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.

Kellogg on the Trolley Problem, Pragmatism, Moral Particularism, and the Continuum of Normative Inquiry

Frederic R. Kellogg, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, has published Take the Trolley Problem . . . Please! Pragmatism, Moral Particularism, and the Continuum of Normative Inquiry. Here is the abstract.

Departing from hypothetical dilemmas and drawing on examples from law, this paper offers a pragmatist account of normative induction that characterizes moral particularism and generalism as stages of inquiry into ethical problems, rather than rival accounts of moral knowledge and motivation. Ethical particularism holds that the evaluative cannot be “cashed out” propositionally, that it is descriptively “shapeless.” Real moral problems occur in a continuum, and at first encounter a shapeless particularist context of seemingly unlimited non-moral properties. But normativity is driven by repetition of similar situations toward shared practices and descriptive predication. Rather than a Dancian retention of epistemic status by defeated reasons, this illustrates retirement of relevant properties and accompanying reasons, transformation of the reasons environment, and a pluralist normative ontology. This paper contends that pragmatism’s response to analytical moral theory lies in understanding the transformative nature of John Dewey’s social continuum of inquiry. The actual continuum is unrecognized in the analysis of hypothetical dilemmas, like the trolley problem, but can clearly be seen in studies of law. Real moral dilemmas represent actual conflicts, the solution of which cannot be addressed through the analysis of cleverly balanced moral puzzles. Repeated over time, real problems drive the consensual formation and revision of social practices and the predication of general moral rules and principles.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.