Experimental ethics hot tub adventure
I live quite close to the Essex Hot Tub. Which is a fascinating institution and a lovely place—a man gave out a variety of key codes to his backyard hot tub, and over about forty years they have reached more than 30,000 people. He changes them from time to time if he doesn’t like the guests being brought by a particular code. There are maybe five visitors at any given time, mostly women, all silent. Most of them are not in the tub at any given point, but seemingly doing yoga, naked, on wooden platforms among the giant redwoods. It is unreal. Or possibly very real. Anyway.
The important thing about the Essex Hot Tub for this story is that it is extremely hot. I think it says on a piece of paper there that it is 112 degrees, which the internet suggests is very much too hot for a hot tub. So my first several visits to the hot tub involved putting my hand in, or possibly my foot, and then being in pain, and then removing it. And then squatting awkwardly next to the hot tub for a bit, and then repeating. And then giving up and lying naked on a wooden platform and looking at trees. It is hard to say to what extent my removing my limbs from the water was voluntary. I ‘tried’ to keep them in. But then they weren’t.
At some point when I was staring at the hot tub, I thought this was a bad sign for my ability to do anything important in conditions of moderate suffering. Assuming that the hot tub must be safe—because some stranger with a cool hot tub institution plus thirty thousand other people thought so—I would really like it if I could put up with at least a lot of pain, if something morally important were on the line. For instance, could I not get in the hot tub to save someone? Could I not stay in if someone would pay me a million dollars?
Before considering whether this experiment was a bad idea (which seems plausible), I imagined some scenario like that, and stuck my leg back in the hot tub. And imagining that made it way easier! Not only could I keep my leg in for the specified count, but it didn’t seem to actually hurt importantly or be that difficult. It seemed like I could just keep doing it. While this was gratifying in some sense, it seemed sort of worrying in other ways. And it seems bad to try to motivate yourself with imaginary things, especially imaginary threats. Plus maybe I didn’t want to be in lots of pain, so I didn’t try my whole body that time. But what is this phenomenon?