In Not even if they were really bad headaches? Jonathan Ichikawa asks whether there is some number of headaches which if they could be prevented by killing someone would justify that killing. The reasoning (according to a paper by Norcross which he finds persuasive) goes something like: Suppose you had a bad headache and no pain reliever in the house; suppose further there was a one in a million chance that if you drove to the store to buy some, you'd get in a fatal traffic accident on the way; it's not irrational to go to the store for pain reliever instead of suffering; ergo headaches can be traded off against the chance of death, and thus there must be some number of headaches such that they outweigh the certainty of a single death.
Note, however, that this chain of reasoning involves a classic bad move that utilitarians (and most other consequentialists) make all the time: the unjustified substitution of one person for another. I sometimes wonder if they even notice that they're doing this.
While it may be rational for you to risk your own life to some small degree to cure your own headache, that intuition says nothing about the rationality of imposing that risk on others. For instance, would anyone argue that it's intuitively obvious that it was rational to coerce someone to go get you the pain killer so they underwent the risk? The utility is the same. If you think that it's not the same, because being coerced causes distress, suppose instead that you send someone out who is ignorant of the risk. You might further suppose that you were such a thoroughgoing utilitarian that neither the deception nor putting someone at risk causes you any greater distress than contemplating your own risk. Folk morality holds no terrors for you.
Jonathan Ichikawa, a first-year philosophy grad student at Brown, has a blog There Is Some Truth In That that covers various things including ethics and Gilbert and Sullivan. He's a utilitarian, but then it is only his first year in the program. ;) Let's wish him good luck in his studies, and lots of traffic for his blog.
A thorough article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explores Zombies of the philosophical variety (creatures behaviorally and possibly physically identical to you and me, but who lack any sort of consciousness). It's argued that if Zombies are even conceivable, some form of dualism must be true. Now, I find the idea of Zombies so absurd that I think almost any of the arguments advanced against it (as put forth in the above article) persuasive, which may be a problem since some of them may be contradictory, but without poking holes in the standard arguments against dualism (which as far as I can tell the Zombie-friendly don't do) it appears to me that the Zombie argument begins with a reductio. I.e. if the conclusion is dualism, there must be a mistake in one of your premises.
The argument for the possibility of Zombies goes:
1) Zombies are conceivable
2) What's conceivable is possible
3) Zombies are possible
From there it's reasoned that if Zombies are even possible, there must be something else going on that gives us conciousness and subjective sensations (qualia). I think if you buy that you ought to also buy the following:
1) It's conceivable that you are mistaken about having qualia
2) What's conceivable is possible
3) It's possible you are a Zombie
Hence the title of this post, taken from Heinlein's short story in which a man through time travel becomes his own origin and ends up saying "I know where I came from -- but where did all you zombies come from?"
As with the Zombie argument, you can argue against either 1 or 2, but the Zombie-friendly accept 2 so are left with arguing against 1. At first blush it might seem that 1 is eminently defeasible, since if Descartes's cogito ergo sum establishes anything it's that the subjective experience of qualia is self-validating. I don't think it's quite that simple, though, given how much more we now know about the brain and cognitive processing. We know for a fact that what might seem to introspection to be a single immediate sensation is actually a complex multi-stage process that takes place over time, involves various parts of the brain, involves subprocesses over which we have no conscious awareness, is sensitive to context and can be mistaken. For instance we know that we can easily mistake cold for hot, or see different shades of gray where there are none (c.f. the checkerboard illusion that was bouncing around the blogosphere recently); these might be taken as evidence that of course there are qualia--the mistaken impression is the qualia...but that has to be wrong: since Zombies are behaviorally identical, the Zombie would also report the mistaken impression. The mistake must occur at the physical level.
Consider this: when you introspect about qualia how do you know that's what you're doing? The you that is introspecting from moment to moment is a complex thing that's relying very heavily on memory (possibly among other things) for its sense of continuity, and we know how easily memory is mistaken. Isn't it conceivable that you are mistaken in thinking that you have qualia, when actually what you have is a mistaken memory of having had qualia. The memory of having had qualia is not necessarily evidence of qualia, any more than the Zombie's verbal report that it has qualia is necessarily evidence that it has them. If this seems farfetched, it's only because the act of introspection is not itself subject to introspection, even though it is known to be prone to error. That this is so is well documented empirically. For instance, take the case of the the patient described in Brain-Wise, by Patricia Smith Churchland with "anosognosia" (unawareness of illness):
Ramachandran studied one patient who, though very normal in other respects, believed that her motor functions were entirely normal, and specifically that she could move her paralyzed left arm and leg. She nonchalantly explained her presence in the hospital as owing to some minor problem. When asked to move her left hand, she would cheerfully agree to comply, and a moment later when queried about not complying, she would reply that indeed she just did move it. If asked to point at Ramachandran's nose, she would agree to do so, and later reply that yes, she could see her hand pointing directly at his nose.
Now, this is obviously some kind of introspection failure. One explanation of the failure is that the introspection worked, but there were hallucinatory qualia--but isn't it at least conceivable that there were no qualia at all, but the act of introspection itself failed and reported what the outcome would have been had there been sensory data and qualia? Remember that by the Zombie hypothesis everything about what actually happens in the perceptual system and reporting about it is completely explained at the physical level, so there cannot be a physical or perceptual difference between introspecting and actually having had qualia and introspecting and not having really had qualia (otherwise you could tell the difference between real people and Zombies by quizzing them on the act of introspection). If that still doesn't seem conceivable, consider some of the scenarios proposed by the Zombie-friendly in arguing for its conceivability where you slip in and out of the Zombified state (through plugging and unplugging your qualia): isn't it then conceivable that at any given moment you are Zombified, although your normal state is in force the moment before and the moment after, with the physical Zombie memories afterward indistinguishable from the ones that were "accidentally" accompanied by qualia? Isn't it conceivable you were a Zombie in the past, and will be in the future, even though you aren't right now? But if that's conceivable, isn't it conceivable that you are a Zombie even right now?
Do I believe this argument? No, I think it trades on the same laxity in what it means to be conceivable that the original Zombie argument does, although I think that the idea that we may sometimes misattribute qualia to ourselves may be in better empirical shape than the admittedly non-falsifiable Zombie hypothesis. There is necessarily something that it is like to be us--even though there may never have been a situation in which being us was exactly like what our memories prompt us to suppose it was. There is no possible universe where there are physically and behaviorally identical beings to ourselves who have nothing which it is like to be them, any more than (to use an example from Churchland) there is a universe which has physically and behaviorally identical beings that lack the property of being alive.
is harder than it sounds. At least, according to research by these guys (Dans Gilbert and Kahneman, and Tim Wilson), as reported in the New York Times The Futile Pursuit of Happiness
The basic finding is that people are really bad at predicting how events will affect their future happiness, at least in terms of intensity and duration. Good things won't make you happy as much or as long as you think, but then again bad things won't affect you as much as you think, either.
They are cautious about drawing public policy conclusions from this, and I think rightly so, but it does suggest that overextending yourself to achieve that one thing or event that you really covet (or avoid that one thing you really dread) is not the way to maximize your happiness. A better strategy seems to be to minimize the minor irritations, while going for smaller and steadier rewards. In other words, when it comes to mazimizing happiness, Epicurus was right all along.
Brian Weatherson asks Thoughts Is Hibernation Time Travel? While simply sleeping or otherwise being unaware of the passage of time seems clear to him not to be time travel, he's not so sure about processes like hibernation or freezing that slow down relevant processes and not just the subjective passage of time. I have to wonder, though, why advancing through time normally according to your frame of reference would ever be considered travel at all. A hibernating bear or a cryogenically suspended Phillip J. Fry is still advancing (if that's the word) through time at the exact same rate as everything else around them--only the rate of decay and dissolution has changed but that doesn't seem much like travel at all--if anything the opposite. I know the intuition is that subjectively it's as if they had travelled over the intervening time rather than through it, but since the whole discussion begins with recognizing that subjective experience (at least in the case of deep sleep or a wandering mind) isn't a reason to regard something as time travel, what's left to suggest otherwise?