The Dullard's Wisdom

Some thoughts I had today about Utilitarianism:

Pop quiz: train speeding down the tracks towards a junction; innocent toddler on one side, ten convicted murderers on the other; you determine who lives and who dies. What do you do? What do you do?

Every intro-level ethics class will have some variation this scenario posed to them in the first few weeks, at which point some philosophically disinclined student (the dullard) will propose a solution, "tell them to get off the track." No, they are too far away and there's no time. "Tell the train to stop." No, it's going too fast and would crash. "How many people are on the train?" Eleventy billion. "What if the murderers were wrongfully convicted?" And so on and so on for the entire semester. It quickly becomes obvious that this student is maybe a bit slow to catch on and is completely missing the point. His persistent queries are really just a way to get out of thinking about a difficult question by circumventing the tricky bits. This will be a cause of much frustration in the future, but, I realized today, in a way he is actually the smart one.

Utilitarianism is in many ways the fall-back ethical framework when making ethical choices. It is never the first thing you look to in order to figure out "should I give up my seat to this old lady" or "should I plagiarize this paper." Its role is much more to provide some sort of ethical justification or calculus in order to make morally testing, complex, or otherwise difficult decisions. In fact I would say that in most cases, if a utilitarian justification for an action is the primary one being given or considered, the actual decision that the person wants to make is "make this decision or the circumstances surrounding it go away."

Morality seems somehow more fundamental than Utilitarianism in that the latter, for most people, is a tool used to figure out the former. While there are probably militant Millsians out there, it generally a much more widely accepted notion that that Utilitarianism is a useful framework for analyzing ethical dilemmas than that Utilitarianism is the underlying principal that "causes" decisions to be right or wrong. Aside from the discomfort with such a consequentialist theory, I think a major reason for this is that Utilitarianism is very susceptible to the sort of bargaining and dithering that the misguided student from the first paragraph was attempting. Say, for instance, A will cause $1000 of damage to 1000 people, and ~A will cause $100 to 10,000 people- a utilitarian wash. Subtract a dollar per person from A and it is the clear winner. Subtract a dollar/person from ~A and suddenly that option is the correct one. It feels wrong somehow to have moral conundrums be so sensitive to such small changes in details. Adding or subtracting 1% or .1% to arbitrary numbers shouldn't flip the morality of a decision. Morality should be more concrete than that, more stable, which is ironic since Utilitarianism is often though of as the ultimate objective ethical measuring stick.

And this is where the class dullard turns out to have had some important insight. The obvious solution to the A/~A problem above is obviously to just deny the Excluded Middle and say the whole thing is dumb. When presented with such an esoteric, clinical scenario, it actually seems to be the correct response to give a pedantic, technical response. His resistance to playing along with the philosophical game reveals a deep underlying issue with Utilitarianism. It is never something you want to have to use as a sole justification for an action because it rests on such shaky supports in our subconsciousness. And I would say that one aspect of a good leader/policy maker/public figure is to always be looking for ways out of scenarios like that. You wouldn't want your president to just flip the rail switch one way or the other and then feel satisfied that he made the morally correct choice as the train pulverizes a little girl. He should try everything he can to change the parameters of the problem or cheat his way to a better solution.

And that is why you shouldn't play in railyards. Not because you may get hurt, but because you may be forced into making a purely utilitarian snap decision, or may inadvertently force someone else to.

Coordinating Conjuctions

Just a quick exercise I thought up to justify the comma-conjunction rule when coordinating two complete sentences, even when they have the same subject.

A) "I was in deep trouble. I had forgotten Valentine's Day again. I went to the candy shop, and I bought a flower. My girlfriend had always wanted a chocolate rose. ..."

B) "I was in deep trouble. I had forgotten Valentine's Day again. I went to the candy shop and I bought a flower. My girlfriend had always wanted a chocolate rose. ..."

C) "I was in deep trouble. I had forgotten Valentine's Day again. I went to the candy shop and bought a flower. My girlfriend had always wanted a chocolate rose. ..."

D) "I was in deep trouble. I had forgotten Valentine's Day again. I went to the candy shop. I bought a flower. My girlfriend had always wanted a chocolate rose. ..."

E) "I was in deep trouble. I had forgotten Valentine's Day again. I went to the candy shop. And I bought a flower. My girlfriend had always wanted a chocolate rose. ..."

This story can have two endings. Had I managed to find a chocolate rose or not? Had I bought the flower  at the candy shop, or was it simply something I did afterward?

1) "She would have to wait another year."

2) "It would be my one ticket out of this mess."

Obviously I wrote these intentionally being unclear, but it is interesting to consider the different situations such  small changes might imply. To me, 1 most easily completes A, while 2 most easily completes B. B is technically not a grammatical sentence according to the style guides I learned, but I think it would be acceptable if you were finishing with 2, especially if you wanted to create a bit of dramatic tension in the reader.

C is the clearest. It could only with 2 unless you wanted to intentionally mislead the reader. D seems to be the most neutral between 1 and 2. It is also jarring enough that you would have to have a pretty good reason to use it. D and B are opposites most ways, but they are similar in that neither is a sentence you would write if you only wanted to convey simple meaning, which is why they are the most interesting.

E is grammatically correct, but stylistically bad according to many. I have no problems with starting sentences with conjunctions. But doing it too often generally leads to sloppy writing, so it something I tended to encourage my students to avoid if possible. 1 is the most natural ending to E, with the added implication that the speaker was especially worried about his girlfriend's wrath.

As a side note: fleshing this out has been a perfect example of how pointless questions like these are on standardized tests. It would be funny if the rise of emoticons came from people slowly becoming less proficient with style/grammar as a tool because it was made a painful end goal by the addition of the writing section to the SAT.