Philosophical puzzles, like the “Ship of Theseus” (see last blog), are much used in analytical philosophy and especially in the philosophy of action. Then I don’t mean logical puzzles or puzzles merely done for fun or for training your brain and, but puzzles with an ethical or practical aspect, so like Theseus’ Ship, which plays an important part in discussions on identity, or the trolley problem, which I used in my blog dated Feb. 18, 2013. They are good instruments for thinking through complicated issues. However, the reasonings involved rely on philosophical intuitions, and is it really true that such intuitions are the same for everybody, even if philosophically schooled? It’s doubtful. Therefore a new branch of philosophy has come into being, experimental philosophy, which investigates philosophical problems by presenting them to different groups of laymen, while using an experimental format (for instance using test groups with different cultural backgrounds).
Since my specialty is the philosophy of action, I am especially
interested in puzzle cases in that field. Some are about what an action is, what
intentionality is, and the like. Other ones try to distinguish actions “as
such” and its side effects. Again other puzzle cases focus on the relation
between action and causality. And maybe there are other categories as well.
Donald Davidson, who left his mark on the development of modern action theory,
uses several puzzle cases for examining the question if and under which
conditions there is a causal relation between an agent’s beliefs and the result
of an action by him or her. Such cases are of the type that someone wants to
perform an action with an important consequence and the idea of doing so makes the
agent so nervous that he loses the control of his body and just this makes that
he does what he intended to do but not in the way or at the moment he wanted to
do it. Here is an example by Davidson: “A climber might want to rid himself of
the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that
by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and
danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his
hold, and yet it might be the case that he never chose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally.”
(Davidson, 1980: 79). According to Davidson we can say only that the climber
caused the fall of the co-climber if what the climber believed and wanted to do
on the one hand and the fall of the co-climber on the other hand were causally
related “in the right way”, and that is apparently not the case in this
instance. Is he right? For one can also say that one needs to keep his nerves
under control in such a situation, anyhow, since being unnerved can make that a
climber loses control of what he does and he has to know that, and wrong
beliefs can make a climber nervous. Maybe one must say that just because the
climber’s belief and want were related in the wrong way to the fall of the co-climber they caused it. Isn’t it so
that we are often held responsible for what we do, not as side effects but just
as the thing we do, because what we intended to do is related in the wrong way to the consequences?
Just this “being related in the wrong way” makes that we are often held
responsible for what we didn’t believe and wanted to do and nevertheless
actually did (in causing a traffic accident, for example).
These are only a few initial remarks about Davidson’s puzzle
case. Much more space is necessary to flesh it out, and maybe finally I would
draw another conclusion, if I did. But what all this shows is that a good
puzzle case doesn’t only make you think (using your brain) but also gives you a
lot to think about.
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