Professor James Wilson: "Thought Experiments, Experience, and Ethical Insight"

Much philosophical work in normative ethics makes heavy use of thought experiments. It’s not obvious that thinking hard about escaped trolleys is helpful for making wise real-world decisions. Many philosophers respond that thought experiments are akin to scientific experiments - an analogy I’ve examined elsewhere. This lecture examines whether thought experiments in ethics can be defended as learning from fictions. I argue that this move also misfires: literature is a source of ethical insights not because it is fictional, but because it creates rich worlds of experience. It is precisely this experiential element that thought experiments typically lack.