Well, J likes to play with a train set, and after dinner, I was playing with J, and I thought to try out the trolley problem. We got some Lego figures, put them on the tracks, and I told J that the train was going to hit these five people, but J could switch tracks if J is willing to have the other person crushed. J looked at me, then at the tracks, and then very seriously picked up the lone figure and put it on the track with the other five. Then J took the train, ran over all six of them, turned to me, and said, very seriously, “it was a bad accident.”
I'm just kidding. I don't think the kid is a psychopath. I think he's taking his cue from Mother. She set up the carnage. It was a carnage-setting-up game. It's not like young people in a college philosophy class, where they've all be cued to step up to the highest level of morality or to choose between morality and pragmatism and then talk about why. You might just as well suspect your child of psychopathy because after he builds a tall building out of blocks he takes his toy airplane and crashes into it, like a 9/11 terrorists, though only you know about the 9/11 terrorists. He's never heard of such a thing. Unless you've cruelly burdened him with such knowledge. What is he, 3?
Okay, let's see what Slate's advice-giver has to say:
I don’t know what kind of conversations you all have had about the permanence of death just yet, but it is entirely possible that a 3-year-old wouldn’t understand the seriousness of this scenario. Furthermore, I don’t know exactly what you were trying to accomplish by asking such a young child to ponder a difficult moral quandary that adults have been debating for years....
Oh, I think I know what Mom/Dad was trying to accomplish: My child is a very special little man. Here's a way to marvel at his perspicacity.
I can imagine myself doing the same thing, setting up the trolley problem with the Legos. But what would I do, if I'd gotten that far, and my child had moved the sixth figure over to the killing position and said "it was a bad accident"? My first thought would be to pick up that sixth figure and say, Oh, but I loved this person!
ADDED: I hesitate to go with my "first thought," because what would the child do next, point at the other 5 and say "I suppose you hated these people. Why do you hate people so much and involve me in this grisly scenario?"
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76 comments:
uhm, im in trouble big time. I would send HER to the looney bin.
Ms. Althouse, you do realize all of these advice columns are made up. Forget the smell test, this isn’t even a sniff test.
BTW glad you posted on the Duke/BYU volleyball hoax, even Glenn Reynolds on his blog hasn’t mentioned it. The story is blowing up just like Duke lacrosse and uva frat sexual assault
I suspect I've shared on this site before, but a Philosophy prof once told me: whatever you do, don't ask the kids to do the lifeboat exercise. They've done it so many times, they're kind of slick and heartless about it. It was originally designed (one would think) to demonstrate how hard some choices might be (people who lived with slavery might have had reasons not to set out to destroy it, leaders have to make life or death decisions), but instead it has become very easy. Throw the nun overboard.
If the figures were all MAGA, the kid is a genius 😉
The mom needs help. Frankly, why would any parent set up a scenario like that for a child, a toddler? What kind of dark recesses are playing out from the mom onto this kid? And if she's setting this scenario out at this age, imagine the carnage to come as the kid gets older and more comes out of her dark recesses.
As Keanu Reeves said playing Tod in Parenthood: "You know, Mrs. Buckman, you need a license to buy a dog, or drive a car. Hell, you need a license to catch a fish! But they'll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father." Or a mother.
BTW, I know it's not fair of me and a huge leap, but my gut is telling me this parent lives in New York or Connecticut. I can't help myself.
Maybe the kid is smart enough to know that a block is not a person.
Civilization is invaded by barbarians once a generation.
We call them children.
"Ms. Althouse, you do realize all of these advice columns are made up."
Including when Benjamin Franklin did it? Even Eleanor Roosevelt?!
I certainly don't think they are all made up. For one thing, that would only make it harder. I think the problem — often written about — is that the questioners are often making it up and the columnist has to have a good nose for fakery. It think the good ones are trying to pick out real questions but often fail. I agree that this could be a made-up question, but I don't think the columnist believes that.
My son turned anything into a gun when he was smaller. It was innate. So when reading about this child, i could already guess what would happen. Haha
Advice columns are a great newspaper tradition. Of course, there can be lies, but everything human is permeated with lies. Once could withdraw entirely, but that wouldn't be something you'd see in a blog.
I'm more agnostic in this situation. My son is approaching his terrible twos and I've seen him do things that can't be explained away as anything but raw human id any other way. It's in all of us.
At some point during the long hominid parenting cycle yes...I intend to assert more moral control over his development. This will be especially important when introduce him to blasting caps and brisant primaries at age 5.
His maturity level will determine his privileges. If I see rapid progress he might be lucky enough to learn about RDX shaped charges by the time he's 10. I would beem with pride.
The lifeboat exercise? Am I supposed to know what that is?
I feel very sorry for this kid, with a fucked-up mother like that. Sounds like she's trying to let loose her own nutso thoughts on the kid. And a three year-old at that.
I'd love to write that so-called advice column.
I suppose you hated these people.
That's what i got out of your comment.
If people have values, then they have different values
If a Trump/Hitler is on one track
And a collection of people are on the other track, how many (and what ratio) of them need to be EVIL (transphobe? Christian? Cis?) in order to make it BETTER to kill them rather than Trump/Hitler
I'm thinking something like 79 Million evil, mixed with 81 million good; is Evil enough to be ran over
right?
“but it is entirely possible that a 3-year-old wouldn’t understand the seriousness of this scenario.”
But a 12-16-year-old can change sexes. Permanently. Kids understand that! The experts at Nebraska Medicine and Boston Children’s Hospital tell us.
Althouse said...
I'm just kidding. I don't think the kid is a psychopath. I think he's taking his cue from Mother. She set up the carnage. It was a carnage-setting-up game.
Morticia: Oh no, darling, you blow up the train. I know how you love those wrecks...
Gomez: Used some of Pugsley's TNT. Young fella really knows how to mix an explosive.
Morticia: Makes a Mother proud.
Coleridge wrote (probably in The Friend) that moral quandaries are designed to dull the moral sense.
My first reaction would be to laugh and consider whether my child has a future in stand-up. That is some pretty funny stuff!
Were the figures male or female?
Ms. Althouse do you remember the magazine Maxim? It was one of the first “for men only” magazines in the early ‘00s. Anyway one of my coworkers (not sulllivan and Cromwell but one of the big firms) dated a NYC native that worked there. He played on our firm softball/basketball teams. After games we would help him make his quota for articles. Some of it was advice, some about dating in the city, etc. 100% of it was bs. Things haven’t changed. I don’t believe anything I read, and sometimes things I see!
J's mom conspicuously avoids pronouns. Poor J is in for years of Mom's using him/her for some conspicuous virtue signaling. J might even be transitioned because J was assigned the wrong gender at birth. And Mom will look on proudly and post about it.
Just don't buy that kid a stuffed tiger.
"Ms. Althouse do you remember the magazine Maxim? It was one of the first “for men only” magazines in the early ‘00s."
I can't understand the concept of the first “for men only” magazines beginning the early ‘00s. Men's magazines go way back.
The tradition of fake letters in men's sex magazines was notorious with Penthouse Forum which began in 1968. People enjoyed the letters specifically because they were fake. So, yes, there are magazines with letters columns that are known to be fake. It's a separate tradition. If the editors choose that route, they have a different relationship with the readers.
I guess I could decide never to blog these things, the risk being too great that I look naive. I make my own judgments. It would be easy to have a flat rule against all advice columns. But why don't I have a rule against every news article in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
On the other hand, when I was a kid my folks got me play army soldiers, play guns, and a great Remco Bulldog Tank to play with. I also had some kind of toy machine gun on a tripod. It was loud and our neighbors hated it. I would shoot at everything moving. I was older than 3, but not by much. We used to go outside and play 'war' with other kids on the street, including two kids from a German family. Guess who got to play the Nazis when we played 'war'? Ahh...the good old days in Detroit. A couple of years later we were watching shows on TV like "Combat" and "The Gallant Men".
We were the post WWII generation. My dad fought in North Africa and later in the Philippines. So he was probably buying what he knew. That and a baseball mitt. We grew up with this stuff and no- we didn't go around shooting and killing people later on in life. So maybe J in this article will turn out just fine. But the mom...she still sounds off-kilter to me. Playing 'war' a few years after actual war is not as subtly weird as setting up scenarios by which your kid has to decide who dies and who doesn't. When you play 'war', everyone gets to die, then get back up in 10 seconds. It's active, not festering in the mind.
Gator,
Concur. A sportswriter friend for the Oakland Tribune told me similar stories, including various "contests" other staff members engaged in about getting published in those columns. He regularly had potential column material lying around his house.
All that letter says is "I'm a bad teacher" (age inappropriate lessons) and "I learned philosophy from watching 'The Good Place'".
I would be concerned if I read:
Dear Slate,
There's an unusually large number of "lost cat" (and small dog) signs up around the neighborhood. Little Dexter (10 m) likes to take evening walks by himself and I'm wondering if I should keep him home. I'm worried that there might be a predator prowling around.
First, Ann, people didn't enjoy the Penthouse letters because they were fake. They enjoyed them by imagining the stories being told were real, and were depicting things that could happen to them if the stars were perfectly aligned. Maybe a few readers read them as parody and found them amusing for that reason, but not very many.
Anyway, letters like the one you shared this morning do not arrive in an advice columnist's inbox without the assistance of at least some degree of fraud. If the columnist herself isn't composing the letters, then there is a group of friends and associates who are contributing fake letters to the effort. Of course, the columnist probably receives some real letters from readers, and perhaps some of those have even been published. But the ones that sound crazy and improbable are undoubtedly made up.
i was going to ask how long before the mom decides the child's gender needs to be reassigned?
but, a cassandra lite said...
J's mom conspicuously avoids pronouns.. already!
Overthinking all around. This is normal, and for almost any boy it's rather fun to smash toys with other toys. Gun, cannon, train, sledge hammer, wrecking ball, it matters not.
Review the stages of childhood development. The worry is a parent projecting on a small child. All children must learn to empathize in order to have human relationships. We all start out as simple, selfish beasts. Some surely never learn to care about others but this is too early. Come back at puberty -- if the child is shooting arrows at neighborhood dogs and cats then he/she will likely end up in prison. Or on Wall St. Or in D.C.
https://educationlearningtoys.com/knowledge-base/piaget-vs-erikson/
But why don't I have a rule against every news article in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
The Washington Post and New York Times no longer print "news" articles - only opinion pieces disguised as news articles.
There used to be a competition among smart kids all over America to see who could make up the weirdest problem and have Dear Abby publish it and offer advice. Dear Abby outed some of the letters, but I bet there were others that got through....Eleanor Roosevelt had an advice column? WTF. Her five kids had seventeen divorces between them, she treated Lorena Hickok far worse than FDR ever treated Eleanor, and she condemned millions of Americans to heart disease and early death because of her shilling for trans fat products. I can see how Hilary would look upon her as both inspirational and aspirational, but she's not a person to whom I would look for sage advice.
hypothetical morals problems - definition
These are a set of hypothetical problems ostensibly formulated as thinking problems about weighing moral decisions.
In actuality, they are designed so that the respondent can be criticized by the questioner on their moral standing.
They say far more about the formulator than the respondent.
Countering the game:
Do not play in their sandbox - example:
Questionable setup:
You go back in time to Hitler's infancy. Would you kill Hitler?
1:
No. I'd grab the infant and return to my own time with him.
Having avoided their trap, they will then attempt to box you back in.
You cannot bring anyone back with you.
2:
I'll grab the infant and transport him to the US to be raised.
You cannot transport the infant elsewhere.
3:
I'll establish a scholarship in art school for his later use.
You cannot........
Conclusion:
There is no real need to go past response number one as they will simply disavow any decision you make which bypasses their desired trap.
Anyone asking such a question is disingenuous.
At best.
To this specific post - The kid rightly saw through his parent's trap although he took the opposite tact.
This is stealth bragging. She's showing off how clever her child is.
I'll take things that never happened for $500 Alex. I continue to believe all these "seeking advice" letter to whatever publication are in the saame class as the letters to the now(?) defunct Penthouse magazine
Imagine there is a plane circling Tupelo, Mississippi and threatening to crash into the local Walmart. Do you a) let it crash thus getting rid of a large number of deplorables? or b) shoot down the plane and hope it crashes into an un-inhabited area and kills no democrat voters?
Developmental psychology used to be a thing, even a science.
We lost sight of it in the rush to make every baby a Mozart or Einstein as soon as possible.
It takes time for children to develop concepts, including moral concepts, but even preteens and teens and many adults love a good massacre if real lives aren't involved: it's only make-believe.
This story does make me think that the letters are coming from inside the building, and clever slate staffers are competing to come up with the wackiest ones.
Those six turns out were MAGA Extremists, so ... you know ... it's all good. Our Democracy saved.
It's "Slate" so forget about it.
Damnit, Buckwheathikes beat me to it- I was going to make the "Democracy Saved" joke myself.
Ann Althouse said...
I guess I could decide never to blog these things, the risk being too great that I look naive. I make my own judgments. It would be easy to have a flat rule against all advice columns. But why don't I have a rule against every news article in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
That is the problem with your cruel neutrality position.
It requires you to take everything at face value as long as they are not presented next to toe fungus ads.
But one of the things you must do when gathering information is evaluate your sources.
The Slate has fabricated so much of the "news" they have printed and just blatantly lied to you for 7 years.
It isn't even Naivete anymore. You are choosing to give people credibility who obviously do not deserve it.
And you are doing it in a way that is clearly not neutral.
Perspicacity? It's only fair that you forever leave garner alone.
But like some of the commenters above, I think this and a lot of the letters written to advice columnists are complete fabrications of events, and this one sounds more like that than most.
cfs said...
Imagine there is a plane circling Tupelo, Mississippi and threatening to crash into the local Walmart. Do you a) let it crash thus getting rid of a large number of deplorables? or b) shoot down the plane and hope it crashes into an un-inhabited area and kills no democrat voters?
I do find it interesting that only one plane got shot down on 9/11.
Well, the child could be a genius, realizing that he is in the hands of and totally dependent upon psychopaths and so figures to way to curry favor and perhaps signal toughness chooses option 3.
The "solution" to the Trolley Experiment is a test of socialized morality. A three year old has more options
Hannah Arendt: “Every year Western Civilization is invaded by a new group of barbarians whom it is our duty to civilize. They are called children.”
Temujin... Remember the MARX military sets w/lithographed buildings and plastic obstacles. Man, your post took me back to the good times!
I like the cut of his jib, especially if the six were communists...
'I certainly don't think they are all made up.'
Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would happen to me...
I recall the Playboy advice column as being sort of like sex and love advice which my church gave out.
It was all very sensible, and advocated treating women with respect, even as one pursued hedonistic sexual goals. You just had to find women who were at peace with that (and such women were normal too).
The church advice was all sexual hedonism was fine as soon as you first got married. You just had to find a woman to go along with that (and such a woman would be normal too).
Keillor put it well: give a girlchild a toy gun and she'll coddle it like a baby; give a boychild a doll and he'll tear it apart and pretend the limbs are guns. (No wonder They cancelled him.)
Like Temujin, I and my Boomer peers were immersed in the afterglow of victory, and the exploits--real and imagined--of our fathers were celebrated and re-enacted on TV, on the playground, on the bedroom floor. Kenny and I had countless Hookrug Island battles of
HO scale Airfix Marines vs determined Japanese defenders . . .
Monkey Mountains across Estate were the site of mock soldiering and real dirt-clod battles
for years, and none of the bloodthirsty lads ever went on to harm a soul.
I don't have a strong opinion on the authenticity of the letter.
My Lional had plenty of train crashes (Gomez Addams was my hero) and my toy cars crashed a lot and toy boats sank.
It was called playing back when I was young.
As a child, I enjoyed setting dominoes, only to knock one down, and observe others that followed in ever more creative patterns. As a child, I would build a house of cards.
Why not let children play games that include the death of some of the players. When we grew up our fathers around us had come back from years of a game featuring death to many of the players. Out of 10,000,000 American men that went war, 1 million had become casualties. And Truman had to use the A-bombs to prevent another million casualties.
After 1945 Hollywood found that it had to make Film Noirs (about trusting no evil men and women and westerns about killing the evil savages) for 10 years to get those former fighting men back into their movie houses. Real Life had been a killing field. And our fathers had to slaughter the Jerry’s and the Japs before they finished slaughtering the whole world. There was no choice since physicists knew theoretically how to make a world changing A-Bomb and making the first was a race. Thank God we just barely won that race so that the Americans alive today could have life.
Ah, yes... the trolley problem, one of the admission tests for the Schutzstaffel's Adolf-Hitler-Schulen, those elite finishing schools for prospective Konzentrationslager commandants. Once the budding murderer made the right choice (which is not pulling an appalled face at the evidently psychopathic questioner who thinks such an absurdity as perfect knowledge is a sound basis for ethical reasoning) the screener would then coo, That's right, little Heinrich. And I'll tell you more, those five you saved are loyal Aryans, but the one who got run over because you switched the trolley to the other track was just a filthy Jew, a danger to our Third Reich.
In Biden's America, aka the Fourth Reich, the trolley problem has regained popularity, except the choice is between five loyal Biden voters and one MAGA Republican, a danger to our democracy.
The train Dilemma was presented in a slide by someone at a conference ( a scientific, non philosophical one) I was attending. I raised my hand and said I would set the switch half way and derail the car before it killed anyone. The presenter moved to the next person without a comment.
Regarding the toy machine gun:
When I was a kid I got a toy mortar tube with a spring in the base and plastic ammunition, I loved practicing indirect fire.
Oh, and [paper] airplane crashes, the tales that the brick walls, the asphalt shingles, the flowerless trees, the concrete pavement, the chain link fence, the canine retriever, and my parents' cars could tell. A perturbation in the climate would ensure a certain catastrophic progression.
“ They enjoyed them by imagining the stories being told were real, and were depicting things that could happen to them if the stars were perfectly aligned. ”
Yes, but it doesn’t make me wrong. You are merely describing the feeling of reading fiction, low level fiction.
Narr writes, "HO scale Airfix Marines vs determined Japanese defenders . . ."
HO scale seemed too small to little Quaestor, who preferred those 54mm soldiers made by Marx.
A typical play scenario: the Marines land on a remote Japanese-occupied island and discover it's the home of the surviving dinosaurs. (also molded by Marx) After a brief skirmish, the dinos and the Marines unite to make a joint attack on the hapless Japs encamped on the other side of the sandpile.
@Achilles
Why do you bother to read this blog?
Apparently you’d like a completely different blog. Why don’t you write it? I write the blog I want.
Violence by very young children against their newborn siblings is a thing pediatricians warn parents about. Two pediatricians I know experienced it with their toddlers and newborns. Young kids are potentially violent monsters, because they don't know any better.
That said, if the mom in the story was upset by her child's bloodthirsty approach to the Trolley Problem, she must never have let her kid pretend to be a dinosaur, or play with a completed Lego structure, or walk in clean clothes and dry shoes near a sidewalk puddle. Real chaos and pretend destruction are two means of kids learning how to be non-chaotic and non-destructive.
I am still disappointed that when my kids learned alligators are native to Texas, they never took me up on my promise to house any alligators they brought home in a pen out back. I guess they were too smart to try, or at least too smart to tell me they failed to catch any.
it is entirely possible that a 3-year-old wouldn’t understand the seriousness of this scenario.
it's fucking legos
I think he totally gets it!
"Mom, they're not human beings. Are you okay?"
Isn't this exactly what Althouse is doing with her blog? Setting up cruelly neutral lifeboat scenarios to see our psychopathic responses?
Psychosis vs Delusions
"Doctor, I'm really worried that my son is not more cognizant of the hypothetical situations in my brain. I know it's not real. But one day it might be real. What can I do to get his mind aligned with my fantasies?"
vs
"Doctor, I'm really worried that my mom is obsessed with these little lego people who are not people at all. Can she tell the difference? And this is important because she makes my lunch."
It's a First World problem, that's for sure.
I once wrote an actual letter to Dear Prudence (the incomparable Emily Joffe, not the lesser beings who came after her), and she published it. Good advice, too.
So at least one non made up letter to an advice columnist exists.
"I write the blog I want."
--Althouse
"I write the songs."
--Manilow
A kid builds a model just for the (evil?) glee of destroying it?
https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Calvin_the_Giant?file=Calvin_the_Giant_3.png
OG trolly problem brought to you by Caiaphas
You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish
Didn't have easy access to Marx figures, or any other classics for that matter. We did have easy access to the Revell 1/72 scale WWII stuff, and could field whole tank companies with support.
We were early adopters of the original G I Joe Action Figures, and for a while those were the hot item. (Everybody wanted the Nazi trooper of course.) As we matured we went through a brief period where we would strip the plastic men and pose them running with a trail of toilet paper streaming behind, or just in obscene poses, for the benefit of our little brothers and their friends.
We used to blow our toy soldiers up with firecrackers. Also, some would get burned to death with a "flamethrower". Dolls were run over with Toy Dump trucks. Model ships were sunk by death from above (rocks).
Those were the days.
Yes, many carefully hoarded firecrackers were used to blow up the war-worn planes, tanks, and ships.
Talk about putting an eye out, it was a wonder nobody got hurt with all the burning plastic
smithereens filling the air.
Kids today have no idea. And few ideas.
J. Melcher (1:29pm):
A "kid build[ing] a model just for the (evil?) glee of destroying it" goes back WAY beyond Calvin & Hobbes. It's at least 2700 years older. One of the similes in the Iliad compares something or other to a boy at the beach building a castle/fortress (Mycenaean palace?) out of sand . . . and then kicking it over.
"Doctor, I came home and my son, and he is only six years old, he was wearing a dress and shooting a water pistol at the cat."
"Listen, it's not a problem. We can castrate him and give him a vagina. And a vulva. That will fix the dress thing. What was the other one?"
"Shooting a water pistol! I am losing my mind here."
"You're losing your mind?"
"Figuratively, doctor, figuratively."
"I don't know what that means. Got some pills for you. That will take care of your mind. Where did she get the water pistol?"
"He got it, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. She got it--"
"How long have you been confusing your girl for a boy?"
"I knew she was a girl. I knew it. I knew it."
"What is her name?"
"Well, uh, okay, we named her when she was a baby. And the nurse said, it's a boy."
"You listened to the nurse!"
"Well...and the penis, you know. That's why we called her Frank."
"You called your daughter, Frank."
"My husband was listening to a lot of Johnny Cash at the time."
"I think you're the problem, okay. We need to fix your mind. Oh man, I am so busy. Okay. Don't worry, don't worry. Castration for your son."
"Daughter."
"Daughter, daughter! I need to prescribe something for myself. Castration for her, lobotomy for you. Get your husband in here and we'll fix him, too. All your problems will go away, I promise."
"Thank you, doctor. Thank you!"
"That's what I'm here for. Fixing humanity. That's what I do. Abortions, sex changes, lobotomies. I've been thinking I ought to start healing the planet."
"Yes. Yes!"
"I am going to prescribe shooting aerosols into the air. Similar to volcanic eruptions. We will block out the sun, cool the earth down, humanity will be saved. Science wins again."
"Doctor, I'm getting a niggling doubt."
"What did you call me?"
"What?"
"Did you just call me a niggler?"
"No! No, no, no! I would never. The doubt, the doubt! Was a niggler. Niggling! Sorry. Oh my God. I have the whiteness."
"Lobotomy on Monday. Castration on Tuesday. Whiteness studies on Wednesday. Might take a couple of days to blot out the sun. Schedule that for Friday. And then I'm going to rest. In fact I'm going to double my rest prescription for myself. Saving humanity is exhausting."
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