The Ethical Dilemma Tier List

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Everyone loves an ethical dilemma, and everyone loves a tier list. So, let's get started. My name is Joe Folly, and this is Unsolicited Advice.

All right, first up, no surprises here, we have the trolley problem. So, I imagine that many of you will have come across or heard of the trolley problem. Although the most famous version of it, the one where the man has the lever by the side of the tracks, actually isn't the original version.

The original version is in a paper by Philip Foot, who's probably better known for other contributions to philosophy. She did just loads of work in loads of different fields. Her version of the trolley problem was where you are the driver rather than somebody switching the lever. You're on the track towards five people, and you're given the choice of swerving to the other track to hit one person. And in Foot's paper, she kind of uses this as a very obvious example of when it is okay to sacrifice, in effect, one person's good for the good of many. But she's using it as a kind of contrast case because her other example in that paper is the example of a judge sentencing one person to death who is innocent in order to save five other people from being killed by a sort of angry mob who's going to kill these five people unless the judge sentences this one innocent person to death through, sort of, you know, contrived moral philosophy reasons.

But anyway, Foot's point is that that would be impermissible because the judge has a special duty to not sentence innocent people to death in a way that the trolley driver doesn't. You know, the people he doesn't have a special duty towards the five or towards the one. And so it makes sense to kind of, you know, maximize utility there, effectively. And it's interesting that this has become so associated with utilitarianism because in a lot of ways, all of the different variants of the trolley problem are aimed to bring out non-utilitarian concerns. Right? You're effectively saying, okay, we've got a situation whereby, in terms of mere consequence, one option is clearly better than the other option. But we are going to see what countervailing factors there are that would prevent someone from endorsing the decision that leads to merely the best consequence because of some other countervailing moral factor.

So, one example from Judith Jarvis Thomson, who is also the person who made the lever version, is the so-called fat man version of the trolley problem, which is where you are tasked with, rather than stopping the train using a lever, you're tasked with physically pushing a rather rotund person in front of the train whose body will then bring the train to a halt. And so the train will then not hit the five people tied to the track. You know, a lot of people react to that by kind of being a bit viscerally uncomfortable or maybe even chuckling because they're a bit uncomfortable with confronting that particular scenario. But the discomfort there is actually the point. Judith Jarvis Thomson's point is that a kind of hands-on style of action there seems to count against the goodness of the consequence or the betterness of the consequence there. Seems like for at least a lot of people, they don't want to push the large man in front of the train because there's something about the kind of hands-on, visceral action there that means that they, they suddenly disvalue the consequences a little bit more. You know, they now think, "Oh, maybe the consequences aren't so important. Maybe it's still wrong despite the fact that when all of the actions have been completed, we will have been in a better scenario than if I hadn't pushed the man in front of the train." It's sort of meant to bring out the non-consequentialist considerations within ethical decision-making.

I mean, you know, this is this is a clear A tier for me. It would go in S tier were it not for the fact that it is so dominant within discussions of ethical dilemmas online that it has almost become like a parody of itself in a lot of ways. The one thing that I would say about the trolley problem is that it is helpfully almost infinitely malleable, right? So loads of different philosophers play with loads of different versions of the trolley problem. And each of them is kind of serves as a little, in a benign way, a little intuition pump to kind of see how you react to all of these different possibly countervailing ethical considerations that might override consequences in some situations. However, I sort of think that maybe it's just because it's become a bit overused that I don't want to put it in S tier. Basically, by all rights, it probably should be an S tier, and I'm probably putting it in A tier for entirely personal, arbitrary reasons.

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But anyway, back to the video. And speaking of related to the trolley problem is the organ harvesting problem, which is also from Judith Jarvis Thomson and is building directly on the trolley problem. And here, similar to the case of the judge in Philip Foot's example, you are a doctor or a surgeon, and you have five patients, each of whom is going to die if they don't have a particular organ. And they don't all need the same organ. You know, well, maybe two of them need kidneys, but you know, the point is that they're not competing over organs between them. Each of them could take one organ from a healthy human being and be fine. And lo and behold, a person strolls into your office one day with all of the organs that they need, that all of these patients need, but he himself is perfectly healthy. And Judith Jarvis Thomson asks, "Well, is it right for you as the surgeon to kill this healthy person in order to save your five patients?" And for her, the answer is pretty obviously no. And I think for most people, the answer is pretty obviously no. But the question is why, right?

Because when I, you know, I occasionally talk in schools, right? By the way, if you're a teacher, drop me an email. I will come and speak at your school. But I speak at schools and this is one of the ethical dilemmas that I tend to pose to like younger years if I'm giving a sort of a talk to some year eights or year sevens because it really does. People react in a very viscerally negative way, or at least they tend to. There'll always be like one or two kids who will just be like, "No, we should do that. It's all for the greater good," in a kind of very Hot Fuzz way. I don't know if Hot Fuzz is a relevant reference outside the UK, but in the UK, Hot Fuzz is huge and it's a great film and everyone should watch it. Apart from that, people tend to have a visceral negative reaction to the organ harvesting dilemma. They tend to say the doctor definitely shouldn't. But they have very different responses when I've asked kids, mainly, why they reject it so much. So some will appeal, much like the case of the judge in Philip Foot's thought experiment, to a kind of special duty that the surgeon has towards healthy people. Do no harm, as the Hypocratic Oath goes, at least allegedly. I've never actually read the Hypocratic Oath, but I assume that's in there. That, you know, for some people, that duty is the thing that weighs the moral scales in favor of not killing this healthy person. But other kids, when asked, when I've asked them, have given very consequentialist stories. So they've said something like, "No, I think that any kind of violation of the bond of trust between doctor and patient will have worse consequences further down the line." So their point there is that say we collectively decided that it was okay to kill one healthy person in order to harvest their organs and redistribute them to five sick people. Well, you know, a lot of these kids tend to argue that, I think reasonably plausibly, that having the complete, or being able to have the complete confidence that when you go into a doctor's office, you're not going to be stripped for parts, does so much more good than any amount of organ redistributive work. So that is, that is a consequentialist argument, right? That's not saying the surgeon has a special duty. That's saying something like, there is a rule, and if we break that rule, it's going to have disastrous consequences further down the line. But it's still like a fundamentally consequentialist story.

There are lots of thought experiments that are along these lines whereby it's around constructing a reasonably artificial scenario, attempting to say, "Okay, here, either there are no negative consequences, or there's a positive consequence, but nonetheless, it's breaking some kind of moral rule." So in, I can't remember the name of the book, "The Righteous Mind," that's the Jonathan Haidt book on moral psychology, where he poses questions to participants in studies about, like, the case of incest or the case of a kind of artificially victimless form of incest. Which is, it's very interesting, right? Because people will struggle to articulate exactly what's wrong with his kind of artificial victimless incest scenarios, even though they will maintain a kind of visceral reaction that it is wrong. First of all, I think it's always worth noting with stuff like that that in actual practice, incest is almost always accompanied by some kind of horrifying abuse scenario. So I think that a fair amount of intuitions on it are to do with the fact that it's so strongly correlated with horrible forms of abuse. So I know there's an extent to which, you know, I think with a lot of these artificial scenarios, one of the worries that I have with them is that our intuitions are not necessarily totally separable from the conditions in which they're forged. We can't just cut them up and examine them and examine their parts in isolation. If a given event is almost always accompanied by extreme negative consequences, and then you set someone down in a lab setting and say, "Right, I want you to ignore all of those negative consequences, what does your intuition say?" Now, I don't know why we expect them to suddenly be able to separate that. I don't think that ethical intuitions are these neat, rationally responsive beasts that are perfectly amendable to artificially stripping normally consequentially disastrous scenarios of their consequences. And so, you know, one, I think, perfectly valid response somebody could give to this kind of no-consequence incest scenario would be to say, "No, like the rule that we condemn it under almost any circumstance." And it wouldn't just be that it would have to be a lack of harm that were justified. It would have to be a positively counteracting some kind of other horrible harm, like some kind of horribly contrived scenario like, "This person's going to shoot 10 people if you don't commit incest." That kind of thing. The kind of stuff that happens in philosophy classes. That, apart from that, actually just having a taboo on actions that are almost always correlated with harm, even if there are specific scenarios where, as an exception to the rule, there might not be harm. I think that actually somebody can make a good consequentialist argument that, "No, right? Like, I get it that, like they could say something like, 'I get it that Mr. Jonathan Haidt, you think that you're saying that no one will find out about it in this scenario, but my point is that preserving the taboo, even when it's posited that no one is observing, is on balance the best thing to do.'" So no, I think there's probably a kind of meta-consequentialist argument you can make there. And a lot of kids, when I bring up the organ transplant or the organ harvesting dilemma, do tend to reach for that. And I think that's kind of an unexplored scenario. And I do think that it brings out the fact that in practice, it is very difficult to rationally carve up our intuitions and examine each part in isolation, quite in the way that a lot of these scenarios want us to do and kind of turning around and being like, "Oh, gotcha. You've got no justification for this moral intuition." And it's like, well, you know, that intuition was forged in the world that we inhabit with all of its correlations and and causative butterfly effects. And we can see that some actions almost always have disastrous consequences. And that then attempting to say, "Okay, but just forget all of that. Forget all of that kind of intuition training you've had over the years. What do you think under these very specific circumstances?" I just think, I don't know. I wonder about whether that is a feasible thing to do.

Um, so organ harvesting, I think, will go on B tier. I do really like it for a number of reasons. I say, I always use it in schools when I'm talking to younger years about ethics. So I do have a lot of appreciation for it. However, on balance, I think that the trolley problem is more malleable, and the organ harvesting case, for me, just falls a bit short of its glorious predecessor.

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Okay, next up we have The Ring of Gyges. This is a straight S tier for me. I absolutely bloody love The Ring of Gyges. For those who haven't come across it, this is an ethical, well, I don't even know whether to properly call it an ethical dilemma. So maybe just an ethical thought experiment at the beginning of Plato's Republic, whereby we're told a legend. Loads of Plato's thought experiments and dilemmas and other philosophical apparatuses come in the form of legends and fables. I wish more philosophers did that. I think it's really fun. Like Atlantis is a fable, and I love that. I think it's brilliant. And within the dialogues, they're always presented as if they actually happened. And the Ring of Gyges is, you know, a shepherd, I think it's a shepherd or a farmer or something, finds a ring and he puts it on. The ring turns him invisible. And he uses this power to seduce the queen of his land. And then, I don't know how he managed to use this power to seduce the queen. Like, I don't know whether turning invisible is massively seductive, but I don't know. I'm not sure that will work on me. But anyway, he turns invisible and uses this to seduce the queen, and then he conspires with the queen to kill the king, and then he becomes the king. And Gyges, that's G-Y-G-E-S. I'm not just saying that this character is gorgeous, but this Gyges character poses the question to Socrates as to whether anyone psychologically could resist this temptation. If they were freed from all kind of social bonds of responsibility and punishment, wouldn't they just indulge and seek power and stuff like that? So there's a kind of psychological spin on this.

However, this is such a malleable thought experiment, and it's used in a number of different ways in the Republic. Because, if I remember correctly, Socrates uses it to clarify the business of ethics as opposed to the business of seeking personal gain. A reasonably decent definition for clarifying your subject matter when you're asking, "What is the right thing to do?" and "Just what is the right thing to do?" is what ought you to do, even when there are no consequences, no personal consequences that are going to come back to bite you or affect you. In other words, what should you do if you were invisible and no one would ever find out and stuff like that? You know, this is, I think, a very, very useful constraint sometimes when you're trying to establish the bounds of the kind of questions that you want to ask in ethics, as opposed to say, realpolitik and you're looking for personal advancement. It's a way of kind of trying, at least, to strip away some of the matter that is, at least on the face of it, sort of extraneous to what you're trying to do. If you're simply trying to ask, "What is the right thing to do?" So it doesn't just have a psychological dimension. It also has that dimension to it, which I think is incredibly interesting. And also, if you're Socrates, and you're trying to ultimately argue that to be a good person is good for you, regardless of any kind of consequence. Like, for Socrates, goodness benefits the person who is good, which is kind of an idea that's so prevalent in loads of different ancient Greek philosophies. It's there in Cynicism. It's there in Stoicism. It's there in Socrates and Plato. It's there in Aristotle, though to a slightly lesser extent. You know, virtue is still good, but for Aristotle, it's not like the soul good, you know. And it is, it's everywhere in ancient Greek philosophy, and it's something that we haven't necessarily held on to. I don't know whether it's just because we're a bit more cynical. A lot of our perceptions around goodness is that goodness is, even if you know you're a moral realist and a robust moral realist and you think there are real moral facts and there's a fact of the matter about what is good and what is bad. We tend to not endorse that kind of tight correlation between virtue or doing the right thing and prudential or pragmatic goodness for the person acting in that way. Our current mainstream view on the connection between personal benefit and morality is actually much closer to the position of the ancient Greek Sophists, who were, Gyges was a Sophist, and Sophists on the whole were much more pessimistic about the connection between any kind of supposed objective goodness, which I mean, I don't know enough about Sophism to know how much variation there was, but on the whole, at least as Plato paints them, they're kind of unconcerned with that. It's very difficult to tell because Plato is as much an anti-Sophist propagandist as anything else. So, you know, it's difficult to tell whether he's just misrepresenting. In either case, they certainly don't think there's as neat a connection between objective goodness, should it be there, and personal prudential goodness in the way that Socrates thinks there is. So, that's another use for the Ring of Gyges, right? Socrates is trying to establish, if you're trying to establish that goodness is good for the person who is good prudentially speaking, then you have to argue that even if you had this invisible ring and you could do whatever you want, you should still, even from a prudential perspective, strive for Socratic virtue.

I think again, that's like, it's just that the Ring of Gyges is so brilliant in so many ways. It also touches upon the idea of power possibly revealing someone's true moral qualities, which is another interesting psychological and philosophical question. You can sit there and think about the Ring of Gyges for hours, if not days, and you'll always come up with new relevances it has for various different philosophical and moral psychological issues. I think it's brilliant, and that's why it's going in the S tier, hands down.

Okay, next up we have Peter Singer's Drowning Child thought experiment, stroke ethical dilemma. And I imagine that many of you will have probably come across this in some form. It's originally from his paper "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," which it's kind of hard to overstate the impact that this paper had. It's probably one of the most cited ethics papers in the 20th century, and I think part of it is because of this underlying ethical dilemma or thought experiment that underpins Singer's argument. Essentially, the thought experiment goes that you're walking along one day and you see a child drowning in water that you could just wade into and save the drowning child. And Singer says that unfortunately, the only downside to you is that you would ruin your new shoes. And your new shoes, you know, set you back a couple hundred quid or something like that. So you don't want to ruin your new shoes. And Singer asks us to imagine how we would judge someone who refused to go and save the child on the basis that they're going to ruin their new shoes, and that was an unacceptable personal cost. And Singer basically says, "Look, we would think that person is a total monster. They would come across as absolutely irredeemable."

Our intuitive response there is meant to underpin his later argument that we are analogous to the person walking by the drowning child all the time. If we have some level of disposable income, in that once our necessities are taken care of, we have a roof over our heads, we have food to eat, etc., etc., etc., well, we could donate any extra money that we happen to have left over to an effective charity that would then use that money to save lives or massively increase well-being in places where even just a tiny investment can have an absolutely huge impact. So there's a charity called GiveWell that kind of measures the effectiveness of different charities based on kind of quality life hours saved, if that makes sense. Top of their list for a long time, and it might still be, was malaria, like malaria charities were the biggest bang for your buck well-being-wise donation. I think they worked out that it was about $3,000 was pretty much guaranteed to save an entire human life, which is pretty substantial. And of course, less than $3,000 would still have an enormous impact. You know, even just 50 quid could buy a whole bunch of mosquito nets, and that could potentially save lives. And at the very least, it would massively increase the peace of mind of someone sleeping because they would know that they're very unlikely to now be bitten by a mosquito and thus are very unlikely to get malaria that night. And that's, you know, that's a pretty good use of money. And $50 or 50 pounds or what have you would buy quite a lot of mosquito nets.

So, one of Singer's points is that when we are spending our money on luxuries that benefit us personally as opposed to donating to some kind of effective charity, we are analogous to the person who walks by the drowning child without saving them because they don't want to ruin their nice, expensive, luxurious shoes. And of course, there are many arguments that people have given against this or for this. And I kind of want to focus on, I can't remember if this was in the original paper or if this is when Singer was writing a book in response to criticisms of this argument, but especially in his later statements and later publications, Singer kind of reins back in his argument to what I think is a much stronger position. Right. So initially, his argument is that we are all duty-bound to give up to the point of marginal utility. So to give until giving would cause you more harm than that money would do good elsewhere. A lot of people critique that for, I think, pretty understandable reasons, because it relies on you having no special duties towards either yourself or others. It relies on a pretty hardcore utilitarian moral philosophy, which not everyone subscribes to, and is controversial, right? You can't just assume utilitarianism and then expect our argument to apply to people who aren't utilitarians.

So in later publications, if I'm remembering correctly, Singer reins it in so that he is just more interested in asking the question, "Are we doing enough?" Like, plausibly, are we using our money in ways that are intuitively falling well short of our moral duties towards our fellow human beings in parts of the world where a little bit of money could do an awful lot of good. And I think, you know, the thing about Singer's thought experiment there is that it's very hard to sort of unsee. I think it is, in its original form, I think it does have a fair amount of flaws to it, but in that later form, where it's just the modest conclusion, it's just kind of milking your conscience a bit. I think it's a very good thought experiment. It's going in the A tier for me. The only reason it's not really in the S tier is because I think in the initial formulation, it's probably not its strongest, and that is where it was formed. And also because I think that there is a tendency for this kind of thought experiment to railroad us into very, very utilitarian assumptions that are quite questionable. You could think, for instance, that you have special duties towards your community that you happen to be a part of, the kind of people who are spatially located around you. There are also kind of critiques you might raise that certain charities might not be the best use of money, etc., etc., etc. I think that once you add all those tweaks and you get down to largely just the question, given this thought experiment and your intuitive reaction to it, are we doing enough? I think that would be S tier, but that's a lot, that's adding quite a lot to merely the drowning child thought experiment. So it's going in the A tier, but this is a very, very confronting ethical dilemma and eminently practical, I would say. So, you know, let me know what your reactions to it are.

Our next one is the Experience Machine. So this is an ethical dilemma by Robert Nozick. The idea is, say I'm a scientist, right? And I've invented a magnificent experience machine, which if I plug you into it, will simulate a reality for you that is just perfect and blissful, and you'll love every moment of it. It will just butter your biscuits in a uniquely you way. Of course, it's all simulated, right? So you don't have any contact with reality, the external world, or our shared reality. You're put in your own kind of private reality that's going to be happiness-inducing for you. And Nozick asks us, would we agree to this? Is the tradeoff of pure pleasure worth not having any contact with reality? And his argument is that it's not. He thinks that most people would say that this is a bad deal, you shouldn't take it. I think the technical way he puts it is that most people would agree that your future is not better for you in the experience machine than it is in the external world.

And this underpins a kind of psychological, ethical point that Nozick is trying to make, which is that we, as humans, value things other than pleasure and other than like emotional states. So there's a certain view of morality and of kind of moral psychology, probably not the right word, but a certain view of human well-being, holds that, for instance, John Stuart Mill argued this, holds that what humans ultimately pursue is pleasure, or just to loosen it slightly, certain internal emotional states. So earlier this year, I thought I would practice chess, and I get pretty good at chess, and I absolutely failed in that. But at that point, I thought, right, I want to get good at chess. This hedonistic or just more broadly internalist picture of human well-being would hold that I don't actually want to get better at chess. What I want is to experience the pleasure that I would experience getting better at chess. So what I'm actually aiming for is the feeling, and this goal is just a means to the end of that feeling. And if that were true, Nozick argues, well, someone should want to just be put into the experience machine, right? Because that's cutting out the middleman. There is a simulated reality that's going to be totally blissful for you, and none of your stated explicit goals, like getting better at chess or starting a family or anything like that, would be achieved because you would be in the experience machine. And he even says that they'd wipe your memory before you get put into the machine. So you wouldn't know you're in the machine. You'd just think, "Wow, blimey, my life's going absolutely fantastic." And still, Nozick argues, and there has been some experimental evidence that this is the case, Nozick argues that people would refuse it or would otherwise say this is a bad deal for the person going into the experience machine.

You can also kind of dial this up and down, right? So you could, for instance, say that you're going into the experience machine, but everyone else is as well. So you're having contact with other real people, but your reality is merely simulated, a kind of blissful matrix, I suppose. And maybe some people are happier with that. It seems to be that the more in contact you are with reality, the happier people are to accept some version of altered reality. So not an alternative reality, but merely an altered reality. I think that the version of the thought experiment that I think, if I remember correctly, almost no one says yes to is where there's not even a simulation. So you don't even have a simulated world. You're just hooked up to an IV that just pumps pure bliss into you. Most people think that that is a bad state for the person experiencing it to experience.

I really like this. I think this is an excellent thought experiment. I think that it challenges, the challenge to the internalist model of human well-being, I think is excellent. And I also think that it's very needed. I think many of us, myself very much included, intuitively reach for an internalist picture of human well-being where we just define well-being in terms of phenomenal states, in terms of happiness or the experience of a desire being fulfilled rather than a desire actually being fulfilled. And the experience machine just challenges that. And you know, you can just say yes to the experience machine. I've sometimes wondered that if my life were just horrible and I was just finding existence very unpleasant, whether I would not just be much more inclined for the experience machine. You know, maybe I don't, or maybe we don't just value pleasure and pain and these internal states, but maybe they're a big enough part of our well-being apparatus and our desire structure that even though the average person with the average life wouldn't say yes to this, if you're in a really bad way, maybe you would say yes to it. And you know, I kind of, I don't know, because life can get much, much worse than my life specifically has got. I know. I think that it would probably depend. At the very least, as I say, the reason I'm putting this in the S tier is because I think that it's uniquely good at destabilizing that internalist picture of human well-being that I think so many of us are pre-theoretically married to, if that makes sense. Myself very much included. This really made me rethink my own picture of human well-being. So to that extent, you know, in terms of impact on me, I think the experience machine has really been up there, and I, yeah, that's definitely an S tier one.

So the next on our list is "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." So this is a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, who's a fantastic author, by the way. When I was a kid, I used to absolutely love her Earthsea books. They're brilliant. I would highly recommend them, especially if you've got like children between the ages of like 9 and 11, I'd say. They're just amazing and they're so wonderful. Like they're books that I wish I could read again for the first time because they're just brilliant. They're like a kind of warm hug of a book. And actually, to be fair, they are meaty enough that you would enjoy reading them as an adult. I mean, I've reread them as an adult and really enjoyed them. Um, but anyway, this isn't about the Earthsea books. This is about "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," which Le Guin said that in hindsight, she's pretty sure that she just nicked this from Dostoevsky. It was one of those things where she wasn't consciously doing that. I think she says, you know, this story came about through forgetting something from Dostoevsky. Because a thought experiment that it's either Alyosha puts it to Ivan, I think it is. Alyosha puts it, no, Ivan puts it to Alyosha in "The Brothers Karamazov." He says, "Would it be acceptable for you that the well-being of the entire of a big city or a big country, I think it's a city, but like, you know, the well-being of a large population center, that just was blissed out all the time, they had perfect lives, not in an experience machine sense, but just kind of in a regular standard sense. But that population center rested on the suffering of one innocent child." And Ivan is putting this to Alyosha because that's meant to be analogous to the story of Christ, right? So Alyosha is a deeply religious character. This is Ivan's challenge to the goodness of the Christian story. Ivan's point, at least within this, is that not only is the problem of evil a problem for theistic beliefs, and I think they've just talked about the problem of evil before this passage, but that the Christian redemptive story, resting as it does on, you know, the Lamb, the sacrificial lamb, is a fundamentally unjust one. And Alyosha ought to affirm this story about the large population center resting on the suffering of an innocent child if he is to be a Christian. And Alyosha can't. He admits that he could not permit the suffering of this small child. And it's, you know, a lot of Dostoevsky books, they really show Dostoevsky wrestling with his faith in the text. And this is just a wonderful part of that. Sometimes people use the term polyphonic novel for Dostoevsky's books, and I think that's just perfect. It's brilliant. He's just fantastic at showing things from different people's perspectives. He's like Herodotus, I guess, in that respect. But anyway, wandered quite far from "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

But to bring this back to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," Le Guin posits quite a similar story. So she says that, you know, there's this perfect town, but that there is a, the town has a secret, and everyone knows the secret that once they reach a certain level of maturity, they get let in on the secret. And the secret is that there's this small, suffering, unloved, innocent child in a dark basement somewhere, and that were the child to ever be let free, the town would no longer be the blissful, wonderful place that it is. The mechanism for this is never quite made clear. In fact, when I made a video on this, some people pointed out in the comments, I think rather astutely, that the story begins with Le Guin saying, "There's this perfect city or perfect town," and then saying, "Oh, but you wouldn't believe in a perfect city. There must be some catch." And then she introduces this. So, you know, we could talk about kind of unreliable narrator stuff here. But as an ethical dilemma, I think that in some ways "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is similar to a utilitarian trade-off ethical dilemma like the trolley problem, but I think that it has an important twist. Well, it has a number of important twists. The first is that the city of Omelas, all of their ethical dilemmas are boiled down to one ethical dilemma. So, in some sense, this is like the only contradiction in their world, which I think is fascinating. And I think that it raises all kinds of interesting psychological questions about not necessarily need, but our human willingness and wish to escape the moral complexity of our world and try and reduce the number of dilemmas to us to as few as possible. And there's plenty of literary stuff there to get your teeth into.

But the other interesting thing about "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is that you are not put in the position of someone designing the city. You're put in the position of someone already in the city who then has to decide what they're going to do. And the choice isn't whether to free the child or not, because that's kind of considered to be, at the very least, not a live option. The choice is whether to stay and reap the rewards of this child suffering, or to leave and at the very least extricate your soul from the situation. And I think this is a wonderfully creative thought experiment. I think that the focus on bystander as opposed to actor, I think is really interesting. Because most of us are bystanders rather than actors most of the time. You know, that makes it kind of more widely relevant, I think, a lot of the time. And also from a utilitarian perspective, you can make the argument that the more people walk away, the worse the situation gets, since fewer people are benefiting from the child suffering. So there are just so many angles you can take here, which is one of the reasons I mean, I think it's a fantastic story. I'm going to put it in the B tier. I think that I ought to say something about why it's not going in the A or S tiers, given how wonderful it is. While I think it is fantastic in a whole host of ways, and I would highly encourage people to read the story, I think that ultimately it rests on so many other things that I'd feel weird putting it in the A tier. So I'm going to put it in the B tier, though I do feel a bit guilty about that. Maybe it's just a vibe thing. I don't know. I think, you know, we do these kind of tier lists and rankings and stuff, and it's all very fun, but actually, you know, the reasoning for placements is always a little bit just sort of shooting from the hip, intuitive, vibey. So maybe this is just a viby thing. The thing is, I'm quite bad generally at condemning things. I don't know why. I have a natural inclination to try and milk everything I find for as much philosophical meaning as possible, and that approach has its pros and cons. I'm forcing myself to be harsh and take a hard line. So yes, it's going in the B tier, and I'm going to stop second-guessing myself.

Okay, next up we have the Sorites torture paradox, or sometimes called the harmless torture paradox, which is a thought experiment, stroke dilemma, basically by Derek Parfit in "Reasons and Persons." Although I'm not going to give his version, I'm going to give a slightly simplified and slightly altered one. But essentially, he compares two different situations. So in one situation, a thousand torturers have a thousand personal victims, right? And at the start of each day, each victim is in mild discomfort. This is from Parfit's book. Then each of the torturers turns a switch a thousand times on some kind of torture instrument. And each turning of a switch affects a victim's pain in a way that is imperceptible. But after each torturer has turned his switch a thousand times, he's inflicted really quite severe pain on the victim. So the idea is that no individual action there kind of does a perceptible amount of harm. But when you've got a thousand of them, it builds up to a kind of quite a substantial harm.

And this is contrasted with the harmless torturers. So in the bad old days, that thought experiment we just looked at, each torturer inflicted severe pain on one victim. So each torturer had one victim, and they inflicted severe pain on them. And this allowed us, this allowed it to be quite easy to link responsibility back to the torturer. But in this scenario, things have changed. Each of the thousand torturers presses a button and thereby turns the switch once on each of the thousand instruments. So the victims still suffer the same severe pain, but none of the torturers makes any victim's pain perceptibly worse. No one has inflicted more than an imperceptible amount of pain on any one of the victims, right? Because each person has pressed this button, and the pain level has risen like an imperceptible, what we would call a harmless amount, right? So maybe it's the equivalent of the mild discomfort of a breeze that's slightly above a gentle, you know what I mean? Like, you go outside, the breeze hits you, and there's not really pain. But I don't know. The thing is, it's difficult to describe because in Parfit's version, like the pain is meant to be imperceptible, which means it's quite difficult to give an example. But let's go with the kind of mild breeze one for now. So each one of the torturers has done something incredibly minimal, is the point. But taken altogether, they seem to have done an awful, awful thing, right? They've tortured a thousand people and put them through horrible pain.

So, I mean, I say Parfit has his own aims for this experiment, but for our purposes, we will just think about it like this: How should we react to that? What is each individual torturer's moral responsibility there? Because each of them seems to have only done an imperceptible amount of harm, and yet they've all taken part in a collective action that seems to have done an awful lot of collective harm, right? So this is kind of, again, maybe a way to phrase it as a dilemma would be to say, "You know, what are you to do with each individual torturer? Do you punish them? Do you let them go because it seems like they've done something like, each individually has done something relatively harmless? Or do you condemn them? Do you say that each of them is in some sense responsible for the whole collective action? And if so, should you punish each of them as if they have done the whole torturing?" The point is that it's very hard to figure out exactly what to do here. And this is kind of analogous to a lot of situations in our general world, right? So I always like to analogize this to things like online harassment campaigns. So if you're like one Twitter user, say, and you tweet a mean thing at a celebrity, whatever, like that in itself probably does a very minimal amount of harm. But it seems like for that person on the other end, if they're receiving thousands of those types of messages, well then they're probably undergoing quite a lot of harm, but each individual message only adds a tiny, maybe imperceptible amount to that.

So I do think that this idea, not necessarily how Parfit uses it, but just kind of abstracted from its original context, is very useful for examining some modern situations. I'm going to put it in the B tier. And the reason I'm going to put it in the B tier is because I think that paradoxes generally require basically some kind of gradable logic system or gradable semantic system in order to properly make sense of it. And I think that to that extent, this doesn't function as well as an ethical dilemma.

And partly that's because I don't think Puffford originally really intended it to be an ethical dilemma. You know, he's using it to illustrate a a point in a grander argumentative scheme. That it has then become an ethical dilemma and I don't think necessarily it is totally fit to play that role. Um, I do think it's illuminating. I just don't think it's got kind of a neat dilemma structure to it. That that's why it's going in a beat. But I do think it's quite a good one to ruminate upon if you are thinking about collective action and collective responsibility in whatever form it happens to come in your own life.

But anyway, we'll go on to the next one, which here is the axe murderer moral dilemma. So I, you know, full disclosure, I'm not a fan of the axe murderer moral dilemma. It's normally used as a critique of Kant and K's moral philosophy, but it's just kind of strawmaning Kant. I'm I'm by no means an expert on on Kant's moral philosophy, but the idea here is that you pose this, and it was actually posed as a problem to Kant in a very particular context. It's actually originally posed in the context of Kant's kind of legal philosophy as opposed to his like straightforward moral philosophy.

Well, the scenario is just that there's an axe murderer who knocks on your door and your friend has taken refuge in your house and they're looking at your friends. The axe murderer knocks on the door and says, "Is your friend home and do you lie?" Of course, most people just say, "Yes, you lie." And Kant sort of says no. He's not saying that it's like, "Oh, it's it's it's you know, you're you're harming the murderer when you lie to them." It's more like Kant thinks that telling the truth is in some sense not getting involved in the situation at all because you know your kind of default mode is telling the truth. And that sounds ridiculous but actually there's a paper on this. I'm just going to um dig it out because it is genuinely very very interesting.

There's a paper on this by Helga Gavard that was sent to me by um a postgrad at university when I was in undergrad because I gave this argument against cat's moral philosophy and she basically went you're strawmaning him and this is why and effectively a it's in the context of K's legal philosophy. So it's not actually invoking the kind of categorical imperatives that that are run through K's um ethical philosophy. Oh, the paper is called "Kant and Lying to the Murderer at the Door." It's by Helga Varden. As I said, Verden points out that a really important part of the thought experiment as proposed to Kant is that the person has sought refuge with you, sort of they've kind of rushed into your house and who've put you kind of unwillingly in a scenario where you are now involved in this scenar. If you're following your your general duty towards telling the truth, then you're kind of absolving yourself from the situation. You're not making any kind of it's it's difficult to explain without the context of kind of K's legal philosophy, but effectively that's K's position. We don't need to go into the weeds of it right now. Is that you're not you're not kind of getting yourself involved in the situation if you just tell the truth because, you know, telling the truth is a safe bet. Let's let's put it like that.

That is a pretty circumscribed scenario, right? It's not it's not the scenario that is often posited which is that you've kind of agreed to shelter your friend and then you betray them to the murderer. You've agreed to shelter this person then you betray them to the murderer which Varden pretty persuasively argues Kant would morally condemn. Part of Kant's argument is that if you lie you have got yourself involved in the situation and then you have kind of entered the causal chain of the murderer's actions. So say you were to lie to the murderer and then on the basis of that information the murderer were to somehow get hold of your friend. Say you told the murderer ah no actually he's he's gone out and then you know unbeknownst to you your friend is kind of climbing out the window to try to escape and then the murderer catches him and and kills him that way. Well then K would say that you're now kind of implicated in that uh that causal chain. And part of this is because Kant thinks that if you dispense false information to someone, you then bear responsibility for the actions that are committed on the basis of that false information. So you are then responsible for the murderer leaving and going around the side of the house and then you're responsible thus at least partly responsible for the murderer then killing your friend.

So I'm not suggesting it's like a great framework. I have lots of problems with canmoral philosophy anyway. So I'm I'm not suggesting that that this doesn't function as an objection to certainly Kant's legal philosophy and possibly his moral philosophy in that Kant certainly thinks that it is you know you have an unconditional duty not to lie but nonetheless I do think that in the form it's presented it does often end up caricaturing uh the context in which Kant said that you shouldn't lie to the axe murderer at the door for that it's going in the D tier. I'm terribly sorry. I don't mean to be unkind to the axe murder experiment. Um, but I I do think that possibly just for the pedagogical damage that it's done and I would highly recommend um reading that Ven paper. You know, it's not that Kant has like a totally airtight position here. It's just this position is it makes more sense when viewed from the inside. I've not necessarily explained it that well here, but as I say, I will I will link the paper. I think that whenever we find ourselves saying ah you know this philosopher said this and look how much of an idiot they are and it's always best to like take a step back and think I don't know like does it make sense within some kind of broader sophisticated framework that they're working it right? So you know for can the axe murderer situation is analogous to if I think that the the the example that Varden gives is like say somebody asked you for directions and you deliberately sent them to kind of this horrible side of town where there were there were loads of robbers and stuff there, you would bear responsibility for them getting robbed or possibly killed in a way that you wouldn't if they asked for directions to the bad side of town and you truthfully gave them. So, as I say, the point is largely that that I I don't mind the axe murderer thought experiment in isolation, but it is just used to often kind of pillar's philosophy without necessarily trying to see things from his perspective. Uh, I I say I kind of think that can moral philosophy is a non-starter for a whole bunch of reasons, but nonetheless, I I think that it's important to to criticize it without strawmaning it. So, I'm terribly sorry, but it's in the detail.

Hello there. This is post-prouction Joe here. I just sort of realized that I did not explain this um all that clearly. So, I'm just going to read a quote from Vardon's paper that I think uh best sums up her argument here. "The focus is not to unravel complicated scenarios involving Nazis and other unjust regimes, but on how a just state's legal system should handle cases involving an innocent private person's imparting of information about a victim to a potential wrongdoer. His basic claim is that if a person chooses to stay out of the interaction between the murderer and his potential victim by telling the truth to the potential murderer, then a public court of justice cannot punish her for having done so. In these situations, only the murderer can be punished because the entire action is traceable only to him. In contrast, when a person lies to someone, she deliberately deceives another person, the potential murderer, with regard to his perception of the empirical world. And in this way, she becomes a co-author of the action undertaken. The liar, therefore, is punishable for the bad consequences of the lie." Of course, you don't have to agree with Kante, but yes, sorry. I think that's a that's a slightly better way of putting things.

And next up we have the violinist thought experiment, which is from Judith Jarvis Thompson. She is just the queen of ethical dilemas and ethical thought experiments and such. And this is originally given as an argument in defense of abortion or the the legal permissibility of abortion even if you say at the outset of your argument that a fetus has full right to life in the same way that any human would. There are various different formulations of the violinist thought experiment, but the one that's probably best known is the one where you are uh kind of kidnapped or duped or whatever into being hooked up to uh the the comeomaos body of a violinist and your kidneys are sort of being used as a dialysis machine and that's keeping the violinist alive. So if you unplug yourself, they will die. Their life is dependent on yours and we all agree that the violinist has you the same right to life that any any other human does. And Judith Jarvis Thompson's point is well it kind of splits into two points. So if I remember correctly her main point is actually would you legally reprimand, punish or imprison somebody for disconnecting their kidneys from that situation and leaving? And she kind of holds that no you wouldn't. And the second point is about moral responsibility. So are you morally permitted to unplug yourself? Have you done something wrong? And for me, the reason I quite like this thought experiment is actually just like tugging those two things apart. People quite often run together, something being wrong and something being the kind of thing that we should make illegal. Whereas, you know, intuitively these these these things come apart. I mean, the best example of this is probably something like adultery, right? We all agree pretty much universally that adultery is something morally impermissible. And yet, we don't tend to want to send people to prison over it. It's one of those things that you say is wrong, but you keep legal.

I have actually heard some people argue that adultery should be illegal for the simple reason that it causes a lot of harm. And Judith Jarvis Thompson's thought experiment here, I think, can help us tug apart the two concepts of moral permissibility and legality there, which I I think is just very important. Um, so I I quite like it for that. It's also just been hugely influential. Anyone who talks about the abortion debate in any kind of philosophical sense will have to engage with this thought experiment. So, it's been incredibly influential and it's also just it's very adaptable. You know, you can you can have it so you initially volunteered and then changed your mind. You can have it so uh it's it's three violinists, you know, you can kind of you can you can play around with it and do bits and bobs. That's always a pretty good hallmark of a of a reasonably good thought experiment. And she has a whole bunch of others that she uses either in that paper or elsewhere. Uh, as I say, she's just got a Judith Jarvis Thompson just has a real talent for coming up with thought experiments. I think I think this is a pretty good one. It's it's very interesting. I also just like the idea of taking one of the core premises of uh an opposing sides position in a debate and attempting to diffuse it. I think that's quite a a philosophically sophisticated maneuver. Of course, like there are loads of objections to this argument. I don't by any means uh mean say that it's it's it's decisive, but it is very interesting and for that it is going in the A tier.

Okay, that's all we've got time for today. Let me know what other kinds of tier lists you'd like me to explore. I I quite enjoyed doing this one in the end. I thought it'd be a fun little experiment. If you want to check out any more of my casual, unscripted videos, there's a playlist right here. Thank you so much for watching and have a wonderful.