I consider this a reason to not strictly adhere to any single moral theory.
This statement is ambiguous. It either means that you adhere to a hybrid theory made up of parts of different moral theories, or that you don’t adhere to a moral theory at all. If you adhere to a hybrid moral theory, this theory is itself subject to the impossibility theorems, so it, too, will have counterintuitive implications. If you adhere to no theory at all, then nothing is right or wrong; a fortiori, not rescuing the child isn’t wrong, and a theory’s implying that not rescuing the child isn’t wrong cannot therefore be a reason for rejecting this theory.
OK—I mean the hybrid theory—but I see two possibilities (I don’t think it’s worth my time reading up on this subject enough to make sure what I mean matches exactly the terminology of the paper(s) you refer to):
In my hybridisation, I’ve already sacrificed some intuitive principles (improving total welfare versus respecting individual rights, say), by weighing up competing intuitions.
Whatever counter-intuitive implications my mish-mash, sometimes fuzzily defined hybrid theory has, they have been pushed into the realm of “what philosophers can write papers on”, rather than what is actually important. The repugnant conclusion falls under this category.
Whichever way it works out, I stick resolutely to saving the drowning child.
Can you (or anyone else who feels similarly) clarify the sense in which you consider the repugnant conclusion ‘not actually important’, but the drowning child example ‘important’?
Both are hypotheticals, both are trying to highlight contradictions in our intuitions about the world, both require you to either (a) put up with the fact that your theory is self-contradictory or (b) accept something that most people would consider unusual/counter-intuitive.
Can you (or anyone else who feels similarly) clarify the sense in which you consider the repugnant conclusion ‘not actually important’, but the drowning child example ‘important’?
Because children die of preventable diseases, but no-one creates arbitrarily large populations of people with just-better-than-nothing well-being.
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand this reply. Suppose you can in fact create arbitrarily large populations of people with lives barely worth living. Some moral theories would then imply that this is what you should do. If you find this implication repugnant, you should also find it repugnant that a theory would have that implication if you found yourself in that position, even if as a matter of fact you don’t. As an analogy, consider Kant’s theory, which implies that a man who is hiding a Jewish family should tell the truth when Nazi officials question him about it. It would be strange to defend Kant’s theory by alleging that, in fact, no actual person ever found himself in that situation. What matters is that the situation is possible, not whether the situation is actual.
But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you meant by “not actually important”?
Well, you can argue that the hypothetical situation is sufficiently exotic that you don’t expect your intuitions to be reliable there.
It’s actually pretty reasonable to me to say that the shallow pond example is simple, realistic and important, compared to the repugnant conclusion, which is abstract, unusual, unreliable and hence useless.
If you find this implication repugnant, {you should also find it repugnant that a theory would have that implication if you found yourself in that position, even if as a matter of fact you don’t}.
I reject the implication inside the curly brackets that I added. I don’t care what would happen to my moral theory if creating these large populations becomes possible; in the unlikely event that I’m still around when it becomes relevant, I’m happy to leave it to future-me to patch up my moral theory in a way that future-me deems appropriate.
As an analogy
I guess I could attach some sort of plausibility score to moral thought experiments. Rescuing a drowning child gets a score near 1, since rescue situations really do happen and it’s just a matter of detail about how much it costs the rescuer. As applied to donating to charity, the score might have to be lowered a little to account for how donating to charity isn’t an exact match for the child in the pond.
The Nazi officials case… seems pretty plausible to me? Like didn’t that actually happen?
Something of a more intermediate case between the drowning child and creating large populations would be the idea of murdering someone to harvest their organs. This is feasible today, but irrelevant since no-one is altruistically murdering people for organs. I think it’s reasonable for someone previously a pure utilitarian to respond with, “Alright, my earlier utilitarianism fails in this case, but it works in lots of other places, so I’ll continue to use it elsewhere, without claiming that it’s a complete moral theory.” (And if they want to analyse it really closely and work out the boundaries of when killing one person to save others is moral and when not, then that’s also a reasonable response.)
A thought experiment involving the creation of large populations gets a plausibility score near zero.
I reject the implication inside the curly brackets that I added.
[...]
I think it’s reasonable for someone previously a pure utilitarian to respond with, “Alright, my earlier utilitarianism fails in this case, but it works in lots of other places, so I’ll continue to use it elsewhere, without claiming that it’s a complete moral theory.”
I find your position unclear. On the one hand, you suggest that thought experiments involving situations that aren’t actual don’t constitute a problem for a theory (first quote above). On the other hand, you imply that they do constitute a problem, which is addressed by restricting the scope of the theory so that it doesn’t apply to such situations (second quote above). Could you clarify?
Maybe I’ve misinterpreted ‘repugnant’ here? I thought it basically meant “bad”, but Google tells me that a second definition is “in conflict or incompatible with”, and now that I know this, I’m guessing that it’s the latter definition that you are using for ‘repugnant’. But I’m finding it difficult to make sense of it all (it carries a really strong negative connotation for me, and I’m not sure if it’s supposed to in this context—there might be nuances that I’m missing), so I’ll try to describe my position using other words.
If my moral theory, when applied to some highly unrealistic thought experiment (which doesn’t have some clear analog to something more realistic), results in a conclusion that I really don’t like, then:
I accept that my moral theory is not a complete and correct theory; and
this is not something that bothers me at all. If the thought experiment ever becomes relevant, I’ll worry about how to patch up the theory then. In the meantime, I’ll carry on trying to live by my moral theory.
Thank you for the clarification. I think I understand your position now.
this is not something that bothers me at all. If the thought experiment ever becomes relevant, I’ll worry about how to patch up the theory then. In the meantime, I’ll carry on trying to live by my moral theory.
Why doesn’t it bother you at all that a theory has counterintuitive implications in counterfactual scenarios? Shouldn’t this lower your confidence in the theory? After all, our justification for believing a moral theory seems to turn on (1) the theory’s simplicity and (2) the degree to which it fits our intuitions. When you learn that your theory has counterintuitive implications, this causes you to either restrict the scope of the theory, and thus make it more complex, or recognize that it doesn’t fit the data as well as you thought before. In either case, it seems you should update by believing the theory to a lesser degree.
Why doesn’t it bother you at all that a theory has counterintuitive implications in counterfactual scenarios? Shouldn’t this lower your confidence in the theory?
I think my disagreement is mostly on (1) -- I expect that a correct moral theory would be horrendously complicated. I certainly can’t reduce my moral theory to some simple set of principles: there are many realistic circumstances where my principles clash (individual rights versus greater good, say, or plenty of legal battles where it’s not clear what a moral decision would be), and I don’t know of any simple rules to decide what principles I deem more important in which situations. Certainly there are many realistic problems which I think could go either way.
But I agree that all other things equal, simplicity is a good feature to have, and enough simplicity might sometimes outweigh intuition. Perhaps, once future-me carefully consider enormous aggregative ethics problems, I will have an insight that allows a drastically simplified moral theory. The new theory would solve the repugnant conclusion (whatever I think ‘repugnant’ means in this future!). Applied to present-me’s day-to-day problems, such a simplified theory will likely give slightly different answers to what I think today: maybe the uncertainty I have today about certain court cases would be solved by one of the principles that future-me thinks of.
But I don’t think the answers will change a lot. I think my current moral theory basically gives appropriate answers (sometimes uncertain ones) to my problems today. There’s wiggle-room in places, but there are also some really solid intuitions that I don’t expect future-me to sacrifice. Rescuing the drowning child (at least when I live in a world without the ability to create large numbers of sentient beings!) would be one of these.
I think it quite obvious that if one does not observe a given theory they are not thereby disarmed from criticism of such a theory, similarly, a rejection of moralism is not equivalent with your imputed upshot that “nothing is right or wrong” (although we can imagine cases in which that could be so). In the case of the former, critiquing a theory adhering to but contradicting intuitionistic premises is a straightforward instance of immanent critique. In the case of the latter, quite famously, neither Bernard Williams nor Raymond Geuss had any truck with moralism, yet clearly were not ‘relativists’.
I consider this a reason to not strictly adhere to any single moral theory.
This statement is ambiguous. It either means that you adhere to a hybrid theory made up of parts of different moral theories, or that you don’t adhere to a moral theory at all. If you adhere to a hybrid moral theory, this theory is itself subject to the impossibility theorems, so it, too, will have counterintuitive implications. If you adhere to no theory at all, then nothing is right or wrong; a fortiori, not rescuing the child isn’t wrong, and a theory’s implying that not rescuing the child isn’t wrong cannot therefore be a reason for rejecting this theory.
OK—I mean the hybrid theory—but I see two possibilities (I don’t think it’s worth my time reading up on this subject enough to make sure what I mean matches exactly the terminology of the paper(s) you refer to):
In my hybridisation, I’ve already sacrificed some intuitive principles (improving total welfare versus respecting individual rights, say), by weighing up competing intuitions.
Whatever counter-intuitive implications my mish-mash, sometimes fuzzily defined hybrid theory has, they have been pushed into the realm of “what philosophers can write papers on”, rather than what is actually important. The repugnant conclusion falls under this category.
Whichever way it works out, I stick resolutely to saving the drowning child.
Can you (or anyone else who feels similarly) clarify the sense in which you consider the repugnant conclusion ‘not actually important’, but the drowning child example ‘important’?
Both are hypotheticals, both are trying to highlight contradictions in our intuitions about the world, both require you to either (a) put up with the fact that your theory is self-contradictory or (b) accept something that most people would consider unusual/counter-intuitive.
Because children die of preventable diseases, but no-one creates arbitrarily large populations of people with just-better-than-nothing well-being.
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand this reply. Suppose you can in fact create arbitrarily large populations of people with lives barely worth living. Some moral theories would then imply that this is what you should do. If you find this implication repugnant, you should also find it repugnant that a theory would have that implication if you found yourself in that position, even if as a matter of fact you don’t. As an analogy, consider Kant’s theory, which implies that a man who is hiding a Jewish family should tell the truth when Nazi officials question him about it. It would be strange to defend Kant’s theory by alleging that, in fact, no actual person ever found himself in that situation. What matters is that the situation is possible, not whether the situation is actual.
But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you meant by “not actually important”?
Well, you can argue that the hypothetical situation is sufficiently exotic that you don’t expect your intuitions to be reliable there.
It’s actually pretty reasonable to me to say that the shallow pond example is simple, realistic and important, compared to the repugnant conclusion, which is abstract, unusual, unreliable and hence useless.
I reject the implication inside the curly brackets that I added. I don’t care what would happen to my moral theory if creating these large populations becomes possible; in the unlikely event that I’m still around when it becomes relevant, I’m happy to leave it to future-me to patch up my moral theory in a way that future-me deems appropriate.
I guess I could attach some sort of plausibility score to moral thought experiments. Rescuing a drowning child gets a score near 1, since rescue situations really do happen and it’s just a matter of detail about how much it costs the rescuer. As applied to donating to charity, the score might have to be lowered a little to account for how donating to charity isn’t an exact match for the child in the pond.
The Nazi officials case… seems pretty plausible to me? Like didn’t that actually happen?
Something of a more intermediate case between the drowning child and creating large populations would be the idea of murdering someone to harvest their organs. This is feasible today, but irrelevant since no-one is altruistically murdering people for organs. I think it’s reasonable for someone previously a pure utilitarian to respond with, “Alright, my earlier utilitarianism fails in this case, but it works in lots of other places, so I’ll continue to use it elsewhere, without claiming that it’s a complete moral theory.” (And if they want to analyse it really closely and work out the boundaries of when killing one person to save others is moral and when not, then that’s also a reasonable response.)
A thought experiment involving the creation of large populations gets a plausibility score near zero.
I find your position unclear. On the one hand, you suggest that thought experiments involving situations that aren’t actual don’t constitute a problem for a theory (first quote above). On the other hand, you imply that they do constitute a problem, which is addressed by restricting the scope of the theory so that it doesn’t apply to such situations (second quote above). Could you clarify?
Maybe I’ve misinterpreted ‘repugnant’ here? I thought it basically meant “bad”, but Google tells me that a second definition is “in conflict or incompatible with”, and now that I know this, I’m guessing that it’s the latter definition that you are using for ‘repugnant’. But I’m finding it difficult to make sense of it all (it carries a really strong negative connotation for me, and I’m not sure if it’s supposed to in this context—there might be nuances that I’m missing), so I’ll try to describe my position using other words.
If my moral theory, when applied to some highly unrealistic thought experiment (which doesn’t have some clear analog to something more realistic), results in a conclusion that I really don’t like, then:
I accept that my moral theory is not a complete and correct theory; and
this is not something that bothers me at all. If the thought experiment ever becomes relevant, I’ll worry about how to patch up the theory then. In the meantime, I’ll carry on trying to live by my moral theory.
Thank you for the clarification. I think I understand your position now.
Why doesn’t it bother you at all that a theory has counterintuitive implications in counterfactual scenarios? Shouldn’t this lower your confidence in the theory? After all, our justification for believing a moral theory seems to turn on (1) the theory’s simplicity and (2) the degree to which it fits our intuitions. When you learn that your theory has counterintuitive implications, this causes you to either restrict the scope of the theory, and thus make it more complex, or recognize that it doesn’t fit the data as well as you thought before. In either case, it seems you should update by believing the theory to a lesser degree.
I think my disagreement is mostly on (1) -- I expect that a correct moral theory would be horrendously complicated. I certainly can’t reduce my moral theory to some simple set of principles: there are many realistic circumstances where my principles clash (individual rights versus greater good, say, or plenty of legal battles where it’s not clear what a moral decision would be), and I don’t know of any simple rules to decide what principles I deem more important in which situations. Certainly there are many realistic problems which I think could go either way.
But I agree that all other things equal, simplicity is a good feature to have, and enough simplicity might sometimes outweigh intuition. Perhaps, once future-me carefully consider enormous aggregative ethics problems, I will have an insight that allows a drastically simplified moral theory. The new theory would solve the repugnant conclusion (whatever I think ‘repugnant’ means in this future!). Applied to present-me’s day-to-day problems, such a simplified theory will likely give slightly different answers to what I think today: maybe the uncertainty I have today about certain court cases would be solved by one of the principles that future-me thinks of.
But I don’t think the answers will change a lot. I think my current moral theory basically gives appropriate answers (sometimes uncertain ones) to my problems today. There’s wiggle-room in places, but there are also some really solid intuitions that I don’t expect future-me to sacrifice. Rescuing the drowning child (at least when I live in a world without the ability to create large numbers of sentient beings!) would be one of these.
I think it quite obvious that if one does not observe a given theory they are not thereby disarmed from criticism of such a theory, similarly, a rejection of moralism is not equivalent with your imputed upshot that “nothing is right or wrong” (although we can imagine cases in which that could be so). In the case of the former, critiquing a theory adhering to but contradicting intuitionistic premises is a straightforward instance of immanent critique. In the case of the latter, quite famously, neither Bernard Williams nor Raymond Geuss had any truck with moralism, yet clearly were not ‘relativists’.