Mankind is doing it for itself
. . .
Moral philosophy, as the
name implies, is that part of philosophy that deals with matters of good and
evil, justice and injustice etc. etc. In recent years, moral philosophers have begun
to take on the title of ‘ethicists’, which more or less gives the game away. They see it as their function to create a new
and modern system of ethics, one shorn of inherited and traditional ideas of
right and wrong. After all, it is the 21st
century!
As has been stated already, this tends to be grounded in
a materialist view of the world. There is
nothing but matter and the internal and accidental developments of matter
through evolution. There are no other creative
or moral forces in the world—or beyond it either. Humanity is a purely material phenomenon. To the extent that it finds itself capable of
philosophising and making moral judgements etc.,
it is really doing nothing more than giving a voice to certain aspects of the
blind fumblings of matter.
The primary tool of modern ethicists is the thought experiment, the word ‘experiment’
being added to give it a certain scientific ring to what is nothing other than
the writing of fiction. A thought
experiment is usually a story devised to prove a philosophical point or to show
up a dichotomy in our natural thinking. Nor
is it confined to the rules and elements of the real world, but can involve any
degree of fantasy that you like.
One of the most famous thought experiments has been outlined
in the following terms: ‘suppose
there were a planet that was a duplicate of Earth in every way except that the
chemical compound of the colorless, odorless drinkable stuff in its lakes and
rivers was not H20 but something else, XYZ. Would XYZ
be water?’
Now one of the central thought experiments in modern ethical
philosophy goes something like this. You
are the engineer of a train that has run out of control. You have no power to stop it or blow a
warning whistle or anything else. And,
ahead of you on the line, you can see a half-a-dozen people walking. And, as is the way with thought experiments, they
can be allowed no possibility of escape, either through hearing you coming or
wandering off the line or whatever way you might like to have it. If you hit them—and it seems you must hit
them—then they all die. Except that at
some point before you reach them there is a branch-line which, under the fantasy
of the thought experiment, you can easily divert on to, except that there
happens to be a single person walking on this line—with everything applying to
him that applies to the other six. If
you take the branch-line you end up killing him. You, the engineer, have no time to think
about it. You have to react. What do you do?
The
reaction of most people to this story is that you have to take the branch line,
on the grounds of what, for the time being, we will call the principle of the
lesser evil. Faced with this carefully
contrived dilemma, people tend to choose the life of the six over the death of
the one.
Except
that the ethicist adds a further twist to the tale: supposing four of the six
weren’t actually killed, but instead were seriously injured, to the extent that
each of them needed a different organ transplant in order to live. They are taken to hospital, where there
happens to be a healthy young man sitting with a twisted ankle in the waiting
room. Surely, on the basis of people’s
earlier decision, it would be morally permissible to kill him for his organs,
so that the four could live at the expense of one. Something which a majority of people, when tested,
strongly react against.
Now
the ethicist is not necessarily suggesting that this should be done. Nor is he suggesting that it shouldn’t be done,
either. What he is saying to people is
that their instinctive moral reaction or judgement is inconsistent, or, to use
the philosophical term, incoherent, and therefore needs to be analysed and
reformulated.
Where
such a practice might lead—in fact, where it seems already to have led—will be
dealt with in the next mailing.
