(This is the third and final installment of my series of posts comparing two ethics thought experiments. If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 and Part 2.)

In these thought experiments we don’t know anything about the victims, which forces us to consider whether the victims’ identities matter. Ethical subjectivists would say that it is impossible to make a judgment in these cases without additional information, such as identities or identifying information, but this has a significant implication: if the ethical decision changes based on the victims’ identities, then we are accepting that some individuals’ lives are more valuable than others.

This is of course not a completely invalid assumption. While equality seems like a positive virtue, there are a lot of senses in which it is negative. First, to say simply that two people are “equal” is to accept that they are, morally, interchangeable. If what you mean is that they are equal in certain respects, such as entitlement to respect or inherent dignity, then they are interchangeable in questions concerning these aspects (ostensibly like our trolley problem and surgeon experiment). In summary, if people are truly equal (either in all respects or only in those respects that relate to human dignity), then you should save five people at the cost of one life (whether through surgery or pulling the trolley lever). I do not want to devote any more time to the drawbacks of equality here, but Henry Frankfurt’s On Inequality offers an interesting perspective on the subject.

Whether we accept the subjectivist critique or not, it is the same in either experiment: If we need identities for one, then we need identities for the other. If the potential victims are the same in each, my argument from this post is unchanged. If the victims are different, then the cases (as per the argument from last week) are reversible; if its ethical to sacrifice a given person to save one set of 5 victims by pulling the lever, it would be ethical to make the exchange between these same people via surgery.

In conclusion the fundamental value at stake is whether or not people are essentially equal in the respects that determine the value of individuals’ lives and the respect they ought to be afforded by others. If you believe this to be true, then it is fair to kill the one person, but you have to make this decision in every case. If you do not believe that this is true, then it is ok to decide whether or not to make the trade-off based on the circumstances and identities (though you would still have to make the same decision in either thought experiment).

As a final thought, people often present a version of this experiment in which the one person is your son/daughter. In this case, the outcome is the same to neutral observer (who is not the parent of the person) as in the original experiment. As a result, those who embrace consequentialism/utilitarianism cannot give preferential treatment to their child. To those who believe in virtue ethics or duty ethics, saving the child can be considered either the virtue of loyalty/friendship or the duty of a parent to protect his/her child. If you are inclined towards assuming that saving five lives is worth killing one person in the trolley problem simply because of the numbers, bear in mind that the extension of this logic requires making the same trade-off both in the surgery case and if you have an emotional attachment to the one person.

(this is a continuation of last week’s post, which can be found here)

Now that you are familiar with the experiments themselves, I want to compare and contrast them to draw out some of the underlying ethical considerations. As Mitch pointed out in a comment last week, the numbers in each experiment are clearly the same, yet the surgeon harvesting the organs of one patient to save five “feels” more wrong than pulling the lever in the trolley problem. The first question I want to answer is whether this gut instinct is rational.

In each case, some amount of death is inevitable: five people will die if you do not act, one person will die if you do. In neither case are you responsible for the circumstances, as you neither infected the five patients with their respective diseases nor caused the trolley to lose control. Both cases have innocent victims who are not responsible for their circumstances, and in both cases the one victim is in no danger unless you act. As far as I am concerned, these cases are equivalent in all relevant respects and impartiality dictates that the same logic must be applied in each. In other words, unless you can think of a compelling difference that I have missed, it is irrational to choose to pull the lever but not perform the surgery.

One possible reason some have offered for deciding differently in the two cases is that the surgery is more likely to set a precedent for future surgeons, meaning that future surgeons may repeatedly kill healthy patients to give their organs to ill ones. While on the surface this may seem like a valid critique (life-saving organ transplants are, in fact, more common than runaway trolleys barreling towards physically restrained workmen), this should not be a problem. One of the fundamental tenets of impartiality is treating like cases alike. If we are o.k. with the surgeon doing this once, we should be o.k. with all surgeons doing it always. The circumstances of each individual surgery are the same (barring additional information), so we should not fear that the action we deem moral is repeated.

I have made a point in this argument of emphasizing impartiality, but it should not be accepted at face value that impartiality is important. I have embraced it here because I am attempting to take a rational approach to these experiments (to contrast the gut feeling that leads people to treat them differently). Rationality requires beliefs (and actions that follow from them) to be grounded in reason and facts. By definition, there is no factual reason for treating cases differently based on attributes that are irrelevant to the situation at hand. Consequently, to treat identical cases, or cases that differ only in irrelevant respects, differently is irrational. Some philosophers have argued that rationality itself is not important, and that being guided by emotion is preferable. I do not wish to engage in this debate here (nor do I have the requisite expertise in the field), but if you are interested there are a lot of books on the subject.

Up to this point, I have argued only that we must decide the same way in either case: I have not argued for deciding one way or the other. For that, you will need to read again next week. In the meantime, if anyone believe that there is a difference I have missed that makes treating these cases differently acceptable, please let me know in the comments.

— Yes, I have changed this from a two-part to a three-part post. I am trying to be thorough so you guys can get a sense of how the process of evaluating thought experiments generally works. I promise that next week I will finish this and move on to something else (unless you guys want me to keep going with this, in which case you can leave me a comment next week). —

For this week’s post, I want to delve into a set of thought experiments that offer compelling lenses through which to view one of the most essential fields in the entire discipline of philosophy: ethics. For as long as people have interacted with one another, their behavior has implicated questions of right and wrong. These questions have formed the basis of the vast majority of legal codes, social norms, and religions.

The first thought experiment that I want to explore is called the trolley problem. There are many versions of the trolley problem that have been used to explore different dimensions of ethics, but I will explain the original as it was proposed by Philippa Foot in 1967. In Foot’s though experiment, there is a runaway trolley careening down a track towards a junction. You are placed near the junction holding a lever. If you do not pull the lever, the trolley will remain on the current track and hit five workmen working on that section of the track. If you do pull the lever, the trolley will be diverted to another section of track on which there is only one workman. It is assumed that all the people working on whichever portion of the track the reader chooses (either 5 workmen or 1 workman) will be killed. For reference, there is a sketch below that shows this visually (although in the sketch the people are tied to the track).

The question Foot poses is whether the reader should pull the lever and divert the train toward the track with fewer people. Essentially, it is a question of whether human lives are fundamentally interchangeable (and therefore 5 is greater than 1) or each should be treated as an individual moral agent deserving the respect of others. Some philosophers have attempted to tease out a middle ground; usually by changing the numbers on each side, assigning specific attributes to the people involved (for example, the one person is your daughter or the President of the United States, or the five people are prisoners or terrorists), or changing the role the individual plays (pushing a man onto the tracks to stop the trolley rather than pulling a lever). At its core, the question is about determining the worth of people and deciding if it is morally acceptable to make decisions about how to act based on one’s perception of a person’s worth.

Since most people tend to read Foot’s experiment and instinctively accept that the person should divert the trolley to kill the individual person, one philosopher offered a particularly powerful counter-experiment that often elicits the opposite response. In this experiment, proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson in a 1985 paper, you are a brilliant surgeon with five patients of the same blood type in need of five different vital organs. This surgeon also has a sixth patient who is perfectly healthy but who’s organs are compatible with the other five patients. Thompson asks whether the surgeon would be morally justified in taking the five vital organs from the healthy person in order to save the five other people who need the organs.

Like with the first experiment, this one lends itself to a number of variations. A few notable ones include different numbers of patients in need of organs, the possibility that some of the organ transplants will not be successful, and assigning roles the the characters in play (the five people are children or the one person is the president, etc.) Because there are a number of ethical issues at play in each of these variations and this post is already fairly long, I will use the next two weeks’ posts to explore these issues in great detail.

After a brief foray into scientific thought experiments, I want to return to pure philosophical ones. For this week’s post, I want to focus on another famous thought experiment from Plato’s Republic: “The Ring of Gyges”. In the Republic, the story of the ring of Gyges is told by Glaucon, Plato’s older brother, when he his talking to Socrates about the nature of justice (for anyone interested, this comes at the beginning of the second book of the Republic). Socrates and Glaucon are discussing Thrasymachus’ assertion (from book 1) that “injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice,” and trying to decide whether people would prefer to be unjust if they knew that they would not be punished. To help them consider this question, Glaucon explains to Socrates the legend of the Ring of Gyges.

Gyges, a real historical figure, was the king of Lydia from 716 to 678 B.C.E.; approximately 3 centuries before Socrates and Glaucon would have had their dialog (to clarify, Plato wrote the dialogues after Socrates’ death and the extent to which they are based on real events is unclear). According to Glaucon’s legend:

When Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he … saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended…. (Later) he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result: when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. (The other shepherds sent him to make an annual report to the king; but) as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king, slew him, and took the kingdom.

This is clearly mythological, but many aspects of it do align with what historians understand of the life of Gyges. For example, Gyges was born a shepherd, was sent by other shepherds to deliver a message to the King of Lydia, and did kill the King. It is unclear whether he seduced his wife prior to killing the king or married her after, but they did have a relationship.

The question that Socrates and Glaucon discuss is whether a man who could make himself invisible would behave justly or unjustly. Glaucon agrees with the general principle expressed by Thrasymachus that men are only just out of a fear of reproach or punishment; and therefore argues that, with the knowledge that his unjust behavior would never be punished or discovered, “no man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men.” Socrates however argues that a man who did these things would be a slave to his appetites (the word that the Ancient Greeks used to describe one’s desires) and would never truly be happy or fulfilled as long as he lived unjustly.

The Ring of Gyges offers one way of looking conceptualizing the role that shame and social pressure play in making people behave morally, but different philosophers have come up with a number of similar thought experiments since Plato. It is a little off-putting to think that you, the person sitting next to you, and the hundreds of people you walk past on a daily basis are restrained from killing you only by a form of pseudo-peer-pressure; but deep down anybody who has ever done something in private they would never have done in public knows that there is some truth to this.

This intuition laid a lot of the ground work for social contract theory’s “state of nature/state of war” and has perplexed legal and social philosophers for millennia. On a lighter note, some have speculated that the ring of Gyges, with makes its wearer invisible and possibly evil, may have been the inspiration for the “One Ring” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, though this is a controversial claim. Whether or not it was the inspiration, there are a lot of notable similarities.

For this week’s post, I want to explore the relationship between philosophical thought experiments and scientific thought experiments. When people think about science, they usually think about empirical experimentation, not philosophical conjecture; however, many of the greatest scientists have also been philosophers, and their philosophy has had a profound impact on their scientific discoveries. This is perhaps most obvious with older scientists/philosophers; such as Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Descartes (yes the same one from last week); but it is no less true of more recent ones like Bohr, Einstein, Turing, and Heisenberg. While it may seem counter-intuitive, many of science’s greatest developments in the last century have come from thought experiments rather than physical ones. To better illustrate this, I want to give a famous example.

There is perhaps no more famous modern scientist than Albert Einstein. While many people are vaguely familiar with some of his most notable work (E=MC², Special and General Relativity, etc.), fewer people are familiar with his research methods. Einstein himself described the process through which he discovered relativity as a “Gedankenexperiment,” gedanken being the German word for thought. This experiment was simple.

Einstein imagined that he was riding on a beam of light and looking at another beam of light parallel to his own. Reasoning from classical mechanics, the second beam should appear to be still, yet according to the laws of electromagnetism, light’s speed must always be 3×10⁸ meters per second. Both classical mechanics and electromagnetism claimed to be universal, meaning that the laws were the same for all observers, but Einstein’s thought experiment led him to conclude that either classical mechanics or electromagnetism was wrong, or that neither was universal. Confident in the laws of each, he reasoned that neither could be universal. It was from this insight that special relativity was born.

He was not done yet though. He then thought about a man in a falling elevator car. He knew that the car and the man would fall towards the center of the earth at the same rate, and reasoned that the man would thus be unable to feel his own weight. He then realized that the man would also be unable to determine, from within the car, whether he was falling due to gravity or accelerating up as the result of a force. While this was a revolutionary insight at the time, it probably should not have been. If you replace the elevator in Einstein’s experiment with the earth, which is constantly in motion, it is obvious that our measurements of motion here on earth are relative to our frame of reference. We do not express the speed at which cars travel as the observed speed (say 60 MPH) in our reference frame plus the speed of the earth’s rotation around the sun (roughly 1000 MPH) plus the speed at which our solar system is moving within our galaxy (roughly 514,000 MPH) plus the speed at which our galaxy is moving within the universe (indeterminate, because we have no external frame of reference, like the man in the elevator!!).

The fundamental insight Einstein had was one that scientific experimentation could never have arrived at empirically, since its entire premise is that empirical observation itself is relative. Without philosophy, the theory of relativity and the scientific breakthroughs that came with it would have been impossible. While this is just one example of the intersection between philosophy and science, I hope it has been helpful in understanding their relationship. If you guys are interested, I have dozens of similar examples and would gladly write a few posts about them, so let me know in the comments.

If I asked you to give me an example of “lowbrow music” or “music for kids and dope addicts”, what style of music would you think of? Unless you already looked at the title of this post, you probably were not thinking of jazz. It will likely come as a surprise to learn that legendary Jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie once explained that “the great mass of the American people still consider jazz… lowbrow music…To them, jazz is music for kids and dope addicts. Music to get high to. Music to take a fling to. Music to rub bodies to. Not “serious” music.” It will likely come as even more of a surprise that this was in an article that he wrote in 1957, long after the establishment of jazz and during the heyday of rock and roll (I will write another post about “rock and roll” and rock, they are not the same).

It would make sense that people would have this perception of jazz when it first became prominent: and they certainly did. In an article in the New York Times titled “Conspiracy of Silence Against Jazz” and dedicated to the “negation of rhythmical sound and motion called jazz”, Robert J. Cole wrote that teachers could “help to curb jazzing… by showing the benighted ones how much more joyful the artistic (ballet) steps really are”. He goes on to propose that “maybe the jazzer has no soul”. This type of criticism, while comically extreme, is not unusual for a new style that challenges conventions.

What is unusual is for a style to be accepted and then go back to being “music for kids”. Paul Lopez explains this in his book, The Rise of a Jazz Art World, by noting that Gillespie’s comments came during the “peak of a renaissance in jazz music – a rebirth of jazz as a high art movement that over the two decades of the 1950s and 1960s transformed American music”. To those teens that were not enamored with the Beach Boys and the British Invasion, jazz was coming back. This was not their parents’ jazz: it was more experimental, faster and more improvisational. It also wasn’t just the artists, the new wave of jazz “included record producers, concert producers, club owners, music critics, magazine publishers, and diverse audiences. All these various actors… brought their own meanings and practices to bear on jazz music.”

Also, as a style, jazz was designed to be rebellious. As behavioral scientist Paul Lopez puts it in “Signifying Deviance and Transgression: Jazz in the Popular Imagination”, jazz “represented a double consciousness of romantic rebellion and dangerous deviancy” and “acted to reaffirm dominant norms against a rebellious and deviant world in urban America.“ Jazz began as a rejection of what had previously been considered essential aspects of music. Rhythms were swung, non-harmonic tones were embraced, and (as Cole and Gillespie point out) the dancing was far more sexual then previous styles.

If any of this sounds familiar, it is because successive generations nearly always identify with new and evolving styles of music; and these styles usually reflect a rejection of previous convention and an increased sexualization of expression. A stark cultural revolution accompanied the arrival of jazz: to recycle a quote from my post on “Blue Skies”, “few times, standing so close together, has there been such a sharp line of distinction as that which existed between pre- and post-WWI”. While this shift was more extreme than usual, it was also centuries in the making. More recently, generations are defined in much narrower groups of years and music has evolved (or devolved, depending on your perspective) tremendously even in the last 10 years (see the Billboard year-end top songs from 2005 for proof of this). It is possible that the speed of this evolution has remained constant and my perception that it is accelerating is biased by a subtlety of differentiation that will be lost to time, but the ridiculousness of the idea of jazz music as lowbrow rebellious music to modern audiences is proof that a shift is happening: it will be interesting to see where it goes in our lifetimes.

69 years ago (the earliest year Billboard year-end chart data was reported), Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby were in the year-end top ten and dancing looked like this (https://youtu.be/I9zHYkKoL4A). 69 years later, you all know what dancing looks like. What will it look like 69 years from now? I am already scared for my grandkids.