Social Analysis

Following the so-called “paradigm shift” in Danish refugee policy in 2019, the previous ambition of “integration” was replaced by a state strategy of revocation and deportation. This article suggests that the political change reflects the development of a particular “grammar of identity,” where refugees are viewed as exogenous “others” who are neither seen nor recognized as part of the Danish nation and welfare state. The grammar tends to cast externalization as a reasonable and necessary solution to current challenges—best illustrated by the utopic–dystopic vision of sending asylum-seekers off to camps in Rwanda. Finally, the article discusses the risk of the current grammar transmuting into an “anti-grammar” of ethnic annihilation by means of externalization and deportation.

In certain domains of contemporary life, political action connected to people's conscience is of central significance. But what is the conscience, and how may it be studied? Much of the anthropological study of conscientious objection has occurred in places where freedom of conscience is codified as a legal possibility. By contrast, this article investigates the social life of the conscience in Turkey, where discourse on freedom of conscience has been crucial to its system of laicism but which does not recognize the right of conscientious objection to conscription. Drawing upon the testimonies of refusers, it examines the qualities of conscience they reveal, showing their shared characteristics with the ethical subjectivity of objectors in ostensibly more liberal contexts. I adapt the term “forensic conscience” to describe these common characteristics, stressing their universal dimensions.

This introduction situates the trolley problem and other such dilemmas in anthropological debates about contextualization and abstraction both within and beyond the realm of the moral. We highlight some of the criticisms anthropologists have made of the “thinness” of ethical thought experiments while also suggesting some ways in which philosophers might wish to defend them. We also point to a growing interest on the part of a range of anthropologists in formalized, stylized, and abbreviated modes of ethical reasoning, and emphasize the importance of attending to such forms of reasoning, even though they may conflict with our disciplinary preference for the “thick” and the contextualized.

It matters what people do. It also matters what people would do in counterfactual circumstances. Perhaps less obviously, it matters what people think or say about what they would do in counterfactual circumstances. In this article, I consider some of the ethical challenges raised by the ethics of thinking about what to do in counterfactual circumstances. In doing so, I connect some of the most influential recent work on thought experiments in moral philosophy with some of the most influential recent work in the anthropology of ethics.

Anthropologists and philosophers have typically been skeptical about the use of dramatic vignettes in the study of ethics, in particular targeting three characteristic features of such devices—stylization, simplification, and selectivity—and arguing that they undermine ethical inquiry. I argue that this skepticism misconstrues the aims of arguments that incorporate such devices. Rather than seeing them as botched attempts at historical or scientific reporting, we should evaluate dramatic vignettes as a genre of ethically illuminating speculative fiction, useful for understanding the concepts and counterfactual commitments that are embedded in our ethical practices. So construed, they sit in a wider methodological context that vindicates them as a useful part of ethical inquiry.

Anthropologists have criticized thought experiments for the lack of context and depth that they provide. But are they context-free? In this article, I take an ethnographic approach to the development of trolley problems in the 1960s and 1970s, examining the culture of humor in which they were crafted and the gendered political contexts in which they were employed. I argue that, for female philosophers writing about abortion, macabre humor provided a way of cutting through the overblown and the sentimental. Historical and cultural contextualization of trolley problems reveals the work that stylized ethical dilemmas performed. In a highly politicized and gendered context, the “thinness” of examples of “fat” men was methodologically and rhetorically powerful.

Anthropologists are often averse to the decontextualized approaches of moral and other forms of philosophy, arguing that they lack the thickness required to think well and carefully about issues of import. Based on fieldwork with a group of people who meet regularly in pubs to do philosophy, this article argues that decontextualization and abstraction can be useful in attempts to think well about big questions with others, but for oneself. Pub philosophers attempt in their weekly conversations to balance an attention to positioned knowledge with an effort to arrive at general ways of thinking about something. It is not only professional academics and philosophers who value thinking for its own sake, and not in order to find resolutions or conclusions to tricky questions.

Animal protection activism has a longstanding relationship to formal philosophizing, most notably through the philosophy of animal rights. Within that tradition, the stylized ethical dilemma plays an important role. This is especially true for the formative work of Tom Regan, where the lifeboat problem is a central argumentative resource. Based on fieldwork with a Scottish animal protection organization, this article explores that relationship but also examines how else activists approach the use of stylized and abbreviated examples. More broadly, the article is concerned with the equivocating relationship at the heart of this practice—that is, between ethical dilemmas and their apparent stylizations, and, on the other hand, between dilemmas and the philosophical arguments that they are taken to serve.

“Truth or Trick” takes the trolley problem thought experiment as a found object and compares it to the psychotherapist's probe in responding to the collection's call to think with stylized ethical dilemmas rather than against them. The article asks what simplification and reduction are good for, without assuming an answer ahead of time. Despite the vastly different aims of philosophy on the one hand and an ethnographically observed clinical practice on the other, a comparison of two disciplines’ use of devices points to how the removal of noise can facilitate clarification and observation. Simplification appears to be a complementary response to the intractability of the problems such objects aim to address—a relation of inverse correlation.

Anthropologists generally reject philosophical issue-based scenarios such as trolley problems, viewing them as thin and decontextualized in comparison to ethnographic engagement. This article argues, though, that philosophical scenarios and ethnography share a structural homology in that they are both attempts to articulate not only a range of solutions but also the nature of the underlying problem that generates them. It investigates the implications of this homology for anthropological analysis by comparing the Turing Test, here framed as a philosophical scenario, with how secular and religious American transhumanists discuss the possibility of sexual encounters with mechanical or computer-virtual entities.

This article aims to complicate the opposition between “thick description” and “thin” thought experiments by constructing a thought experiment of its own. It compares the use of examples—thick and thin—in the work of Malinowski and Wittgenstein, who came to extremely similar conclusions about the importance of context to meaning, the former around a decade before the latter. By imagining the—by no means implausible—possibility that Wittgenstein read Malinowski, the article asks how it might change anthropological views about thickness and thinness if it turned out that one of the major philosophical sources of our disciplinary preference for “thick description” as a generalized prescription for ethnography took some inspiration for such ideas from Malinowksi's more modest and restricted empiricism.

If trolley problems are accused of simplifying, does this mean anthropologists only ever make things more complex? This afterword focuses on anthropology's own techniques of simplification, in particular, comparison.