Thread: Trolley ethics Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.
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Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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I've been puzzled by these thought experiments for a while. Basically they're sets of ethical problems posed by Philippa Frost and expanded by Judith Jarvis Thomson.
For those who don't know, the widely discussed situations include the following:
Case 1: trolley hurtling down the track with 5 people on it. He has the ability to change tracks where there is only 1 person. Should he, and is he morally obliged to, change tracks. There are no get outs - one person dies or five people die.
Case 2: in a hospital there are five people dying because they need different transplants. A healthy person walks in with the correct organs. Should he be killed to save the five?
Case 3: same situation as 1 but it is a bystander who has the ability to move the trolley onto the second track
Case 4: due to medical malpractice, the doctor has caused the serious illness of 5 patients - who can only be saved by the death of a healthy person who innocently walked into the hospital.
Case 5: a fat man is on a bridge over the runaway trolley. Pushing him off will stop the trolley and save the 5 people but kill the fat man.
It seems most people chose to save the five on the track, but are uncomfortable with pushing someone onto the track or kidnapping an innocent person for his organs to save five people.
When I've encountered this before, I've thought that the only moral option in all cases is to allow what is to happen to happen. Because any other option is an active choice to kill people.
But thinking about it again, maybe I'm being a bit ridiculous. If a plane is spiraling out of control, it would be rather idiotic for the pilot to do nothing to try to avoid hitting a densely occupied area. The moral option would be to try to avoid deaths by aiming at a field, even if an isolated farmhouse is in the way.
And I might think that killing a person to save five is a bit ghoulish, but isn't that what we're doing with mass inoculations? I don't know if it happens, but it is conceivable that someone could get a deadly complication from a standard jab. Does the fact that one person died negate the moral obligation to inoculate all children (assuming that this has a protective effect on the whole population of children)?
Deliberately killing an innocent or torturing someone for information to protect everyone else seems instinctively more wrong than exposing a child to something that might kill them for the sake of everyone else.
I guess I'd just been looking at these problems in the abstract, considering them in a real world scenario intuitively seems to give me different results.
Posted by tclune (# 7959) on
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It is said that extreme cases make for bad laws. I suspect the same is true for ethics -- if you want to develop a sound ethical view, begin with the actual things that you need to decide every day, and try to determine what is the most ethical way of dealing with your spouse, your family, the grocer, etc. The real problem that I have with these silly extreme cases is that they don't grow organically out of anything more meaningful than an intro to ethics course syllabus.
--Tom Clune
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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MMm. I don't know whether that is true though. It isn't so hard to imagine situations where we'd have to make these kinds of choices.
I'm not sure they are as silly and as abstract as they first appear.
Posted by Choirboy (# 9659) on
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The danger is in falling into some sort of utilitarianism. The greatest good for the greatest number is not always a sound ethical position, as your case of the transplant "trolley" problem shows. Exactly how to counterbalance that is tricky; in the case of the transplant patients example, the healthy participant is their own moral agent and it is ethically wrong to violate their autonomy by ending their life, regardless of the needs of others. We lack moral justification to compel one person to donate even one kidney when they have a second functioning kidney.
On the other hand, if in the choice between killing 5 on the tracks or killing 1, suppose an evil person had set the train on this course. Are you doing good to kill the one? The evil person bears the responsibility for killing the five (or, for that matter, the one), but the person asked the question bears no responsibility for killing the five, but might acquire responsibility for killing the one. Would that person's inaction be morally the same in this case (as opposed to the people being on the various tracks by accident alone)?
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Choirboy:
Would that person's inaction be morally the same in this case (as opposed to the people being on the various tracks by accident alone)?
Or perhaps more to the point - would that person have difficulty sleeping at night if he knew that he could have made a choice to save the five people?
Posted by HCH (# 14313) on
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Some of the cases are preposterous. In case 2, for instance, are we to assume that this is in some fantasy world in which no other sources of donated organs exists? If the answer to the questions asked is "yes", why aren't the hospital staff busy killing one another? Are we to ignore all questions of tissue-matching? Are we to assume the five patients are each so eager to live as to be willing to accept such as solution?
It's easy to invent such thought experiments, but it is probably not helpful. Of course, some people make money off such questions; consider the "Saw" movies. (No, I have not seen them myself.)
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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HCH, I don't have much confidence in the examples themselves, but it is interesting to see how people's intuitions about ethics are different. As I said above, it isn't so abstract that there are no examples of this kind of thing in the decisions that are commonly made - with regard to health, government spending etc.
Posted by tclune (# 7959) on
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quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
I'm not sure they are as silly and as abstract as they first appear.
While I admire the vividness of your imagination, ask yourself how many of these scenarios you have faced during the entirety of your life. Now ask yourself how many choices you have made today that have ethical significance. If that doesn't sway you off your romantic proclivities, I surrender.
--Tom Clune
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
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quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
HCH, I don't have much confidence in the examples themselves, but it is interesting to see how people's intuitions about ethics are different.
I think the problem is that one is trying to use situations as an intuition pump that are themselves not very intuitive, as HCH says. Though I will admit to a sneaking fascination with them...
(FWIW, I once attempted to write, for my own amusement, a short story based on case 5. In my short story it was a runaway explosives train in the middle of a war that was on course to plunge into a tunnel where workmen were busy repairing some damaged roof supports, and a signalman pushed a fat man off a bridge to stop it. He defended himself before a military tribunal saying that he was saving lives. The military tribunal rejected his plea, on the grounds that if he was so keen on saving lives he should have thrown himself into the path of the train. All very silly really.)
Posted by The Great Gumby (# 10989) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Choirboy:
The danger is in falling into some sort of utilitarianism.
Is it?
First off, I'm not so sure that any sort of utilitarianism can be easily and rigorously identified as a danger to be avoided. But aside from that, I find these scenarios interesting not because they'd ever happen, but because they tell us something about how we approach ethical questions.
Almost everyone would switch the track, but we tend to shy away from pushing the fat man, when the utilitarian equation is identical (possibly more in favour of action in the case of the fat man, as he may well have a shorter life expectancy). This appears to be a deeply ingrained instinct, as it's very hard to explain rationally, but most people would give those contradictory answers. That's the interesting bit.
Posted by Erroneous Monk (# 10858) on
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It seems fairly simple to have a rule that in a scenario where all involved are in peril, reducing the number in peril is a good thing. In a scenario where not all are in peril, reducing the number in peril by putting in peril someone who isn't already, without their consent, is a bad thing.
Other than that, I'm with tclune.
You can torment yourself more TLR by imagining that as Fat Man falls to his death, he shouts "But I discovered the cure for cancer today and didn't make any noooooooootes....."
Posted by Erroneous Monk (# 10858) on
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quote:
Originally posted by The Great Gumby:
Almost everyone would switch the track, but we tend to shy away from pushing the fat man, when the utilitarian equation is identical (possibly more in favour of action in the case of the fat man, as he may well have a shorter life expectancy). This appears to be a deeply ingrained instinct, as it's very hard to explain rationally, but most people would give those contradictory answers. That's the interesting bit.
I appear not to have a "deeply ingrained instinct" then. Hmmm.
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
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quote:
Originally posted by The Great Gumby:
Almost everyone would switch the track, but we tend to shy away from pushing the fat man, when the utilitarian equation is identical (possibly more in favour of action in the case of the fat man, as he may well have a shorter life expectancy). This appears to be a deeply ingrained instinct, as it's very hard to explain rationally, but most people would give those contradictory answers. That's the interesting bit.
I agree with your general point, but I think what we have is evidence that most people would say they'd flick the switch, but no evidence that they'd actually do it.
For myself, I think if some researcher asked me the question, I'd feel strong pressure that the correct answer is 'flick the switch', but if I was actually in the situation, then I'd either a.) faff around like a headless chicken and tell myself afterwards that nothing could be done, or b.) make a heroic attempt to grab the trolley as it passed even if that was manifestly futile.
(Tangentially, I remember the leaders of our church youth group ages ago told us to imagine we were in charge of rescuing trapped potholers from a collapsing cave, and saying what order we would rescue them in based on their life histories (one was a sex offender working on a cure for cancer, one a mother of three, etc etc), with the assumption that the lower in the list you came the more likely the cave was to collapse on you. After some discussion we decided the only ethical approach was to draw lots, which I think was the correct decision, but which somewhat pissed off our leaders.)
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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If anyone is actually interested in answering the question I posed with regard to the unwillingness to kill the innocent hospital visitor and yet willing to risk x deaths during an inoculation campaign, I'd be interested to hear them. I think these are real moral dilemmas which are of a form that we face every day. Whilst at the same time knowing that things I depend upon are very likely created by people with (various kinds of) rubbish lives, I give myself a pass that means I am not morally responsible.
You might think this whole topic is rubbish, that's fine, you've made your point.
I'm interested to discuss how we make ethical judgements when our instincts appear to be contradictory, if you can't see past the flaws in the observation method, there is nothing further to discuss with you.
Posted by HCH (# 14313) on
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Ricardus,
I like your parenthetical tangent, but if you are ever in such a situation, you certainly will not and should not pause for an ethical debate, nor for background checks on those trapped. Save whoever you can.
Posted by TurquoiseTastic (# 8978) on
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A friend of mine was involved with a pacifist group whose take on these situations was that you must never cause anyone to suffer who would not otherwise have done so. So they would take the line that one should not intervene to switch the track, either.
My objection was that if you had this philosophy you would not be permitted by your own ethics to share it with anyone, lest they one day find themselves on board a trolley - without your interference, they would have switched the tracks, but now they won't, killing 5 people who would otherwise have survived...
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
Ricardus,
I like your parenthetical tangent, but if you are ever in such a situation, you certainly will not and should not pause for an ethical debate, nor for background checks on those trapped. Save whoever you can.
I was imagining this in the context of the recent mine disaster - I suspect you'd be doing some kind of triage and getting those out in the most savable condition first, mostly because that is the way that the emergency services are taught to deal with these situations. I doubt anyone is going to stop to draw straws or check whether all of those saved are of the right moral standard.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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quote:
Originally posted by TurquoiseTastic:
A friend of mine was involved with a pacifist group whose take on these situations was that you must never cause anyone to suffer who would not otherwise have done so. So they would take the line that one should not intervene to switch the track, either.
My objection was that if you had this philosophy you would not be permitted by your own ethics to share it with anyone, lest they one day find themselves on board a trolley - without your interference, they would have switched the tracks, but now they won't, killing 5 people who would otherwise have survived...
I'm a pacifist, so maybe this is where I got my initial thoughts from. But it doesn't really work - given that most pacifists think inaction which causes damage is as bad as action. In an airplane situation, I can't see anyone refusing to try to avoid the tower block.
Posted by IconiumBound (# 754) on
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ISTM that all of the cases would fall into the "it depends..." category in an ethics class but have no reality otherwise.
In the case of another famous study (Milgram) volunteers were required to administer electric shocks to a (real) person increasing the voltage until the subject admitted his guilt. In this case the volunteers all obeyed up to the last notch of volts, even enjoying the (pretended) agony of the subject.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
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The inoculation case differs from the dismemberment case in that what you're trying to do when you inoculate the one patient who dies is save their life. Also, if you knew which patient would be the one patient that dies you wouldn't inoculate that patient. On the other hand, you're clearly trying to kill the healthy patient for their organs. In the one case you intend the death of the person and in the other you don't.
The same applies to the trolley case: if you switch the tracks you aren't trying to kill the one person on the line, but if you push the fat man off then you are trying to kill him.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
The military tribunal rejected his plea, on the grounds that if he was so keen on saving lives he should have thrown himself into the path of the train.
That's why it's specified that he's a fat man. He's sufficiently fatter than you that throwing him off will make a difference but jumping yourself won't.
Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on
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I think these are ridiculous moral dilemmas because they box in the response to completely unreal situations and don't come remotely close to resembling reality. None of these situations could actually arise with any degree of certainty and without additional complications.
To bring this closer to current issues, I'm also reminded of the torture dilemma posed by American pro-torture lawyers who proposed the "ticking time bomb" scenario, where they argue rhetorically that torturing one person to get the shut off code and location of the bomb will save many so torturing the one is a Good Thing. No-one will ever devise a decent and proper understanding of ethics from such fake scenarios, and they are frankly damaging because they cause people to consider in advance how to simplify situations to resemble scenes like these.
Posted by que sais-je (# 17185) on
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quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
I think these are ridiculous moral dilemmas because they box in the response to completely unreal situations and don't come remotely close to resembling reality. None of these situations could actually arise with any degree of certainty and without additional complications.
I agree but to me that's the point. Thought experiments often involve a reductio ad absurdam to a ridiculous case. Then you can work back towards why you get contradictory answers, change a bit here and there as people have done in response to this question. You don't get an answer but hopefully will be more aware of the complexity of moral decisions - and less inclined to rely on simplistic rules of thumb (utilitarian or otherwise).
As a small defence of utilitarianism, its first significant modern advocate was Bentham whose concern was reform, rationalisation and codification of the legal system (Utilitarian Ethics p27 by Anthony Quinton). It was not a be all of ethics but a practical approach to creating law in a burgeoning British Empire within which many different cultures co-existed. In such situations - where rules are being created for general application at unknown times, places and situations it seems sensible at least in its negative form ('minimise suffering' rather than 'maximise utility').
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The inoculation case differs from the dismemberment case in that what you're trying to do when you inoculate the one patient who dies is save their life. Also, if you knew which patient would be the one patient that dies you wouldn't inoculate that patient. On the other hand, you're clearly trying to kill the healthy patient for their organs. In the one case you intend the death of the person and in the other you don't.
The same applies to the trolley case: if you switch the tracks you aren't trying to kill the one person on the line, but if you push the fat man off then you are trying to kill him.
Yes, that is an explanation that is used - that treating each person individually as an end is more moral than treating a person as a means to an end.
I don't find that particularly convincing though. I suspect this is much more to do with the physicality of touching and killing someone. To push the fatman off the bridge or to kill the hospital visitor requires actually touching him. To kill someone by pulling a lever or moving an airplane or giving a large population an inoculation is much more distant.
Again, I dispute that these are really unreal situations that are no help at all. I agree they are unreal situations, but they illustrate clearly how we make moral judgments in real situations.
Posted by Alogon (# 5513) on
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quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
In a hospital there are five people dying because they need different transplants. A healthy person walks in with the correct organs. Should he be killed to save the five?
If so, then let's forget about any right to abortion to save the life of the mother. Either of these violates the long-held principle that sacrificing one's own life to save another's, however laudable, is not required of civilians. It may be required of military personnel, but they are paid to take the risk.
[ 24. September 2012, 20:44: Message edited by: Alogon ]
Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on
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You know, after giving it careful thought, my response to the fat man scenario is to ask "you would do that, you would kill me?" First look into my face and tell me that you're going to do it.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:
You know, after giving it careful thought, my response to the fat man scenario is to ask "you would do that, you would kill me?" First look into my face and tell me that you're going to do it.
Exactly, I believe it is the looking-into-the-face which is the problem. If someone could press a button and an unidentified person was sacrificed to save the five, I think there would be less of a moral problem for most people.
When it gets to the point where someone else is deciding to kill someone else for the sake of others, then I'd think we're into 'meh' territory.
Posted by Ricardus (# 8757) on
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quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
I suspect this is much more to do with the physicality of touching and killing someone. To push the fatman off the bridge or to kill the hospital visitor requires actually touching him. To kill someone by pulling a lever or moving an airplane or giving a large population an inoculation is much more distant.
One of the many disturbing results of the Milgram experiments - which, for the uninitiated, showed how easy it is to persuade volunteers to torture each other in the name of science - was that people were more willing to electrocute someone by flicking a switch when the victim was in another room, than by physically holding the victim's hand to an electric plate.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Alogon:
If so, then let's forget about any right to abortion to save the life of the mother. Either of these violates the long-held principle that sacrificing one's own life to save another's, however laudable, is not required of civilians. It may be required of military personnel, but they are paid to take the risk.
I guess that comes down to whether one thinks that the fetus is a full human being in the same sense of someone after-birth. If it is, then there is a direct comparison, if there isn't then maybe it is less of a moral quandary.
I think there are a great many things that we depend on which are the same model these examples, we just don't want or like to think about it in that way. Indeed, we seem to rationalise that indirectly causing pain and suffering to the millions of people that are engaged in making the consumer products we buy is a price worth paying for the convenience they give us, they don't even have to be sacrificed for a life. I suppose the problem is that even if we are aware of those harsh conditions, there are few things we can do to make a lot of difference to their lives, and we like to convince ourselves that their crappy existence is better than it would be if they were not engaged in making things for us. It doesn't matter so much that their current conditions are like if we look at how much poorer they might be.
Posted by Dal Segno (# 14673) on
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quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
If anyone is actually interested in answering the question I posed with regard to the unwillingness to kill the innocent hospital visitor and yet willing to risk x deaths during an inoculation campaign, I'd be interested to hear them.
It is a false comparison.
In an inoculation campaign, the probability of a complication is generally considerably smaller than the probability of a complication from catching the disease. Therefore, on the balance of probabilities, it makes sense for an individual to be inoculated regardless of what any other individual does.
Health professionals are well aware of the risks of inoculation and ensure that they minimise those risks. For example, an allergic reaction to immunisation is very rare. It can be life threatening but is treatable if caught quickly. Therefore children are immunised by trained health professionals at a clinic and are required to wait at the clinic for 20 minutes after the procedure to ensure that they do not suffer a reaction and to treat them immediately if they do.
This is completely different to Case 2, where killing one person to save five is definitely going to cause the death of the one with a probability of 100%.
Three of your five cases (2,4,5) are poorly-thought-out on the grounds that the person taking the action cannot know that the proposed course of action will work (the outcomes for transplants are not good, the fat man on the bridge may not stop the trolley because you might push him too early or too late or a bit to the side). Therefore many would not take the action because they cannot guarantee the outcome. You might kill one person and still fail to save the five.
This is also why the justification of torture argument doesn't work: the argument assumes that the torture of one will save many, but you cannot know that it will. What if you are torturing the wrong person? What if there is no way to stop the bomb? What if the person being tortured holds out until after the bomb goes off? What if you accidentally kill the person being tortured before they tell you?
By comparison to those cases, Case 1 is a straightforward guaranteed choice. Five people die or one person dies: you choose. If you do not know the people then it is clear to me that you take action that you know will save the many rather than the one.
You can make Case 1 like the other cases by assuming that you are mechanically incompetent and are not 100% sure which way the points are turned. You think that they will direct the trolley at the five people but you aren't totally sure. How sure do you have to be that the trolley is going to hit the five and that pulling this lever will divert it to hit the one? What if, by your incompetence, it was going to hit the one, but you pull the lever and it hits the five? I think that, it would only need a little bit of "unsurity" for most to leave things alone rather than risk it. I think I'd pull the lever if I was 90% sure it would save the five, but if I was only 75% sure, I'd probably leave it (or, rather, vacillate until it was too late).
-DS
PS I was expecting your Case 2 to be more like: what if the five people are strangers, but the one person is your spouse or your child or your parent? Would you sacrifice someone you know for five people you do not know?
Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on
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quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
When it gets to the point where someone else is deciding to kill someone else for the sake of others, then I'd think we're into 'meh' territory.
Does "meh" mean "bloody unlikely", because I like it if if does.
Posted by Belle Ringer (# 13379) on
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quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
If anyone is actually interested in answering the question I posed with regard to the unwillingness to kill the innocent hospital visitor and yet willing to risk x deaths during an inoculation campaign, I'd be interested to hear them. I think these are real moral dilemmas which are of a form that we face every day.
I have met people who think some clinical trials are unethical because if you have a new drug or procedure that you really believe will help people in the target population obtain health, how can you intentionally withhold it and substitute a sugar pill for some who come to you for help? You KNOW you are withholding help they need, are asking for, and is available.
One clinical study here: Tuskegee syphilis study
Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on
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William Styron's book "Sophie's Choice" (book better than movie) has Sophie choose on the rail platform at Auschwitz to save one of her children and send the other to the gas. She chooses and loses both.
I think these sorts of scenarios are a 'Sophie's choice', where to follow the reasoning, you will also lose, even if you believe you'll gain or save someone. Sophie ends up living with a mental patient and dies BTW. Making such choices in real life will also kill you by your own hand, and, if you don't do that, we must subject you to interrogation, trial and execution mustn't we.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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Totally straightforward stuff, I would have thought...
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Case 1: trolley hurtling down the track with 5 people on it. He has the ability to change tracks where there is only 1 person. Should he, and is he morally obliged to, change tracks. There are no get outs - one person dies or five people die.
Double effect. I switch the track so that the 5 people will live. In doing so, I can predict that 1 person will die as a consequence of the per se neutral act of switching tracks. But this is not my intention - I would be elated if instead the cart derailed. And it is the lesser evil that 1 person rather than 5 die.
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Case 2: in a hospital there are five people dying because they need different transplants. A healthy person walks in with the correct organs. Should he be killed to save the five?
One must not do evil to achieve good, so I cannot kill someone to harvest their organs. Full stop. The difference to the previous case is the intention of doing an evil, killing an innocent human being, even though motivated by a greater good.
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Case 3: same situation as 1 but it is a bystander who has the ability to move the trolley onto the second track
That does not change anything. It is still the same situation, double effect holds, and one should switch the tracks.
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Case 4: due to medical malpractice, the doctor has caused the serious illness of 5 patients - who can only be saved by the death of a healthy person who innocently walked into the hospital.
There is no relevance whatsoever to the added qualification. One must still let the 5 patients die, since evil must not be done to achieve good.
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Case 5: a fat man is on a bridge over the runaway trolley. Pushing him off will stop the trolley and save the 5 people but kill the fat man.
One must not do evil in order to do good. I cannot kill the fat man, since that is doing evil, even if it causes greater good. Hence the fat man lives, the others die. This is equivalent to cases 2 and 4, not 1 and 3. One is supposed to be misled by the physical setup of the cases, which suggest the opposite associations, but the morals here are obvious.
Seriously, how is this hard? ![[Confused]](confused.gif)
Perhaps one needs to learn the above way of arguing about these moral choices, to show their logical consistency. But I doubt that there was ever a time when I would have hesitated making these moral choices. There's other stuff that I find way, way harder to decide on morally. This seems to me mostly like an attempt to trick people into confusing their morals...
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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Thanks, I like that explanation.
Posted by EtymologicalEvangelical (# 15091) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus
The military tribunal rejected his plea, on the grounds that if he was so keen on saving lives he should have thrown himself into the path of the train. All very silly really.
Not silly at all.
Like your military tribunal, I have often wondered about the attitudes of those who won't put their lives where their mouth is. For example, there are those who complain about large families, on the grounds that they are a drain on the world's limited resources. Well, if they are so concerned to limit the world's population, why don't they commit suicide in order to make room for other people?! Sounds extreme I know, but why do such people consider themselves so important that they feel they have a right to live, but not other people?
It's a bit like someone complaining about traffic congestion, when he is in his car in the middle of it and therefore contributing to it.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
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@IngoB - how about if there was a trolley situation with either a) ploughing into the five people or b) being send on a different loop to the same five people but where there is a person who would die and stop the train?
Is that similar to the first scenario or the fatman scenario?
Posted by Moo (# 107) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Belle Ringer:
I have met people who think some clinical trials are unethical because if you have a new drug or procedure that you really believe will help people in the target population obtain health, how can you intentionally withhold it and substitute a sugar pill for some who come to you for help? You KNOW you are withholding help they need, are asking for, and is available.
What you KNOW may not be true. There was once a study to determine the effectiveness of a treatment for a frequently-fatal condition that sometimes affects premature babies.
The babies were divided into three groups. One was given the new treatment; one was given the traditional treatment; the third was given no treatment.
The highest death rate was for those receiving the new treatment; next highest, those receiving the traditional treatment; lowest those receiving no treatment.
Moo
Posted by Grammatica (# 13248) on
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quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
quote:
Originally posted by Belle Ringer:
I have met people who think some clinical trials are unethical because if you have a new drug or procedure that you really believe will help people in the target population obtain health, how can you intentionally withhold it and substitute a sugar pill for some who come to you for help? You KNOW you are withholding help they need, are asking for, and is available.
What you KNOW may not be true. There was once a study to determine the effectiveness of a treatment for a frequently-fatal condition that sometimes affects premature babies.
The babies were divided into three groups. One was given the new treatment; one was given the traditional treatment; the third was given no treatment.
The highest death rate was for those receiving the new treatment; next highest, those receiving the traditional treatment; lowest those receiving no treatment.
Moo
Moo's right. The new treatment may or may not be effective -- that's what you don't know and are trying to find out.
In a real case, when a new treatment begins unambiguously to demonstrate its effectiveness in a double-blind study, the clinical trials are immediately stopped and all participants are given the new treatment.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
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quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
@IngoB - how about if there was a trolley situation with either a) ploughing into the five people or b) being send on a different loop to the same five people but where there is a person who would die and stop the train? Is that similar to the first scenario or the fatman scenario?
Sorry, I really don't understand what part b) of your scenario is supposed to be about? There is no importance whatsoever to the "physical" setup, i.e., how the tracks are laid. The only thing of interest is the sequence of acts and consequences. More precisely the sequence of your acts and their consequences. You are not responsible for what other people do or have done, much less are you responsible for the way the universe happens to be. You cannot kill an innocent man intentionally, because that would be evil. No matter what. And if the very existence of the universe depended on that, it does not matter in the slightest. You are not the master of the universe, but of your own actions.
You can however, under specific conditions, do something that will lead to the death of an innocent man. Namely if what you do is good or at least neutral, if there is an outcome that is good and which you intend, if you do not intend the death of the innocent man (though you may well foresee it with certainty), and if finally the good you intend is greater than the evil of the innocent death. Why can you do that? Because then a) you are not doing evil, b) you do not intend evil, and c) the consequences of your actions, though partly good and partly evil, are foreseen by you to be more good than evil overall.
More cannot be demanded of you, or anyone: do good, avoid evil. And this is not meant in some abstract or global sense. It's personal, practical, and local. If the greater good of humanity emerges from this (and it generally does), then this is wonderful. But that is an emergent property, not your moral rule.
Well, more cannot be demanded of you by morals. By Christ, that's another matter again...
Posted by Grammatica (# 13248) on
:
Since no one else has mentioned this yet, herewith
"The Ultimate Trolley Problem," complete with the "Non-philosopher's Explanation Page."
Oh, and IngoB, the Doctrine of Double Effect makes its appearance there, too.
[ 26. September 2012, 00:09: Message edited by: Grammatica ]
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
Uhh, I found that neither funny nor enlightening, Grammatica. And I did get 80% of the references without reading the explanation page... It's a missed opportunity, really. This trolley stuff should be made fun of.
Posted by Grammatica (# 13248) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Uhh, I found that neither funny nor enlightening, Grammatica. And I did get 80% of the references without reading the explanation page... It's a missed opportunity, really. This trolley stuff should be made fun of.
Ah well, you're in the minority, then, IngoB. To most people it's a classic.
Really, you should try your hand at a better version.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Sorry, I really don't understand what part b) of your scenario is supposed to be about? There is no importance whatsoever to the "physical" setup, i.e., how the tracks are laid. The only thing of interest is the sequence of acts and consequences.
I think this is a minority view, I believe the majority would pull the switch even though they would not push the fatman. In fact, I don't think your 'do no evil' thing actually works, given it is not obvious what is evil.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
I think this is a minority view, I believe the majority would pull the switch even though they would not push the fatman. In fact, I don't think your 'do no evil' thing actually works, given it is not obvious what is evil.
I can only repeat that I simply do not understand your new trolley setup. You apparently have now assumed that I have judged it, but so far I just haven't. I can make no reasonable comment about the morals of a situation if I do not grasp that situation. Try describing it more clearly.
If the 'do good, avoid evil' thing does not actually work, then there are no morals. Full stop. While the trolley examples are as obvious as one might wish for, it is not necessary that everything is. A moral life consists in doing good and avoiding evil to the best of one's capabilities, not to some abstract gold standard. If one commits evil due to an honest error of judgement, then one has committed evil, but is not culpable for it. (This does not free one from the duty of learning, informing oneself and otherwise acquiring wisdom, but again these requirements must be reasonable. Not all can spend their lives becoming ethicists.)
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I can only repeat that I simply do not understand your new trolley setup. You apparently have now assumed that I have judged it, but so far I just haven't. I can make no reasonable comment about the morals of a situation if I do not grasp that situation. Try describing it more clearly.
I'm sorry, my bad.
There is a split in the track, on one side there are 5 people, on the other one person. However, the split with one eventually loops back around to the five. Hitting the one will stop the train.
So either you hit the one to save the five or you hit the five to save the one.
In my view this is no different to the first scenario except that your double effect thing doesn't seem to come into play because you are intending to kill the one to save the five. Which would appear to suggest that the action is evil and therefore not permissible.
Contrary to what you said before, I think the layout does matter. To me, the act of killing a person is no less evil if you've been able to rationalise it or not, so for me this whole category of evil acts is not really very helpful.
As I said above, my instinctual reaction is to do nothing and let what happens happen. But I've also said, I feel that in a real situation I would make a snap decision to save as many people as possible. I am concerned about people's rights - to life, to not be tortured, to agency. But I suppose for me it is the consequences that are more important than whether or not one way of killing an innocent is 'less evil' than another.
I don't think torture can be justified because it is unreliable and degrades the torturer. I don't think an innocent bystander should be killed for his organs because the risks involved in transplants mean that you are better off keeping a healthy person healthy than in parceling off his organs to sick people. He has rights to life and agency and choice, but then so does the person on the train track who has been killed by the runaway trolley.
quote:
If the 'do good, avoid evil' thing does not actually work, then there are no morals. Full stop. While the trolley examples are as obvious as one might wish for, it is not necessary that everything is. A moral life consists in doing good and avoiding evil to the best of one's capabilities, not to some abstract gold standard. If one commits evil due to an honest error of judgement, then one has committed evil, but is not culpable for it. (This does not free one from the duty of learning, informing oneself and otherwise acquiring wisdom, but again these requirements must be reasonable. Not all can spend their lives becoming ethicists.)
I am disputing your categories of evil. Ethics involves doing the best in (often) bad situations, to characterise some as categorically evil (when by other measures they seem to be the same as other cases) is wrong, in my opinion.
[ 26. September 2012, 07:44: Message edited by: the long ranger ]
Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
There is a split in the track, on one side there are 5 people, on the other one person. However, the split with one eventually loops back around to the five. Hitting the one will stop the train.
So either you hit the one to save the five or you hit the five to save the one.
In my view this is no different to the first scenario except that your double effect thing doesn't seem to come into play because you are intending to kill the one to save the five. Which would appear to suggest that the action is evil and therefore not permissible.
You say it's no different, but then go on to explain quite clearly why it might be seen as radically different. Intention matters.
In case 1, a simple choice of routes, you don't want to kill the lone man. You would be delighted if he were not there, or somehow jumped out of the way. You would, if you could, shout a warning to him to do just that.
None of that is true in this new case where the five are always going to be in the train's path but you have the option of sending using the lone man as a human shield. Here you are sending the train at him hoping that it will hit him. If he jumped out of the way, it would frustrate your plans. You aren't going to warn him, even if you knew he would escape if you did, because the whole point of diverting the train was to use his mass as a brake.
Morally, the situation seems more similar to me to the ‘push him off a bridge' case than the ‘choice of lines' case.
I think the only weakness this probes in IngoB's argument is the idea of intrinsically good and evil actions. It seems to me that the difference between "pushing someone off a bridge" and "switching the points on a railway track" is not that one action is morally neutral per se and the other is intrinsically evil. The intrinsic evil is intentional killing, whatever the physical means used to accomplish it. Switching the points with the intention of killing would be as wrong as killing by any other means.
And I'm not sure that IngoB would necessarily disagree with that - his reasoning doesn't seem to me to require an absolute moral distinction between intrinsically good and evil actions as a wholly separate category from the actor's intentions, because his case in relation to 'intending' as opposed to 'foreseeing' evil consequences I think is quite robust enough to support all of the distinctions he wants to make. Possibly the addition of the category of 'intrinsically evil actions' point is a placeholder for answering future contrivances aimed at subverting those distinctions.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
There is a split in the track, on one side there are 5 people, on the other one person. However, the split with one eventually loops back around to the five. Hitting the one will stop the train. So either you hit the one to save the five or you hit the five to save the one. In my view this is no different to the first scenario except that your double effect thing doesn't seem to come into play because you are intending to kill the one to save the five. Which would appear to suggest that the action is evil and therefore not permissible.
This is indeed no different from the first scenario, and double effect applies just as much or as little. Indeed, nothing in the first scenario says that the track is not looping back in this way.
Switching tracks is per se a neutral act. Nobody is killed in and by the process of switching tracks as such. Again, if after switching tracks the cart derails, nobody dies. This neutral act has two outcomes. One I intend: saving the 5. The other is foreseen but not intend: killing the 1. Saving the 5 outweighs killing the 1. Therefore, in switching the tracks: no evil is done, no evil is intended, and net good is achieved. Therefore it is an allowed action. (Technically, it is even a praiseworthy one, though we should rather consider it "tragic but necessary".)
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
To me, the act of killing a person is no less evil if you've been able to rationalise it or not, so for me this whole category of evil acts is not really very helpful.
If you would not switch tracks in this situation, then I would consider you evil. And I would do so, prior to any argument. I can argue this situation, but frankly it is clear and unequivocal enough to allow for "intuitive" decision with very little hesitation.
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
As I said above, my instinctual reaction is to do nothing and let what happens happen. But I've also said, I feel that in a real situation I would make a snap decision to save as many people as possible.
Exactly! Thereby you do express proper morality, the law of God written on our hearts. The only problem is that things are not always this simple. In this case your decision can come in a snap. However, in other cases this is not true. At that point one must apply argument. Argument based upon what snap decisions tell us about proper morality, but now extended far beyond the point where such snap decisions can be made. Of course, once such arguments have been developed, one can apply them back to cases where snap decisions are in fact possible, to "explain" these snap decisions. And that's just what I've done for your trolley scenarios.
Why is that important? Well, you can make the right snap decisions, but think up the wrong kind of arguments for them. And then, when you extrapolate to more difficult cases, you run into trouble. Or you may be led by a sophist to doubt your correct intuitions (which is what these trolley scenarios are about). Etc.
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
I am disputing your categories of evil. Ethics involves doing the best in (often) bad situations, to characterise some as categorically evil (when by other measures they seem to be the same as other cases) is wrong, in my opinion.
Just because real situations are often confused and difficult to analyse, doesn't mean that our concepts must be confused and that all situations must be difficult to analyse. To intentionally kill an innocent man is evil as such. It never becomes neutral or good. You may think that that it saying too much, but in fact this statement can be extracted from the "snap decisions" that you make. For example, you do not harvest the organs of a random healthy person, just because their death would let five others live. Maybe you don't realize that this particular category of evil is embedded in your moral judgement, but you show it forth by not getting your knife out upon seeing a useful supply of organs walking into the room.
quote:
Originally posted by the Eliab:
I think the only weakness this probes in IngoB's argument is the idea of intrinsically good and evil actions. It seems to me that the difference between "pushing someone off a bridge" and "switching the points on a railway track" is not that one action is morally neutral per se and the other is intrinsically evil. The intrinsic evil is intentional killing, whatever the physical means used to accomplish it. Switching the points with the intention of killing would be as wrong as killing by any other means.
Not so. It is of course true that if one switches tracks with the intention of killing someone, then this act becomes evil - however, still not because of the act itself, but because of the evil intention, which has been super-added to it. Whereas pushing someone off a bridge is an evil act as such. There is, if you will, no room for adding any modifying intention to this act. At least so if we assume that someone is acting who knows what they are doing. If an adult in a sane state of mind pushes someone else off a bridge, we simply will not accept that they didn't mean any harm to the victim. The act as such is not suited for good. And we will also not really care about the outcome in our judgement of the act as such. Even if the victim miraculously survives the fall without the slightest injury, we will still put the perpetrator on trial for attempted murder. The evil is not in what actually happens, but in what is being done.
Perhaps one could say that the "inherent evil" of an act is a kind of immediate and necessary intent "glued to" the action by being situated in a context. Basically, when we say "he pushed him off the bridge" we carve out a conceptual part of the world which under normal circumstances cannot be separated further. It is complex, it has context, but it still is an "atom" of behaviour. If you push someone off the bridge in order to save them from being run over by a train, then you are actually not pushing them off the bridge as such. Rather, you are pushing them out of the way, and since there is no room they then unfortunately fall off the bridge. The "atom" of behaviour is here in fact different, because a change in context (the onrushing train) allowed a further conceptual cut. Now we can argue about what was a behavioural "atom" before, pushing someone off the bridge, as double effect of pushing someone out of the way.
This may sound contrived, but I think it really reflects what happens in us. The physical act may be precisely the same, but there is still a different behaviour going on. And there is a level of intention in these acts that cannot be separated out because it is just part of what makes these acts be what they are. I can however have the intention to push you of the way of the train, because I want to torture you to death rather than see you die so quickly. That is a super-added intention again, an evil one, which is not "glued to" the act. Because I could also just push you as a simple "reaction without thinking", super-adding nothing or perhaps something neutral. Or I could do it because I really wish to preserve your life even at a risk to my own, super-adding a good intention.
When we talk about the intentions of an act, we mean these "super-added" ones, not the ones which are "glued to" the act in the very way with which we conceptually carve the world into pieces. Hence to kill an innocent man is categorically evil, because we have made this category to contain what we see as inevitably evil. The key move is the word "innocent", which actually is a horribly complex concept, with which we however operate quite easily most of the time...
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Not so. It is of course true that if one switches tracks with the intention of killing someone, then this act becomes evil - however, still not because of the act itself, but because of the evil intention, which has been super-added to it. Whereas pushing someone off a bridge is an evil act as such. There is, if you will, no room for adding any modifying intention to this act. At least so if we assume that someone is acting who knows what they are doing. If an adult in a sane state of mind pushes someone else off a bridge, we simply will not accept that they didn't mean any harm to the victim. The act as such is not suited for good. And we will also not really care about the outcome in our judgement of the act as such. Even if the victim miraculously survives the fall without the slightest injury, we will still put the perpetrator on trial for attempted murder. The evil is not in what actually happens, but in what is being done.
Now you've lost me. I can't see that switching a train track to kill an innocent is morally any different to pushing someone off a bridge. In both cases, the person has to die for the others to live, and you've had to make a decision that they should die.
and with regard to this
quote:
Just because real situations are often confused and difficult to analyse, doesn't mean that our concepts must be confused and that all situations must be difficult to analyse. To intentionally kill an innocent man is evil as such. It never becomes neutral or good. You may think that that it saying too much, but in fact this statement can be extracted from the "snap decisions" that you make. For example, you do not harvest the organs of a random healthy person, just because their death would let five others live. Maybe you don't realize that this particular category of evil is embedded in your moral judgement, but you show it forth by not getting your knife out upon seeing a useful supply of organs walking into the room.
I refer you to the answer I gave some moments ago. It is not immoral because it is evil but because the effects are disputable. I'm very happy to discuss this with you, but I can't if you totally ignore what I said in the post you're replying to.
[ 26. September 2012, 19:20: Message edited by: the long ranger ]
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
This is indeed no different from the first scenario, and double effect applies just as much or as little. Indeed, nothing in the first scenario says that the track is not looping back in this way.
In the classic trolley scenario hitting the one person isn't a means to the end of saving the five: it's an unwanted byproduct. Long Ranger has altered the scenario so that the trolley hitting the one man is now a means to the end of saving the five. In the long ranger's new scenario should the one person see the trolley coming and jump out of the way in time the trolley will continue round and hit the other five and thus one's intention will be frustrated. In switching the trolley to go round the loop the other way you are now intending the death of the one person, and therefore it is morally wrong to do it.
Note however that it would be a mistake to separate out the act and the intention. In Long Ranger's scenario, 'saving the five men', 'killing the one man', 'diverting the trolley', 'switching the points', and 'pulling a lever' are all intentional and genuine characterisations of the action. None of those is more 'the real description' than any other. One of them however is morally forbidden, and therefore the act ought not to be done. In the classic scenario 'killing the one man' is not an intentional characterisation of the action and therefore the act is permissible (indeed obligatory).
(Aside: although it is necessary for an act to be permissible that it be permissible under all intentional characterisations, it is not sufficient. An act performed with callous disregard for human life that results in someone's death is morally wrong even though death is not intended.)
However, in the case of a man who saves another's life in order to kill them more painfully later the intention to kill them more painfully later does not characterise the action itself. A philosophical pedant would say that 'killing them more painfully later' was a purpose not an intention.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
In the classic trolley scenario hitting the one person isn't a means to the end of saving the five: it's an unwanted byproduct. Long Ranger has altered the scenario so that the trolley hitting the one man is now a means to the end of saving the five. In the long ranger's new scenario should the one person see the trolley coming and jump out of the way in time the trolley will continue round and hit the other five and thus one's intention will be frustrated. In switching the trolley to go round the loop the other way you are now intending the death of the one person, and therefore it is morally wrong to do it.
Just to be clear - in the loop scenario, you'd let the five die rather than pull the lever, correct?
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
I don't think torture can be justified because it is unreliable and degrades the torturer. I don't think an innocent bystander should be killed for his organs because the risks involved in transplants mean that you are better off keeping a healthy person healthy than in parceling off his organs to sick people. He has rights to life and agency and choice, but then so does the person on the train track who has been killed by the runaway trolley.
I don't think basing the immorality of harvesting organs on the unpredictability of the matter is going to work. Say that the likelihood of an organ transplant working is 80%. (That seems low to me.) In that case, if you harvest the organs to distribute among five people you will on average save four people at the cost of losing one life - the chances of coming out behind are less than one in a thousand. That doesn't seem to me sufficient to make the act itself wrong on merely consequentialist grounds.
Claiming that torture is wrong because it degrades the torturer seems to me to get it the wrong way round: if it wasn't wrong in itself it wouldn't degrade the torturer to do it. The torturer is degraded because he or she ceases to care about the effects on the victim. It follows that we ought to care about the effects on the victim, and that amounts to saying that it is the effects on the victim that make torture wrong.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Just to be clear - in the loop scenario, you'd let the five die rather than pull the lever, correct?
Yes. I think it's equivalent to dropping the fat man on the tracks.
Posted by Choirboy (# 9659) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Totally straightforward stuff, I would have thought...
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Case 1: trolley hurtling down the track with 5 people on it. He has the ability to change tracks where there is only 1 person. Should he, and is he morally obliged to, change tracks. There are no get outs - one person dies or five people die.
Double effect. I switch the track so that the 5 people will live. In doing so, I can predict that 1 person will die as a consequence of the per se neutral act of switching tracks. But this is not my intention - I would be elated if instead the cart derailed. And it is the lesser evil that 1 person rather than 5 die.
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Case 2: in a hospital there are five people dying because they need different transplants. A healthy person walks in with the correct organs. Should he be killed to save the five?
One must not do evil to achieve good, so I cannot kill someone to harvest their organs. Full stop. The difference to the previous case is the intention of doing an evil, killing an innocent human being, even though motivated by a greater good.
Let's modify Case 2 a bit. One person is dying of end stage renal disease. You grab one healthy person of the streets against their will and harvest one kidney for transplantation.
There are no downsides to kidney donation that occur in all donors and most donors see no negative effect at all. Any negative result, like the trolley going on to kill the one person down the line, could be hoped not to occur - in fact, that is overwhelmingly likely to be the case.
Still abhorrent, but in terms of quality adjusted years of life, more good comes from the act than not doing it. This seems to need something more than an appeal to Double Effect.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Choirboy:
Still abhorrent, but in terms of quality adjusted years of life, more good comes from the act than not doing it. This seems to need something more than an appeal to Double Effect.
Um... double effect explains why some acts that have bad consequences are permissible even so. The point isn't to explain the wrongness of grabbing people off the street against their will to harvest their organs. Double effect doesn't apply to the case, since it's difficult to grab off the street to harvest their organs as an unintended side effect.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
In the classic trolley scenario hitting the one person isn't a means to the end of saving the five: it's an unwanted byproduct. Long Ranger has altered the scenario so that the trolley hitting the one man is now a means to the end of saving the five. In the long ranger's new scenario should the one person see the trolley coming and jump out of the way in time the trolley will continue round and hit the other five and thus one's intention will be frustrated. In switching the trolley to go round the loop the other way you are now intending the death of the one person, and therefore it is morally wrong to do it.
Oh, OK. Now I do get where the difficulty is constructed to be. That's a fair point, this is getting more difficult now. But I still do not think about this as killing the 1 in order to save the 5. I think of it in terms of switching to save the 5, which happens to involve killing the 1. What allows me to think like this is that the act of switching is still not an act of killing the 1 as such. It is still intended as an act of not driving into the 5. Of course it is true that now it becomes an act of not killing the 5 only because the 1 will die. Whereas before it was in some sense accidental, though certain (!), that the 1 will die. However, it is still not I who has arranged this. I'm still passive as far as the options go, the causality that the 1 will stop the cart is how the world is, not how I made it be. If I push the fat man in front of the cart, then it is my act which determines how the world is going to be. I'm at the same time creating the option of the cart being stopped, and realizing it, by killing an innocent person. But here I'm not in charge of that. Here I'm still only in charge of where the cart will go, and switching is a neutral act as such. That one way kills 5 and the other way kills 1 is not my doing, and hence not my responsibility. What is my responsibility is that I do not wish to kill the 5, even if that kills the 1.
Actually, that the 1 could jump off the track is an argument in my favor. It shows that the choice that I make is not as such a choice to kill the 1. If I push the fat man onto the tracks, then the only way for the fat man to escape would be to precisely thwart this act. Because it is I who is killing him by pushing him onto the track. But here it is not necessarily so. Admittedly, my choice of switching hurtles the cart towards the 1 and foresees his death. Still, I did not put him on the track there, and stepping off the track does not thwart my act of switching as such. Rather, stepping off the track retroactively takes away they choice I thought I had and renders my act of switching pointless.
And while all this is complicated to argue, I maintain that psychologically it just is not. I maintain that, in particular under "decide right now" pressure, we would still see this switching as "passively" choosing the best of the options presented to us. We sure would hate the choice, but not hesitate. Whereas we would see pushing someone onto the tracks as an "active" killing, and likely avoid it even if put under considerable pressure to act this way.
For me, that is the ground truth. Whether I successfully capture it with the above is a different question. If I have failed in that, then it is a failure of my analysis, it does not change what is the right thing to do.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
Interesting that Dafyd and IngoB seem to be trying to use the same logic to argue the opposite case. I think that if you are in a runaway airplane heading for a towerblock and the only option to stop is to crash through a house, you do it. I can kinda see it is different if the crash is inevitably going to kill someone vs if that is a side-effect, but I don't think it would make a lot of difference to that decision even if you knew there was someone in the house who would inevitably die.
I think Choirboy's kidney example is interesting. Again, I'd find it difficult to do - and would reason that it makes no sense to forcibly take something from a 'complete' person to heal an incomplete person and risk killing both. But I also take the point that Dafyd made about this logic.
So I think I am back to a point about the rights of the individual - that he has a right to his own organs and a right to decide whether to give them to someone else (whilst he is alive) even if there is objectively no risk to himself. Interesting.
I think my point was about torture was that even if you could convince yourself that it was necessary to protect the millions* and that the individual pain was outweighed by the benefits, the degrading effect was important.
*of course, there is a very debatable question whether the millions are safer if it is known that you conduct torture and whether the whole society is degraded by allowing it to continue. For me, I would say it is wrong for all these reasons (over and above some potentially discountable pain of the individual): it doesn't work, it makes the world a more dangerous place, it degrades the torturer and the society.
In all of these arguments, I find myself trying to find reasons to back up my intuitions, which I find very uncomfortable. But I am even less comfortable with just assigning things as 'evil', which seems very arbitrary.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Choirboy:
Let's modify Case 2 a bit. One person is dying of end stage renal disease. You grab one healthy person of the streets against their will and harvest one kidney for transplantation.
There are no downsides to kidney donation that occur in all donors and most donors see no negative effect at all. Any negative result, like the trolley going on to kill the one person down the line, could be hoped not to occur - in fact, that is overwhelmingly likely to be the case. Still abhorrent, but in terms of quality adjusted years of life, more good comes from the act than not doing it. This seems to need something more than an appeal to Double Effect.
As Dafyd has correctly pointed out, this is not a case of Double Effect at all. This is a case of doing evil to achieve good, which is not licit. What is needed for this argument is a definition of why the act of harvesting a kidney against someone's will is evil (even if - as a thought experiment, not as a reflection of reality - this had no immediate negative medical consequence). And that would involve a discussion about the good of bodily integrity and the good of having control over the body that one has. An interesting discussion, no doubt, but one whose outcome for the case at hand we are basically certain of. We are not really in doubt that it is a bad thing to take control over someone's body and take out their body parts against their will. At least I hope nobody here really is, because otherwise I will have to dust off my (fully functional) sword to have a steely argument why it would be a great evil for anyone to try this stunt on me...
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Interesting that Dafyd and IngoB seem to be trying to use the same logic to argue the opposite case.
That's because we do agree on the same "moral logic" as correct framework. We merely disagree on the application to a difficult case (for now).
One should note that we are all swallowing a lot of bullshit here, which is trying to put us into a difficult moral spot. For instance, in all of this, how do I actually know that the cart is going to be stopped once it runs into one person (no matter how fat)? If something like this would happen in reality, we would probably hesitate - and likely hesitate too long to make a choice - simply because we cannot get a clear cognitive handle on the situation.
One could argue that such cases, if constructed with enough complication (as the long ranger may have already achieved), do start to break down our moral framework. But not in a meaningful manner. That is to say, in real life it is not these kinds of difficulties that make it hard to say what is moral or not, but others, and these other difficulties may be quite accessible to our moral framework. I have the impression that many of these are "stress-tests" more for our psychology and cognition than for our morals...
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
In all of these arguments, I find myself trying to find reasons to back up my intuitions, which I find very uncomfortable. But I am even less comfortable with just assigning things as 'evil', which seems very arbitrary.
I think it is entirely correct to go back to one's intuitions - if one gets a clear reading of them. As mentioned, I think morals properly arise from such intuitions. However, I consider your reluctance to call evil "evil" to be entirely unreasonable and likely an outcome of "cultural indoctrination" (for the want of a better word). No matter how reluctant you are to put words to this, in the background of your mind the categories of good and evil do the heavy lifting...
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
One could argue that such cases, if constructed with enough complication (as the long ranger may have already achieved), do start to break down our moral framework. But not in a meaningful manner. That is to say, in real life it is not these kinds of difficulties that make it hard to say what is moral or not, but others, and these other difficulties may be quite accessible to our moral framework. I have the impression that many of these are "stress-tests" more for our psychology and cognition than for our morals...
I disagree with this. Whilst the format of these problems is hard, I think it shows a structural flaw in the ethical processing systems we use instinctively. And I think it is the moral questions which take this form that are the most debated. Abortion-where-the-mothers-life-is-in-danger for one.
quote:
I think it is entirely correct to go back to one's intuitions - if one gets a clear reading of them. As mentioned, I think morals properly arise from such intuitions. However, I consider your reluctance to call evil "evil" to be entirely unreasonable and likely an outcome of "cultural indoctrination" (for the want of a better word). No matter how reluctant you are to put words to this, in the background of your mind the categories of good and evil do the heavy lifting...
Well, equally I could say that your random allocation of certain things as 'evil' seems to me to be a form of cultural indoctrination. I'm not sure how a resort to personal attack helps, I'm afraid.
[ 27. September 2012, 07:58: Message edited by: the long ranger ]
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Interesting that Dafyd and IngoB seem to be trying to use the same logic to argue the opposite case.
That's because there's a well-defined point of disagreement between us. IngoB, if I've understood him, thinks that there is a single morally relevant description of any action. I think that any intentional action can be characterised in a number of ways and all of the intentional descriptions may be morally relevant.
quote:
I think that if you are in a runaway airplane heading for a towerblock and the only option to stop is to crash through a house, you do it. I can kinda see it is different if the crash is inevitably going to kill someone vs if that is a side-effect, but I don't think it would make a lot of difference to that decision even if you knew there was someone in the house who would inevitably die.
There are to my mind two possible relevant differences between this and the trolley case. The first is that what the pilot is doing is steering the plane away from the tower block. The pilot is only steering the plane into the house because the pilot can't steer the plane anywhere else - nothing about the pilot's plan to not crash into the tower block requires that the house be there. Secondly, you could alter the case so that the pilot can't avoid the tower block but can slow the plane down if she steers the plane through the house. That's more akin to the trolley loop (although even more implausible). But even there the plan would work just as well if the house were empty. Destroying property to save lives is fine; nothing wrong with that.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
I disagree with this. Whilst the format of these problems is hard, I think it shows a structural flaw in the ethical processing systems we use instinctively. And I think it is the moral questions which take this form that are the most debated. Abortion-where-the-mothers-life-is-in-danger for one.
You are wrong on both counts. First, so far no "structural flaw" has been identified, and even less has there been any demonstration of problems with our intuitive moral reactions. Furthermore, one could only prove that there is something wrong with our intuition if one had a valid moral structure. And similarly, one could only prove that a moral structure is wrong if one had valid moral intuition. One cannot prove that moral intuition is wrong by pointing to structural flaws in moral arguments. That makes no sense whatsoever, failures do not get proven by errors. Second, all this has very little to do with typical abortion arguments. It is true, there is a small minority of people who would support the right of the mother to kill her child, even if the child is identified as a fully human person. But most arguments on this topic rely heavily on identifying the foetus as human, but not as fully human person. This is why most countries have a (somewhat arbitrary) time limit for abortions, the idea being that after this time the foetus somehow turns into a fully human person. This is why many people find "partial birth abortions" particularly heinous. So in terms of your trolley scenarios, it's then not a single human person that would get sacrificed for five other human persons, but say a chimpanzee (human-like, but not human enough). Few people would hesitate to kill the chimpanzee in all scenarios.
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Well, equally I could say that your random allocation of certain things as 'evil' seems to me to be a form of cultural indoctrination. I'm not sure how a resort to personal attack helps, I'm afraid.
You could say that, but it is obviously false. There's nothing random about my allocation of things as "evil". It is regrettable that you see this as a personal attack. But I'm simply saying that you are misinterpreting your own mental acts because our culture has moved away from the - in my opinion - correct way of doing that interpretation, and has taught you accordingly. In particular, you could be making all good choices and no evil ones, ever, and still misinterpret what you are doing. Thus I'm not making any assumptions that you are "evil".
Now, like all good axioms the moral one "Avoid evil, seek good." would be "circular" if it was not a definition. Basically, I can use it the other way around, and define your evil by what you avoid and your good by what you seek. And since it basically guaranteed that I will find repeated patterns in your behaviour, I will be able to abstract concepts of evil and good from your actions, which do explain what you are doing. And then I can argue about those. The point here is that you cannot really escape this machinery, since it is just a systematic way of talking about your evaluations of actions.
I think the real problem here is to realize what we mean, and what we do not mean, when we say that "good and evil depend on circumstances". It is obvious that how we evaluate a situation depends on what the situation is. Evaluation depends on reality. However, it is perhaps less obvious, but evaluation necessarily always involves something that goes beyond the current situation. I can no more say that this situation is good without some stable "moral reference point" than I can say that this colour is red without some stable colour percept. If the same wavelength of light would associate with different colours every time I move in the environment, then in fact I do not have colour vision, and I will not be capable of saying that something is red. Likewise, my morals cannot fluctuate with every situation, since then I would not have an idea of what to approve and what to reject.
It may not be particularly simple to say what modern post-Christian Westerners consider good and evil, fundamentally speaking. It may not be particularly coherent or compelling either. It may even be a social taboo to talk about all that. Nevertheless, the fact that people are making moral decisions tells us that they do have a moral reference point which is more static than the situations that they face.
[ 27. September 2012, 09:25: Message edited by: IngoB ]
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
You could say that, but it is obviously false. There's nothing random about my allocation of things as "evil". It is regrettable that you see this as a personal attack. But I'm simply saying that you are misinterpreting your own mental acts because our culture has moved away from the - in my opinion - correct way of doing that interpretation, and has taught you accordingly. In particular, you could be making all good choices and no evil ones, ever, and still misinterpret what you are doing. Thus I'm not making any assumptions that you are "evil".
I never said that you'd claimed I was evil. I'm saying that your characterisation of some of the acts in the scenarios above as evil and others as not evil is arbitrary.
I am aware that I have morals. I am aware that I categorise things. I am saying that in this situation I cannot see that your characterisation is anything other than arbitrary.
Your cultural analysis is largely pointless, give up. You've absolutely no idea what my cultural influences have been.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
That's because there's a well-defined point of disagreement between us. IngoB, if I've understood him, thinks that there is a single morally relevant description of any action. I think that any intentional action can be characterised in a number of ways and all of the intentional descriptions may be morally relevant.
That's not quite correct. I do not believe that morals operate on reality as such. I do believe that they operate on cognized reality. In classical terms, morals have to do with motions of the will, but the intellect operates prior to the will. I need to know what something is before I can attach a value to it. Hence there is scope for variance in morals, but it is false to locate that in the intentional descriptions, which are more consequences. Rather the variance lives in the cognitive descriptions. Once I say in what way I conceptually carve up the world for subsequent evaluation, there is no more variance possible for the will in principle, only failure and weakness in practice.
Now, apart from Divine inspiration the human intellect is not capable of understanding the world perfectly. Not even in principle. We may be able to understand specific parts perfectly in some sense, but we cannot hold the whole world in our mind, so to speak. It follows that apart from Divine inspiration our morals cannot be perfect, even if our wills were (and of course our wills are very much not perfect in reality). Hence I do believe that we can have cases where indeed two morals are possible about the same case. But not because something can be good for me but evil for you. Rather because we can honestly carve the same world into different conceptual pieces, and hence arrive at different moral conclusions. Ultimately, I do not believe that such a difference can stand. And hence ultimately, there is indeed just one right and one wrong. But I'm not necessarily committed to locating this ultimate evaluation into human minds. God may be required to break human cognitive gridlocks.
That said, this move from "intentional" to "cognitive" difference is important. Because it means that I can viably argue with you about for example the scenario proposed by the long ranger. Because I'm not saying "your intention is wrong", I'm saying "you are thinking about this the wrong way". There's more hope for eventual agreement in that.
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Whereas pushing someone off a bridge is an evil act as such. There is, if you will, no room for adding any modifying intention to this act. At least so if we assume that someone is acting who knows what they are doing. If an adult in a sane state of mind pushes someone else off a bridge, we simply will not accept that they didn't mean any harm to the victim. The act as such is not suited for good.
Bridge is about to explode, bridge is being attacked by terrorists armed with machine guns, bridge is collapsing, bridge has rampaging elephant on it...
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I do not believe that morals operate on reality as such. I do believe that they operate on cognized reality. In classical terms, morals have to do with motions of the will, but the intellect operates prior to the will. I need to know what something is before I can attach a value to it. Hence there is scope for variance in morals, but it is false to locate that in the intentional descriptions, which are more consequences.
Whereas I would say that: a) intentional descriptions are not best understood as consequences; b) the intentional description of an action is part of what we know under the cognitive description of what happens.
As regards b) I'll start by saying that this is one of the major reasons why behaviourism and similar projects are doomed to fail. To understand something under an intentional description is what it is to understand it as an action rather than as a reflex or as mere behaviour.
Suppose K knows that A, a dictator, has gone mad and is preparing to start a world war. K takes a gun and shoots A.
All the following are true descriptions of K's action:
- Pulling a trigger
- Firing a gun
- Shooting a man
- Preventing A from starting a world war
Each of those could be true without the intention to perform the next action. (People fire guns at a firing range; people shoot people without preventing a world war.) Further, each could be true without the next being true despite the intention (the gun's mechanism might be jammed, the bullet could go astray, A might already have given the order to start the war). But that doesn't mean that those descriptions are consequences of the earlier description.
Compare your case in which one person saves another's life in order to kill him more painfully later - 'in order to kill him more painfully later' describes the rescuer's state of mind not his action. Whereas if K does kill A and A has not already given the orders K just has prevented A from starting a world war. (If J shot A first having been hired by B as an assassin without caring either way about the world war, B and J would both have unwittingly or unintentionally prevented a world war.)
It is also true that if K's shot wakes a baby, then K has woken a baby. But that, although another description of K's action, is not an intentional description of K's action.
Going back to the trolley, if you pull the level all the following are true descriptions: you've pulled a lever, you've switched the points, you've killed one man, you've saved five. And again, all could be done without intending the next level of description and all could fail to achieve the next level. None of those it seems to me has any right to be considered less definitive a description than any other.
Consider a further trolley example. The fat man happens to be working in a water tank over the line. Instead of pushing the fat man onto the tracks bodily, C pulls a switch that opens the water tank dumping the fat man onto the line. If the fat man had climbed out of the water tank in time he would not have thwarted C's act of pulling the switch, yet I do not think that you could therefore say that in pulling the switch C's action did not constitute killing him.
Posted by Dave Marshall (# 7533) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
I do not believe that morals operate on reality as such. I do believe that they operate on cognized reality.
Morals don't operate as morals at all. They describe some pattern of behaviour, and that may inform individual choices, but the pattern doesn't determine choices in the sense that "operate" suggests.
It may be that using "morals" in this way is a category mistake, because a moral choice is only one that must account for the interests of others but is ours to make. I don't think morals have any reality with which to operate.
[ 27. September 2012, 14:46: Message edited by: Dave Marshall ]
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Bridge is about to explode, bridge is being attacked by terrorists armed with machine guns, bridge is collapsing, bridge has rampaging elephant on it...
Funny thing, if you would have read just one paragraph further in the post you are quoting from, you could have saved yourself this post and the world would be an ever so slightly better place.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
b) the intentional description of an action is part of what we know under the cognitive description of what happens.
Indeed, as I have explained myself at length above (response to Eliab). However, there are different kinds of intention involved here, and the intention that is meant by the "classical" judgements of an act (right intention, right act, right results) is not the "cognitive" one, but rather what one may call a "planning" one.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Going back to the trolley, if you pull the level all the following are true descriptions: you've pulled a lever, you've switched the points, you've killed one man, you've saved five. And again, all could be done without intending the next level of description and all could fail to achieve the next level. None of those it seems to me has any right to be considered less definitive a description than any other.
This however is simply confused between act (the first two) and outcome (the subsequent two). If you muddle the temporal and causal sequence, then it is not surprising if you end in a moral muddle.
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
The fat man happens to be working in a water tank over the line. Instead of pushing the fat man onto the tracks bodily, C pulls a switch that opens the water tank dumping the fat man onto the line. If the fat man had climbed out of the water tank in time he would not have thwarted C's act of pulling the switch, yet I do not think that you could therefore say that in pulling the switch C's action did not constitute killing him.
Obviously that would be at least an attempt to kill the fat man. But in switching tracks I'm not killing a single person in order to save five people. Rather, I'm making a forced choice between killing five or killing one. It just happens to be the case that independently of me the world has been arranged such that there is a causal connection between killing one and saving the five others. But I am not responsible for this causal connection, it just happens to exist, and by existing sets up my unhappy choice. If I push the fat man on the tracks, whether directly or through tipping a water tank or whatever, then it is me who is arranging the world so that the fat man's death is causally connected to the five people's survival. I create the option of a single death, and take it, in one act. I do not make use of how the world is, I make the world be in a way I want it to be. Hence I am responsible. The point I was making with avoiding the killing was that for the case of switching the choice otherwise given to me is being removed, whereas in the case of pushing my attempt to create a choice is thwarted. There's a difference there, which reflects the difference of a "passive" or "active" role in setting up the causal chains.
Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Bridge is about to explode, bridge is being attacked by terrorists armed with machine guns, bridge is collapsing, bridge has rampaging elephant on it...
Funny thing, if you would have read just one paragraph further in the post you are quoting from, you could have saved yourself this post and the world would be an ever so slightly better place.
You presume, Sir, that I don't think the next paragraph is utter nonsense.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
Maybe the problem is how you phrase the question and whose interests you highlight in the example.
Consider this horrible example: a group of Jews are hiding from Nazis. One has a screaming baby. Should the mother smother the baby to save the rest of the community from being captured?
If you focus on the baby then no, a million times no. But if you focus on the community, who would suffer certain death if captured, then yes.
Frankly, I'd suspect someone else would quickly silence the baby outwith of what the mother wanted.
I'm sorry to pollute your brains with that horrible example.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
If you focus on the baby then no, a million times no. But if you focus on the community, who would suffer certain death if captured, then yes.
Neither focus is correct. The only correct focus for morals is on what one is doing: one's own present actions, their purpose, their kind, and their outcomes.
Ought you murder a baby? No, that's not the kind of thing you should be doing. Case closed.
The Nazi do not come into this. At least not into what is moral. If you murder that baby out of fear for your own life, then simply admit to your cowardice and depravity. Frankly, such deeds are all too human - and if you repent, even this can be forgiven. At least by God, if not by the mother. But do not try to hide you failings behind fancy moral calculus.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
I don't think the case is closed, as we have seen further up the thread, there are cases where the death of an individual is acceptable to save more people.
Your blanket statements are not helpful.
Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
I don't think the case is closed, as we have seen further up the thread, there are cases where the death of an individual is acceptable to save more people.
The particular case at hand is indeed closed, non-withstanding that in other circumstances the death of a baby may be acceptable.
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Your blanket statements are not helpful.
Quite to the contrary, they are very helpful. If you try to kill that baby, then I shall treat that as attempted murder. And defend the innocent, if need be with deadly force. See how the fog of your confused ethical meanderings has disappeared, leaving some stark but clear choices for all involved?
Mind you, you could have talked of using various means for silencing the baby, including - if all else fails - stopping temporarily all air going in and out of the tiny body, possibly until the baby drops unconscious. And yes, that would have been allowed by double effect, even if there is a risk that the baby might die due to a lack of oxygen. But no. You had to think of killing the baby by smothering it, so that silence would be assured henceforth.
That's evil. That's allowing the Nazis to win, even if they never find you. Over my dead body.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
You need to go and calm down.
This is not 'my' illustration and nor have I somehow allowed Naziism to win by suggesting maybe these cases are a tad more complicated than you make out.
Whoever is in charge of these things can close the thread, I'm done here.
Posted by Moo (# 107) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Whoever is in charge of these things can close the thread, I'm done here.
In that case, I feel free to introduce the question of whether this kind of discussion helps anyone to make real life decisions.
I am coming to this from a peculiar angle. When my daughters were in school, they were asked to discuss these kinds of decisions. They were eleven years old at the time. The rationale was that this was supposed to give them decision-making experience that would enable them to say no to drugs. ![[Ultra confused]](graemlins/confused2.gif)
The stories they were asked to consider were - A spaceship has an accident, the result of which is that there is not enough food and oxygen to enable everyone to survive until the ship can land. Specific characteristics of each person are listed; I don't remember any of them. Who should be shoved out of the spaceship?
- There has been a worldwide nuclear explosion such that there are only ten survivors; they have to stay in a fallout shelter for a year before they can safely leave. There is only food and air for six. The personal characteristics of each survivor are listed. The only two I remember are a man who has necessary skills and is capable of fathering a child. (The world has to be re-populated.) His wife has no useful skills and is infertile.
My younger daughter was especially distressed by this second story. She said it would be terrible to kill the man's wife, and what if he didn't want to have sex with any other woman? My older daughter had never mentioned this story to me until her sister talked about it. Then she told me that when she was in sixth grade, the teacher formed them into small groups and told them to come to a unanimous decision about who should be excluded. She said that when she got into her small group, she said to the others, "You discuss and decide; I'm not going to say a word." I was very proud of her, and I figured her father and I, as well as the people at church, had done something right.
Incidentally, neither of my daughters ever used drugs, but many of the other children did.
I'm sorry to bang on like this, but I'm still mad about it thirty years later.
Moo
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
b) the intentional description of an action is part of what we know under the cognitive description of what happens.
However, there are different kinds of intention involved here, and the intention that is meant by the "classical" judgements of an act (right intention, right act, right results) is not the "cognitive" one, but rather what one may call a "planning" one.
If so, that's somewhat irrelevant to the point that there are cognitive intentions and you can't get at whether the act was the right act without them.
quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
Going back to the trolley, if you pull the level all the following are true descriptions: you've pulled a lever, you've switched the points, you've killed one man, you've saved five. And again, all could be done without intending the next level of description and all could fail to achieve the next level. None of those it seems to me has any right to be considered less definitive a description than any other.
This however is simply confused between act (the first two) and outcome (the subsequent two). If you muddle the temporal and causal sequence, then it is not surprising if you end in a moral muddle.
That line of reasoning taken far enough would leave us with the position that the only thing that is really our act is send a message down the nervous system from the brain. Changing the points is as much a consequence of pushing the lever as sending the trolley down the other fork is a consequence of changing the points and so on.
Suppose the five people aren't on the track and it isn't a loop - in that case it's obvious that switching the points is killing the one man.
Either way, arguing that the man's death was a consequence of switching the tracks but that you didn't kill him appears to me somewhat like the faulty robot in Asimov. The faulty robot was allowed to let people die and so could drop weights on people because he lets go 'intending to catch the weight' and then 'changes his mind' merely letting the weight kill them.
quote:
But in switching tracks I'm not killing a single person in order to save five people. Rather, I'm making a forced choice between killing five or killing one.
Your forced choice is between letting five die and killing one. That letting people die is not the same as killing them is the fundamental point of difference between non-consequentialist ethics and consequentialist ethics.
Two more cases:
1) No loop. The trolley is headed for five and can be switched on to a track with one man. The one man is close enough that he will hear a warning shout but not so close that he can't get off the track in time.
2) As above but with the loop. If the trolley doesn't hit the one man it will kill the five either way. Hitting the one man will stop it.
My claim here is that the doctrine of double effect means that obligations to shout warnings are untouched. But if switching the tracks in the loop case is the right thing to do when the one can't hear your warning, it must still be the right thing when the one man can hear.
Posted by Choirboy (# 9659) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Choirboy:
Let's modify Case 2 a bit. One person is dying of end stage renal disease. You grab one healthy person of the streets against their will and harvest one kidney for transplantation.
There are no downsides to kidney donation that occur in all donors and most donors see no negative effect at all. Any negative result, like the trolley going on to kill the one person down the line, could be hoped not to occur - in fact, that is overwhelmingly likely to be the case. Still abhorrent, but in terms of quality adjusted years of life, more good comes from the act than not doing it. This seems to need something more than an appeal to Double Effect.
As Dafyd has correctly pointed out, this is not a case of Double Effect at all. This is a case of doing evil to achieve good, which is not licit. What is needed for this argument is a definition of why the act of harvesting a kidney against someone's will is evil (even if - as a thought experiment, not as a reflection of reality - this had no immediate negative medical consequence). And that would involve a discussion about the good of bodily integrity and the good of having control over the body that one has. An interesting discussion, no doubt, but one whose outcome for the case at hand we are basically certain of. We are not really in doubt that it is a bad thing to take control over someone's body and take out their body parts against their will. At least I hope nobody here really is, because otherwise I will have to dust off my (fully functional) sword to have a steely argument why it would be a great evil for anyone to try this stunt on me...
I agree that double effect does not apply to the case of forced kidney donation.
However, if I had to choose, I'd rather be the person whose kidney was stolen than the one person left on the tracks to die. Yet, this is excused by double effect and the kidney donation case is not. It does not seem that double effect is behaving in a way that consistently protects the minority; it functions as a convenient excuse for authoritarian utilitarianism - a decision by some self-appointed authority to deliberately sacrifice an unwilling party for others.
Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
I'm sorry to bang on like this, but I'm still mad about it thirty years later.
Why?
When I was at school 'balloon debates' (of which this is a variation) were a rhetorical staple. I can't see why any parent would be shocked or angry about them. I don't get what the objection is.
Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on
:
Dunno about Moo, but they seem pretty inappropriate for eleven-year-olds, at least some of whom haven't learnt to turn off their emotional reactions to hypothetical scenarios yet. Mine would be deeply upset by contemplating such scenarios (though I know others who would leap gleefully on them). I'd say wait till high school, when everyone catches up developmentally. At least for hypotheticals with death and disaster in them.
Posted by Moo (# 107) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
When I was at school 'balloon debates' (of which this is a variation) were a rhetorical staple. I can't see why any parent would be shocked or angry about them. I don't get what the objection is.
My objection is that they give eleven-year-olds the idea that they can and should decide which lives are more valuable than other lives.
Moo
Posted by Doublethink (# 1984) on
:
Isn't that exactly the point ? If you take the position you are saying changing the outcome so that you actively kill someone is an absolute evil so you don't do it - even if that ultimately results in more people dying over all. In other words you choose do no evil, over the lesser of two evils.
But that is a moral position you can debate.
Posted by Doublethink (# 1984) on
:
Lamb chopped, what on earth do you do about the news then
Posted by Moo (# 107) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Doublethink:
Isn't that exactly the point ? If you take the position you are saying changing the outcome so that you actively kill someone is an absolute evil so you don't do it - even if that ultimately results in more people dying over all. In other words you choose do no evil, over the lesser of two evils.
But that is a moral position you can debate.
That kind of debate requires a level of mental and emotional maturity which is beyond every eleven-year-old I have ever met.
Moo
Posted by Russ (# 120) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
Mind you, you could have talked of using various means for silencing the baby, including - if all else fails - stopping temporarily all air going in and out of the tiny body, possibly until the baby drops unconscious. And yes, that would have been allowed by double effect, even if there is a risk that the baby might die due to a lack of oxygen.
Hi IngoB.
Seems to me that there is something right and something wrong in the classical position that you're putting forward.
Whether the question is smothering the baby, sending a trolley down the track to kill an innocent pedestrian, shooting a terrorist to prevent him for exploding a bomb, these are all variations on the theme of "would you commit an apparently-evil act in order to achieve a greater good ?".
What's right is that there is a moral obligation to look for ways out of the dilemma. The passer-by pushing the points lever should always do his/her utmost to shout a warning to the one person on the track. The policeman shooting the terrorist should always shout an instruction "hands up or I shoot" and only pull the trigger if the suspect's hand moves towards the explosive device. The mother silencing the baby should always pray that there be a way that the silencing be able to stop short of being fatal. There should always be the element of "I morally reject this action which I do because cruel circumstances force me to decide between unpalatable alternatives". It's never right to do the evil action, only less wrong than not doing it.
Like abortions, no-one wants trigger-happy police and infanticidal mothers.
The point of the philosophical thought-experiment is to strip away other factors to get people to focus on core bottom-line moral principles. Do we have coherent moral principles that accord well enough with our moral intuition that we will act on the principles in cases where our intuition is weak or confused ?
One of those stripped-away other factors that is relevant in any real-life situation is the level of uncertainty in the mind of the actor as to whether they have grasped the situation correctly. Would you push the lever if there was some chance that it would send the trolley towards rather than away from the 5 men ?
The option of looking around for other possible actions might be thought of as another of those stripped-out factors.
In each case the dilemma can be thought of as a choice between this package of consequences or that package. "Double effect" on its own seems to argue that either choice is morally legitimate provided that the intention - what we will to do by the action - is the good consequence (saving the 5 or not-killing the one) rather than the evil consequence (killing the one or leaving the 5 to die).
That's sounds like a way of letting oneself off the hook of taking full responsibility for the downside of the chosen action.
I don't believe in redefining the lesser evil as non-evil.
You may say that "double effect" needs to be applied alongside a consequentialist principle - in other words that it is not valid to use it to justify a great evil consequence of an intention to do a small good.
In which case any tone of moral superiority to "mere consequentialism" is misplaced.
I would guess that all of us have a consequentialist intuition alongside whatever other moral intuitions we may have. I suspect I would transgress further, take a greater burden of evil on my own soul, to prevent a train crash that would kill 500 than I would to save 5 track workers.
Feel the wrongness, do it anyway, God will forgive us for getting it wrong. Fat man beware!
Best wishes,
Russ
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
That kind of debate requires a level of mental and emotional maturity which is beyond every eleven-year-old I have ever met.
Moo
I don't know, my 12 year old is quite capable of understanding the problems, she just can't articulate a way to answer them.
I am seriously thinking about how Christian churches fail to provide any kind of moral and ethical education to our children (and everyone else). As we have seen recently in several threads, the default position for many Christians is that the 'correct' Christian opinion is to refuse to have an opinion on a morally troubling issue.
I certainly remember doing the same as a child when faced with the balloon issues.
But to refuse to answer is akin to refusing to think about the issues. Nobody is saying that there is a 'correct' answer - well, nobody except IngoB who I believe is entirely wrong - but that a reasoned answer is a moral answer.
I don't think Christians should shy away from trying to think through these issues. What are we afraid of? And if we do not try to examine and contemplate our own instincts, how are we expecting our children to think clearly about their own moral quandaries?
We have a board game called 'Would you Rather' in which participants are forced to choose between two silly choices and give reasons. For example - if you worked in the circus, would you rather be someone who the knife-thrower is throwing knives at or someone who puts his/her head inside a lion's mouth. There is no correct answer. But the process of thinking and trying to reason your way through unlikely examples is a useful exercise.
And certainly nothing to get upset about or to try to protect our children from.
Posted by The Rogue (# 2275) on
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This is what some of the Star Trek films were about - Spock asserted that the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few (or one) and everyone else persuaded him that sometimes the needs of the one were important as well. Of course in Star Trek they would find some bizarre way of saving everyone except maybe a few heroes and definitely all the bad guys.
So their solution to the question is to change the rules governing it which is an example of how unrealistic it is to pose such a tiny set of circumstances anyway.
Having said that, I see the point of this kind of question as being to provoke discussion rather than have any right or wrong answers. Rather like the Ship, really.
Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on
:
I have been reading about the Japanese nuclear disaster. So how about this moral situation:
1. A cloud of radioactive material is released by a nuclear reactor disaster. This material is highly radioactive, will kill instantly a lot of people and will cause many others to suffer into the future with cancerous diseases. This is without any question at all.
You are the Prime Minister of this country and have the ability via enormous fans to move the cloud of radioactive material. Currently it is heading for a large city of 5 million people, you have the ability to blow it to the countryside where there are far fewer people. Do you do it?
2. In order to right the situation, technical work is needed on the damaged reactor. However the radioactive dose which workers would receive to do it will inevitably kill them. Some will die within a few months, others will die long and lingering cancerous deaths.
The work is absolutely necessary to make the thing safe, and can only be done by highly trained and highly competent staff.
As the Prime Minister of the country, do you order all staff with the requisite skills to attend the site - whether or not they are prepared to volunteer for the role?
--
Finally, can example 1 be considered to be similar to the original trolley case and 2 the fatman case? If not, why not?
[ 02. October 2012, 10:17: Message edited by: the long ranger ]
Posted by Erroneous Monk (# 10858) on
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I think (1) is the same as the original trolley case. You waft the poison towards the largely empty land and at the same time do everything you can to help the few people there re-locate.
(2) is interesting because the reality is that you wouldn't have to force anyone to do anything. They would volunteer. That is why we have emergency services and a military and people like Red Adair to close off flaming oilheads.
Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on
:
quote:
Originally posted by the long ranger:
Finally, can example 1 be considered to be similar to the original trolley case and 2 the fatman case? If not, why not?
1 is certainly similar to the trolley case.
2 differs from the fatman case in a number of ways - a) you don't benefit directly from their deaths; b) therefore, presumably, you hand out the best radiation suits you have and drugs so they survive as long as possible; c) people who have trained to clean up radiation accidents presumably accept the risks.
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