0: Should we kill the miraculously-compatible traveler and distribute his organs?
My answer is based on a principle that I’m surprised no one else seems to use (then again, I rarely listen to answers to the Fat Man/Train problem): ask the f**king traveler!
Explain to the traveler that he has the opportunity to save ten lives at the cost of his own. First they’ll take a kidney and a lung, then he’ll get some time to say goodbye to his loved ones while he gets to see the two people with the donated organs recover… and then when he’s ready they’ll take the rest (though he ought not wait long, as patients are dying while he waits).
Sure, most travelers will say no. But utilitarians should want to spread their moral thinking far and wide, thus creating more utilitarians who would be willing to say yes.
I’ll call the principle is shared moral responsibility. Instead of one person claiming a moral authority to kill other people, which is problematic for various reasons, we give each person the moral responsibility (should they choose to accept it) of killing themselves or (as in this case) giving someone else permission to kill them. Of course, when the time comes, some “utilitarians” will agree that they should die under their own moral system, but refuse to die (and allow multiple other people to die instead). But this tradeoff is still the most appealing one I know of.
In a world like this, where organ compatibility is apparently easy to come by, I think I would donate all my organs, but wait until I was old enough for my remaining life to drop substantially in value. If Effective Altruism becomes sufficiently common, I suppose there will be enough people like me to provide almost all the organs that the world needs, even in our actual world where compatibility is rare. For myself, knowing my own “expiry date” would provide some relief to my financial worries, since I wouldn’t have to plan for a very long retirement, nor would I have to plan for unforeseeable medical expenses of unbounded size. (I can’t rule out that I might chicken out when the time comes, though).
1. Pascal’s Wager?
This is a weird one because the “wager” doesn’t seem to have the ordinary meaning of “placing money on a bet that God exists with a non-transferable payout to be received after death” (on which I would surely place a wager, if only for shits and giggles). Rather it means “discard my epistemic standards and choose to believe God exists regardless of what the evidence says”. Presumably you can’t fake it—profess belief but secretly disbelieve—for God would detect your deception. So, the problem with taking this second wager is that humans are not physically capable of choosing to discard epistemic standards in just one domain while keeping strict standards in all other domains. Also, probably if you appreciate the value of good epistemics, you’ll be incapable of letting go of them entirely. Thus, in practice, only those with poor epistemic standards even have the ability to take the wager in the first place, and someone taking Pascal’s Wager is engaging in a status-quo bias in which they promise not to improve their standards.
2. The God-Shaped Hole
I’ll go off-topic. My God-shaped hole is the sense that I have a soul (which I now call a consciousness, because souls are considered to be eternal, but I have no evidence that my soul is eternal). This issue is also known as the hard problem of consciousness, and it seems to me that what makes it hard is that there’s no reason for evolution to give humans a strong-but-wrong sense of having a soul/consciousness, nor is there a reason for evolution to involve genuine souls/consciousness. The hard problem is not hard for Christians, who can just suppose that humans have whatever-God-has-only-smaller. Nor is the problem hard for people that lack a sense of having consciousness/qualia (if such people exist?).
However, several years ago I noticed that the existence of God does not imply eternal life for human souls, nor does the existence of eternal life for human souls imply there is a God. This observation, along with the observation that God really, honestly seems like kind of an evil bastard (especially in the Old Testament), helped me let go of my theism.
But if the God-shaped hole you asked about was really, truly God-shaped, wouldn’t that provide evidence that God actually exists and thus justify theism to at least some extent? If it’s justified to some extent, well, we should at least attend mass on Christmas and Easter, no?
3. Shouldn’t we give all our possessions to the charity?
I recall Scott Alexander argued about this in later posts. Basically the answer is no, on consequentialist grounds, because
the number of people willing to do this is extremely low
people who do this probably harm their own future earning potential (and their own happiness)
by giving a lesser amount, say 10%, and then strongly encouraging/campaigning others to do the same, the total amount of donations can be vastly increased because almost everyone is capable of doing that and might actually do it with enough social pressure, whereas campaigning on “donate literally everything to charity” is never, ever, going to have many takers.
(I don’t feel like putting forth the effort to figure out what kind of hypothetical worldstate is required for giving away everything to actually be the utilitarian best answer)
Only replying to a tiny slice of your post here, but the original (weak) Pascal’s wager argument actually does say you should pretend to believe even if you secretly don’t believe, for various fuzzy reasons such as societal influence, and that maybe God will see that you were trying, and that sheer repetition might make you believe a little bit eventually
0: Should we kill the miraculously-compatible traveler and distribute his organs?
My answer is based on a principle that I’m surprised no one else seems to use (then again, I rarely listen to answers to the Fat Man/Train problem): ask the f**king traveler!
Explain to the traveler that he has the opportunity to save ten lives at the cost of his own. First they’ll take a kidney and a lung, then he’ll get some time to say goodbye to his loved ones while he gets to see the two people with the donated organs recover… and then when he’s ready they’ll take the rest (though he ought not wait long, as patients are dying while he waits).
Sure, most travelers will say no. But utilitarians should want to spread their moral thinking far and wide, thus creating more utilitarians who would be willing to say yes.
I’ll call the principle is shared moral responsibility. Instead of one person claiming a moral authority to kill other people, which is problematic for various reasons, we give each person the moral responsibility (should they choose to accept it) of killing themselves or (as in this case) giving someone else permission to kill them. Of course, when the time comes, some “utilitarians” will agree that they should die under their own moral system, but refuse to die (and allow multiple other people to die instead). But this tradeoff is still the most appealing one I know of.
In a world like this, where organ compatibility is apparently easy to come by, I think I would donate all my organs, but wait until I was old enough for my remaining life to drop substantially in value. If Effective Altruism becomes sufficiently common, I suppose there will be enough people like me to provide almost all the organs that the world needs, even in our actual world where compatibility is rare. For myself, knowing my own “expiry date” would provide some relief to my financial worries, since I wouldn’t have to plan for a very long retirement, nor would I have to plan for unforeseeable medical expenses of unbounded size. (I can’t rule out that I might chicken out when the time comes, though).
1. Pascal’s Wager?
This is a weird one because the “wager” doesn’t seem to have the ordinary meaning of “placing money on a bet that God exists with a non-transferable payout to be received after death” (on which I would surely place a wager, if only for shits and giggles). Rather it means “discard my epistemic standards and choose to believe God exists regardless of what the evidence says”. Presumably you can’t fake it—profess belief but secretly disbelieve—for God would detect your deception. So, the problem with taking this second wager is that humans are not physically capable of choosing to discard epistemic standards in just one domain while keeping strict standards in all other domains. Also, probably if you appreciate the value of good epistemics, you’ll be incapable of letting go of them entirely. Thus, in practice, only those with poor epistemic standards even have the ability to take the wager in the first place, and someone taking Pascal’s Wager is engaging in a status-quo bias in which they promise not to improve their standards.
2. The God-Shaped Hole
I’ll go off-topic. My God-shaped hole is the sense that I have a soul (which I now call a consciousness, because souls are considered to be eternal, but I have no evidence that my soul is eternal). This issue is also known as the hard problem of consciousness, and it seems to me that what makes it hard is that there’s no reason for evolution to give humans a strong-but-wrong sense of having a soul/consciousness, nor is there a reason for evolution to involve genuine souls/consciousness. The hard problem is not hard for Christians, who can just suppose that humans have whatever-God-has-only-smaller. Nor is the problem hard for people that lack a sense of having consciousness/qualia (if such people exist?).
However, several years ago I noticed that the existence of God does not imply eternal life for human souls, nor does the existence of eternal life for human souls imply there is a God. This observation, along with the observation that God really, honestly seems like kind of an evil bastard (especially in the Old Testament), helped me let go of my theism.
But if the God-shaped hole you asked about was really, truly God-shaped, wouldn’t that provide evidence that God actually exists and thus justify theism to at least some extent? If it’s justified to some extent, well, we should at least attend mass on Christmas and Easter, no?
3. Shouldn’t we give all our possessions to the charity?
I recall Scott Alexander argued about this in later posts. Basically the answer is no, on consequentialist grounds, because
the number of people willing to do this is extremely low
people who do this probably harm their own future earning potential (and their own happiness)
by giving a lesser amount, say 10%, and then strongly encouraging/campaigning others to do the same, the total amount of donations can be vastly increased because almost everyone is capable of doing that and might actually do it with enough social pressure, whereas campaigning on “donate literally everything to charity” is never, ever, going to have many takers.
(I don’t feel like putting forth the effort to figure out what kind of hypothetical worldstate is required for giving away everything to actually be the utilitarian best answer)
Only replying to a tiny slice of your post here, but the original (weak) Pascal’s wager argument actually does say you should pretend to believe even if you secretly don’t believe, for various fuzzy reasons such as societal influence, and that maybe God will see that you were trying, and that sheer repetition might make you believe a little bit eventually