Harming another individual is permissible if it is the foreseen consequence of
an act that will lead to a greater good; in contrast, it is impermissible to harm
someone else as an intended means to a greater good.
The distinction to me looks something the difference between
“Take action → one dies, five live”
and
“Kill one → five live”
Where the salient difference is whether the the act is morally permissible on its own. So a morally neutral act like flipping a switch allows the person to calculate the moral worth of one life vs five lives, but a morally wrong action like pushing a man in front of a trolley somehow screens off that moral calculation for most people.
I don’t put much stock in the “unconsciously convinced of our own fallability” argument, as thakil edit: and rwallace presented below—I actually feel this is a case of our social preservation instincts overriding our biological/genetic/species preservation instincts. That is, murdering someone is so socially inexcusable that we have evolved to instinctively avoid murdering people—or doing anything that is close enough to count as murder in the eyes of our tribe.
And when a variation of the trolley problem is presented which triggers our “this is going to look like murder” instinct, we try to alter the calculation’s outcome¹ or reject the calculation entirely².
¹ I have noticed that people only present mitigating circumstances (“pushing the fat man might not work”, “I might not be able to physically push the fat man, especially if he resists”, “the fat man might push me”, and so on) when the situation feels impermissible. They rarely bring up these problems in situations where it doesn’t feel like murder.
² Sometimes by rejecting utilitarianism completely, a la anti-epistemology
So I think my position on this matter is that we have a procedure for determining when something is a value and a bug, it’s called utilitarianism, and unfortunately the human brain has some crippling hardware flaws that cause the procedure to often fail to output the correct answer.
That is, murdering someone is so socially inexcusable that we have evolved to instinctively avoid murdering people—or doing anything that is close enough to count as murder in the eyes of our tribe.
Is evolution fast enough to have evolved this instinct in the past 4000 years? IIRC, anthropologists have found murder was the most common cause of death for men in some primitive tribes. There can’t have been a strong instinct against murder in tribal days, because people did it frequently.
It may not even be instinctual; it could be purely cultural conditioning that makes us instinctively refuse murder-like options. Actually, on the balance cultural conditioning seems far more likely.
Murder is the most common cause of death today for some groups (young African American males, for example).
I don’t believe it is correct in general that intentional killing was the most common cause of death in primitive tribes; and if it was the case in specific groups, they were exceptional. The citation that occurs to me immediately is “Sex at Dawn” (Ryan & Jetha), which goes to some trouble to debunk the Hobbesian view that primitive life was “nasty, brutish, and short”. (Also, my partner is a professional anthropologist with a lot of experience with indigenous South American populations, and we discuss this kind of thing all the time, FWIW.) When population density is very low and resources (including social resources such as access to sexual partners) plentiful, there is no reason murder should be common (if by “murder” we mean the intentional killing of another in order to appropriate their resources). Even in groups where inter-group violence was common (certain American Indian groups, for example), that violence was generally of a demonstrative nature, and usually ended when one group had asserted its dominance, rather than going on until the ground was littered with corpses. The depictions we see of these conflicts in the media are often heavily over-dramatized.
Actually, upon further thought… Even if killing wasn’t the point of such inter-group conflicts, it’s possible that if those conflicts supplied sufficiently many male deaths, then that sort of “murder” might in fact have been the most common cause of male death in some groups. It is pretty certain, though, that intentional killing within social groups was an extremely rare occurrence, likely to have been met with severe social consequences. (Whereas killing an out-group individual might have been viewed as positively virtuous, probably not analogous to our concept of “murder” at all. Edit: more like “war”, I guess :-P )
As for evolving a specific aversion to murder… I think we’ve a general propensity to abide by social conventions, which seems rather more likely to have evolved in social primates than aversions to specific acts. Those of us raised in strict religious traditions probably had, at some point, a severe aversion to masturbation, for example, and it’s pretty clear that no such biological aversion has evolved in humans.
Yeah, it seems moderately plausible to me that in primitive tribes the killing of out-group individuals as part of inter-group violence would be a lot like war.
War requires a great deal more organisation, claity of purpose and discipline. If you’ve ever read much fantasy it’s the difference between a great big fight with warriors (people who may know how to fight, and fight extremely well individually) and soldiers (people who fight as part of a unit, and can be more or less relied upon to follow orders, usually there will be more than one type of unit, each of which has specific strengths and weaknesses and tactical roles.)
Obviously there is a continuum, but at one end we have set piece battles with cavalry, infantry, ranged weapon units of whatever type, and at another skirmishes between loose groups of men who have not trained to fight as a team, and are not capable of e.g. retreating in good order, and are much more likely to attack before the order goes out than soldiers.
I agree that there’s a continuum between engagements involving complex arrangements of heterogenous specialized combat and support units at one extreme, and engagements involving simple arrangements of homogenous combat units at another.
I agree that the former requires more explicit strategy and more organization than the latter.
I mostly agree that the former requires more discipline and more clarity of purpose than the latter.
I agree that certain tactical and strategic maneuvers (e.g., retreating in good order or attacking in a coordinated fashion) become much easier as you traverse that continuum.
I’m not entirely convinced that “war” doesn’t equally well denote positions all along that continuum, but I guess that’s a mere dispute over definitions and not particularly interesting.
(nods) OK, fair enough. Thanks for the clarification.
The principle of double effect is interesting:
The distinction to me looks something the difference between
“Take action → one dies, five live” and “Kill one → five live”
Where the salient difference is whether the the act is morally permissible on its own. So a morally neutral act like flipping a switch allows the person to calculate the moral worth of one life vs five lives, but a morally wrong action like pushing a man in front of a trolley somehow screens off that moral calculation for most people.
I don’t put much stock in the “unconsciously convinced of our own fallability” argument, as thakil edit: and rwallace presented below—I actually feel this is a case of our social preservation instincts overriding our biological/genetic/species preservation instincts. That is, murdering someone is so socially inexcusable that we have evolved to instinctively avoid murdering people—or doing anything that is close enough to count as murder in the eyes of our tribe.
And when a variation of the trolley problem is presented which triggers our “this is going to look like murder” instinct, we try to alter the calculation’s outcome¹ or reject the calculation entirely².
¹ I have noticed that people only present mitigating circumstances (“pushing the fat man might not work”, “I might not be able to physically push the fat man, especially if he resists”, “the fat man might push me”, and so on) when the situation feels impermissible. They rarely bring up these problems in situations where it doesn’t feel like murder.
² Sometimes by rejecting utilitarianism completely, a la anti-epistemology
So I think my position on this matter is that we have a procedure for determining when something is a value and a bug, it’s called utilitarianism, and unfortunately the human brain has some crippling hardware flaws that cause the procedure to often fail to output the correct answer.
Is evolution fast enough to have evolved this instinct in the past 4000 years? IIRC, anthropologists have found murder was the most common cause of death for men in some primitive tribes. There can’t have been a strong instinct against murder in tribal days, because people did it frequently.
It may not even be instinctual; it could be purely cultural conditioning that makes us instinctively refuse murder-like options. Actually, on the balance cultural conditioning seems far more likely.
Yes, this makes sense. Culture has been changing faster than genes for a long time now. If you’re right, shokwave’s point still stands.
Murder is the most common cause of death today for some groups (young African American males, for example).
I don’t believe it is correct in general that intentional killing was the most common cause of death in primitive tribes; and if it was the case in specific groups, they were exceptional. The citation that occurs to me immediately is “Sex at Dawn” (Ryan & Jetha), which goes to some trouble to debunk the Hobbesian view that primitive life was “nasty, brutish, and short”. (Also, my partner is a professional anthropologist with a lot of experience with indigenous South American populations, and we discuss this kind of thing all the time, FWIW.) When population density is very low and resources (including social resources such as access to sexual partners) plentiful, there is no reason murder should be common (if by “murder” we mean the intentional killing of another in order to appropriate their resources). Even in groups where inter-group violence was common (certain American Indian groups, for example), that violence was generally of a demonstrative nature, and usually ended when one group had asserted its dominance, rather than going on until the ground was littered with corpses. The depictions we see of these conflicts in the media are often heavily over-dramatized.
Actually, upon further thought… Even if killing wasn’t the point of such inter-group conflicts, it’s possible that if those conflicts supplied sufficiently many male deaths, then that sort of “murder” might in fact have been the most common cause of male death in some groups. It is pretty certain, though, that intentional killing within social groups was an extremely rare occurrence, likely to have been met with severe social consequences. (Whereas killing an out-group individual might have been viewed as positively virtuous, probably not analogous to our concept of “murder” at all. Edit: more like “war”, I guess :-P )
As for evolving a specific aversion to murder… I think we’ve a general propensity to abide by social conventions, which seems rather more likely to have evolved in social primates than aversions to specific acts. Those of us raised in strict religious traditions probably had, at some point, a severe aversion to masturbation, for example, and it’s pretty clear that no such biological aversion has evolved in humans.
I wouldn’t call that an understatement. The difference between inter-tribe violence and ‘war’ is non-trivial.
Hm.
If you’re motivated to expand on that, I’d be interested.
War requires a great deal more organisation, claity of purpose and discipline. If you’ve ever read much fantasy it’s the difference between a great big fight with warriors (people who may know how to fight, and fight extremely well individually) and soldiers (people who fight as part of a unit, and can be more or less relied upon to follow orders, usually there will be more than one type of unit, each of which has specific strengths and weaknesses and tactical roles.)
Obviously there is a continuum, but at one end we have set piece battles with cavalry, infantry, ranged weapon units of whatever type, and at another skirmishes between loose groups of men who have not trained to fight as a team, and are not capable of e.g. retreating in good order, and are much more likely to attack before the order goes out than soldiers.
I agree that there’s a continuum between engagements involving complex arrangements of heterogenous specialized combat and support units at one extreme, and engagements involving simple arrangements of homogenous combat units at another.
I agree that the former requires more explicit strategy and more organization than the latter.
I mostly agree that the former requires more discipline and more clarity of purpose than the latter.
I agree that certain tactical and strategic maneuvers (e.g., retreating in good order or attacking in a coordinated fashion) become much easier as you traverse that continuum.
I’m not entirely convinced that “war” doesn’t equally well denote positions all along that continuum, but I guess that’s a mere dispute over definitions and not particularly interesting.
(nods) OK, fair enough. Thanks for the clarification.