Life is so full of opportunities to get into arguments that I hesitate to get into one. In addition, an awful lot of arguments are long running. They started before I got involved and they'll keep going after I leave so why bother.
And yet there are some things where I believe it is essential to at least state where I stand and one of these is the whole issue of values clarification. The point was made in the comments last week that what mental experiments such as the trolley problem really do is to force us to examine our values and in the case of the trolley problem itself to specifically confront our values regarding the value of human life.
Some quick hits on this:
1. If the real point of the trolley problem is to evaluate the social worth of human lives there is a tremendous irony here because Foot's quite explicit goal in creating it was to devalue the life of a fetus so as to argue that in some cases at least it would be okay to kill a fetus for the sake of its mothers health. That is always the effect of these things. (Follow the logic of discussions in lifeboat ethics and they head very rapidly in the direction of forced population reduction.)
2. Related to the above, we should also note the intentional use of gradualism here. We begin with an argument intended to show that there are some imaginable cases wherein killing a fetus to save it's mother's life but where we ended up was abortion on demand.
3. One of the biggest drivers for the use of ethics teaching such as the trolley problem and lifeboat ethics has been pedagogical. Because many schools are publicly funded, the argument went, they should not teach any particular ethics but rather teach students to think critically about their ethical beliefs. The argument was that students who evaluated their moral beliefs critically would have stronger moral beliefs than those who (catch the language here) merely accepted moral beliefs uncritically. This turned out to be exactly backwards. The students who were taught moral systems turn out to be both stronger in their moral beliefs and better able to evaluate moral arguments.
4. I'm repeating what I have said before but the inescapable truth is only someone who teaches from a position of authority teaches better than someone who claims only to teach neutrally. The best way to teach people how to value human life is to value human life. The way to learn how to value human life is to train yourself to actually value human life.
5. When I compared Phillipa Foot to Niels Bohr I meant it. She made a huge contribution to the development of virtue ethics but her conclusions are worthless. Foot herself at least partially realized this. She kept revisiting and redoing the very basis of her moral arguments like a person who keeps tearing up their work and starting again. Even her last work has a very tentative quality about it. She helped move the game forward but she added nothing in the end. (The same is true of her colleague Elizabeth Anscombe BTW.)
1) Social worth or the value of one human life over another was only part--albeit a big part--of the reason for the trolley and lifeboat stories. Those stories ask the question: if there are scarce resources ought one be granted access to those resources based on their current, past, or potential contribution to society or should none of those be considered, would a lottery system be a more just resolution? The larger issue is competing moral values, when one moral value collides with another moral value and it is impossible to honor both values. This would include, but is not limited to, abortion. That this was misconstrued or even abused and led to abortion on demand is irrelevant, it doesn't invalidate the methodology or its usefulness as a teaching tool or its practical application in real life.
ReplyDelete2) When this methodology is used, at least where I went to graduate school, it was done within the context of accepted moral systems, not just the student's moral tradition. We studied Kant, Aquinas, and others in order to have a framework for arriving at a resolution of the issue of competing moral claims. When we wrote our papers and essays the moral arguments that were made were expected to be grounded in specific moral systems and not just off the top of our heads. When you say that Ethics should be taught from a position of authority, whose authority? The Ayatollah's, the Pope's, the Dalai Lama's, Kant's, Aquinas'? None of them are complete in and of themselves or sufficient to resolve these thorny issues under every circumstance.
"The best way to teach people how to value human life is to value human life. The way to learn how to value human life is to train yourself to actually value human life."
We all value human life. It is because we value human life that Ethics even addresses these issues or we even have these discussions. They are an attempt to provide a framework for prioritizing competing moral claims or allocating scarce resources. Decades ago the US decided that people would have access to health care based on employer provided health insurance or their ability to pay for it themselves. That's deciding that some lives are worth maintaining and ultimately saving, while others are not. And that affects a helluva lot more people than abortion because every citizen could find him/herself in the position of no access to health care at a moment's notice.
I think you're looking for a quick one-size-fits-all answer to these complex questions, and there aren't any.
Two quick thoughts:
ReplyDeletePlease don't think I'm looking for any sort of answer to the complex problems raised by the Trolley Problem or lifeboat ethics. My point is quite simply that these problems are dead ends. Their only real use is getting us to see that these things lead nowhere.
When I say ethics needs to be taught from authority, I mean only that the person teaching it must really believe in some moral view and make that the basis of their teaching.
I would say that these stories are starting points rather than dead ends, and they lead to the kind of analysis and discussion that these moral questions demand. If you know a better method then please let me know.
ReplyDeleteI agree that a person teching Ethics should have a moral point of view. I believe that every professor of Ethics that I had did have a moral view that came from years of wrestling with these thorny issues, which is a form of "practice," and some of them put that experience in the books they wrote. But, that doesn't make these complex moral issues more easily resolvable (as I saw), and there is no guarantee that the student is going to accept any professor's singular moral view.