’re stating then you’d be reluctant to pose a hypothetical that discusses incest; you intuitively see that its usefulness outweighs the risk it actually will promote child rape or whatever.
"Because they release comments in packets, you and I are out of phase and now have a bifurcated discussion. So, I'll respond now, and then pause for for the next round in hopes that we can sync up."
ReplyDeleteSure, thanks.
Re: "muggles" - I am (unsuccessfully I guess) joking around. I sometimes playfully use the word to describe people whose outlook is... self-impoverished.
"It's hard for me to talk about the Incest Trolley problem without getting grossed out, but I'm sure you can imagine that there is a way to construct an Incest Trolley Problem so that it has all the fine qualities you see in the other Trolley Problems."
I actually have issues with the trolley problems as well - my main objection is the sheer implausibility of many of them, which you mentioned as well. I think if the supposed solution (e.g., pushing the fat man) is implausible enough, then it is hard to disentangle one's judgment of implausibility from one's judgment of immorality. I also don't like the related fact that they often ask you to assume "100% certainty" that some strategy will work, which is an impossible epistemic state for a human being to occupy.
But the solution is just to construct more plausible thought experiments which don't rely on "absolute certainty."
Your incest trolley problem grosses me out too, but my point is that the very fact that it grosses us out and makes us think "Never would I do that, even for the greater good," is a nice example of using these thought experiments to elicit moral judgments.
'These trolley problems are awful, I refuse to take part' is also a datum.
"I mean, for crying out loud, why isn't the dilemma "there is a wingamajig that will kill five people if you don't flabber the wichamahook. But as everyone knows, flabbering the wichamahook will kill at least one person. Do you flabber the wichamahook or not?" I'm going to call that the "Gibberish Trolley Problem." If the Gibberish Trolley Problem isn't also a legitimate thought experiment, then you have a whole new batch of problems."
This is a very good point. I actually do think the Gibberish trolley problem is legitimate, although probably not useful on anybody but Lewis Carroll readers. The point of using trolleys (or whatever) is just to make it more vivid and imaginable.
"I think the fact that the trolley problem is becoming more popular amongst psychologists than philosophers points to the fact that it is philosophically unsound but serves as a nice Rorshach test. I think it is liable to all the criticisms as the Rorshach test. AFter all, a kick in the shins can also result in interesting fMRI results too."
But surely the nature of morality is such that it ought to be informed by psychology (unless you think morality is ontologically basic or something).
"And don't get me started on the outrage of the cute graphics used in the article."
Clearly you are more sensitive that I am to the potential knock-on effects of such things. You may be right to be so concerned, but it is not obvious to me that such is the case. And notwithstanding the high status of philosophers, there is about a gazillion tons of lower-hanging fruit to pick when it comes to public exposure to violent ideas.
There are places in the world where neither killing nor incest are prima facie illegal. So the trolley scenarios might be realistic there, except those areas likely have no trolleys either.
ReplyDeleteThe point being that morality is as much a cultural artifact as an intrinsic biological strategy.
ReplyDelete