One thing that seems relevant to philosophical “bullets” is how often they come up. If your theory says that you should kill a live person to save 5 with their organs, that comes up literally all the time. Not in the sense that you know who will get the organs, but we all know that transplant lists are long and people regularly die because there is no compatible transplant available.
Obviously bringing up Immanuel Kant is not exactly breaking new ground, but its worth considering what would happen if many people bit that particular bullet. And that’s a major difference between the transplant problem and the triage problem—few people are triage doctors or nurses and even for them, that particular situation is rare. Whereas for the transplant problem, tools are such that almost every adult human being could physically murder a healthy person in a way that preserves their organs.
So I would think that a policy for “biting” philosophical “bullets” should include something about how often the hypo would actually come up in everyday life. If it comes up frequently, the intuition that you shouldn’t do that thing is probably more valuable than the clever argument. Intuitions should be considered “weaker” when applied to situations are rare or nigh-impossible to actually occur, since our intuitions were developed for common situations.
One thing that seems relevant to philosophical “bullets” is how often they come up. If your theory says that you should kill a live person to save 5 with their organs, that comes up literally all the time. Not in the sense that you know who will get the organs, but we all know that transplant lists are long and people regularly die because there is no compatible transplant available.
Obviously bringing up Immanuel Kant is not exactly breaking new ground, but its worth considering what would happen if many people bit that particular bullet. And that’s a major difference between the transplant problem and the triage problem—few people are triage doctors or nurses and even for them, that particular situation is rare. Whereas for the transplant problem, tools are such that almost every adult human being could physically murder a healthy person in a way that preserves their organs.
So I would think that a policy for “biting” philosophical “bullets” should include something about how often the hypo would actually come up in everyday life. If it comes up frequently, the intuition that you shouldn’t do that thing is probably more valuable than the clever argument. Intuitions should be considered “weaker” when applied to situations are rare or nigh-impossible to actually occur, since our intuitions were developed for common situations.