The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: And Ninety Nine Other Thought Experiments by Julian Baggini

This is a difficult book to read. No, that’s not right. It’s a difficult book to read properly. The book is a collection of a hundred philosophical. The problem itself may take up a page and there’s a follow-up discussion of another couple of pages. The problems are usually witty and the discussion engaging and it is a real page-turner. And that’s the problem, because while the problems are simple they do involve a pause for reflection. Yet part of the joy of the book is finding something weird in the mundane and there’s an eagerness to see what the next problem will be. However, reading the book without thinking about it would seem to be missing the point.

The problems are generally taken from various philosophical classics. The rail worker’s conundrum appears pretty much as you’d expect it. The tree falling in a forest though is re-worked with a twist that I won’t reveal because it would spoil it. That’s a bit of a problem in discussing any of the problems which would make excellent blog-fodder. Discussing the problem would remove a lot of the reason for buying the book. It’s rather like having a friend tell you that ‘Mousetrap’ is a brilliant play to see because you’d never guess it’s the policeman who’s the murderer. So what I’ll do is grab an example problem that’s already appeared in the Guardian.

Do you remember having a rather disturbed night’s sleep about a month ago? That was the night I stole your brain. After landing my flying saucer in your garden, I crept into your bedroom and surgically removed your sleeping brain. I whisked it to my laboratory back on Pluto and connected it up to a supercomputer running a virtual-Earth program. This computer is currently feeding into your brain the same patterns of electrical stimulation that used to be produced by your sense organs, when you still had some. So it seems to you as though you’re still on Earth. But everything you seem to observe around you, including this newspaper, is actually virtual. You’ve been brain-snatched.

How can you tell this hasn’t happened: that what you’re experiencing now isn’t virtual?

The other obvious problem is familiar to anyone who has read the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Would it be moral to eat an animal that wants us to?

This does paint a picture of a rather wry and arch philosophical read and in places it is. However despite being an atheist Baggini gives a pretty accurate description of hell in his problem “When no-one wins.” This problem, which is too unpleasant to describe, appears too early in the book. It’s raises issues that are worth thinking about, but against the mild introduction it opens doors to places that are extremely unpleasant. Other problems raise the question of the use of torture to prevent atrocities. Interspersing these with the fluffier problems does keep the book sharp and keeps the focus on the importance of establishing the truth of principles.

The icing on the cake is the lack of a bibliography. This would normally be a bad thing, but in this case the source of the problems is listed as a citation at the end of each description. There is an index at the bad of the book to help you find half-remembered problems and also suggested cross-references between problems.

Friends and family can now probably guess what they’ll be getting for Christmas.