Kellogg on Scrooge, the Trolley Dilemma, and Analytical Philosophy

Frederic R. Kellogg, George Washington University; Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), has published Scrooge, The Trolley Dilemma, And Analytical Philosophy. Here is the abstract.

In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is famously transformed--but how? He and we are creatures of habit. He was a creature of ugly habits and suddenly, in one night, he is a creature of good ones. How, in the real world, can moral habits be changed at all, much less overnight? The famous trolley dilemma is a test of habits. In the imaginary dilemma a brakeless trolley is headed to kill 5 workmen on the track ahead, and you as the driver are confronted by a choice —should you let it happen, or intervene, and divert it to a siding where it would nevertheless kill one workman? Isn’t that murder? This is testing current intuitions, rather than addressing the important question of habit change. Habits today are the problem, if we consider the “Me Too” movement, or race, or health care, or drugs, or guns, or policing, or gender, or religion, education, the workplace, all are guided by entrenched practices. We find ourselves in a stream, a tidal momentum, of habit. This is our crisis, not just of individual but corporate habits, social habits. I should also add intellectual habits. I will suggest here that the analytical tradition of philosophy in law is a bad habit, not just useless today, but positively dangerous. It blocks out the necessity of hard choices, opens the door to ideology, and leads to the conclusion that judges in difficult cases must either legislate, or resort to their personal values.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.