Four questions for World Philosophy Day

Apparently it’s World Philosophy Day (or maybe it recently was — I’m not too clear), and the BBC has four philosophical problems, posed by David Bain of the University of Glasgow (my alma mater) to help you exercise your mind:

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he’ll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you’re in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

2. YOU ARE NOT THE PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE

Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you’re an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement – this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush’s brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.

But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it’s actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn’t implant your brain in Bush’s skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush’s pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.

But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush’s and Gordon Brown’s? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There’s nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.

In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?

What reason do you have to believe there’s a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.

But this, you might reply, doesn’t show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it’s about to rain.

Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it’s readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.

Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they’re generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you.”

4. YOU DID NOT FREELY AND RESPONSIBLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE

Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one’s denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn’t really exist, so he didn’t really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred’s predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly.”

IN CONCLUSION

Let me be clear: the point is absolutely not that you or I must bite these bullets. Some philosophers have a taste for bullets; but few would accept all the conclusions above and many would accept none. But the point, when you reject a conclusion, is to diagnose where the argument for it goes wrong.

Doing this in philosophy goes hand-in-hand with the constructive side of our subject, with providing sane, rigorous, and illuminating accounts of central aspects of our existence: freewill, morality, justice, beauty, consciousness, knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on.

Rarely does this allow us to put everything back where we found it. There are some surprises, some bullets that have to be bitten; sometimes it’s a matter simply of deciding which. But even when our commonsense conceptions survive more or less intact, understanding is deepened. As TS Eliot once wrote:

“…the end of our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time.”

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One Response to “Four questions for World Philosophy Day”

1. Rob R says:

   November 24, 2008 at 9:30 pm

   I have a few things to say on all of these but rather than post an obnoxiously long post, I’ll just discuss the last two problems about which I’ve thought a great deal.

   The 3rd problem in the article is just one of the many epistemic conundrums that have brought about significant challenges which are all rooted at the beginning of modern philosophy that began with Descarte. Descarte sought to establish infallible foundations for knowledge such that any item of knowledge with these foundations could not be doubted rationally. Much of enlightenment thinking and the modern thought that followed followed suit and found faith and knowledge to be at odds. Religious faith here has often been cast as irrational and against knowledge on these grounds but I must point out that the faith I speak of and religious faith are two different things. Faith in this context, what I call epistemic faith is epistemic risk. Epistemic risk is the risk that something that is believed could conceivably be wrong. Religious faith involves epistemic risk, but in Christianity (where the concept of faith really became important though the word has been watered down by referring to other religions as “faiths”) faith is not just an epistemic category regarding knowledge, but rather, it is a personal category (personal not meaning individualistic but pertaining to personhood and more specifically, the aspect of personhood that involves relationships).

   I believe that an important answer to the modern and post modern problems of epistemology today is simply to reject that infallibility is a necessary aspect of knowledge. The answer to the problem of epistemic risk is to simply bite the bullet and embrace the risk, to insist “it’s not impossible that I am wrong, but I have good reason to believe what I do thus I believe that I know it to be true”.

   The computer screen could be an illusion, but my experience presents it as real and I have reason to trust my experience on this level given it’s consistency and I have no compelling reason not to trust it. The mere logical possibility that my normal experience may be deceived here does not present itself as a sufficient reason to doubt my experience. For this reason, I believe my epistemic risk is very low.

   For the fourth problem, this has been an issue that has been debated quite a bit in the last century in theology and religious philosophy and has in fact been touched on by philosophers and theologians for the last few thousand years. what David Bain says of Fred has been said of God whom Christians believe to be omniscient.

   In the 80′s and 90′s a group of theologians and philosophers, mostly evangelicals have taken a position that God actually does not know our future free decisions because of this problem with free will. There are several different approaches to this as to how it is worked out in consistency with traditional theism. Of course it is a challenge to much of traditional theism but these theologians still hold that God is omniscient. Some suggest that we alter the definition of omniscience in a similar fashion that Aquinas altered the definition of omnipotence. Aquinas’ adjustment to omnipotence suggested that God can do anything that is logically possible and within the scope of his character. Likewise, it is suggested that God’s omniscience entails that God only knows what is logically possible for him to know. Since it is illogical to infallibly know the outcome of a future free act without ruling out the possibility for a contrary action, a future free acts cannot be a part of God’s omniscience as it is illogical for him to know them.

   I prefer a different approach which is to suggest that it is logical for God to indeed know everything about the future, but I don’t believe that a specific outcome of future free acts is itself a logically possible fact. If you are free with respect to a future action, it is neither true that you will act in that way nor is it true that you will not act in that way. What is true is that you might and might not act in such a way. Statements about what will be and what will not be are not taken as contradictories, where the truth of one statement guarantees the falsity of the other and vice versa, but rather they are considered contraries where both statements can potentially be false but both cannot be true.

   These two perspectives are a small part of a movement amongst Christian philosophers and theologians called open theism. Most people mistakenly view open theism as being primarily about this issue of knowledge and free will, and though this is an important aspect, open theism is actually more so about the personhood of God and his relationship to us (which is characterized by freedom). Other important issues of open theism involves the claim that God does not practice meticulous sovereignty (as theological determinists claim) he is not timeless, not immutable, not impassible and so on.

   As for the problematic notion of linking our freedom to random quantum fluctuations, I agree that such randomness is not at the root of our freedom for two reasons. For one, I’m not a materialist and I don’t feel the need to link all aspects of our psyche to the physical body. Secondly, there is the semantic issue of what randomness entails. Random events are unconscious unthinking, nonrational, purposeless events. Our freedom is indeterministic, meaning it entails multiple possibilities (like truely random events), but it is rooted in our conscious selves which I believe is irreducible. I recall that you have expressed the idea that the self is an illusion, but I don’t have a use for this notion since I find the self to be a very useful concept and something that is most basically self evident albeit it has a significant degree of opacity.