Philippa Foot is most known for her invention of the Trolley Problem thought experiment in the 1960s. A lesser known variation of hers is as follows:
Suppose that a judge is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime. The rioters are threatening to take bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed from the riots only by framing some innocent person and having them executed.
These are the only two options: execute an innocent person for a crime they did not commit, or let people riot in the streets knowing that people will die. If you were the judge, what would you do?
State violence is always worse, less acceptable, than interpersonal violence. Moreover, the judge has no reasonable reassurance that her wrong action now will lead to a satisfactory outcome later; that is to say, she could execute an innocent and the rioters might still attack.
All versions of the trolley problem are rooted in utilitarian ethics and inherit the flaws of that philosophy.
Said the guy saying state violence is always worse than lynch mobs…
Not a utilitarian, but goddamn what a weak line to lead with.
That settles it. We will kill one person in a lottery every few months to placate the masses
Kill exactly enough people to keep pop growth under replacement levels, chosen randomly of course.
A lynch mob is terrible, a state-sanctioned lynch mob is worse, a state-enacted pogrom is even worse. I stand by what I said.
What? The point is to demonstrate different approaches. Yes a utilitarian will answer a predictable way. You can answer a different way. That’s fine. That’s the point. There’s no right answer, it’s a thought experiment.
That’s the point. The “thought experiment” is constructed in a way that makes only utilitarian ethics have a clear right answer. Deontologists and virtue ethicists have to argue their positions and are still in a grey area, making their arguments appear dubious. It’s structural favoritism.
Okay? So? A utilitarian having an easy answer doesn’t actually mean there’s ‘structural favoritism.’ First of all, utilitarians always have an easy answer to most thought experiments that don’t address the prediction problem. The value in a thought experiment isn’t in the ease of your answer. That’s just stupid. The value in the thought experiment is stepping in and evaluating a stance, philosophy, belief, or lack thereof, and in getting one step towards applying and comparing them.
If you think the idea of a thought experiment is to score points by answering quickly and feeling smug, then I think you’ve missed the point dreadfully.
Half the interest in a given thought experiment is changing or adding nuance and seeing how that changes answers! Your position just feels angry, and not for any good reason, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of a thought experiment and how you should navigate them, combined with feeling outrage preferentially because the internet just does that.