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“A Lovely, Nasty Difficulty”

Cook, Joanna; (2023) “A Lovely, Nasty Difficulty”. Social Analysis , 67 (3) pp. 75-81. 10.3167/sa.2023.670306. Green open access

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Abstract

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.

Type: Article
Title: “A Lovely, Nasty Difficulty”
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3167/sa.2023.670306
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2023.670306
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s), 2023. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords: cultural contextualization, culture of humor, dark humor, gendered politics, trolley problems
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10193186
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