A Philosophical Trick Question
This post originally appeared at: A Philosophical Trick Question - LewRockwell
For years one of my conversation pieces while discussing the various life decisions about school, employment, place to live, etc., was to pose “the fundamental philosophical question.” What would you do if you won the lottery? That is, if you didn’t need money what would you do with your life? How would you spend your time? What was really of value to you? Clearly I am not a professional philosopher. I have never even had a course in philosophy.
Notwithstanding my lack of philosophical bona fides, here I write about a theoretical philosophical dilemma called the Trolley Problem.
From Wikipedia, “The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments in ethics, psychology, and artificial intelligence involving stylized ethical dilemmas of whether to sacrifice one person to save a larger number. The series usually begins with a scenario in which a runaway trolley or train is on course to collide with and kill a number of people (traditionally five) down the track, but a driver or bystander can intervene and divert the vehicle to kill just one person on a different track.”
Clearly, the sense of the problem as posed behooves a utilitarian response. More precisely, you are led to make a calculation, one versus five, to determine the greatest good. The equivalent of the trolley problem was posed in the Sanhedrin about 2000 years ago. In the Biblegateway the NIV bible has a section titled: The Plot to Kill Jesus (My emphasis in bold.)
45 Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. 46 But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. 47 Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.
“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. 48 If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”
49 Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! 50 You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”
51 He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, 52 and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. 53 So from that day on they plotted to take his life.
During our own lifetimes we can think of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as she calculated the death of thousands of Iraqi children as being “worth it.”
The point of this philosophical exercise can be considered a variant of the Milgram experiment; that is, to implant the idea in people to take orders to do or accept evil. In modern life this has become commonplace. Be it the response to Covid in dozens of ways, climate change, terror, Russia, China, the list is endless. A utilitarian calculation is presented to give an excuse for doing evil.
Think back to the trolley problem. What if you are being told a lie about the five people on the other track, and in fact, the whole purpose of posing the problem is to convince you to kill the one person who is on the other track? The trolley problem is simply a philosophical trick question.
I was framed. ~ The Question
Either/or binaries & sacrificial coal mine canaries. It’s a Heller of a Catch-22, these “philosophers” snares.
(( I liked watching David Canary in the post WW2/Bretton Forest Fire coal mine tv show Bonanza; good times rolling backwards in time… enroute to other times.
Homer C. Hickam wanted not to breathe coal dust so badly he decided rocket fuel fumes & voilà de-nazified Werner “I aim for the stars, but I keep hitting London” von Braun was the ticket to ride way to go, & later, to let a movie about it be made. ))
Casuist Triage scans before the fact is mirage, not “strategic,” & that’s a fact. So smite the hand that sleights - before it feeds you to the dogs. Cue To Dream The Impossible Dream.
Posing as mathematician martyr(“for the greater good”)-selector is incorrect; sophistry.
I watched a docu recently about the Waco/Davidian - OK City nexus bombing of the Murrah fed (but never stops eating) building - the one with the human shield daycare full of babies & children on the first floor.
Both math martyr-selector sides to that abom(b)ination - in both those abominations - claim/ed the divine right of collateral damage.
That’s a binary-headed buys nuthin’ (but the next atrocity) wooden nickel … that only takes however much it costs to “educate” nervous, very nervous, systems for twelve years …
… And voilà! nature meets nurture to beget f/utilitarianisn on rails, tires & tank treads, & to the rafters brought low.
(( Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour. Remember JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield’s take: phoniness was a metastasized cellular network long before wireless surveillance phones were added to the cancer, man … remember the X-Files character, too, along with the Alamo. ))
Unattainably ideally it is less about saving life than it is about making life worth saving/living. If you’ve ever “jumped in” on behalf of another - who took that opportunity to flee•ve you in the breach - or been betrayed by a utilitarian in a tight spot, you know what I mean.
The immured biological imperative impairs. Men without chests & casks of amontillado & all that.
And so of course the bombing continues.
And will continue to continue until the curve-graded morale continuum improves in the eyes of the anathematicians.
And until the “useless eater” ratio is pared all the way down to the core ‘by their fruits you will know them’ bad apples claiming catbird seats way up in the crown of the tree of knowledge are sated … which is a trick of time, since those pathological appetites can never be sated … & since maybe time is a flat disc, after all, & the abyss is the ever-spiraling needle-groove in the vinyl.
Casuistry, casus belli, hadda’ burn down the village, or London, to save it.
Mal(a in se)thusianism … for money, power, feeding the monkeygo … which includes, depends upon, the monkey see/doo-wop that brings numberless numbered knaves to the gunfight.
Sean shoulda & woulda let the shot shout … but there was a script to follow so’s to get paid, so’s not to get fired, so better to be fired upon two barrels to a Tommy drum:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d5jXDvrOu4