Guest Post from Raven Oak: Linguistics in Fantasy"”To Thee or Not to Thee

When The Good Place episode “The Trolley Problem” won one of science fiction’s most prestigious awards, the Hugo, in the category of best dramatic presentation, short form, I celebrated. I celebrated not because I loved the episode (in fact, I had so far only seen a couple of The Good Place‘s earlier episodes) but because, as a philosophy professor aiming to build bridges between academic philosophy and popular science fiction, the awarding of a Hugo to a show starring a professor of philosophy discussing a famous philosophical problem seemed to confirm that science fiction fans see some of the same synergies I see between science fiction and philosophy.

I do think the synergies are there and that the fans see and value them ““ as also revealed by the enduring popularity of The Matrix, and by West World, and Her, and Black Mirror, among others ““ but “The Trolley Problem”, considered as a free-standing episode, fumbles the job. (Below, I will suggest a twist by which The Good Place could redeem itself in later episodes.)

Yeah, I’m going to be fussy when maybe I should just cheer and praise. And I’m going to take the episode more philosophically seriously than maybe I should, treating it as not just light humor. But taking good science fiction philosophically seriously is important to me ““ and that means engaging critically. So here we go.

The Philosophical Trolley Problem

The trolley problem ““ the classic academic philosophy version of the trolley problem ““ concerns a pair of scenarios.

In one scenario, the Switch case, you are standing beside a railroad track watching a runaway railcar (or “trolley”) headed toward five people it will surely kill if you do nothing. You are standing by a switch, however, and you can flip the switch to divert the trolley onto a side track, saving the five people. Unfortunately, there is one person on the side track who will be killed if you divert the trolley. Question: Should you flip the switch?

In another scenario, the Push case, you are standing on a footbridge when you see the runaway railcar headed toward the five people. In this case, there is no switch. You do, however, happen to be standing beside a hiker with a heavy backpack, who you could push off the bridge into the path of the trolley, which will then grind to a halt on his body, killing him and saving the five. (You are too light to stop the trolley with your own body.) He is leaning over the railing, heedless of you, so you could just push him over. Question: Should you push the hiker?

The interesting thing about these problems is that most people say it’s okay to flip the switch in Switch but not okay to push the hiker in Push, despite the fact that in both cases you appear to be killing one person to save five. Is there really a meaningful difference between the cases? If so, what is it? Or are our ordinary intuitions about one or the other case wrong?

It’s a lovely puzzle, much, much debated in academic philosophy, often with intricate variations on the cases. (Here’s one of my papers about it.)

The Problem with “The Trolley Problem”

“The Trolley Problem” episode nicely sets up some basic trolley scenarios, adding also a medical case of killing one to save five (an involuntary organ donor). The philosophy professor character, Chidi, is teaching the material to the other characters.

Spoilers coming.

The episode stumbles by trying to do two conflicting things.

First, it seizes the trope of the philosophy professor who can’t put his theories into practice. The demon Michael sets up a simulated trolley, headed toward five victims, with Chidi at the helm. Chidi is called on to make a fast decision. He hesitates, agonizing, and crashes into the five. Micheal reruns the scenario with several variations, and it’s clear that Chidi, faced with a practical decision requiring swift action, can’t actually figure out what’s best. (However, Chidi is clear that he wouldn’t cut up a healthy patient in an involuntary organ donor case.)

Second, incompatibly, the episode wants to affirm Chidi’s moral expertise. Michael, the demon who enjoys torturing humans, can’t seem to take Chidi’s philosophy lessons seriously, despite Chidi’s great knowledge of ethics. Michael tries to win Chidi’s favor by giving him a previously unseen notebook of Kant’s, but Chidi, with integrity that I suppose the viewer is expected to find admirable, casts the notebook aside, seeing it as a bribe. What Chidi really wants is for Michael to recognize his moral expertise. At the climax of the episode, Michael seems to do just this, saying:

Oh, Chidi, I am so sorry. I didn’t understand human ethics, and you do. And it made me feel insecure, and I lashed out. And I really need your help because I feel so lost and vulnerable.

It’s unclear from within the episode whether we are supposed to regard Michael as sincere. Maybe not. Regardless, the viewer is invited to think that it’s what Michael should say, what his attitude should be ““ and Chidi accepts the apology.

But this resolution hardly fits with Chidi’s failure in actual ethical decision making in the moment (a vice he also reveals in other episodes). Chidi has abstract, theoretical knowledge about ethical quandaries such as the trolley problem, and he is in some ways the most morally admirable of the lead characters, but his failure in vividly simulated trolley cases casts his practical ethical expertise into doubt. Nothing in the episode satisfactorily resolves that practical challenge to Chidi’s expertise, pro or con.

Ethical Expertise?

Now, as it happens, I am the world’s leading expert on the ethical behavior of professional ethicists. (Yes, really. Admittedly, the competition is limited.)

The one thing that shows most clearly from my and others’ work on this topic, and which is anyway pretty evident if you spend much time around professional ethicists, is that ethicists, on average, behave more or less similarly to other people of similar social background ““ not especially better, not especially worse. From the fact that Chidi is a professor of ethics, nothing in particular follows about his moral behavior. Often, indeed, expertise in philosophical ethics appears to become expertise in constructing post-hoc intellectual rationales for what you were inclined to do anyway.

I hope you will agree with me about the following, concerning the philosophy of philosophy: Real ethical understanding is not a matter of what words you speak in classroom moments. It’s a matter of what you choose and what you do habitually, regardless of whether you can tell your friends a handsome story about it, grounded in your knowledge of Kant. It’s not clear that Chidi does have especially good ethical understanding in this practical sense. Moreover, to the extent Chidi does have some such practical ethical understanding, as a somewhat morally admirable person, it is not in virtue of his knowledge of Kant.

Michael should not be so deferential to Chidi’s expertise, and especially he should not be deferential on the basis of Chidi’s training as a philosopher. If, over the seasons, the characters improve morally, it is, or should be, because they learn from the practical situations they find themselves in, not because of Chidi’s theoretical lessons.

How to Partly Redeem “The Trolley Problem”

Thus, the episode, as a stand-alone work, is flawed both in plot (the resolution at climax failing to answer the problem posed by Chidi’s earlier practical indecisiveness) and in philosophy (being too deferential to the expertise of theoretical ethicists, in contrast with the episode’s implicit criticism of the practical, on-the-trolley value of Chidi’s theoretical ethics).

When the whole multi-season arc of The Good Place finally resolves, here’s what I hope happens, which in my judgment would partly redeem “The Trolley Problem”: Michael turns out, all along, to have been the most ethically insightful character, becoming Chidi’s teacher rather than the other way around.

Bio: Eric Schwitzgebel is a professor of philosophy at University of California, Riverside, and a cooperating member of UCR’s program in Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science. His short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, F&SF, and elsewhere. He regularly blogs at The Splintered Mind on topics in philosophy, psychology, and science fiction. His third book, tentatively titled Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures is forthcoming with MIT Press.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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In 2014 The North Bristol Writers created an anthology and successfully funded it via Fundsurfer. The book is now available to buy in eBook and paperback from Tangent Books & Amazon worldwide.

North by Southwest is an anthology by ten writers. The tales are mainly set in Bristol and are an eclectic and unlikely series of journeys through landscape and story. These are all new stories, never before published, and show great variety. Here lies the strength of the book, showcasing as it does the work of the writers after a year or so of collaboration.

Bristol is a vibrant, creative city and the tales here are infused with that energy. Bristol has had such a great effect on transport through the ages ““ it’s an airplane city, a railway city, and a port city ““ so naturally such themes recur, as does the theme of “˜North’.

***

In February 2014, at a North Bristol Writers meeting I said, “We should write an anthology!” which was greeted by enthusiasm by all present. Writing the stories was the “˜easy’ part; how would we get it published?

A few friends had run successful Kickstarters and we toyed with the idea of crowdfunding but weren’t sure how to start. Then I had a chance meeting at a reading evening (the much missed Small Stories) with another writer ““ Amy Morse http://www.amymorse.co.uk/ who had just successfully funded her novel Solomon’s Secrets via a funding platform I’d not heard of ““ Fundsurfer, which is a Bristol based crowdfunding platform, very similar to Indiegogo and Kickstarter. I invited Amy along to a North Bristol Writers meeting to talk about her experience and after her talk we determined to use Fundsurfer. Mainly because Fundsurfer was local and the stories were mostly set locally.

We got on with writing the stories and recruiting local artist Claire M Hutt to do the cover and illustrations. Claire was a key addition as we could use her art for pledge rewards. I had a couple of meetings with the Fundsurfer guys, who were super helpful and also with local publisher Tangent who were going to facilitate the publishing process.

We budgeted for Typesetting, Design, Printing and postage & packing then set up the Fundsurfer page. The most difficult bit was making the video, no-one in the group had any experience of making videos. We recorded a few hours of footage and in the end I only used the audio from it.

We launched the Fundsurfer at the end of October 2014 at BristolCon, who very generously donated several sets of tickets for the 2015 Con that we could use for pledge rewards, and set it to run for until mid-December.

Friends who’d had successful crowdfunding campaigns gave some great advice. The best piece of advice was “build the crowd, then the funding” so we had spent a while telling everyone we could think of that the book existed and needed funding. So that when we launched the Fundsurfer campaign a lot of people already knew about it.

I’ve mentioned a couple of rewards already and obviously the rewards and the levels are key to the success of the project. We started with a long list of about fifteen rewards but with the advice of “˜less is more’ from the Fundsurfer guys we whittled them down to seven. Apparently it’s like the way people choose wine, some will go for the bargain basement (but in fact we had very few go for the lowest reward level) some will go for the mid-range and some will go for the top range. The majority of people will go for the mid-range. So having a range of rewards is more important than having a variety of awards. We budgeted for a certain number of physical copies and worked out the likely number for P&P. P&P kills many crowdfunding campaigns & is something you need to give careful consideration to!

We got some nice publicity from Bristol 24/7 and a very entertaining “˜celebrity endorsement’ from local writer Jonathan L. Howard.

With 10 writers, an editor and an artist involved we thought that funding would work out if we could all get a few friends & family to pledge. It was still a nailbiting few weeks as the project slowly accumulated the funds; slower than I would have liked. We reached our funding goals a few days before the project was due to end and got pretty much what we asked for, getting just £62 over our goal.

Often it felt like all those times in school when you tried to get money out of people for doing a sponsored walk, or similar. We mainly sold it as a pre-order for the book, but potentially didn’t set expectations well enough, that once we had the funding the process of getting the book published would begin, and as we all know, everything in publishing takes a lot longer than you think. However the actual process has been very smooth, thanks to Tangent. All the funders have now received their eBook and the print book is imminent. We are looking to have a local launch and have started planning our next anthology.

Would I crowdfund again? It’s a very viable way to fund a project but it does rely totally on people’s goodwill and it is a lot of hard work. The amount of people who will “get round to it” is very large and there is an inevitable amount of nagging, which I didn’t like at all. However we were successful and it was the most equitable way of creating the book.

Bio: Pete Sutton is a UK writer and blogger, one of the organisers of Bristol Festival of Literature and contributing editor to Far Horizons magazine . He is a contributor to the Naked Guide to Bristol and you can read his latest published story ““ The body in the lake in Fossil Lake 2 published by Sabledrake Enterprises.
Follow him on Twitter as @Suttope and read his blog here: http://brsbkblog.blogspot.co.uk/ & his website here: http://petewsutton.com/.

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Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.