Monty Python and Philosophy

by Gary L. Hardcastle

  Not content with this, though, the Pythons also recognized that people might complain about the inclusion of such complaints into their sketches. To respond to this they had another character in the sketch “Complaints” (the “BALPA Man”) complain about “shows that have too many complaints in them as they get very tedious for the average viewer.” And, of course, including the BALPA Man’s complaint about shows with too many complaints in them itself added to the number of complaints in the show . . . and so Michael Palin then complained about people who hold things up by complaining about people complaining. Such a series of complaints about complaints about complaints could, of course, go on indefinitely, but fortunately a sixteen-ton weight fell on Michael after he’d made his complaint about people who complain about the inclusion of complaints about the Pythons’ sketches, and the chain was broken.

  So, what does all this have to do with the price of butter? Nothing! But it does have a lot to do with the common complaint that philosophers’ examples aren’t relevant to the moral issues that they are supposed to illuminate. In “Complaints,” the Pythons anticipate complaints about their sketches, and incorporate these complaints into their sketches—and then anticipate complaints about their incorporation of these complaints into their sketches, and so on. We find the Pythons thinking about what their audience are thinking, and including their audiences’ thoughts about their sketches into their sketches humorous. And it is the Pythons’ innovative abstraction from writing comic sketches to thinking about why sketches are comic in order to make them funnier that is the key to explaining the value of the apparently bizarre examples that philosophers use. Like the Pythons’ abstraction from complaining about their sketches to complaining about complaining about their sketches (and then complaining about the complaining about the complaining about their sketches!) the examples that philosophers use are supposed to get people to think about their thinking about an issue. Through this, such examples can help people clarify what their views are. It can also help them see if their views are well supported by their reasoning. And, if they are not, either to develop support for them or else to revise them. To see how philosophers’ examples can help people to think more clearly in this way, consider the following standard philosophical example:Trolley Case 1: You are working in a coalmine with a Y-shaped shaft. The long part of the shaft leads to the surface. The two arms of the Y are the shafts from which the coal is being mined. The coal is taken out of the mine by a trolley, which is pulled up by a chain. Unfortunately, the chain breaks, and the trolley runs out of control down the main shaft. The points at the junction currently direct the trolley to the righthand shaft, where it will kill five miners working there. However, you can switch the trolley to the left-hand shaft, where it will only kill one miner. (All miners are equally loved by their families, equally intelligent, and so on.) What is the moral course of action for you to take?

  When faced with this example most people would say that they would switch the trolley, justifying their decision by saying that switching the trolley would cause the least amount of suffering. In response to this a philosopher might then offer the following example:Trolley Case 2: You are working in a coalmine with a single shaft that slopes downward. Trolleys run up and down this shaft taking coal out of the mine. The chain pulling the trolley breaks, and it runs out of control towards five miners working at the bottom of the shaft. You’re standing by the side of the trolley track. You’re too small to stop it by jumping in front of it, but a coworker standing next to you is very large, and if you push him in front of the trolley he would stop it from killing the five miners. Unfortunately, in doing so he would be killed. What is the moral course of action for you to take?

  In this case most people would object to throwing another person in front of the trolley to save the five miners. But at first sight the decision not to throw the coworker in front of the runaway trolley looks odd, since in Trolley Case 1 most people would say that you should sacrifice one person to save five. After all, it seems that the only difference between Trolley Case 1 and Trolley Case 2 is that in the first case one would be throwing a trolley at a person to save five miners, whereas in the second one would be throwing a person at a trolley to save five miners. And it doesn’t seem that what is thrown through the air to save the five miners should make so much moral difference, since in both cases your chosen actions would save five persons through sacrificing one.

  Now, you might say that you will never be faced with the decision of whether to sacrifice one person to save five, and so rather than being useful in defending philosophers from the charge that their examples are impractical and irrelevant, the above discussion really confirms it. But to argue in this way would be to miss the point of the above two Trolley Cases, which is to help people clarify their thinking about what makes an action morally right. To be sure, you are about as likely to encounter a runaway mine trolley as you are likely to be hit on the head by a rubber chicken wielded by a passing knight. But this doesn’t detract from the fact that through using such examples you can assess whether your original view of what makes an action right is correct or not. Like the Pythons’ thinking about the thinking of their audiences’ thinking when writing the sketch “Complaints,” then, your thinking about the Trolley Cases will lead you to think about your own thinking about what makes an action right.

  For example, if you started off thinking that an act was right if it minimized pain (a version of the ethical theory known as “utilitarianism”) you might have to revise your view when faced with Trolley Case 2. You might need to abandon this view altogether and try to find another principle for determining what makes an act right, or else you might decide to try to revise your original view so that you can accommodate your intuition that you shouldn’t push people in front of trolleys, even if doing so will save more lives. In the latter case you might come to endorse a version of “rule utilitarianism,” holding that an act is right if it conforms to a general rule that, when followed, would minimize pain. Thus, since the rule “don’t push people under trolleys” is likely to minimize pain you could modify your original utilitarian position in this way to accommodate the second trolley case. Like the Pythons finding humor in being both performers and audience to their own performance, in constructing their examples philosophers are encouraging people both to think about a particular issue (such as “What makes an act right?”) and also to be the audience to their own thinking, and think about their thinking on this issue.

  Madmen, Blancmanges, Violinists, and Abortion

  The point of the above discussion is not, of course, to show either that people should abandon a utilitarian approach to ethics or that they should become rule utilitarians. Rather, it’s to show that just as the Pythons derived humor from their sketches’ reflexivity and self-reference, so too do philosophers derive understanding (and help others to derive understanding) though using examples to help people reflexively think about their thinking. So far, however, this discussion of the value of philosophical examples has still been conducted at a pretty abstract level. After all, the question of “What makes an act right?” is a question of ethical theory. Given this, even someone suspicious of the worth of bizarre philosophical examples might accept that the type of abstruse reasoning that they seem to encourage would be relevant at this abstract level. After all, such a person might reason, just as the Pythons’ sketches have little to do with the real world, so too does ethical theory have little to do with solving practical moral problems. So, although consideration of the Pythons’ sketch “Complaints” might help to illuminate the value of bizarre examples for philosophical theorizing, it might not be as useful in combating the worries of people like Leon Kass who don’t see what use such examples can be in addressing more immediate, practical issues.

  Luckily, another Python sketch can be used to rescue philosophers from the charge that to the extent that their arguments are based on bizarre examples they are irrelevant to discussions of real moral issues. In th
e “Police Station” sketch (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 7, “You’re No Fun Anymore”) a Scotsman, Angus, reports to the police that a giant blancmange has eaten his wife, and the following exchange ensues:DETECTIVE: Are you mad?

  ANGUS: No, sir.

  DETECTIVE: Well that’s a relief. ’Cos if you were, your story would be much less plausible.

  Like the detective, we usually believe that it’s a good thing to tell the truth to the police. So, were Angus mad and his story less plausible as a result, we would normally think that this was regrettable. (This is why the detective was relieved that Angus was sane!) However, since it would be better for there not to be carnivorous blancmanges roaming around England eating people’s wives it would be better overall were Angus’s tale to be the product of madness. In this sketch, then, the joke’s on everyone who holds the common-sense view (implicitly expressed by the detective when he says that he’s relieved that Angus’s story is plausible) that it is always better to report true things to the police, for in this particular situation everyone can see that it would be better were Angus not to be telling the truth.

  The way in which this sketch works thus has a great deal to teach us about the usefulness of philosophical examples for addressing practical, as well as theoretical, issues in ethics. Just as in the sketch “Complaints” the Pythons derived humor from the type of thinking about thinking that is the basis for the value of philosophical examples, here they derive humor from the related philosophical technique of the “thought experiment.” Like scientists, philosophers also test their hypotheses through performing experiments. However, since philosophers’ hypotheses concern conceptual claims such as “Stealing is always immoral,” they are tested through constructing examples that are designed to discover whether any exceptions could be found that would undermine the conceptual claim that is at issue. Once we see that this is how philosophers work, we can see that the Python sketch “Police Station” is in the form of a philosophical thought experiment that is designed to show the falsity of the commonsense claim that “It is always better to tell the truth to the police than to tell them falsehoods.” We can test this claim by seeing if there are any counterexamples to it. That is, we can test it by seeing if there might be any cases where it would be better were someone to be telling the police falsehoods rather than the truth. And, of course, the case of Angus is such an example, for it would be better if his tale of the carnivorous blancmange were to be false.

  Yet philosophical thought experiments don’t only enable us to test individual hypotheses, such as that tested in the sketch “Police Station.” Rather, by developing a series of such thought experiments philosophers can help both themselves and their audience develop a more nuanced view of an issue. To illustrate this, let’s look at how the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson uses thought experiments to address the question of the morality of abortion. Thomson asks us to imagine thatYou wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back with an unconscious violinist . . . . He has been found to have a kidney ailment . . . the Society of Music Lovers has kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. . . . But never mind, it’s only for nine months.86

  Thomson asks us whether we would consider it morally permissible to unplug the violinist, knowing that if this is done he will die? Thomson expects that most people would say that it is morally permissible to unplug him in these conditions, even if we know that he will die as a result. If she’s right, then we know that most people do not believe that a person has a moral obligation to use her body to support the life of another for nine months if she had nothing to do with him coming to be attached to her. But this type of involuntary attachment does not only occur in fictitious cases dreamt up by philosophers after a few pints and choruses of “Bruces’ Philosophers Song.” It also occurs in the real world. A woman who becomes pregnant through rape will have to decide whether to allow her body to be used by the fetus for nine months, where she came to have it through no action of her own, or whether she should “unplug” it from her. Thus, if you think that it is morally permissible to unplug the violinist, so too should you think it morally permissible to abort in the case of rape. Moreover, if you think that it is morally permissible to unplug the violinist you have to accept that even if you think that the fetus has the right to life this does not necessarily mean that it is always morally impermissible to abort it. You believe that the violinist has this right too, and yet even so you do not think that it is morally impermissible to unplug him.

  Thomson’s thought experiment thus presents a clear-cut case (a violinist is attached to your body without your consent) that allows her to ask a clear-cut question (is it permissible to unplug the violinist?). The answer to this question is then applied back to the real-world issue that Thomson is addressing, and used to show what one would say in that case also. With this in hand we can then turn back to the abortion issue to clarify what our views are about other aspects of it. For example, even though we might think that abortion in the case of rape is permissible we still have to determine whether it is morally permissible to abort a fetus that was conceived through voluntary intercourse. Engaging in voluntary sex could be seen as akin to offering a fetus an invitation to “take up residence,” and if a person acts as if to invite a fetus in like this then he acquires duties towards it. But how far can we go with this argument?

  In the sketch “The Visitors,” (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 9, “The Ant, an Introduction”) Arthur Name takes up Victor’s invitation to have a drink sometime and goes to his house to meet him. However, since Victor only casually invited Arthur out for a drink three years ago, no longer remembers him, and is having a romantic evening in with his girlfriend, it’s clearly unreasonable of Arthur (“Name by name but not by Nature”) to expect Victor to honor the invitation. Thus, simply because one person has issued an invitation to another doesn’t mean that he necessarily incurs any obligations as a result. Since this is so, it’s not true that if the woman acted in such a way that she could be understood as inviting in the fetus she necessarily acquires duties towards it. Now, we might think that this argument from “The Visitors” moves too fast, since whereas Arthur Name won’t die as a result of Victor not honoring his invitation, the fetus will—and this marks a moral difference between the cases. This seems right, but if we say this we’re conceding that the fact that a woman acted as if to invite the fetus into her body is not enough to establish that she has any moral duty to support it. Instead, what now seems to determine whether an abortion is morally permissible is the relative costs that would be incurred by both the woman and the fetus were she to abort or not. And once we recognize that this seems to be the question that lies at the heart of the abortion debate we can develop other philosophical thought experiments to see when, if ever, it is morally permissible to abort a fetus conceived through voluntary intercourse.

  The Practical Value of Philosophical Examples

  Just as the point of the discussion of the two Trolley Cases was not to argue for rule utilitarianism, the point of the above discussion is not to settle the debate over abortion once and for all. Rather, it is to show that the technique that the Pythons used to comic effect in the sketch “Police Station” is relevantly similar to that used by philosophers for a more serious purpose. Just as this sketch showed that we would be wrong to think that it is always better to report the truth to police than to tell them falsehoods, so too can philosophical thought experiments help us to test our beliefs about issues. And this is true even if the subject matter of such thought experiments apparently has nothing to do with the issue at hand. “The Visitors” sketch, for example, doesn’t have anything to do with abortion, but it can be used to show that the fact that an invitation was issued doesn’t necessarily impose any obligation on the issuer. Moreover, that many philosophical thought experiments don’t directly bear on the iss
ues that they have been designed to illuminate is an advantage, not a drawback. Many issues of practical ethics (such as that of abortion) are emotionally charged, and so abstracting from them is useful as it enables persons to think without their judgments being clouded by emotion.

  By now, it should be clear why the bizarre examples that philosophers use in arguments are not as irrelevant as some people believe. But if philosophers are so useful for their ability to use examples and thought experiments to clarify important issues, why are they commonly perceived as being ineffectual, overly-intellectual buffoons of the sort lampooned by the Pythons in the sketch that features soccer-playing philosophers, “International Philosophy” (originally presented in the “German episodes” of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and later presented as part of Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl)? Clearly, philosophers’ reputation for impracticality has a lot to do with the apparent irrelevance of the bizarre examples and thought experiments that they use. But it also has a lot to do with the irony that although philosophers use these examples to think about how to think about issues, they haven’t really taken to heart the lesson to be learned from the Pythons’ self-reflexivity in sketches like “Complaints.” Much of the Pythons’ humor comes from their being aware that they are performing, and playing on their audiences’ expectations of them as performers. They often explicitly recognize that they are performing for an audience, and incorporate what they think the audience will be thinking into their sketches. So, for example, one of the recurring characters in Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a crusty Colonel who stopped sketches when they became too silly. This Colonel stopped the sketch “Hell’s Grannies” (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 8, “Full Frontal Nudity”), for example, when the Pythons moved from joking about Hell’s Grannies attacking people to having “vicious gangs of keep-left signs” attack a vicar. “Right, right, stop it,” he interrupted. “This film’s got silly. Started off with a nice little idea about grannies attacking young men, but now it’s got silly. . . .”)