Far more interesting to me was the discussion of the trolley problem here. Ethically, what happens if you switch the trolley problem from a dilemma to a trilemma including killing yourself to stop the trolley? All sorts of interesting stuff falls out, and it becomes blatantly obvious that killing the fat dude is evil. Check it out. Brilliant.
Sick all of last week. Still crappy at posting.
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I realize I'm probably unusual, but this just feels so obvious to me. While I understand the reasoning for other cases I have a really hard time grokking those as anything but fairly uninteresting results from deducing from a system of rules which nobody actually uses to guide their decisions.
My order of preference, which I truly feel is moral.
* Nobody dies.
* I kill the fat dude.
* I kill an arbitrary high number of strangers.
* I kill myself
* Members of my immediate family, or similiarly closely bonded people, dies.
Probably with exceptions made for kids.
This comes back to one of the basic flaws of liberal thinking: Who chooses?
The choice being presented cannot be made without more information. Bob might just be Bob Einstein. One of the five might be a serial killer that will go on to kill a couple hundred people if Bob was chosen.
At the point in time where you must make some silly decision, you don't have enough information.
And even with more information, what gives you the right to make such a choice? I seriously doubt you'd ever have enough information to be able to positively make the right choice.
One person vs. five persons. One saint vs. five killers. One killer vs. five saints. You. Don't. Know.
And even if you did know, that doesn't mean you'd make the right choice. Another person might make a different choice. Both of you might have great reasons. So who's right?
Why is it that liberals think there are those among them that can choose more wisely than the rest of us? That there are some who can infallibly throw the switch the right way every time?
Oh, did I just politicize this discussion? Oops...my bad! But the parallels were too strong to ignore.
Hank and Rasmus, welcome. I don't recognize either of you as prior commenters.
Rasmus first.
Under any standard set of ethics I am familiar with...sacrificing others to oneself is a bad thing. Egoist ethics consider sacrificing self to others bad as well. There's also uniformly a distinction between action and non-action.
IF you kill the fat dude, you are a murderer, and will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. If you kill yourself to save 5 others, you are a martyr/hero/saint. If you let the 5 die, you're on morally fuzzy ground, in between the martyrdom and the murder.
Hank,
The issue is: What if you're the dude at the switch when the train comes around, and you're running with low information.
In your political analogy, it's a good parallel. However, the trilemma largely solves that problem.
Well, I'd have to say that it's not a question of low information, but essentially a dearth of information.
And as to the trilemma, I still wouldn't have enough information to make an informed decision...unless I thought I was so worthless that any other life was worth mine. Then I might be able to make the right choice, but few people would know that.
No, in general, I feel that there is no answer to the question. It's too vague and there are far too many factors that may or may not bear on the exact situation.
There is no way to tell beforehand if your choice was correct. There is no way to tell after the fact that your choice was correct. It's all supposition. The only takeaway from this scenario is that any choice you make may or may not be the right choice. And even after you make your choice there's no way to tell if it was the right choice.
I sort of consider all ethical systems as mostly independent of human morals.
In the sense that the ethics are formal systems and morals some sort of cognitive function probably shaped by evolution to the same extent as other senses.
So while ethical system are constructed and usually strive for non-hypocrisy, consistency and so on morals are shaped only through selection. And hypocrisy is a feature rather than a bug, possibly the *main* feature.
Which also means that most ethical system won't be able to capture human morals properly. Usually people say that means human morals are imperfect, but I lean more towards ethical systems generally being poor models and therefore not that useful.
Anyway, to me it's interesting that my moral intuition so sharply diverges from others' in this case. I suspect it's mostly me sucking a well-calibrated hypocrisy rather than latent psychopathy, but who knows? :)
Do you disagree that what people would *do* is roughly the same thing as my preference list?
I do feel fairly strongly that any ethical system that prescribes action A in situation B, when the vast majority of people in situation B do !A, is simply wrong.
Sorry for the rambling :D
Rasmus,
I am a pretty hardcore ethical egoist ( I don't have the groupist gene). Independent Thinker to Randist to Schmidtz-ian. So I can't push real hard on your save-me-first line.
On the other hand, I'd lay better than even odds that most folks would not divert the train to kill Bob...because we all have a builtin of action as morally more culpable than inaction
(Trolley...it's gonna kill 5 unless you do something...choice 1: let it go. Choice 2: Kill bob. Choice 3: Kill self). In most cases, we do nothing, trolley kills 5, this is morally legit.
However, I think it becomes pretty obvious that killing bob is a wrong thing to do.
Hank,
I agree that you don't have enough information. And many decisions in life are like that. So...what do you DO when there's not enough information, and lives are on the line.
The claim is: It is obviously wrong from all non-egoist ethical systems to kill bob to save the 5 if you could instead kill yourself.
Rasmus,
on other question...
There's a line I use a lot: Direction over perfection.
Some folks would argue that ethical systems exist to create direction of action...and move folks marginally that way, rather than to gain perfect adherence.
If there is insufficient information with which to take an action, then no action can be prescribed.
I have to admit defeat on the trolley problem; adding the suicide option is way better than anything I tried.
That said, I can recover most of the lost ground.
If you could ask Fat Bob whether he's okay with suicide beforehand, you can definitively solve the trolley problem.
The suicide option reveals that normal intuitions take into account the fact you can always check on your own consent. If you wouldn't consent, what right do you have to assume Fat Bob would?
The torture thing makes this clearer. If you're torturing the guilty, to save lives...well, most likely law and Flanigan's morality is simply wrong, and it is fine to torture in that case. (Assuming it can be effective.)
However, if you're going to torture an innocent...err, how do you combine (innocent)&(willingly lets a bomb kill people)? Why would an innocent ever not consent to reveal the location?
On the other hand, it might be worthwhile to concentrate more on models of real situations, rather than on the moral equivalent of optical illusions. Yeah, you can fool the visual cortex. This fact has never crashed a plane.
(I have no problem with curiosity for curiosity's sake, just with pure curiosity pretending to be A Serious Thing.)
This is also illustrated by the torture thing. Does an apparent innocent refusing to reveal the location generally imply that they're secretly guilty, or that they have a really, really good reason to let those people die? The only way to know is to have experience - which we can't get, because it doesn't happen.
The point I'm trying to get at is that these problems' non-existence is what makes them so difficult to tackle; we can't nail down what to apply because there's nothing to apply it to.
Similarly the trolley problem. The point of laws is to prevent wrongs, such as people dying. It's extremely likely that both answers to the trolley situation have computationally intractable knock-on effects. Perhaps letting the five die prevents, on average, thirty more deaths from unintended consequences. Or the reverse. If you've derived that the law should contravene its own purpose, you've made a mistake.
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