Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. They are often very clever, usually well-read folks; at the same time they are emotionally stunted in more than a few ways. Now of course that's not every single one of them - there really are nice, humble, and genuinely good-hearted academics out there, but they are not the norm.
I think in a lot of ways you’re absolutely right. But I’d take your comment a little further and say that while the institution itself plays a role on the whole of academia it has a particularly deleterious effect on the humanities and specifically an old field like philosophy. I used to love academic philosophy when I was an undergraduate, and when I got into graduate school and started working with other academics in other disciplines and going to conferences and meeting other types of people from the academic world and the private sector I realized philosophy really was a group of bitter, archaic, men.
Part of it is the material and the method undertaken within the academe. A part of it is the institutional configuration itself which takes philosophy – a field rooted in a history of intellectual elitism, criticism, and attempts to secure immunity from that criticism – and turns it into a machine which produces new generations of the same brood. More recently competition is taking a toll on the field and its practioners: philosophy jobs are declining, most of the good ones are only accessible to those with degrees from elite institutions, and more and more undergraduates who feel out of place in college or who feel a deep sense of disenchantment are drawn toward philosophy as a major. That may or may not be a bad thing depending on what we’re after, but it does mean that typically unhappy people with few job prospects are teaching other unhappy kids with even less job prospects. It’s more than just knowledge of the material that is carried over from professors to kids.

Parts of this article are interesting - as a currently practicing academic I am sympathetic to aspects of this but hesitant on others. To be sure: the publishing game is nonsense - we spend a tremendous amount of time working on papers just to have option to either submit them to a reputable journal and have them published behind the pay wall at no cost to us (where they will be read by maybe a total of two people ever) or shell out ridiculous amounts of money to make those articles free and accessible to everyone. Granted, publishing problems are not merely indexed to philosophy or the humanities more generally. I just read a paper yesterday entitled "Electric-Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect in a Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Perovskite" - it was published last year in a high impact factor chemistry journal, but - if I were to guess - probably only 20-30 people in the world will skim the paper, 10-15 will read it earnest, 7-10 will understand it completely (myself not included), and 3-5 will use it as a published citation.
Now the reason that matters to academics is two-fold, only one of which is identified in the linked article: first off, yes, academics do need those little CV notations so they can get a job and it behooves them to publish so they can have an increased chance of being able to afford groceries and pay their mortgage. The second component is ego, which was comically avoided in this article. I’ve spent a long term around other academics and many of them are ego-driven jerks – certainly not all of them, but many are. Interestingly enough a disproportionate amount of them do seem to come from philosophy departments. Part of it is the field itself: philosophy as an academic field is all about feeling intellectually superior to your peers; it’s about criticizing other’s work so your looks betters; it’s about trying to argue how correct you in opposition to other academics criticizing you; and frequently it is about the subtle sense of power you feel when you say you’re an “expert” and get to stand in front of a class and tell them how much you know.
The real joke to me has always been that if you say you’re doing academic work (specifically philosophy, but other fields in the humanities are similar) because you love it, you are immediately looked at as a liar, a buffoon, or as if your peddling the line you tell all your students for political purposes. If you commit to the “because I love it” approach in academia you likely will be very lonely because many academics do not love their field or the content which they study – they like having a job and, again, that feeling that comes from saying they are an expert in something.
On separate note: I do get a little irritated with the whole argument that philosophy writing is too complex and inaccessible. Sure, there is no doubt in my mind that a lot of writing done in academia is garbage – it’s often unnecessarily complex and many writers (old and new) often assume that by making a paper more complex in terms of readability it means they are necessarily smarter (and often times, making something incomprehensible does – in fact – lead to published papers). That’s absolutely an issue, and that mentally begins to form during your undergraduate career and is rarely stifled by professors and even encouraged during your tenor as a graduate student. Does that mean that all complex ideas can/should be reduced down to into completely accessible and simple terms? Of course not. What the author of this article is likely frustrated with is that there isn’t any balance to that type of writing academics are doing. Most academic philosophers simply run headlong into the realm of complexity without any care in the world that their writing is so opaque that it has no chance of making a greater philosophical impact on society. There are times when complexity is needed, and there are also probably more instances where simplicity is needed. Striking that balance is the issue.

Just a quick note: "command system" isn't really a widely used definitional approach - certainly not on a philosophical level (academically or otherwise) nor commonly seen in intra-ideological discourse. I remember seeing that sort of thing in, honestly, bizarre textbooks for high schoolers and certain colleges nearly a decade ago, but there is a whole set of vernacular present with a lot of those assumptions about "communism", "socialism", etc. that is incredibly problematic and not at all endemic to communist thought and history.

Part two of this note: there is often a very strange approach when talking about things like communism to assume that the objective is to "seize private property" but this was actually pretty antithetical to Marx's overall objective. Even later "Marxist" thinkers like Gramsci were not interested in seizing property, but rather seizing the means of production - which is a distinctly different notion. Taking your kitchen appliances, car, or TV doesn't really do much in terms or reorienting the mode of production in favor of laborer. Equally as important it does not effectively mitigate the potential for the market to commoditize goods and our relation to them - in fact it probably does the opposite as it just makes people feel angry because they had something "stolen". I know it's a popular trope within criticisms of things-labelled-socialism/communism to say that the goal is to seize property, but that's mostly a misnomer or at least seriously lacks a lot of context.

Ah, you referenced Bernie Sanders so I assumed you were from the US. In either case, the statement still applies. Canada's taxation as a percentage of GDP is comparable to New Zealand, and the UK. It's far closer to the US in terms of taxation than it is the European "democratic socialist" models found in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, etc. In some ways 'the proof is in the pudding' as the saying goes: despite social popularity of parties like the NDP in Canada, or of politicians like Bernie Sanders in the US, there has not been significant policy enacted between 2011-2016 that has fundamentally altered the structure of either countries political economics in a way that would point toward anything even remotely "communist" or definitively "socialist" (and that does not appear to be an objective for characters like Sanders or parties like the NDP anyway).

Trump is indeed a polarizing figure - not just within the US but globally. That, in no small part, is owed to his flamboyant personality, potential for ridicule, and ability to create spectacles where there are/were none while making the public feel as though the complexity of politics of accessible and virtually intuitive. Quite frankly, I doubt he has any serious economic policies (of the variety that could be articulated and passed in legislation) and, more than likely, the bulk of his broad popularity or disdain is a symptom rather than a cause of anything on the political spectrum within the US. I would wager that the difficultly in saying that you like him or parts of his platform is generated more so out of exported assumptions about his supporters, his supposed leanings, and the above items I mentioned. But none of that speaks toward or against developing levels of communist political economies or socialist policies - Trump, as a politician, is pretty boring when it actually comes to analysis through the methods of political science and political philosophy. Again, the social reaction to a politician or the popularity they generate does not always equate to policy proposals or enactment.

There's an odd contradiction here. On the one hand, I get sense that you are concerned about the recent tendency to label a variety of disparate positions as "alt-right" and that's probably a fair concern as, generally speaking, many of those political positions have little common or not enough to begin to form a consensus. On the other hand, it strikes me that casually labeling positions as "communist", "pro-communist", and socialist (interchangeably no less) is an antecedently similar move - those terms are vastly different and vary in time, place, and depending upon the intention of the speaker. If the assumption is to say that all of those things entail giving 100% of one's income to the state or something along those lines - I think that is misleading at best if not a patently false assumption about the aims and differences amongst socialist and communist groups (let alone common ideological trends).

Now as far as the "West" being more in favor of comprehensive benefits programs and social policies - that's debatable. More recent policy studies relying on internal government data (ranging from social benefits programs to income disparity) would suggest that the opposite is true. The US has cut a tremendous amount of social benefits over the past 50 years and with that relative income disparity has dramatically increased and market and disposal incomes relative to GDP have decreased. In other words: on a procedural level the trend would actually suggest the opposite of your position.

Socially it might well be a different story, and perhaps intimately connected with the reasons enumerated above. As income inequality has increased and 'real' disposal income has decreased, it does indeed seem many younger people within the US are concerned about their economic prospects and the dramatic disproportionality in the concentration of wealth and the potential to acquire sources of income. People like Bernie Sanders, who discusses issues along these lines, are not "communist" or "socialist" in any historical or truly ideological regard but presumably more interested in relative decreases in income inequality - I think the ideal goal being something closer to public policy approaches of more Northern European states. Mind you, there is nothing about nations like Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, or even Iceland for that matter that are definitively "socialist" - they have, like every industrial democracy in the world, a mixed economy.

I think the point here is that when pointing to a myriad of political positions and saying something like "I dislike communism" we're probably glossing over a tremendous amount of nuance in each political position while importing terminological disapprobations that needn't be applied. Whatever "communism" is - an ideological position or approach to political economics for instance - there's likely nothing intrinsically bad about it. Further, these things you're labeling as communism are, functionally, variations on a theme - a theme, mind you, that is not all that different in many respects than the one you are most familiar with.

Honestly, I think the approach you ended up taking is exactly right, or more appropriate to the actual "doing" of philosophy at the very least. "Toolkit" is like so many of those introductory books in that it supposes a position of (pseudo)neutrality on the basis that such a position can provide students with the most comprehensive view possible. But philosophy is one of those fields in which comprehension takes time, and the 'view from above' along with the desire to take such a view is constantly subject to scrutiny. As a result I think the approach you took is far more valuable pedagogically: read some philosophy, explore, engage, test the waters - then when you encounter a book like Toolkit you can begin to assess either the concepts in isolation from each other, or maybe encounter a glimpse of the something that you already have to tools to investigate further.

I guess another way of putting, and something I said to an undergraduate back in that course, is basically: no one just hands you a toolkit in philosophy - you have to craft the tools yourself. Now sure, that can often involve guidance. And we should not assume that those tools are reified or static objects (something I think texts like Toolkit assume, even in a loose sense). However once you craft your tools you often can familiarize yourself with the tools of others is a far more meaningful way. Which is important, because if one builds there base from a text like Toolkit they'll often have to go through the more tedious process of unlearning a lot of what was offered as a "tool" when encountering the actual complexity of different authors and ideas (Hegel and Hume are perfect examples of figures which are extremely difficult to explain quickly or in an introductory way, and almost guarantee the unlearning process).

I am going to firmly disagree with that. Back in 2011 or 2012, right around the time the second edition came out, I was TAing a class that used that as the primary text. A lot of the undergrads had complaints about the layout and after going through it with several of them I too became gradually concerned about the pedagogical aim of the book. It is steeped in the Western analytic tradition and does a poor job deviating from that. The authors also gloss over topics with such rapidity that it's not only easy for casual students to get lost but provides more committed newcomers to philosophy the wrong set of tools - as it were. Despite good intentions, the book facilitates the "armchair philosophy" approach common in undergrads wherein, after they read a two page conspectus on Hegelian philosophy they now assume they know all there is to know about Hegel.

Part of the broader issue with these types of books is that, by trying to provide a well rounded introduction to philosophy, they fail to appreciate a lot of the complexity of various ideas and the benefits of engaging with the complexity as a newcomer. That book was a bit of a turning point in my career as it convinced me that the concept of a philosophy "text book" is rubbish. That text book approach is far more conducive to an American University system looking to churn out degrees than it is an adequate or valuable approach to philosophical topics.

Obviously we do not have a definitive answer to those questions (in fact these days the "ideal society question is pretty silly amongst political philosophers), but they have been interesting to wrestle with historically.

I think for a while now the push in Western circles has been for varying levels of cosmopolitanism and that typically occurs within the bounds of democratic theory. You get a handful of folks who push for less enmeshed democratic societies but democracy is the standard in political organization.

Outside of the West I think you see more interesting avenues of exploration: subaltern theorists looking for ways to reorder their political arrangements in post-colonial societies, so called post-Marxists, etc. But I think even there the political idealism question either doesn't hold sway or the conditions were never sufficient to generate the Western fascination with idealist politics in the first place. Hence the emphasis is often sufficiently different than Western circles, but still - generally speaking - pragmatic.

That's probably not true. A lot of Marx's thought is incredibly systematic, rigorously historical, and well thought out. The piece referenced in this post is quite brilliant - "Capital" not to mention smaller works like "...Jewish Question" and "Critique of Hegel..."or his annotated work with Engles (e.g. "Origin of the Family") are all excellent books. I would be cautious when importing biographical notes about Marx into his work as there are too many conflicting accounts and much of his personal history has been bound up in the political movements that have followed him. Equally as important is that there is nothing about Marx's work that would preclude him from, let's say, playing the stock market (again, assuming that biographical footnote is true in the first place).

I think the tendency is for people to read the first section of the Manifesto and react in a similar fashion as you are. There are numerous problems with that, but among the more important are: (1) texts like the Manifesto are for political pamphleting purposes and in no way provide an accurate conspectus of Mark's work, and (2) Marx, with the exception of a political call to action like Manifesto, did not spend a tremendous amount of dealing in the "faith" oriented claims you are talking about. While it's true he was not a "scientist" by modern standards (whatever that means) but he was an excellent scholar in the fields of political philosophy, history, and political ecomomics.

There are a few different things going on in this selection and the text as a whole. You're probably not wrong to say we're "swept along" in a natural process but there are a few caveats that accompany that. The first of which would be simply to say "yes", but only on that basis that humans are naturally productive animals and, insofar as that is the case, engaged with process of production to such an extent that history is driven forward naturally rather than through direct input. In otherwords: it isn't as though we could simply decide history will go another way and thus it shall.

In some ways, this is also Marx critiquing a certain type of political arrangement and a series of capitalist assumptiond about productive enterprise (you likely saw this in the portions just after this quote, but it's clear within the book as well). Humanity is often understood in terms of labor power and the types of formative rations that labor takes within a political economy. This is, however, fairly problematic when taken in isolation as it disabuses us of the historical interaction between the means and modes of production in favor of placing the burden to impel history forward upon the capitalist individual (or set of individuals - labor unions or something). Marx supposes this is manifestation of capitalist modes of production - it disenfranches the laborer by turning them into divided individuals who, upon being burdened with the expectation of making political changes atomistically, must bind together in certain acceptable organizations in order to make micro-alterations that, in the end, still benefit capitalism.

None of this is classic Marx delivering a polemic mind you. I would wager, as this is his preface, this was more just offhanded commentary on some of the broader notions addressed in the book.

You know, it's funny: when I started teaching ethics a few years ago I was quite a bit more in favor of consequentialist approaches and the standard modes of teaching and talking about that style of ethical theorization. I think as I've started to talk with students and colleagues a bit more about these sorts of things and I have had the opportunity to see the typical pedagogical structure of ethics in school I've started to shift away from those standardized models. I think one of the driving factors for me was that I noticed students shied away from personalizing moral reasoning. Complex problems, perhaps problems we might ask each other in a day-to-day situation (e.g. is political policy A good for B, what is our responsibility to disadvantaged group C, etc.) took on a more theoretical character that tended to insulate the student from the criticism of their peers and their grader (me) rather than encourage them to really feel their way through it and determine what they believed was best (I owe a portion of this to reading Bernard Williams by the way, I don't claim to be the architect).

I mean you're certainly not wrong - I think the comparison to a scientific theory is fairly appropriate with one minor addition: scientific theories rely on a specific notion of verification criteria and consensus. Ethical theorization of the variety that comes about through puzzles like the Trolley Problem have the same procedural objective as a scientific theory but lack the constituent elements that transform the observation process into one of concrete theory construction. Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to drive some wedge between science and philosophy here - that's far beyond the scope of this post. Rather I think it's important to acknowledge the aim of the scientific theory and how that aim is shared in consequentialist ethical theorization while lacking certain aspects of scientific theorization.

One way to potentially frame that lack is in terms of personalization. We needn't and often times shouldn't begin the long and detailed process of scientific theory building with a vested personal interest in the outcome or, technically speaking, the content and means of interpreting our data. Ethical problems however often do take on a deeply person character - and with that comes a certain level of mental and emotional complexity. What happens if we start to depersonalize ethics though? What happens if we try and remove the moral agent with all their feelings, reservations, and thoughts in favor of a model that facilitates an abstraction of content that might have a serious impact on our lives? Now to be fair - I am painting this in unfair terms, and I do not which to suggest that the process of ethical abstraction is sociopathic in someway as compared to a more virtuous structure of personalization (it might well be, but that's a big claim that would need a lot of backing). But it's important to observe that something is lost in translation when we move the ethics from the personal to the abstract; the specific to the approximate.

Well it's not the hypothetical nature of the trolley problem that I believe bothers most critics - as I mentioned it's the distance from more common real world applicability and the structure of the hypothetical that is the problem. I would have no problem believing that at some point in since the dawn of the railroad there has been a true-to-life example of the trolley problem. But we might simply ask: how many times has it actually happened? How applicable is that one example to all of us? As I mentioned in my second post those sorts of high-stakes, life or death, and relatively flashy ethical dilemmas do not play a role in our day-to-day determinations. To a degree that's fine if our objective is puzzle-solving, right? After all we can hypothesize various participants, change variables, and have a lot of fun trying to solve a puzzle, but - as I mentioned - that procedure tends not to reflect the actual doing of ethical problem solving that we encounter in our lives.

Let me re-frame the criticism differently before going to far down the path of practical ethics as I think I may have miscommunicated the role of the hypothetical. What Michael mentioned with the war-time general, and what you mentioned with a sinking ship are examples that do happen - that's just fine. But those sorts of events are exceptions rather than rules - specific instances of ethical problems encountered very rarely by a select few and ethical problems themselves that do not have the common content that most of us encounter. Now I casually mentioned this in my first post I think: the argument in favor of this suggests that the applicability and/or exceptional nature of the circumstances are irrelevant - instead we're just attempting to extrapolate a mode of thinking from the example; that's essentially the point of these sorts of puzzle-solving activities. But the overarching issue I believe most critics have is that the grossly unrealistic nature of the hypothetical (and please read the term "unrealistic" as "not something likely to ever be encountered by the vast majority of people in real-world ethical scenarios") tends to the muddy the waters of our ethical judgement.

Ethical judgement becomes the medium of exchange when looking at the difference between a far more applicable ethical problem (e.g. helping the homeless person you pass on the street corner) and the exceptional case of the standard thought experiment. Take the trolley problem for instance - our ethical judgement(s) take on a very different character when we have to abstractly determine quantities of potential dead people, the nature of trolleys in the role of their death, and act of attempting to "solve" the problem. In and of itself that does may not sound as though it would cloud our judgement, but the critical response is to note that because of the structure of the trolley problem (which is used to categorize, compare, and evaluate ethical attitudes) we might cultivate a propensity to look at the far more common ethical problems in that same way. In order to truly articulate the distance of applicability and highlight the role of ethical judgement we need only inquire, "why not simply look at real problems that most of us face, have faced, or will face?" And I think that's the approach that is coming into favor with some contemporary ethicists.

Thank you, I appreciate it. Without going into too much excruciating detail: I'm in academia; I am currently a research fellow and lecturer for a university in the U.S. I studied philosophy, history, and political economics for a long time though my current position is technically couched within the field of political theory.

One of my undergraduate degrees and of one my master's degrees were in philosophy. Honestly it's an incredibly useful field, but was not sustainable in an academic career. By the PhD level, opportunities in academic philosophy for research and funding were/are sparse (far better in Europe where I did a portion of my graduate work, but still rare). It's a wonderful field though - I think if I could change anything I'd probably have aimed to publish in philosophy quite a bit sooner than I did. In no small part because writing and the process of learning how to write does indeed play such a massive role in philosophy. That level of practicum and the exposure one receives to complex writing via the literature is unparalleled in any of the other humanities or liberal arts fields.

Given the heavily religious overtones of both of those blogs and the leading structure of the question, I'm going to selectively choose to read your question as, "did Stoic thought prepare the European world for Christianity as a philosophical doctrine and did stoicism have a notable influence upon Christianity?"

In which case the answer is: probably a decent amount. But we have a few things to keep in mind when looking at that sort of history. First - it's not altogether clear that stoicism, as a school of thought, maintained the levels of cohesion we might find in Zeno and Posidonius (by way of Xenocrates) and some of the immediate post-Socratics including Epictetus. The other consideration is that elements of stoic thought appear in waves throughout Christian literature (and in Christian attempts to secularize various learned literature) well into the 17th Century - see Michel Montaigne's writings for an excellent example. What we can very clearly say is that something that looks like stoic thought or good faith variations on stoicism made their way into Christian theological writing and held a specific place in the ethical and metaphysical claims of Christianity.

Part of the problem in separating out where or when Christianity would have began to take on more stoic philosophical traditions is that there is no clear delineation when stoicism gained philosophical traction external to Christianity - determining where best to parse these two out historically is difficult to ascertain. A chief issue is that a large amount of Greek thought made its way into early Christian canon and appears to have acted as a kind of lingua franca (a philosophia franca, perhaps?) during the Carolingian Empire. Or, to be more clear, the developing bisphophics seemed to have held some similar philosophical traditions that allowed them to exchange ideas within sermons and strengthen those common ideas via the myriad of ecumenical councils that began to take on the business of unifying Christian theological doctrine. A lot of this shared philosophical background, of course, is owed to the strength of Socratic and Aristotelian thought popularized in Rome and making it's way into the seminal works of Tertullian and, later, Augustine.

Given all that it is, perhaps, unsurprising that we find stoic elements in the development of Christianity. Both have some origins in the pains and toils of the lower class (despite Aurelius' noteworthy attempts to bring stoicism in-line with a more broad patriotic and nationalist sentiment). Certain aspects within the stoic school deal with similar types of ethical issues found within Christian ideas of virtue. In all likelihood the potential plebeian popularity and applicability of stoic ideas probably commingled with the phasing out of the rabbinic facets of early Christianity and this was bolstered and perpetuated by a burgeoning Roman clergy who were thinking about and discussing Christian philosophy in the more common Greek philosophical vernacular they were accustomed to.

I suppose that's true, but only in a sense. Again we're mostly back to square one if we're talking about generals and civilian killing zones, eh? How many people talking about trolleys are, in fact, also generals in war-time scenarios where they are required to determine whether to kill civilians or not? We're still left with the same problem(s) we started with, but now with an extra layer that seemingly makes it slightly less hypothetical. And to really drive this point home, let me just ask: how many of us - in our frequent ethical determinations - really need to to talk about intentionally vs unintentionally killing persons? Let me be honest with you: I've had a lot of moral and ethical dilemmas come up, but none that have ever had those types of immediate life or death stakes.

One thing that might be worth acknowledging is that puzzles like the trolley problem are flashy and relatively simple in terms of structure, yes? If you had magical powers to stop an asteroid from hitting earth but only insofar as you could divert it away to a less densely populated alien planet would you? And then we sit around and muse how exciting it would be to have magical powers and what it means to save planets. But aside from the three problems I listed in my first post we have another, more common sense issue here: I don't have magical powers, and even if by some minute chance I ever had something resembling magical powers, why would I be in a situation where I would need to decided between two planets for a potential asteroid impact? It sounds a little silly right?

A real ethical dilemma may not be as exciting. Let me give you a genuine ethical problem I faced last night: it's quite cold in the city I live in. My wife and I were walking our dogs through one of the parks last night and we saw a homeless man under an awning and against the wall of one of the buildings in the park (presumably to protect himself from the chilly wind and potential rain). It was fairly late, and he was trying to sleep but his sleeping bag looked thin I didn't get the sense he had any additional blankets. He appeared to be tossing and turning in the near freezing temperature.

I live approximately six city blocks from this park. Should I go home, get a few old blankets from our closet and run back there so he has some additional layers? I have an arctic rated sleeping bag that I barely use any more - should I just give it to him? Then there are other potentially mitigating thoughts: e.g. it's not as cold as it has been - he obviously survived the snow and ice we had, surely he can survive a twenty degree increase from those conditions? Or is it really my responsibility to provide blankets to the homeless and otherwise indigent? Where does it end? Technically I have lots of non-perishable food I could also give away - should I also give that to him? If I help him out should I also help out the cold homeless man on the street a few blocks away who sleeps near the bagel place? It's only a bit further and I have extra blankets after all. Of course at what point should I just canvass and donate for more homeless shelters in my city? What sort of financial commitment can I afford to make and still support my family? I make enough money to alright, but I likely do not make enough that I could prudently support a large homeless initiative as well.

That's not a flashy problem. It's not an easily structured problem that really allows us the categorization potential for ethical determinations that are typically generated from puzzles like the trolley problem. It's not simple to categorize all the divergent thoughts that run through our minds in those situations, and the nuances alone make it a bit less simple to think about in the types of terms we often partition out when dealing with something like the trolley problem. But it stands that this was a very real ethical question I had to think about with my wife, and it's a type of question that many in my city face on daily basis (from one side or the other) in the winter.

Not to de-rail (no pun intended) this discussion at all, but a noteworthy point here: these sorts of thought experiments are under fire by some contemporary commentators. The arguments tend to center on the idea of practical ethics and that the mis- or over- use of these types of problems create an unnecessary distance from the actual practice and content of ethical decision making. For instance: while it might be sort of a fun puzzle to try and solve - the trolley problem is not a situation most of us are ever likely to encounter in the bulk of our ethical determinations. The further problem being: the trolley problem alters our view of how we think or think about thinking about ethical issues.

A potential third concern is that the trolley problem (like most thought experiments) is structured in much the same way as a mathematical problem. I mean just look at how many variations there are from Foot's original set up, how different parameters are established, how the numbers change for intended effect, etc. And yes, we might say something like, "well the alterations of the variables themselves are irrelevant, what's more important is that we are able to extrapolate some type of broad ethical norms from the scenario." Which might sound good, but probably doesn't accurately reflect the actual business of doing ethics or being in an ethical conundrum. Instead of 'feeling' ethics we just problematize it, and instead of practicing or considering the practice of more real world situations which demand ethical attention we shift our efforts toward a puzzle-solving motif where the focus becomes theory construction and the categorization of ethical attitudes based upon a seemingly unrealistic hypothetical.

Again, I don't say this to de-rail anything. Just to add a potentially useful consideration point to the discussion.