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Would You Rather?

"Philosophy Experiments: Where Great Minds Come Alive"
Last night my roommates and I were sitting in our apartment shooting the breeze playing a game of would you rather.  No, this was not the middle school version of would you rather. Instead, these were thought provoking questions like: Would you rather find a case with 5 million dollars or find your true love?

Early in the night, one of the questions was “Would you rather have to kill one child or three adults?” My roommate said that he would rather kill three adults. Several other questions filled the span of an hour, until a question in a similar vein came up, “Would you rather have to beat up a seven year old or a seventy seven year old?”  The same roommate said that he would choose to beat up the seven year old. I told him that it looked like he held two contradictory beliefs. In the first case, it seemed like he thought a child’s life was more valuable; but in the latter case, it seemed like he thought the older person’s life was more valuable. For my roommate’s view to be justified, he must explain why the two cases are different and  how this difference could lead someone to come to two different conclusions; or, my roommate needs to change his decision in one of the cases to be consistent, so that his beliefs cohere.

I hope this personal anecdote accomplishes two things: (1) I hope that it shows you that philosophy can be practiced by anyone at anytime; and (2) that one of the best ways to evaluate our own beliefs is to see if any of our beliefs are inconsistent with one another.  If there are inconsistencies, we either need to have a good reason why two things that seem the same are different and why this justifies different treatment, or we need to change one of our beliefs so that we can have a cohesive, non-contradictory moral belief system.  If you’re interested in testing your own beliefs, to see if they make sense together, take the Philosophy Health Check:
https://www.philosophyexperiments.com/health/

This “health check” won’t tell you if you are right or wrong, only if your answers make sense together. On that note, let’s finish where we started:

Would you rather have consistent beliefs that are all wrong, or inconsistent beliefs that are sometimes right?