The use of farfetched examples
An important first step towards realising a hierarchy of intuitions would seem to be to eliminate unreliable intuitions from the mix. In this respect, my supervisor had an objection to raise to my use of farfetched examples in my thesis. The essence of the claim was that if the example is not realistic, then we cannot use it to form reliable intuitions. The intuitive appeal of this argument for me now is that it helps explain the success of the natural sciences, which of necessity must concern themselves with "realistic" examples. Even logical and mathematical theorems seem to apply themselves successfully to realistic, practical situations. Even if a branch of mathematics has no practical applications for a very long time, one can still eventually emerge. For example, imaginary numbers were found to be an essential component of building suspension bridges centuries after they were originally proposed as pure speculation. Hence, the fundamental principles of logic and mathematics seem to have "realism" built into them from the ground up as well, which is perhaps what enables us to form such reliable intuitions about them.
Note that the use of farfetched examples has, however, had some very prominent advocates--Robert Nozick springs to mind. He has an example in Anarchy, State and Utopia whereby one has no alternate place to swing one's baseball bat but right where a cow's head is. It is intended as a counterexample to eating meat, on the grounds that the pleasure one receives from the activity cannot compensate for killing the animal involved. My supervisor thought that there must be something ridiculous about this position if he had to resort to such a ridiculous example to promote it.
It is possible to reply to that objection, of course. At the time, I said that Nozick is not stupid, and knows that in practice you will never have to worry about swinging your baseball bat into a cow's head, but you should not have to for his purposes. All that he is saying is, what is the morally relevant difference between swinging your baseball bat into a cow's head and eating meat? Because if the only relevant difference is that one will never be a problem in practice, then that sounds morally dubious. Nozick could quite convincingly argue that the farfetchedness of the example is precisely what we need to throw the problems with our existing intuitions into sharper relief.
I have since, however, thought of a counterexample of my own, revealed to me unwittingly one night while I was on a BBS. There were three of us in a chat room, and one person asked, "Would you go to hell to save someone you loved?" Now, at the time, I had never actually been in love, which did not help, but I could certainly not conceive of being tortured forever for the sake of anyone, so I said with naive honesty, "I wouldn't. Not if it meant eternal hellfire."
Well, I asked for it. The remaining person said, "Whether it meant eternal hell or not, if it was someone I loved, someone I cared about, they would always come before me."
I was furious about this for days afterwards. This person had just committed an act of petty one-upmanship that he knew perfectly well he would never be called upon to make good on. In practice, he would never have to go to hell to save anyone he loved, so he could claim absolutely anything to that effect for the sake of earning a badge of nobility at somebody else's expense without ever being called upon to prove his claim. It was an act of pomposity based on a claim that was, for all practical purposes, unfalsifiable. I, on the other hand, had demonstrated an act of virtue, I would like to think, simply because I had been honest, and taken a risk in being so. Yet I was made to look morally inferior to someone who had demonstrated no virtue, but paid a particularly useless lip-service to same, flash winning over substance.
Given that, I have an obvious interest in rubbishing this example, but I also like to think that I have developed a good argument against it. If the above scenario were at all likely, the world would be so radically different that we could not know how we would behave in it. Might we have developed a dampened sense of self-interest, whereby we could more easily accept going to hell? Or might we have developed a world-calloused sense of love whereby we accepted that no one was worth going to hell for? I suggest that it is impossible to tell, because both perspectives are equally self-consistent, and a priori equally likely to have developed in a world anything like the one depicted in this example.
This same skepticism seems plausible when it is applied to Nozick's cowshead example. If his scenario were at all likely, the world would be so radically different that we could not know how we would behave in it. Might we have become vegetarians out of a heightened sense of empathy for the animals to which we are in such close proximity all the time? Might we have developed a calloused sense of fun that dulled our empathy to the animal's pain as we swang the bat? Or might we have simply decided on other grounds that eating meat and swinging the bat are morally different after all? If nothing else, they must surely reveal very different things about the character of the person who would do either. The point is that these questions seem at least as difficult to answer as the original question of the morality of eating meat. The example, therefore, does not really help us much further with that issue.
Note that the use of farfetched examples has, however, had some very prominent advocates--Robert Nozick springs to mind. He has an example in Anarchy, State and Utopia whereby one has no alternate place to swing one's baseball bat but right where a cow's head is. It is intended as a counterexample to eating meat, on the grounds that the pleasure one receives from the activity cannot compensate for killing the animal involved. My supervisor thought that there must be something ridiculous about this position if he had to resort to such a ridiculous example to promote it.
It is possible to reply to that objection, of course. At the time, I said that Nozick is not stupid, and knows that in practice you will never have to worry about swinging your baseball bat into a cow's head, but you should not have to for his purposes. All that he is saying is, what is the morally relevant difference between swinging your baseball bat into a cow's head and eating meat? Because if the only relevant difference is that one will never be a problem in practice, then that sounds morally dubious. Nozick could quite convincingly argue that the farfetchedness of the example is precisely what we need to throw the problems with our existing intuitions into sharper relief.
I have since, however, thought of a counterexample of my own, revealed to me unwittingly one night while I was on a BBS. There were three of us in a chat room, and one person asked, "Would you go to hell to save someone you loved?" Now, at the time, I had never actually been in love, which did not help, but I could certainly not conceive of being tortured forever for the sake of anyone, so I said with naive honesty, "I wouldn't. Not if it meant eternal hellfire."
Well, I asked for it. The remaining person said, "Whether it meant eternal hell or not, if it was someone I loved, someone I cared about, they would always come before me."
I was furious about this for days afterwards. This person had just committed an act of petty one-upmanship that he knew perfectly well he would never be called upon to make good on. In practice, he would never have to go to hell to save anyone he loved, so he could claim absolutely anything to that effect for the sake of earning a badge of nobility at somebody else's expense without ever being called upon to prove his claim. It was an act of pomposity based on a claim that was, for all practical purposes, unfalsifiable. I, on the other hand, had demonstrated an act of virtue, I would like to think, simply because I had been honest, and taken a risk in being so. Yet I was made to look morally inferior to someone who had demonstrated no virtue, but paid a particularly useless lip-service to same, flash winning over substance.
Given that, I have an obvious interest in rubbishing this example, but I also like to think that I have developed a good argument against it. If the above scenario were at all likely, the world would be so radically different that we could not know how we would behave in it. Might we have developed a dampened sense of self-interest, whereby we could more easily accept going to hell? Or might we have developed a world-calloused sense of love whereby we accepted that no one was worth going to hell for? I suggest that it is impossible to tell, because both perspectives are equally self-consistent, and a priori equally likely to have developed in a world anything like the one depicted in this example.
This same skepticism seems plausible when it is applied to Nozick's cowshead example. If his scenario were at all likely, the world would be so radically different that we could not know how we would behave in it. Might we have become vegetarians out of a heightened sense of empathy for the animals to which we are in such close proximity all the time? Might we have developed a calloused sense of fun that dulled our empathy to the animal's pain as we swang the bat? Or might we have simply decided on other grounds that eating meat and swinging the bat are morally different after all? If nothing else, they must surely reveal very different things about the character of the person who would do either. The point is that these questions seem at least as difficult to answer as the original question of the morality of eating meat. The example, therefore, does not really help us much further with that issue.