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The lure and danger of extreme examples
One of the main reasons I turned away from modern ethics — either of the utilitarian or of the Kantian-deontological stamp — is that it is both too narrow and too infatuated with thought experiments and increasingly convoluted, extreme (alleged) counter-examples, aimed at knocking down opponent schools, rather than actually being useful to people’s day-to-day lives. In other words, a lot of modern ethics indulges in precisely the kind of things that Seneca warned us against:
“I should like to have those subtle dialecticians of yours advise me how I ought to help a friend, or how a fellow man, rather than tell me in how many ways the word ‘friend’ is used, and how many meanings the word ‘man’ possesses.” (Letters XLVIII.4)
Consider, for instance, the cottage industry informally referred to as “trolleology,” the study of trolley dilemmas. Plenty of professional philosophers spend their careers inventing more and more convoluted scenarios to “test” our ethical intuitions about who we should allow to get hit by a runaway trolley. This has resulted in the piling up of a large literature about situations that will never occur in anyone’s real life, or that — if they did occur — would require a snap judgment based on knowledge of very specific circumstances, not idealized cartoonish thought “experiments.”
Here is a short video from the sitcom “The Good Place” that justly makes fun of trolley dilemmas. And the irony is that the whole thing got started with a landmark paper by Philippa Foot, who invented the problem as a way to show the inadequacy of modern ethical approaches and call to a return to the nuances of virtue ethics!
There are several other reasons I think ethics took a decidedly wrong turn with Kant, but this isn’t the place to elaborate on that. Instead, I will turn to what I’ve noticed being a somewhat common kind of “objection” to Stoicism (and, presumably, to other kinds of virtue ethics), inspired by the same attitude that fuels that trolley dilemmas. I am talking about people who bring up exaggerated or highly unlikely scenarios in an attempt to undermine Stoicism by a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Here are two examples.
Case 1: “Tell it to victims of a genocide”
