One last bit on the phenomenon of “Just Asking Questions”

A reader writes:

Last year, the NYTimes ran a piece about an experiment in moral decision-making that was supposed to illustrate the different ways people think about moral decisions. One paragraph I read to my 16 year old son:

“On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.””

My son’s response: he’d set the switch in the middle to see if I couldn’t make the thing derail, then start screaming at the men.

I thought that was a very good answer. Lurking in the question is a problem you’ve been dealing with from a variety of angles, that lurks behind utilitarianism, pragmatism and consequentialism: that we can never be sure of what is happening now, let alone what might be happening in the future.

The question from the NYT assumes the onlooker KNOWS that the trolley will kill the 5 workers, that they will not just happen to look up in time (same goes for the other worker). Or that the conductor will revive in time. Or that somebody else sees it coming in time to warn the workers. Or that the workers might hear you if you yelled to them. It defines only two options – letting 5 men die or making one man die. My
son’s insight was to reject this out of hand – you just don’t know! Same goes for the ‘ticking time bomb’ fallacy – you’re assumed to KNOW that it’s a real bomb that will really go off and really kill people with enough certainty to then engage in unlimited torture? And that whatever information you get from torture will actually help (why the torturee wouldn’t just give you instructions that purposely set the bomb off, I don’t know – what’s to stop him?)

How about humbly recognizing the truth – that nobody knows?

And that, it seems to me, is the wisdom needed to reject the -isms listed above: All of them are, in addition to being stupid philosophically, unworkable on their faces: you don’t and can’t know what the greater good is going to really be, and, what’s more, a moment’s reflection should reveal to anyone the folly of trying to guess
it – even apart from the human capacity for self-serving self deception, who can judge and weigh the quality of another person’s happiness? Lacking an appeal to objective good, all you can do is whatever you like. If you happen to get warm fuzzies from the thought that many people will be happier, or if it tickles you to destroy your enemies, or whatever – just do that. Dressing it up with a high-falutin’ -ism is just that – disguising what you’re really up to.

Anyway, enjoy your blog, keep up the good work.

Yep. There are far-fetched hypothetical scenarios. What would high school and college bull sessions *be* without somebody asking “What if Batman and Spiderman got in a fight?” or “Can God make a rock so big he can’t lift it?” (BTW, the answer is Trinitarian: God can create a rock so big that God the Incarnate Son cannot lift it. But that’s not important right now.)

And one can raise the hypothetical situation of Ellie Mae, the backwoods Appalachia victim of rape and incest by her bizarre extra-chromosome Dad from some of the nastier scenes in “Deliverance” who stands a 98% chance of dying from the resulting pregnancy due to the hemophilia that is the result of similar generations of rape and incest. You can ask in impassioned tones, “Can I even disagree with you by 1% about abortion?” (with, of course, the implicit suggestion that you are a rigid and unbending Pharisee blind to the grey areas of human existence and closed to the warm and human ambiguities that make abortion part of the colorful pageant of life.

But, as I say, when abortion is being fought for across a broad spectrum of our culture as a “fundamental right”, one cannot help but suspect that such “hypotheticals” are rather carefully designed to appeal to the emotions rather than reason (which tells us, among other things, that “hard cases make bad law”).

Dittos for pleas for torture that perpetually rely on the hoary chestnut of the non-existent Ticking Time Bomb and dittos for standard “Slay the weak and outnumbered” scenarios such as the NY Times example above or the famous “Lifeboat”:

All such “just asking questions” scenarios are not “just asking questions”. They are attempts to argue that we should be allowed to play God and they are achieved by frog-marching you into a no win situation and demanding that you play along. Precisely the answer to them is the James T. Kirk Response to the Kobyashi Maru Scenario: Refuse to play. Break the game. Say, “The hell with this” and reassert reality, which is that we do not need to be frog-marched into agreeing that abortion, torture, or murdering the weak or costly are okay.

In other words, bravo for your son!