Ethics thought experiments are interesting and sometimes fun and you can't deny the value of getting people thinking about choices and behavior.
But it's always seemed to me that they, along with ethics in general, miss the point. I don't think absolute right and wrong, or even absolute "lesser of two evils" is a particularly useful goal.
It's the contextual framework that matters... Values, priorities, fears, desires, needs, the things that comprise a person's identity and worldview. Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made.
IMO there's a lot more value in exploring those things, as opposed to ethics, if the ultimate goal is to impact the behavior of a individuals in a society.
The irony here is you just pigeonholed "ethics" and then made several ethical arguments yourself while saying you don't care about ethics!
To add some formal language:
> I don't think absolute right and wrong, or even absolute "lesser of two evils" is a particularly useful goal.
This sounds like a metaethical argument - what underpins ethics is a very important question that a lot of people miss, but that argument is actually the base of ethical stances. The formal metaethical belief here is objectivism. Some other options are things like subjectivism, cultural relativism, error theory, and non-cognitivism.[1]
> It's the contextual framework that matters... Values, priorities, fears, desires, needs, the things that comprise a person's identity and worldview. Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made.
Ethics (once you get past metaethics) is almost always around a framework, and focuses exactly on everything you listed. Aristotle explicitly focused on values to built his ethical framework. Foucault talks a lot about fear and power. Most of consequentialism and utilitarianism focuses on needs and desires. Rawls and egalitarianism is an example of talking about priorities.
To me, it sounds like you have a gripe with the impracticality of philosophers talking about ethics but care quite a lot about ethics itself. If so, I'd be with you strongly on both accounts.
> Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made.
And the point of the thought experiment is to uncover those things, and they make up that person's personal ethics. Maybe their ethics are "I'll always save my family, fuck everybody else", maybe their ethics are "I only save people who share my skin color", or maybe they are "I always maximize the damage, I hate people", using hypothetical situations allows you to figure that out without taking that person on daily walks and sacrificing lots of people on the train tracks to find out.
Ethics thought experiments are interesting and sometimes fun and you can't deny the value of getting people thinking about choices and behavior.
But it's always seemed to me that they, along with ethics in general, miss the point. I don't think absolute right and wrong, or even absolute "lesser of two evils" is a particularly useful goal.
It's the contextual framework that matters... Values, priorities, fears, desires, needs, the things that comprise a person's identity and worldview. Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made.
IMO there's a lot more value in exploring those things, as opposed to ethics, if the ultimate goal is to impact the behavior of a individuals in a society.