ZenHalfTimeCrock
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Vic was just describing an ethical thought experiment.
Ethics, and philosophy in general, is full of these kinds of hypothetical but intriguing scenarios.
Once again, it is going to take a long post to illustrate what I think Vic was getting at. So here's a bit of Ethics 101:
The classic example that is frequently introduced in the first lesson is known as the Trolley Car Dilemma, which immediately involves pondering an action that most people find immoral to bring about what might be thought of as a greater good, or if you like, the avoidance of an outcome that is even worse.
Trolley Car Dilemma Version 1
You are walking near a trolley-car track when you notice five people tied to it in a row. The next instant, you see a trolley hurtling toward them, out of control. A signal lever is within your reach; if you pull it, you can divert the runaway trolley down a side track, saving the five — but killing another person, who is tied to that spur. What do you do? Most people say they would pull the lever: Better that one person should die instead of five.
Trolley Car Dilemma Version 2
Now, a different situation. You are on a footbridge overlooking the track, where five people are tied down and the trolley is rushing toward them. There is no spur this time, but near you on the bridge is a large man. If you heave him over the side, he will fall on the track and his bulk will stop the trolley. He will die in the process. What do you do? (We presume your own body is too light to stop the trolley, should you be considering noble self-sacrifice.)
Philosophers have generally approached morality in two different ways.
1. Only the consequences matter. So when people have to choose between different options when making a moral decision, they should decide on the option that they think will have the best consequences for themselves and everyone affected by it. People who think like this are called Consequentialists. They start by asking themselves ‘Which choice will have the best effects and produce the best outcome for everyone affected by this situation?’
In the case of the first version of the Trolley car problem, people who decide to pull the lever are thinking consequentially about the situation. Pulling the lever will have the best consequences because only one person is killed instead of five.
Just to complicate things a bit, the word ‘teleological’ (from the Greek word ‘telos’ meaning ‘goal directed’) is also used to describe ethical theories that focus on outcomes or consequences.
2. Morality is a set of rules or duties that people need to be follow so that they can then apply them to any given situation e.g. ‘Thou shalt not kill’, ‘Honesty is the best policy’. So the consequences of our actions never matter. They are irrelevant because certain things are just wrong. People who think like this are called Deontologists (from the Greek word deon meaning ‘duty’). The most extreme version of the deontological approach to ethics is one which says that there can never be exceptions to these rules e.g. you would still have to tell the truth to an angry, would-be murderer if they knocked at your door holding a knife and asked where your best friend is, and the friend was hiding in your bedroom. So the first thing a deontologist usually does is to ask themselves ‘What rule should I follow in this situation?’ or ‘What is my duty?’ In the case of the second version of the Trolley Car Problem, people who think that it is wrong to push the large man onto the track are thinking deontologically. They could be said to be following this rule: ‘It is wrong to kill an innocent human being.’
In the highly unlikely event that someone's interest gets piqued by this post, this the book to acquire if you want to read about more thought experiments:
This article is pretty good too:
Matters of life and death
Interest in “trolleyology”—a way of studying moral quandaries—has taken off in recent years. Some philosophers say it sheds useful light on human beha...
www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
There's one other thing: we might, I suppose, expect moral philosophers, who reason about ethical principles all day long, to be more virtuous than other people.
But the evidence suggests that they aren't. The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has investigated this. He used surveys and more surreptitious methods to measure how often moral philosophers give to charity, vote, call their mothers, donate blood, donate organs, clean up after themselves at philosophy conferences, and respond to e-mails purportedly from students. And in none of these ways are moral philosophers better than any other philosophers or professors in the field.
Schwitzgebel even scrounged up the missing-book lists from dozens of libraries and found that academic books on ethics, which are presumably borrowed mostly by ethicists, are more likely to be stolen or just never returned than books in other areas of philosophy.
In other words, expertise in moral reasoning does not seem to improve ethical behaviour, and it might even make it worse, perhaps by making them more adept at coming up with post-hoc justifications for their behaviour.
So perhaps Vic (or his ethics tutor) do have strange morals. I know I do.
For example, I don't have a problem considering whether it would have been better for Farage to have died in that plane crash as a hypothetical issue. Of course, it's an entirely different matter to actually wish someone dead. If I somehow acquired that power I might only ever use it to avert a nuclear catastrophe or something like that.
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