I honestly don’t have too much to say about this one. I read it as as part of the summer work for my philosophy A-level class I started in September, so I am writing this pretty late. It was an interesting book, despite not being something I would usually read.
Out of the 100 chapters containing a multitude of different thought experiments, there were definitely a few that stood out to me. One of these was the contents of chapter 27, ‘Duties done’.
This thought experiment considered 3 individuals who had promised to send their mothers letters whilst they were travelling.
One person wrote a letter, gave it to someone else and asked them to post it (this person didn’t bother and the letter ended up unsent).
The second person wrote letters and posted them themself, however didn’t put the correct information or stamps on the envelope, meaning that their mother also never received a letter.
The next person wrote and posted all of their letters properly, but in this case the postal system was the source of the problems and its faults meant that the mother never received a letter.
The final person did as wrote and posted all the letters properly, as well as making brief phone calls to check if they had arrived, which they hadn’t.
Did any of these children keep the promise they made to their mother?
Purely from this example you should be able to see why this book was so interesting at points, because on a technical level, it could be argued that none of the children kept their promise, however, especially for the last child, they did all they could to ensure the letters were delivered.
All 4 children were under the impression that their letters had been sent and would eventually reach their parents. From my perspective, the first kid didn’t keep the promise, clearly. And technically neither did any of the others, however the three other children did earnestly believe that their letters had been sent and had been delivered successfully, so in their knowledge they had kept the promise and had done nothing wrong.
Overall, this was certainly an interesting book despite it taking a while to get through. I wouldn’t recommend trying to read this in too large blocks of time as I found after reading too many experiments in a short amount of time, they ended up merging together in my mind. In addition to this, I thought that they began to get a little repetitive throughout the book and therefore I did get bored at times. However, the ideas do have credit to them and are interesting to read and consider
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