Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Thought Experiment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thought Experiment. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 25, 2021

Thought experiments and experimental ethics

Thomas Pölzler & Norbert Paulo (2021)
Inquiry, 
DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2021.1916218

Abstract

Experimental ethicists investigate traditional ethical questions with nontraditional means, namely with the methods of the empirical sciences. Studies in this area have made heavy use of philosophical thought
experiments such as the well-known trolley cases. Yet, the specific function of these thought experiments within experimental ethics has received little consideration. In this paper we attempt to fill this gap. We begin by describing the function of ethical thought experiments, and show that these thought experiments should not only be classified according to their function but also according to their scope. On this basis we highlight several ways in which the use of thought experiments in experimental ethics can be philosophically relevant. We conclude by arguing that experimental philosophy currently only focuses on a small subcategory of ethical thought experiments and suggest a broadening of its research agenda.

Conclusion

Experimental ethicists investigate traditional ethical questions with nontraditional means, namely with the methods of the empirical sciences. Studies in this area have made heavy use of philosophical thought experiments such as the well-known trolley cases. Yet, for some reason, the specific function of these thought experiments within experimental ethics has received little consideration. In this paper we attempted to fill this gap. First, we described the function of ethical thought experiments, distinguishing between an epistemic, an illustrative and a heuristic function. We also showed that ethical thought experiments should not only be classified according to their function but also according to their scope. Some ethical thought experiments (such as the veil) can be applied to a variety of moral issues. On the basis of this understanding of thought experiments we highlighted several ways in which the use of thought experiments in experimental ethics can be philosophically relevant. Such studies can in particular inform us about the content of the intuitions that people have about ethical thought experiments, these intuitions’ sensitivity to irrelevant factors, and their diversity. Finally, we suggested that experimental ethics broadens its research agenda to include investigations into illustrative and heuristic thought experiments, wide-scope thought experiments, de-biasing strategies, atypical thought experiments, and philosophers’ intuitions about thought experiments. In any case, since experimental ethics heavily relies on thought experiments, an increased theoretical engagement with their function and implications is likely to benefit the field. It is our hope that this paper contributes to promoting such an engagement.

Friday, September 4, 2020

X-Phi and Impartiality Thought Experiments: Investigating the Veil of Ignorance

N. Paulo & T. Pölzler
Diametros 17 (2020), 64: 72–89
doi: 10.33392/diam.1499

Abstract

This paper discusses “impartiality thought experiments”, i.e., thought experiments that attempt to generate intuitions which are unaffected by personal characteristics such as age, gender or race. We focus on the most prominent impartiality thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance (VOI), and show that both in its original Rawlsian version and in a more generic version, empirical investigations can be normatively relevant in two ways: First, on the assumption that the VOI is effective and robust, if subjects dominantly favor a certain normative judgment behind the VOI this provides evidence in favor of that judgment; if, on the other hand, they do not dominantly favor a judgment this reduces our justification for it. Second, empirical investigations can also contribute to assessing the effectiveness and robustness of the VOI in the first place, thereby supporting or undermining its applications across the board.

From the Conclusion:

There are two ways in which empirical investigations of the VOI turned out to be normatively relevant. First, on the assumption that the VOI is effective and robust, if subjects dominantly favor a certain normative judgment behind the VOI this provides evidence in favor of that judgment; if, on the other hand, they do not dominantly favor a judgment this reduces our justification for it. Second, empirical investigations can also contribute to assessing the effectiveness and robustness of the VOI in the first place, thereby supporting or undermining its applications across the board. Analogous conclusions may apply to other impartiality thought experiments as well.

Sunday, July 26, 2020

The trolley problem problem

James Wilson
aeon.com
Originally posted 20 May 20

Here is an excerpt:

Some philosophers think that ethical thought experiments either are, or have a strong affinity with, scientific experiments. On such a view, thought experiments, like other experiments, when well-designed can allow knowledge to be built via rigorous and unbiased testing of hypotheses. Just as in the randomised controlled trials in which new pharmaceuticals are tested, the circumstances and the types of control in thought experiments could be such as to make the situation very unlike everyday situations, but that is a virtue rather than a vice, insofar as it allows ethical hypotheses to be tested cleanly and rigorously.

If thought experiments are – literally – experiments, this helps to explain how they might provide insights into the way the world is. But it would also mean that thought experiments would inherit the two methodological challenges that attend to experiments more generally, known as internal and external validity. Internal validity relates to the extent to which an experiment succeeds in providing an unbiased test of the variable or hypothesis in question. External validity relates to the extent to which the results in the controlled environment translate to other contexts, and in particular to our own. External validity is a major challenge, as the very features that make an environment controlled and suitable to obtain internal validity often make it problematically different from the uncontrolled environments in which interventions need to be applied.

There are significant challenges with both the internal and the external validity of thought experiments. It is useful to compare the kind of care with which medical researchers or psychologists design experiments – including validation of questionnaires, double-blinding of trials, placebo control, power calculations to determine the cohort size required and so on – with the typically rather more casual approach taken by philosophers. Until recently, there has been little systematic attempt within normative ethics to test variations of different phrasing of thought experiments, or to think about framing effects, or sample sizes; or the extent to which the results from the thought experiment are supposed to be universal or could be affected by variables such as gender, class or culture. A central ambiguity has been whether the implied readers of ethical thought experiments should be just anyone, or other philosophers; and, as a corollary, whether judgments elicited are supposed to be expert judgments, or the judgments of ordinary human beings. As the vast majority of ethical thought experiments in fact remain confined to academic journals, and are tested only informally on other philosophers, de facto they are tested only on those with expertise in the construction of ethical theories, rather than more generally representative samples or those with expertise in the contexts that the thought experiments purport to describe.

The info is here.

Sunday, October 28, 2018

Moral enhancement and the good life

Hazem Zohny
Med Health Care and Philos (2018).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-018-9868-4

Abstract

One approach to defining enhancement is in the form of bodily or mental changes that tend to improve a person’s well-being. Such a “welfarist account”, however, seems to conflict with moral enhancement: consider an intervention that improves someone’s moral motives but which ultimately diminishes their well-being. According to the welfarist account, this would not be an instance of enhancement—in fact, as I argue, it would count as a disability. This seems to pose a serious limitation for the account. Here, I elaborate on this limitation and argue that, despite it, there is a crucial role for such a welfarist account to play in our practical deliberations about moral enhancement. I do this by exploring four scenarios where a person’s motives are improved at the cost of their well-being. A framework emerges from these scenarios which can clarify disagreements about moral enhancement and help sharpen arguments for and against it.

The article is here.

Friday, November 3, 2017

A fundamental problem with Moral Enhancement

Joao Fabiano
Practical Ethics
Originally posted October 13, 2017

Moral philosophers often prefer to conceive thought experiments, dilemmas and problem cases of single individuals who make one-shot decisions with well-defined short-term consequences. Morality is complex enough that such simplifications seem justifiable or even necessary for philosophical reflection.  If we are still far from consensus on which is the best moral theory or what makes actions right or wrong – or even if such aspects should be the central problem of moral philosophy – by considering simplified toy scenarios, then introducing group or long-term effects would make matters significantly worse. However, when it comes to actually changing human moral dispositions with the use of technology (i.e., moral enhancement), ignoring the essential fact that morality deals with group behaviour with long-ranging consequences can be extremely risky. Despite those risks, attempting to provide a full account of morality in order to conduct moral enhancement would be both simply impractical as well as arguably risky. We seem to be far away from such account, yet there are pressing current moral failings, such as the inability for proper large-scale cooperation, which makes the solution to present global catastrophic risks, such as global warming or nuclear war, next to impossible. Sitting back and waiting for a complete theory of morality might be riskier than attempting to fix our moral failing using incomplete theories. We must, nevertheless, proceed with caution and an awareness of such incompleteness. Here I will present several severe risks from moral enhancement that arise from focusing on improving individual dispositions while ignoring emergent societal effects and point to tentative solutions to those risks. I deem those emergent risks fundamental problems both because they lie at the foundation of the theoretical framework guiding moral enhancement – moral philosophy – and because they seem, at the time, inescapable; my proposed solution will aim at increasing awareness of such problems instead of directly solving them.

The article is here.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Who Is Rachael? Blade Runner and Personal Identity

Helen Beebee
iai news
Originally posted October 5, 2017

It’s no coincidence that a lot of philosophers are big fans of science fiction. Philosophers like to think about far-fetched scenarios or ‘thought experiments’, explore how they play out, and think about what light they can shed on how we should think about our own situation. What if you could travel back in time? Would you be able to kill your own grandfather, thereby preventing him from meeting your grandmother, meaning that you would never have been born in the first place? What if we could somehow predict with certainty what people would do? Would that mean that nobody had free will? What if I was really just a brain wired up to a sophisticated computer running virtual reality software? Should it matter to me that the world around me – including other people – is real rather than a VR simulation? And how do I know that it’s not?

Questions such as these routinely get posed in sci-fi books and films, and in a particularly vivid and thought-provoking way. In immersing yourself in an alternative version of reality, and by identifying or sympathising with the characters and seeing things from their point of view, you can often get a much better handle on the question. Philip K. Dick – whose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, first published in 1968, is the story on which the 1982 film Blade Runner is based –  was a master at exploring these kinds of philosophical questions. Often the question itself is left unstated; his characters are generally not much prone to philosophical rumination on their situation. But it’s there in the background nonetheless, waiting for you to find it and to think about what the answer might be.

Some of the questions raised by the original Dick story don’t get any, or much, attention in Blade Runner. Mercerism – the peculiar quasi-religion of the book, which is based on empathy and which turns out to be founded on a lie  – doesn’t get a mention in the film. And while, in the film as in the book, the capacity for empathy is what (supposedly) distinguishes humans from androids (or, in the film, replicants; apparently by 1982 ‘android’ was considered too dated a word), in the film we don’t get the suggestion that the purported significance of empathy, through its role in Mercerism, is really just a ploy: a way of making everyone think that androids lack, as it were, the essence of personhood, and hence can be enslaved and bumped off with impunity.

The article is here.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Learning morality through gaming

Jordan Erica Webber
The Guardian
Originally published 13 August 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Whether or not you agree with Snowden’s actions, the idea that playing video games could affect a person’s ethical position or even encourage any kind of philosophical thought is probably surprising. Yet we’re used to the notion that a person’s thinking could be influenced by the characters and conundrums in books, film and television; why not games? In fact, games have one big advantage that makes them especially useful for exploring philosophical ideas: they’re interactive.

As any student of philosophy will tell you, one of the primary ways of engaging with abstract questions is through thought experiments. Is Schrödinger’s cat dead or alive? Would you kill one person to save five? A thought experiment presents an imagined scenario (often because it wouldn’t be viable to perform the experiment in real life) to test intuitions about the consequences.

Video games, too, are made up of counterfactual narratives that test the player: here is a scenario, what would you do? Unlike books, film and television, games allow you to act on your intuition. Can you kill a character you’ve grown to know over hours of play, if it would save others?

The article is here.

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Student Resistance to Thought Experiments

Regina A. Rini
APA Newsletter - Teaching Philosophy
Spring 2016, Volume 15 (2)

Introduction

From Swampmen to runaway trolleys, philosophers make routine use of thought experiments. But our students are not always so enthusiastic. Most teachers of introductory philosophy will be familiar with the problem: students push back against the use of thought experiments, and not for the reasons that philosophers are likely to accept. Rather than challenge whether the thought experiments actually
support particular conclusions, students instead challenge their realism or their relevance.

In this article I will look at these sorts of challenges, with two goals in mind. First, there is a practical pedagogical goal: How do we guide students to overcome their resistance to a useful method? Second, there is something I will call “pedagogical bad faith.” Many of us actually do have sincere doubts, as professional philosophers, about the value of thought experiment methodology. Some of
these doubts in fact correspond to our students’ naïve resistance. But we often decide, for pedagogical reasons, to avoid mentioning our own doubts to students. Is this practice defensible?

The article is here.

Editor's Note: I agree with this article in many ways.  After I have read a philosophy article and a podcast using a thought experiment, I provided critiques regarding how the thought experiments were limited to the author. My criticisms were dismissed with a more ad hominem attack of my lack of understanding of philosophy or how philosophers work.  I was told I should read more philosophy, especially Derek Parfit.  I wish I had this article several years ago.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Would You Pull the Trolley Switch? Does it Matter?

By Lauren Cassani Davis
The Atlantic
Originally published October 9, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

The trolley dilemmas vividly distilled the distinction between two different concepts of morality: that we should choose the action with the best overall consequences (in philosophy-speak, utilitarianism is the most well-known example of this), like only one person dying instead of five, and the idea that we should always adhere to strict duties, like “never kill a human being.” The subtle differences between the scenarios provided helped to articulate influential concepts, like the distinction between actively killing someone versus passively letting them die, that continue to inform contemporary debates in law and public policy. The trolley problem has also been, and continues to be, a compelling teaching tool within philosophy.

By the late ‘90s, trolley problems had fallen out of fashion. Many philosophers questioned the value of the conclusions reached by analyzing a situation so bizarre and specific.

The entire article is here.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

life after faith

Richard Marshall interviews Philip Kitcher
3:AM Magazine
Originally published on August 2, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

Thought experiments work when, and only when, they call into action cognitive capacities that might reliably deliver the conclusions drawn. When the question posed is imprecise, your thought experiment is typically useless. But even more crucial is the fact that the stripped-down scenarios many philosophers love simply don’t mesh with our intellectual skills. The story rules out by fiat the kinds of reactions we naturally have in the situation described. Think of the trolley problem in which you are asked to decide whether to push the fat man off the bridge. If you imagine yourself – seriously imagine yourself – in the situation, you’d look around for alternatives, you’d consider talking to the fat man, volunteering to jump with him, etc. etc. None of that is allowed. So you’re offered a forced choice about which most people I know are profoundly uneasy. The “data” delivered are just the poor quality evidence any reputable investigator would worry about using. (I like Joshua Greene’s fundamental idea of investigating people’s reactions; but I do wish he’d present them with better questions.)

Philosophers love to appeal to their “intuitions” about these puzzle cases. They seem to think they have access to little nuggets of wisdom. We’d all be much better off if the phrase “My intuition is …” were replaced by “Given my evolved psychological adaptations and my distinctive enculturation, when faced by this perplexing scenario, I find myself, more or less tentatively, inclined to say …” Maybe there are occasions in which the cases bring out some previously unnoticed facet of the meaning of a word. But, for a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually use.

If the intuition-mongering were abandoned, would that be the end of philosophy? It would be the end of a certain style of philosophy – a style that has cut philosophy off, not only from the humanities but from every other branch of inquiry and culture. (In my view, most of current Anglophone philosophy is quite reasonably seen as an ingrown conversation pursued by very intelligent people with very strange interests.) But it would hardly stop the kinds of investigation that the giants of the past engaged in. In my view, we ought to replace the notion of analytic philosophy by that of synthetic philosophy. Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.

The entire interview is here.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Is Applied Ethics Applicable Enough? Acting and Hedging under Moral Uncertainty

By Grace Boey
3 Quarks Daily
Originally published December 16, 2014

Here are two excerpts:

Lots has been written about moral decision-making under factual uncertainty. Michael Zimmerman, for example, has written an excellent book on how such ignorance impacts morality. The point of most ethical thought experiments, though, is to eliminate precisely this sort of uncertainty. Ethicists are interested in finding out things like whether, once we know all the facts of the situation, and all other things being equal, it's okay to engage in certain actions. If we're still not sure of the rightness or wrongness of such actions, or of underlying moral theories themselves, then we experience moral uncertainty.

(cut)

So, what's the best thing to do when we're faced with moral uncertainty? Unless one thinks that anything goes once uncertainty enters the picture, then doing nothing by default is not a good strategy. As the trolley case demonstrates, inaction often has major consequences. Failure to act also comes with moral ramifications...

The entire blog post is here.

Monday, September 1, 2014

Thought Experiments

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Substantive revision on August 12, 2014

Thought experiments are devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things. They are used for diverse reasons in a variety of areas, including economics, history, mathematics, philosophy, and the sciences, especially physics. Most often thought experiments are communicated in narrative form, frequently with diagrams. Thought experiments should be distinguished from thinking about experiments, from merely imagining any experiments to be conducted outside the imagination, and from psychological experiments with thoughts. They should also be distinguished from counterfactual reasoning in general, as they seem to require an experimental element, which seems to explain the impression that something is experienced in a thought experiment. In other words, though many call any counter-factual or hypothetical situation a thought experiment, this seems too encompassing. It seems right to demand that they also be visualized (or perhaps smelled, tasted, heard, touched); there should be something experimental about a thought experiment.

The primary philosophical challenge of thought experiments is simple: How can we learn about reality (if we can at all), just by thinking? More precisely, are there thought experiments that enable us to acquire new knowledge about the intended realm of investigation without new empirical data? If so, where does the new information come from if not from contact with the realm of investigation under consideration? Finally, how can we distinguish good from bad instances of thought experiments? These questions seem urgent with respect to scientific thought experiments, because most philosophers and historians of science “recognize them as an occasionally potent tool for increasing our understanding of nature. […] Historically their role is very close to the double one played by actual laboratory experiments and observations. First, thought experiments can disclose nature's failure to conform to a previously held set of expectations. Second, they can suggest particular ways in which both expectation and theory must henceforth be revised.” (Kuhn, 1977, p. 241 and 261) The questions are urgent regarding philosophical thought experiments, because they play an important role in philosophical discourse. Philosophy without thought experiments seems almost hopeless.

There is widespread agreement that thought experiments play a central role both in philosophy and in the natural sciences. General acceptance of the importance of some of the well-known thought experiments in the natural sciences, like Maxwell's demon, Einstein's elevator or Schrödinger's cat. Probably more often than not, these, and many other thought experiments have led the careful analysis of their epistemic powers to the conclusion that we should not portray science as an exclusively empirical activity (see Winchester, 1990, p. 79).

The entire entry is here.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

How to Be Good

An Oxford philosopher thinks he can distill all morality into a formula. Is he right?

By Larissa MacFarqhar
The New Yorker
Originally published September 5, 2011

Here are two excerpts:

Parfit is thought by many to be the most original moral philosopher in the English-speaking world. He has written two books, both of which have been called the most important works to be written in the field in more than a century—since 1874, when Henry Sidgwick’s “The Method of Ethics,” the apogee of classical utilitarianism, was published. Parfit’s first book, “Reasons and Persons,” was published in 1984, when he was forty-one, and caused a sensation. The book was dense with science-fictional thought experiments, all urging a shift toward a more impersonal, non-physical, and selfless view of human life.

(cut)

Parfit believes that there are true answers to moral questions, just as there are to mathematical ones. Humans can perceive these truths, through a combination of intuition and critical reasoning, but they remain true whether humans perceive them or not. He believes that there is nothing more urgent for him to do in his brief time on earth than discover what these truths are and persuade others of their reality. He believes that without moral truth the world would be a bleak place in which nothing mattered. This thought horrifies him.

The entire article is here.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Mental lives and fodor’s lot

Susan Schneider interviewed by Richard Marshall
3:AM Magazine
Originally posted February 14, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

3:AM: You make strong claims about thought experiments and find them valuable. Some philosophers like Paul Horwich disagree and find them misleading and useless. How can something imaginary lead to knowledge and enlightenment?

SS: Philosophers face a dilemma. On the one hand, philosophers often theorize about the nature of things, so it is useful to think of what might be the case, as opposed to what happens to be the case. For instance, metaphysicians who consider the nature of the self or person commonly consider cases like teleportation and brain transplants, to see if one’s theory of the self yields a viable result concerning whether one would survive such things. On the other hand, thought experiments can be misused. For instance, it strikes some as extreme to discard an otherwise plausible theory because it runs contrary to our intuitions about a thought experiment, especially if the example is far-fetched and not even compatible with our laws of nature. And there has been a movement in philosophy called “experimental philosophy” which claims that people of different ethnicities, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds can come to different conclusions about certain thought experiments because of their different backgrounds.

I still employ thought experiments in my work, but I try to bear in mind three things: first, the presence of a thought experiment that pumps intuitions contrary to a theory should not automatically render the theory false. But a thought experiment can speak against a theory in an all-things-considered judgment; this is an approach I’ve employed in debates over laws of nature.

The entire story is here.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously.

By SAMUEL SCHEFFLER
The New York Times - Opinionator
Originally published September 21, 2013

I believe in life after death.

No, I don’t think that I will live on as a conscious being after my earthly demise. I’m firmly convinced that death marks the unqualified and irreversible end of our lives.

My belief in life after death is more mundane. What I believe is that other people will continue to live after I myself have died. You probably make the same assumption in your own case. Although we know that humanity won’t exist forever, most of us take it for granted that the human race will survive, at least for a while, after we ourselves are gone.

Because we take this belief for granted, we don’t think much about its significance. Yet I think that this belief plays an extremely important role in our lives, quietly but critically shaping our values, commitments and sense of what is worth doing. Astonishing though it may seem, there are ways in which the continuing existence of other people after our deaths — even that of complete strangers — matters more to us than does our own survival and that of our loved ones.

The entire story is here.