Great point. I’ve never thought of that and no-one I’ve ever tried this one has mentioned it either. This makes it more interesting to me that some people still wouldn’t kill the baby, but that may be for reasons other than real moral calculation.
For my own part: I have no idea whether I would kill the baby or not.
And I have even less of an idea whether anyone else would… I certainly don’t take giving answers like “I would kill the baby in this situation” as reliable evidence that the speaker would kill the baby in this situation.
But I generally understand trolley problems to be asking about what I think the right thing to do in situations like this is, not asking me to predict whether I will do the right thing in them.
I agree, I can’t really reliably predict my actions. I think I know the morally correct thing to do, but I’m skeptical of my (or anyone’s) ability to make reliable predictions about their actions under extreme stress. As I said, I usually use this when people seem overly confident of the consistency of their morality and their ability to follow it, as well as with people who question the plausibility of the original problem.
But I do recall the response distributions for this question mirroring the distribution for the second trolley problem; far fewer take the purely consequentialist view of morality than when they just have to flip a switch, even independent from their ability to act morally. I still don’t find it incredibly illuminating, as all it shows is that our moral intuitions are fundamentally fuzzy, or at least that we value things other than just how many people live or die.
Right before the massacre at My Lai, a squad of soldiers are pursuing a group of villagers. A scout sees them up ahead a small river and he sees that they are splitting and going into different directions. An elderly person goes to the left of the river and the five other villagers go to the right. The old one is trying to make a large trail in the jungle, so as to fool the pursuers.
The scout waits for a few minutes, when the rest of his squad team joins him. They are heading on the right side of the river and will probably continue on that way, risking to kill the five villagers. The scout signals to the others that they should go to the left. The party follows and they soon capture the elderly man and bring him back to the village center, where he is shot.
Should the scout instead have said nothing or kept running forward, so that his team should have killed the five villagers instead?
There are some problems with equating this to the trolley problem. First, the scout cannot know for certain before that his team is going in the direction of the large group. Second, the best solution may be to try and stop the squad, by faking a reason to go back to the village (saying the villagers must have run in a completely different direction).
Great point. I’ve never thought of that and no-one I’ve ever tried this one has mentioned it either. This makes it more interesting to me that some people still wouldn’t kill the baby, but that may be for reasons other than real moral calculation.
For my own part: I have no idea whether I would kill the baby or not.
And I have even less of an idea whether anyone else would… I certainly don’t take giving answers like “I would kill the baby in this situation” as reliable evidence that the speaker would kill the baby in this situation.
But I generally understand trolley problems to be asking about what I think the right thing to do in situations like this is, not asking me to predict whether I will do the right thing in them.
I agree, I can’t really reliably predict my actions. I think I know the morally correct thing to do, but I’m skeptical of my (or anyone’s) ability to make reliable predictions about their actions under extreme stress. As I said, I usually use this when people seem overly confident of the consistency of their morality and their ability to follow it, as well as with people who question the plausibility of the original problem.
But I do recall the response distributions for this question mirroring the distribution for the second trolley problem; far fewer take the purely consequentialist view of morality than when they just have to flip a switch, even independent from their ability to act morally. I still don’t find it incredibly illuminating, as all it shows is that our moral intuitions are fundamentally fuzzy, or at least that we value things other than just how many people live or die.
Maybe this can work as an analogy:
Right before the massacre at My Lai, a squad of soldiers are pursuing a group of villagers. A scout sees them up ahead a small river and he sees that they are splitting and going into different directions. An elderly person goes to the left of the river and the five other villagers go to the right. The old one is trying to make a large trail in the jungle, so as to fool the pursuers.
The scout waits for a few minutes, when the rest of his squad team joins him. They are heading on the right side of the river and will probably continue on that way, risking to kill the five villagers. The scout signals to the others that they should go to the left. The party follows and they soon capture the elderly man and bring him back to the village center, where he is shot.
Should the scout instead have said nothing or kept running forward, so that his team should have killed the five villagers instead?
There are some problems with equating this to the trolley problem. First, the scout cannot know for certain before that his team is going in the direction of the large group. Second, the best solution may be to try and stop the squad, by faking a reason to go back to the village (saying the villagers must have run in a completely different direction).