For funsies, you can take the survey here.
Took the survey, lots of good questions to ponder. I hope it helps!
Is this yours or a colleague’s?
Gah! I’m sorry but question #3 annoyed me. Why assume the test-taker is male? It is so unimportant to the question.
…
But woohoo! I’m still in the lowest age group.
And I took it.
Done.
Cool survey, lots of interesting questions. I had to think about #2 for a long time. Will we get to see any kind of results page when the survey is completed?
Neato. The opening and closing pages gave me flashbacks to my own dissertation, though it was for a simple degree, not a doctorate.
I think I may have spotted a mistake (though it really doesn’t matter) - Einstein really didn’t come up with the Theory of Relativity.
I kinda wish the philosophy part had been a bit longer–for me, because there were some interesting questions there, and for you, because I have difficulty imagining that you can extract that much information you can extract from so few answers. But that was definitely one of the more interesting surveys I’ve taken.
I took it. One course away from a BA in Philosophy, so I already knew all the right answers. 
I’d be interested in seeing the results
“Right” answers in philosophy? LOL!
I’ve seen the train switch question before, and I’ve never really understood how it’s supposed to be difficult. Can anyone enlighten me on how it’s questionable to save four lives?
I believe the general argument for not switching the track is one of non-culpability - if you leave it, then the deaths of four are the result of whoever caused the situation in the first place. But if you save them, by directly intervening and causing the single man’s death, you are his murderer.
I’d tend to agree with you, in that i’d say not intervening in this kind of situation makes you as culpable as intervening. But I think that’s the primary other way of looking at it.
For the basketball question, I have a hard time answering it directly. What’s the purpose of the gathering? Is it primarily to see a ball game or do seven old friends want to do something together? Is there one person who doesn’t really like ballgames and wouldn’t mind taking a pass? I put down that six people should go to the game because it’s my experience that you can find someone in a group who’ll take a pass for the team. But if the group experience is more important, then they should all go to the bar.
I had similar issues with other questions, but I can’t get back to the survey to detail them.
I’m already a philosophy professor, so I don’t know if I can take the survey without skewing the results.
Are you affiliated with the CUNY philosophy department? When I was teaching in Beirut, we sent one of our students there; she got her PhD in 2007. You might know her.
It was BASKETBALL? Oh, hell, I thought it was BASEBALL. I’ll have to go back for a do-over; that completely raises the stakes.
I guess I thought I was going to get a personality analysis at the end. It was kind of anticlimactic when I just got a “thank you.” No cookie?
The person running the survey wants Philosophy profs to participate as well.
I’m not affiliated with CUNY and I’ve got nothing to do with the survey, myself. I read about it at Leiter Reports.
What hung me up on that question was not the matter of culpability; though I would agree that in such a situation you’d be equally responsible for the deaths of all those men. No, what I see as the big question is whether or not you think the value of life can be measured. One could argue that if all life is held as sacrosanct, then the life of one man would be equal to that of four men, or four hundred, or four thousand.
For the record, here were my answers and my thinking. (Preferably, I think you should do the survey yourself before reading the following.)
Yes. The autonomy of an action seems to me to be what makes its agent culpable. Libertarian Freedom might be a way a thing could have autonomny. But I don’t think it’s necessary for autonomy. Some purely deterministic systems are configured such that their movements tend to me controlled by internal rather than external factors. To the extent that a physical system has this characteristic, it has autonomy. And if it has enough autonomy concerning the right kinds of movements, it has the kind of autonomy I think supports genuine freedom and responsibility.
I’d advocate going somewhere else, but I’m not sure I have an argument for this. It’s basically a sentiment. I’d really hate to be the one left behind.
No. What we value in a person–what we want to preserve, continue to relate to in the same way, and so on–involves his memories and personality. I think the body with my brain in it is far more likely to have preserved these kinds of things than the body with my friend’s brain in it.
I think I put “yes,” but I was tempted by “prefer not to respond” because it wasn’t clear to me whether the robot was to be equipped with a way to simulate the actions of hormones and other physical processes subvening the mind that are not strictly neural in nature. But I eventually put “yes” because the last sentence asks whether the robot could experience love. Well, yes, provided you add the non-neural stuff I mentioned to the simulation. (Now I’m not so sure I should have said “yes,” since by the reasoning about “could” that I used, I should have answered yes given any description of the robot!)
Yes, but my reasoning comes close to a case of fighting the hypothetical. For what I think is that even if all I know about Einstein is that he developed Relativity, nevertheless what I mean by “einstein” is not encapsulated just by the description “The guy who developed relativity” but also “the guy who I could learn more about by asking around about ‘Einstein’.” However, this may simply amount to saying it’s impossible to “only” know he’s the guy who invented relativity. I may be saying that as well as this, to be using the term at all, you must also know that he occupies a position in the social-causal network I live in that makes him amenable to my learning about him in particular ways. Still, perhaps I don’t have to know this but merely believe it in order to use the term.
No. The belief I had that someone was calling me was formed on the basis of perceptions that did not track objects in a way that actually supports that belief. The perceptions were (unbeknownst to me) locked onto, and tracking, the ringing of a different cell phone than my own. This perception supports the belief that someone is calling someone, but not the belief that someone is calling me. (But the relationship of “support” between perception and belief is a difficult one that I don’t know enough about.)
My philosophical training tells me this is a riff on the “Mary in the Black and White Room” story, whereing Mary is a supersmart superscientist who has never been exposed to colors other than black and white before. She knows everything there is to know about the causal effects of red surfaces on the human eye, brain and so on. But one day she exits the room and actually sees something red. Has she learned something new?
But the example in the survey isn’t quite the same as this. The alien hasn’t tasted apples, but the story seems to imply that the man has tasted plenty of other things. (It doesn’t say this, but it seems like this would be the assumption unless a storyteller explicitly stated otherwise.) Given that, it seems likely that once he’s analyzed apples to the extent that he knows exactly what chemical effects they would have on his tongue, he can match the profile of that reaction to various other reactions occasioned by the tasting of other objects, and on this basis, can see that apples taste (for example) somewhat like pairs.
And so I conclude the man does know what apples taste like. Much in the same way I know what Dodo meat tastes like when you tell me it “tastes like chicken,” though with much more exactness.
I think I put “prefer not to respond” because I thought the question is underdetermined. The heart and lung breathe without being connected to a body, but are they connected to something? Are there constraints on the kind of thing they must be connected to in order to operate? Does this thing act as a kind of substitute for a body? If so, I think that the functional equivalence to a body in the heart and lung cases can be pretty shallow, but I think the functional equivalence to a body in the brain case must be substantially deeper. I don’t think it would have to be a biological body per se, so if they mean just “biologically normal human body” then the answer is yes. But I do think it likely the brain must be connected to something functionally very much like a body. If that counts as a body, then the answer is no.
I’ll tell you when I actually find myself in the situation. Honestly, I think examples like this push moral concepts and concepts of responsibility to their limits, possibly past their breaking points. I think reflection on the situation shows that whatever you do, you are both guilty and not guilty, at the same time, in the same sense, and this suggests that the moral framework, the moral viewpoint, contains inherent contradictions in it. I don’t take this to mean there’s something wrong with the moral framework. Plenty of work has been done on how to make use of inconsistent logics without allowing their contradictions to “explode” by proving true every possible statement.
Them’s my answers. I invite discussion!
I expect it’s probably too late to change any of the questions, but I think the last question on the demographic section needs a bit of tweaking, since it’s unclear what you’re supposed to answer if you’ve had more than one undergraduate class in philosophy but no graduate-level coursework. I ended up ticking “Other” for that one.
*pairs --> pears
I had the same quarrels with that question; ultimately, I took it to ask whether or not the concept of ‘love’ is something used to describe something purely physical, so I answered ‘yes’, as well, though I’m not sure if I’ve not stretched the confines of the question too far.
I’m probably misunderstanding you here – this reasoning seems grounds to answer ‘no’, not ‘yes’, to me. It’s again similar to mine – I concluded that you don’t only know that Einstein’s the guy who came up with relativity, because that knowledge entails knowing that he’s also the guy who publicized it, else, you wouldn’t know about it; this differentiates who I am referring to when I say ‘Einstein’ from the other guy, since he clearly did not publicize.
Hmm, I’m a bit conflicted about this one – you reasonably believed someone was calling you, and that belief was true; what’s knowledge, if not that? Yet, unbeknownst to you, your belief was actually caused by a misinterpretation – the lack of knowledge that it’s actually someone else’s phone that’s ringing. Given a total and correct knowledge of everything else, you couldn’t have known that you were being called, so how could it be knowledge if it’s predicated on ignorance?
In the end, I decided to go a somewhat pragmatic route and check ‘yes’, since there actually was somebody calling.
Another problem with this question (which I again took to concern mostly the matter of whether or not thought is a purely physical process) is that the brain is (as far as I know) constantly creating neural pathways in response to external stimuli, which only then generates a proper matrix for actual thought; lacking this, even though individual neurons may fire and stuff like that, I don’t think anything approaching thought would actually emerge, but that’s more of a neurophysiological than a philosophical issue, it seems to me. (Not to mention a dearth of things to think about without any input, though it could conceivably think about its own capability of thought.)
See, I put “no” to this question for the guy might know what an apple is supposed to taste like, he doesn’t know what an apple will taste like to someone with his biochemistry. He might expect it to be “sweet”, but once he crunches into it he could find that it’s far more bitter than his studies led him to expect.
Sorta like my wife and I and grapefruit. She likes them for their sweetness, I find them horribly bitter.