As with most trolley problems, I have to separate out “what’s the right thing to do?” from “what would I do?”
In the situation as you described it, with the added proviso that there is no other unstated-but-relevant gotcha, the right thing to do is press the button. (By “gotcha” here I mean, for example, it doesn’t turn out that by pressing the button I also cause milions of other people to suffer, and you just didn’t mention that part.)
Were I in that situation, of course, I would be solving an entirely different problem, roughly statable as “I am given a box with a button on it and am told, by a not-particularly-reliable source, that these various conditions apply, yadda yadda.” I would probably conclude that I’m in some kind of an ethical research lab, and try to decide how likely it was that the researchers would actually kill someone, and how likely it was that they would actually give me money, and how likely it was that video of me pressing the “kill a random person” button would appear on YouTube, etc. Not really sure what I would ultimately conclude.
If I were in the situation and somehow convinced the situation was as you described it and no gotchas existed, I probably wouldn’t press the button (despite believing that pressing the button was the right thing to do) because I’d fear the discomfort caused by my irrational conscience, especially if the person who died turned out to be someone I cared about. But it’s hard to say; my actual response to emotional blackmail of this sort is historically very unpredictable, and I might just say “fuck it” and press the button and take the money.
Why? Do we really need more people on this planet? I would be more likely to press the button in a net-neutral case (one saved, one dies, more money for me), provided your other conditions (not a research, not a joke, full anonymity, etc.) hold.
Alternative rephrasing: $4000 dollars is given to your choice of either one of the top-rated charities for saving lives, or one of the top-rated charities for distributing birth control (or something else that reduces population growth).
That means a pure reduction on both sides in number of people on the planet, and- assuming there are currently too many people on the planet- a net reduction in suffering in the long run as there are fewer people to compete with each other, plus the good it does in the short run to women who don’t have to go through unwanted pregnancies and raising the children and all the benefits associated with that (like being able to devote more resources to their other children, or possibly pursuing careers further, or the like).
I’m not prepared at the moment to have a serious discussion about whether extending lives is better than terminating them, but I certainly agree that if the charities which receive the cash are going to do something wrong with it then pressing the button that gives them the cash is correspondingly wrong and I ought not do it.
As with most trolley problems, I have to separate out “what’s the right thing to do?” from “what would I do?”
In the situation as you described it, with the added proviso that there is no other unstated-but-relevant gotcha, the right thing to do is press the button. (By “gotcha” here I mean, for example, it doesn’t turn out that by pressing the button I also cause milions of other people to suffer, and you just didn’t mention that part.)
Were I in that situation, of course, I would be solving an entirely different problem, roughly statable as “I am given a box with a button on it and am told, by a not-particularly-reliable source, that these various conditions apply, yadda yadda.” I would probably conclude that I’m in some kind of an ethical research lab, and try to decide how likely it was that the researchers would actually kill someone, and how likely it was that they would actually give me money, and how likely it was that video of me pressing the “kill a random person” button would appear on YouTube, etc. Not really sure what I would ultimately conclude.
If I were in the situation and somehow convinced the situation was as you described it and no gotchas existed, I probably wouldn’t press the button (despite believing that pressing the button was the right thing to do) because I’d fear the discomfort caused by my irrational conscience, especially if the person who died turned out to be someone I cared about. But it’s hard to say; my actual response to emotional blackmail of this sort is historically very unpredictable, and I might just say “fuck it” and press the button and take the money.
Why? Do we really need more people on this planet? I would be more likely to press the button in a net-neutral case (one saved, one dies, more money for me), provided your other conditions (not a research, not a joke, full anonymity, etc.) hold.
Alternative rephrasing: $4000 dollars is given to your choice of either one of the top-rated charities for saving lives, or one of the top-rated charities for distributing birth control (or something else that reduces population growth).
That means a pure reduction on both sides in number of people on the planet, and- assuming there are currently too many people on the planet- a net reduction in suffering in the long run as there are fewer people to compete with each other, plus the good it does in the short run to women who don’t have to go through unwanted pregnancies and raising the children and all the benefits associated with that (like being able to devote more resources to their other children, or possibly pursuing careers further, or the like).
I’m not prepared at the moment to have a serious discussion about whether extending lives is better than terminating them, but I certainly agree that if the charities which receive the cash are going to do something wrong with it then pressing the button that gives them the cash is correspondingly wrong and I ought not do it.