Institute of Philosophy and Technology

A surgeon could save five dying patients by taking the organs of one healthy person who happens to be a match. Count the lives and the answer is clean. Five outweigh one, and it is not close. Almost no one accepts it.
The interesting part is what the refusal does. The intuition does not yield to the calculation, and it does not dissolve when you restate the arithmetic more slowly. It rejects the whole framework that produced the verdict, and the theory is what ends up being treated as refuted.
What it cannot do is explain itself. We are certain the surgeon must not proceed and cannot name the principle the trade breaks. What grounds a refusal that beats every argument but gives no account of its own?

A moral judgment usually arrives before the reasoning does. You know something is wrong first, and the reasons come afterward, more like things you reach for than the actual ground of the verdict.
Philosophy takes these judgments seriously enough to let them overrule whole theories. A felt verdict with nothing visibly behind it is treated as a fixed point that an argument has to answer to. But an intuition cannot be checked against any independent source the way ordinary evidence can, and two careful people can simply disagree with no way to settle it.
What entitles a conviction that cannot justify itself to override an argument that can?

In 1995 a French court upheld a ban on an activity a man performed for a living, on the ground that the activity was incompatible with human dignity. The unusual part is that the man himself had gone to court to keep the work, and argued that losing it left him worse off. The case raises a question that reaches well beyond it. When a person consents to something others find degrading, dignity can be used to stop them, for their own sake. Sometimes that protection is welcome. Sometimes it overrides exactly the person it claims to serve. Where should the line sit?

Dignity is the word we reach for when we want to say a person's worth holds no matter what happens to them. It anchors human rights law for that reason. But the word is not old in this sense. For most of its history dignity meant rank, an elevated position some people held and others did not. The modern meaning is roughly two centuries old. This week we look at what the word carried with it when it changed jobs, and whether it can hold the weight now placed on it. Can a concept built to mark rank carry the idea of equal worth?

Karl Jaspers wrote The Question of German Guilt in 1945. He had lived through the regime. He had not collaborated. He had remained. The book asked what moral situation a person was in who belonged to a community that had produced mass atrocity, but had not, themselves, produced it.
The answer Jaspers gave still divides the literature. Metaphysical guilt, he called it. A form of implication that attaches not to what one did, but to whom one was among. The case generates pressure points the philosophy has not closed. The dissenter who stayed. The descendant born long after. The member of a community one did not choose.
Can a person be morally implicated by membership alone?

Moral life depends on a quiet division. What I did is mine. What others did is theirs. As long as the line holds, the responsibility is clear.
The cases that strain the line are not exotic. The silent witness. The beneficiary of an arrangement they did not build. The member of a community whose actions they did not perform. None of them caused the harm. And yet something in their position seems to ask for an account.
What does it take to be implicated in something you did not do?

There is a recurring move in moral philosophy. Whenever luck threatens to undermine our judgments, we retreat to a deeper layer of the agent. If outcomes are out of our control, judge intentions. If circumstances are out of our control, judge dispositions. Each retreat is meant to find the part of the person that luck cannot reach.
The question is whether anything actually stays untouched, or whether each layer turns out to be shaped by the same forces we were trying to escape.
How far inward can moral judgment go before there is nothing left to judge?

AI at a Crossroads is a new international online seminar series engaging with aspects of artificial intelligence that remain underrepresented in mainstream discussion — questions about selfhood, meaning, finitude, and autonomy.

IPT is part of the organising network behind the series. The inaugural session takes place on 27 May at 2 pm CET, on the theme Death, Grief, and Self, with Dr. Anna Puzio (University of Bern) and Dr. Clara Saraiva (University of Lisbon).

Full programme: https://www.desirableai.com/events/seminar-series-ai-at-a-crossroads

We accept that luck shapes most of what happens to us. Wealth, health, opportunity, the family we are born into. None of it earned. But moral standing is supposed to be different. Whatever else is unfairly distributed, we tell ourselves that being a good or bad person is something each of us is responsible for on our own.
The question is whether that picture survives scrutiny, or whether it tells us more about what we want morality to be than about what it actually is.
What would change if moral standing turned out to be partly a matter of luck?

A thought experiment is meant to clarify a question by stripping it to its essentials. The Bathtub was built to do this for one of moral philosophy's oldest disputes: is killing worse than letting die.
It has produced the opposite of clarity. Each line of response identifies a different problem, with the verdicts, with the matching, with the inference. The case has become the object of the dispute it was meant to resolve.
What is the method actually accomplishing when its sharpest examples generate this much disagreement?