We read the paper version yesterday; you can read the on-line version here.
At one point the article mentions three hypothetical situations that most people supposedly find immoral. My immediate reaction was a complete lack of objection to any of the three. (Admittedly, my eyes glazed over a critical detail in one of the three. I fervently defended my original position even after catching the important detail: That might be an example of some psychological effect whose name I can't think of (oversimplify a bit and call it stubbornness).)
Julia agreed with me about the lack-of-immorality in the flag case and the dog case. The flag case might have been a moral transgression depending on what standard of conduct the protagonist would have otherwise claimed to uphold.
(Reminds me of something our rabbi told us in Judaism classes over a year ago, that I'll do my best to recount adequately: It's wrong to violate certain Jewish laws/traditions, if and only if you believed in their validity to begin with. So if you assert from the outset, for example, "kosher dietary restrictions are silly"... that's your choice and life goes on. But if you believe that kosher is theoretically correct, yet fail to live up to it in practice, then you've transgressed. Does this make sense? But you could argue that this distinction doesn't apply to any moral rules about treatment of other people.)
I argued with her at length about the brother-sister incest case. It's unclear how much of this was devil's advocacy, how much was rationalizing a stake I'd taken, and how much is what I really believe. I think the two best arguments against brother-sister incest are the risk of pregnancy (you can't just hand-wave this risk down to zero in a hypothetical, no matter how much contraception is involved), and the premise that lots of childhood/adolescent sibling interaction would be really squicky if "these two people can never have sex ever" weren't a ground rule.
The article also mentions two competing flavors of the train problem, that most people will throw a switch to kill one person instead of five, but won't kill that one person with their bare hands (i.e. shove that person in front of the train) to spare five people.
I sort understand why people reflexively draw that distinction, but the way people pigeonhole things is ridiculous in light of simple physics. If you won't use your bare hands but will throw a switch, then what about the case where you save the five people by firing a pistol at the one person? (Railroad switches don't kill people, people kill people.)
[As you know from past moral philosophy posts, I'm in the distinct minority in claiming that you shouldn't even throw the switch. My defense of this is almost exactly the same as what I infer that people say in objection to killing someone with their bare hands. Despite what I claim in theory, in practice I'd probably throw the switch, pull the pistol shove the fat guy, or whatever it took. Unless I just froze.]
Posted by Matt Bruce at January 14, 2008 12:29 PM