I started to watch the famous Harvard online course Justice by Professor Michael Sandel. It mainly discusses ethics and what is the criteria for the right thing. The course started with two utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill. The idea of utilitarian is generally well accepted in China according to my experience. If you ask a random person in China, whether it is right to sacrifice one people’s life for ten, the answer is probable yes. More quantitative and serious application of utilitarian lies in the study of economic. In microeconomics, the concept of utility is well-developed, and rational decision is made by maximizing utility. And many companies and investors will do cost-benefit analysis before making a decision. However, the utilitarian is only one of many criteria about the right thing. When you think about the famous law cased called The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens (1884), you notice the principle of maximizing the total utility is not always the right thing to do.
I’m pretty surprised to see J.S. Mill in Dirac’s biography The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, chapter 3 since I’m influenced by Feynman to think that Philosophy has a very different perspective from Science, so I think a modern physicist might not care much about philosophy. Dirac studied Mill’s book, A system of Logic, carefully, trying to see what it could contribute to physics. Interestingly, young Einstein also studied this book, about fifteen years before Dirac did. Dirac’s reaction to this book is within my expectation. He found the book “pretty dull” and concluded philosophy was not an effective way to figure what makes nature ticks. As I mentioned in my previous post about the history of western philosophy, philosophy actually deals with different stuffs as science does, like ethics or what is the right thing to do, something more related to human beings.
It is pretty fun to see great physicists like Dirac and Einstein both took some interests in philosophy when they were young. As a graduate student in physics, it is good to know I share the same interest with Dirac and Einstein.
