Interesting article on trolley problems in the Atlantic Monthly here. I had no idea that there was such a sizable experimental literature surrounding the issue. The upshot of the article is that maybe there shouldn't be.
I'm not well versed in the recent thinking about it in psychology* or philosophy, but textbook portrayals of it seem to always partially miss the point to me. I mean, it is interesting how people's consequentialist versus deontological intuitions cash out in specific cases. But I think it's more interesting to think of how the real world is filled with analogous tragic choices. I did a post suggesting this with respect to jury duty about this six months ago, but the discussion got derailed by the very practical issue of what I should do.***
Expanded trolly problems are where someone is forced to decide between something bad and something worse (I'm guessing that lots of such situations won't reveal anything about consequentialism or deontology). The interesting thing, it seems to me, is that this is a key way that oppressive systems make people complicit in their own subjugation.**** With the jury duty thing you either: (a) go to jail for refusing, (b) be a part of sending someone to prison, or (c) be a part of letting a possibly dangerous person back into the public where he might very well cause a lot of harm. This is incredible pressure to take part in an unjust system. Any cognitive dissonance one might feel is almost always going to be resolved in terms of thinking the system just. And so the ubiquity of real world trolley examples plays a constitutive role in the self-perpetuation of oppressive structures.
Maybe it's a lack of philosophical imagination on my part, but this seems at least as interesting to me as whether one would throw the guy off the bridge or whatever. I still don't know what to do with respect to jury duty. I suspect that this is one area where passive aggression will save the day. Last time I had jury duty I got thrown out for arguing with the prosecutor over points of Louisiana Law. The judge agreed with me, but the prosecutor got revenge by using his last vote to get rid of a juror. Perhaps I should feel guilty about this, along the lines of "someone has to do it," but I don't.
One might argue that passive aggressively getting yourself out of having to declare one way or the other is to make a choice (the Kantian one in the traditional trolley problem). But this is to ignore the political nature of the problem. If enough people passive aggressively got out of having to make a choice, this would undermine the manner in which the existing institution pushes people into trolley situations. Perhaps that's some consolation of a rule utilitarian sort. I don't know.
*I could use some psychology right now, or at least some of the little pills their psychiatric siblings dispense. I'm at the business center in the Pittsburgh Marriott and the guy to my right keeps sighing theatrically in a sometimes irritated and sometimes satisfied (indeed, almost sexual) manner and the guy at my right keeps humming out of tune in between intermittent grunts. It's work not to pull at my hair. I really do need to get a laptop one of these days.** Now the guy is staring at me. Did he somehow intuit that I'm typing about him? Or am I doing something that is equally irritating to him? O.K. he's back to grunting and working now. Maybe I should say something? For all I know he has undiagnosed congestive heart failure. No. It would not go well if I said something. O.K. He's talking on his cell phone now and not grunting. So I'm guessing no undiagnosed congestive heart failure. This may be the one person in the world less irritating when talking on a cell phone! I should be thankful to witness it.
For all I know he's a tremendously good man, but I can't get past the grunting. It's terrible how neuroses lead the neurotic to dehumnaize others, reducing the imminent cause of neurotic suffering to nothing more than an instance of the specific irritating behavior. I don't know. I wish him well and everything. I just wish he would stop grunting.
**In an interview Larry David once said that much of Curb Your Enthusiasim involves him getting to act out not being the coward that he usually is with respect to his various neuroses. In this vein, I think that complaining on facebook or a blog about stuff that irritates you is the most passive form of passive aggression in which one can engage. . . The benefit is that you might get a shout-out at philosophy metablog though. And as I go on to note above, passive aggression might in fact be the only form of liberatory politics left to us.
***I got let out of it because of a conference, but now I have to go back on August 18th.
****I've been attending excellent lectures by Paul Livingston, Tom Eyers, and Bruno Bosteels this week. It's a great conference.***** Everybody is hitting it out of the park lecturewise. Bosteels is focusing on Badiou's politics, which is why I've been thinking about issues of oppression, emancipatory politics, and various forms of utter futility of theory with respect to praxis. Let us not forget Mark Lance's emendation of Marx's eleventh thesis-
Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to write books about changing it.
*****I hope that that link works. Instead of the page opening, I'm getting a popup from the hotel saying I can't see it because it has "questionable content." Man I wish I knew what triggered the algorithm. That would be a fun thing to share later today when at teh conference. But I'd give that up for this guy to stop grunting. He's gone from aggrieved to sort of triumphant, and now grunting about every ten seconds or so. I'm guessing the work is going well and the modulation in grunts acknowledge that? Did this kind of stuff bother neanderthals? Instead of undiagnosed congestive heart failure, could this be a kind of atavistic reversion on his part? Maybe rendering him better prepared for the zombie apocalypse than an effete academic like myself? I don't know. On his computer he's manipulating all of these open windows with different kinds of graphs you can make with Microsoft products.
I'm so incredibly happy I don't work in a regular office. With my luck I would sit across the cubicle from someone who intermittantly produces weird burping type eructations all day long. This actually happens to real people.]
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