Quoth Brian Holtz: ----- TK) The central mistake of _any_ political philosophy _may_ be believing that a large set of moral lessons which can be drawn from the interactions of _any_ particular group will easily generalize to _all_ groups. (TK
Indeed, that's why I'm extremely suspicious of any absolutist interpretation of an ethical principle. Where you may see a little wiggle room in a principle as a vice, I see it as sometimes a virtue. ----- I don't see a little wiggle room in a principle as a vice. Since a principle, by definition, is a reduction of a rule to a level of complexity at which it is universally applicable to that which it is being applied to, "wiggle room" means that I'm either looking at something which is not a principle, or at a principle which is not applicable to the problem I'm trying to apply it to. Rand's approach to non-initiation-of-force as a a principle is that it is not applicable to a situation in which force already HAS been initiated. Probably the classic example is "Evil Gunman A is shooting at you, and holding Random Innocent Victim B in front of him as a human shield." Rand, as I understand it, would say that the non-aggression principle is not applicable to you shooting through the human shield to keep your attacker from killing you; even though that human shield has not initiated force against you, force HAS been initiated against you and you are morally free to defend your life even at the cost of the lives of innocent others. I'm not sure that I agree with Rand. While I would probably do exactly what she says I'm morally free to do, I'd still regard myself as in violation of the principle, because I consider it applicable ... the fact that I value my life more highly than I value the life of Random Innocent Victim B and more highly than I value adherence to the principle doesn't invalidate the principle, it just makes me a violator of that principle. I'd consider myself reasonably liable for having sacrificed the life of an innocent unwilling other to my own desire to live and obliged, in some sort of split with Evil Gunman A, to make that innocent unwilling other's contractual or reasonably defined creditors/dependents whole for their loss insofar as possible. ----- TK) I reject the notion that "trolley problem" necessarily deterministically decompresses into "to the extent that private charity fails to provide a safety net [...] (TK I didn't imply that it did. I just implied that it rebuts the idea that having clean hands should be of absolute (or arbitrarily high) importance in one's ethics. ----- The more I read on the trolley problem, the less I'm convinced that it rebuts anything. The stench of false dilemma hangs heavy over it. Few situations are binary-optional (throw the switch, don't throw the switch, no other possibilities) situations. The trolley problem does not account for the possibility of driving a car onto the track, or cutting the trolley's power supply, or bending the rails to derail the damn thing, etc. Given realistic options, I suspect that most people would choose a lower chance of saving BOTH sets of "tied to the tracks" victims over a higher chance of saving ONE such set. They might fail ... but the fuse might have blown when the switch was thrown, too. "Clean hands" does not necessarily imply total inefficacy. Tom Knapp
