I think the problem here is that our intuitive moral judgement decides to deny the premise. How do you make a magic box with the properties you state without being inherently amoral? How would you practically arrange for someone, somewhere to die when a button is pressed unless you were someone who inherently either liked killing people, or didn’t care about it? Our intuition is that there has to be a better way to save lives than making a deal with the devil.....
Our moral sense reacts to the social situation. You all know the fat man variation, where you are offered the option of pushing a fat man off a bridge. This seems morally repellent to most people. Make one small change—ask the fat man to jump off the bridge instead of pushing him off—and the whole dilemma changes dramatically in its moral nature.
Thought experiments are always fairly unrealistic, which is one way of explaining why you wouldn’t save the five lives in the original trolley problem: there’s no way you’d be sure enough that the situation was as clear cut as it is presented in the thought experiment. This is the reason why we use the “no killing” rule, and also why people are uncomfortable with the “kill one person” option.
There’s a more practical one, or at least one that doesn’t require being deliberately set up by a diabolical figure, that’s quite similar to the trolley one. Details here http://www.friesian.com/valley/dilemmas.htm but briefly and edited to be more clear-cut:
An underwater tunnel is being constructed despite an almost certain loss of several lives. At a critical moment when a fitting must be lowered into place, a workman is trapped in a section of the partly laid tunnel. If it is lowered, it will surely crush the trapped workman to death. Yet, if it is not and a time consuming rescue of the workman is attempted, the tunnel will have to be abandoned and the whole project begun anew. Ten workmen have already died in the project as a result of anticipated and unavoidable conditions in the building of the tunnel. What should be done? Was it a mistake to begin the tunnel in the first place? But don’t we take such risks all the time?
The strong temptation here is to say ‘we shouldn’t build the tunnel’, but I don’t think that’s a practical response.
Again, the intuition here is to deny the premise. Why should this delay result in scrapping the project? Why not just hoist the section back up, nip in, grab the worker, and lower it back down? Since it hasn’t been lowered all the way, presumably it’s still attached to the crane.
That said, if one accepts the premise, and accepts that it’s really necessary to construct the tunnel for whatever reason, and worth the certain loss of lives, then yes, it’s most practical to crush the guy and move on with the project.
As for the button—having read some short story or other about a case like this where the person killed turns out to be the button-pusher’s wife, I would hesitate to push the button unless I knew it was a truly random process. Moral considerations aside, if it’s going to kill my mother or something I would certainly not press it, not even if it saves five other lives.
That said, if one accepts the premise, and accepts that it’s really necessary to construct the tunnel for whatever reason, and worth the certain loss of lives, then yes, it’s most practical to crush the guy and move on with the project.
I would question the practicality, given that it has rather significant externalities with respect to the effect on all the construction workers on the project. It seems like a situation where inefficiency could be useful for cooperation between the workers. (“Leave no man behind!”)
Moral considerations aside, if it’s going to kill my mother or something I would certainly not press it, not even if it saves five other lives.
If it’s someone I care about I’m not just going to not press it I’m going to destroy the button device and all others like it that I can find!
I don’t see how exactly a tunnel would have such a critical piece that failure to land it at critical time would require the project to start anew. Such circumstances are actively avoided in engineering.
It is really interesting that people who try to make up such ‘kill to save a life’ scenario invariably end up having some major error with regards to how something works, which they try to disguise as a trivial low level detail which they urge us to ignore. Normally, if you aren’t trying to trick someone into some fallacy, it is quite easy to come up with a thought experiment which does not have tunnels that are built cardhouse style and have to be abandoned and started afresh due to failure to lower 1 piece in time.
There’s the very simple scenario for you guys to ponder: you have $100 000 , you can donate $10 000 to charity without noticeable dip in your quality of life, and that could easily save someone’s life for significant timespan. Very realistic, happens all the time, likely is happening right now to you personally.
You don’t donate.
Nonetheless you spend inordinate time conjecturing scenarios where it’d be moral to kill someone, instead of idk working at some job for same time, making $ and donating it to charity.
Ponder this for a while, do some introspection with regards to own actions. Are you moral being that can be trusted with choosing a path of action that’s the best for common good? Hell no, and neither am I. Are you even trying to do moral stuff correctly? No evidence of this happening, either. If you ask me to explain that kill-1-to-save-N scenario inventing behaviour, I’d say, probably some routine deep inside is simply interested in coming up with advance rationalization for homicide for money, or the like, to broaden the one’s, hmm, let’s say, opportunities.
For this reason, rather than coming up with realistic scenarios, people come up with faulty models where killing is justified, because deeply inside they are working for the purpose of justifying a killing using a faulty model.
I wouldn’t press the button. Basically the reason is that the maker of the magic box is responsible for his own moral actions, and I don’t want to have any part of it.
I think the problem here is that our intuitive moral judgement decides to deny the premise. How do you make a magic box with the properties you state without being inherently amoral? How would you practically arrange for someone, somewhere to die when a button is pressed unless you were someone who inherently either liked killing people, or didn’t care about it? Our intuition is that there has to be a better way to save lives than making a deal with the devil.....
Our moral sense reacts to the social situation. You all know the fat man variation, where you are offered the option of pushing a fat man off a bridge. This seems morally repellent to most people. Make one small change—ask the fat man to jump off the bridge instead of pushing him off—and the whole dilemma changes dramatically in its moral nature.
You mean immoral.
Thought experiments are always fairly unrealistic, which is one way of explaining why you wouldn’t save the five lives in the original trolley problem: there’s no way you’d be sure enough that the situation was as clear cut as it is presented in the thought experiment. This is the reason why we use the “no killing” rule, and also why people are uncomfortable with the “kill one person” option.
You didn’t say if you’d press the button.
There’s a more practical one, or at least one that doesn’t require being deliberately set up by a diabolical figure, that’s quite similar to the trolley one. Details here http://www.friesian.com/valley/dilemmas.htm but briefly and edited to be more clear-cut:
An underwater tunnel is being constructed despite an almost certain loss of several lives. At a critical moment when a fitting must be lowered into place, a workman is trapped in a section of the partly laid tunnel. If it is lowered, it will surely crush the trapped workman to death. Yet, if it is not and a time consuming rescue of the workman is attempted, the tunnel will have to be abandoned and the whole project begun anew. Ten workmen have already died in the project as a result of anticipated and unavoidable conditions in the building of the tunnel. What should be done? Was it a mistake to begin the tunnel in the first place? But don’t we take such risks all the time?
The strong temptation here is to say ‘we shouldn’t build the tunnel’, but I don’t think that’s a practical response.
Again, the intuition here is to deny the premise. Why should this delay result in scrapping the project? Why not just hoist the section back up, nip in, grab the worker, and lower it back down? Since it hasn’t been lowered all the way, presumably it’s still attached to the crane.
That said, if one accepts the premise, and accepts that it’s really necessary to construct the tunnel for whatever reason, and worth the certain loss of lives, then yes, it’s most practical to crush the guy and move on with the project.
As for the button—having read some short story or other about a case like this where the person killed turns out to be the button-pusher’s wife, I would hesitate to push the button unless I knew it was a truly random process. Moral considerations aside, if it’s going to kill my mother or something I would certainly not press it, not even if it saves five other lives.
I would question the practicality, given that it has rather significant externalities with respect to the effect on all the construction workers on the project. It seems like a situation where inefficiency could be useful for cooperation between the workers. (“Leave no man behind!”)
If it’s someone I care about I’m not just going to not press it I’m going to destroy the button device and all others like it that I can find!
I don’t see how exactly a tunnel would have such a critical piece that failure to land it at critical time would require the project to start anew. Such circumstances are actively avoided in engineering.
It is really interesting that people who try to make up such ‘kill to save a life’ scenario invariably end up having some major error with regards to how something works, which they try to disguise as a trivial low level detail which they urge us to ignore. Normally, if you aren’t trying to trick someone into some fallacy, it is quite easy to come up with a thought experiment which does not have tunnels that are built cardhouse style and have to be abandoned and started afresh due to failure to lower 1 piece in time.
There’s the very simple scenario for you guys to ponder: you have $100 000 , you can donate $10 000 to charity without noticeable dip in your quality of life, and that could easily save someone’s life for significant timespan. Very realistic, happens all the time, likely is happening right now to you personally.
You don’t donate.
Nonetheless you spend inordinate time conjecturing scenarios where it’d be moral to kill someone, instead of idk working at some job for same time, making $ and donating it to charity.
Ponder this for a while, do some introspection with regards to own actions. Are you moral being that can be trusted with choosing a path of action that’s the best for common good? Hell no, and neither am I. Are you even trying to do moral stuff correctly? No evidence of this happening, either. If you ask me to explain that kill-1-to-save-N scenario inventing behaviour, I’d say, probably some routine deep inside is simply interested in coming up with advance rationalization for homicide for money, or the like, to broaden the one’s, hmm, let’s say, opportunities. For this reason, rather than coming up with realistic scenarios, people come up with faulty models where killing is justified, because deeply inside they are working for the purpose of justifying a killing using a faulty model.
I wouldn’t press the button. Basically the reason is that the maker of the magic box is responsible for his own moral actions, and I don’t want to have any part of it.