The Monte Hall problem is admittedly not a problem in ethics. But the solution is readily and quickly comprehended by turning it into a thought experiment and making it absurd.

There are three doors, a reward behind one of them. You choose one of them and before it's opened the MC opens one of the other two doors to show it empty, leaving just your door and the other unopened door. Then he asks if you'd like to change your guess. And with three doors there has been much confusion about the right answer (yes, you should change). Change it to a thousand or a million doors - the MC opens all the other doors but one - and it ought to be pretty clear that you should change and why.

And this is just finding a way to make intuitively clear the correct way to understand the problem to make clear what the correct answer is and why. But this is just a math problem that has a right answer.

Do thought experiments work with problems in ethics? The usual question is some form of, "What should I do?" Option A with consequences A? Option B with consequences B? And so on. But ethical problems are not math problems. The thought experiment, then, can facilitate thinking, but not finding apodeictic math-like solutions - because there aren't any.

Ethics is peculiar in that it is at the same time both relative and absolute.Nor is this so strange. In geometry parallel lines never meet - except when they do.

What thought experiments permit is changing the parameters to test the thinking, analogous to using a sound board to adjust sound. And absurdity can be a useful tool for close focus on a narrow subset of parameters. With work and some luck the axioms of the ethics can be extracted and accurately stated - and sometimes that's enough.

For example, if one is unwilling to lie to protect someone from being murdered, because lying is always bad. — Marchesk

Exactly, though that particular example is also a cautionary tale about how easy it is to misunderstand a philosophy if you only look at a thought experiment.

:up: good post.

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The way I see it, that kind of thought experiment is more a tool to check how the moving parts of a philosophy work in extremis. If the result is absurd, that's good cause to check where that absurdity comes from. — Echarmion

Can you think of an example of this, where an absurd result from a thought experiment has been a red flag in this sense. I'm not entirely sure what you mean and I think an example might help.

Perhaps thought experiments are a tool, and used poorly produce poor results.

I have much sympathy for your animosity towards misused trams. — Banno

That sums it up for me. Sum people approach them with distain believing they’re meant to guide everyone to sum kind of ‘ethical’ consensus. They are, in terms of ethics, extremely useful for seeking/seeing the nuances of how ‘cold’ reasoning plays its part in shifting the burden of responsible action/thought.

Ethics isn’t merely about exchange figures and summing up some total solution. Thought experiments and hypothetical scenarios are not calculations.

Can you think of an example of this, where an absurd result from a thought experiment has been a red flag in this sense. I'm not entirely sure what you mean and I think an example might help. — Isaac

The "lying is always wrong" example Marchesk brought up is commonly used in this way. Let's assume you have a deontological moral philosophy that argues that certain acts are immoral regardless of their consequences, and an example is lying. Then someone brings up the Nazis searching for a Jew hiding in your house example. Many people will find the conclusion that you have to tell the truth to the Nazis, because lying is wrong, absurd.

Faced with this result, you'd have to either figure out why the initial reaction of "that's absurd" is false, or revise your answer.

I don't see how thought experiments are "bad". Thought isn't bad - philosophers make it a point to encourage thought. Experiments aren't bad - they are used to test the worthiness of ideas,, theories, etc. A thought experiment is simply an experiment done in our minds to gain insight into an issue.

Thought experiments are usually incredibly vague. When applied to a field in which vague-ness is out of the question (law, for example), thought experiments can prove to be quite controversial.

It all depends on the nature of the thought experiment itself, and it's relation to the purported purpose. A few are well thought out and actually useful, but most are bad. Some are hardly even relevant to the intended purpose, making them very bad.

I like to use plausible (or sometimes implausible) thought experiments to either search for or convey exceptions to rules.

It's basically like applying a simulated real-world test to check and see if something holds, and they're especially useful if we can rapidly iterate through thought experiments in order to refine a generalization/model/rule/prediction.

Thought experiments are especially bad when the underlying simulation being run (the worldview and supporting premises of the thinker, more or less) is itself bad. Appealing to incorrect ontic/epistemic/physical/metaphysical priors just imbues the thought experiment with the same inaccuracy.

Ultimately, thought experiments (or at least the "rules" they help us refine) must be put to the test in the real world. If they're never actually put to the test, then the thought experiments in question may in fact have been bad and useless all along...

Can we anticipate before hand whether a given area or field of inquiry, and the accompanying thought experiments that would help expedite that inquiry, will turn out to be useless? Coincidentally, my instinct is to use thought experiments to begin exploring that question.

Using very broad and vague terms that are borrowed from reflections on complex systems, thought experiments actually represent a very interesting and important layer of "intelligence", where intelligence is defined as a planning-capable sensory-experience-having agent.

The evolutionary purpose of our very capacity for thought experiment is that it allows us to make projections about cause and effect (it helps us understand the past, make sense of the present, and anticipate the future): the minds eye.

Taken at face value, thought experiments are like imaginary canvases upon which we can noodle and practice, and create anticipatory models. For instance, without this capacity, we could not anticipate the motives and intentions of other intelligent agents, and this is capacity almost directly impacts our capacity to survive and reproduce in social environments.

The more that I think about it, the more the titular conjecture seems patently false. There are lots of bad philosophies that rely heavily on shitty thought experiments; thought experiments alone does not good philosophy make. Valid priors and real world utility really goes a long way. But without thought experiment, without imagination, we wouldn't have the cognitive power to explore more complex ideas in the first place.

For the first time, I whole-heartedly agree. Not that it means anything, but :clap: