If I flip the switch, one man will die because of my actions. If I don't flip the switch, 5 people will die because of bad luck.
I'm inclined to let destiny decide the outcome and save the one man. Am I alone here?
The concept you're describing is known as moral indulgence or moral self-indulgence: When a person refuses to do the right thing because they want to keep their hands clean. When you're standing at the switch you have agency and should be prepared to own your action. "Five people were struck by a trolley because I lacked the moral fortitude to save them."
>When you're standing at the switch you have agency and should be prepared to own your action.
The problem is people don't stand at these switches. They have to go out of their way to stand at them. They probably aren't even aware that there is a switch. They probably don't know what the effect of the switch is. Yet somehow they have to pull it and get it correct, with no one to support them in making that decision?
This isn't some amateur aircraft landing scenario, where you get assistance by the control tower.
This answer makes a lot of sense from an observational perspective because, in reality, a lot of people decide based on someone else doing something (or perceived to be doing something) instead of using the direct and relevant information at hand.
In other words, what I mean to say is that your response (and similar ones) are quite common.
Why are those 5 people there? How can I be sure they'd be killed? How can I be sure they don't want to be killed. It's not wrong not to kill the one man because you can't be sure of the situation.
There are variations of this (incredibly, incredibly boring) problem that consider this. The five people are workers, the one person is a trespasser, or they're all workers, or all trespassers and so on.
> It's not wrong not to kill the one man because you can't be sure of the situation.
People don't make decisions with perfect information. We make decisions based on the best information we have available. Refusing to sacrifice one to save five because you don't know how they ended up there smacks of making excuses to get out of making hard choices.
>People don't make decisions with perfect information.
That is exactly the reason why the trolley problem is bad. People don't make decisions with perfect information, but the trolley problem is such a perfect information problem.
The thing is, people follow some sort of behavioural pattern that simplifies reality. Shooting people with guns is bad, therefore killing people with switches is bad. Choosing to kill people with switches might make them more likely to kill people with guns and people with guns are more of a danger than people not flipping switches.
These heuristics aren't optimal in theoretical scenarios that test the limits, but they work in every day scenarios.
The trolley problem has more information and stats than someone is likely to ever encounter but it’s hardly an inconceivable level of information for a thought experiment
Assume all things are sure. The point of the moral conflict is to address the core problem of the moral dilemma not side details and speculative hypotheticals.
Thanks for your feedback. It's brave to judge a moral position as wrong, as that implies the judge is some sort of omniscient god :)
Thinking more about it, in my case it's the number of people what would push me to take action. I feel 5 lives vs 1 is not worth enough for me to change destiny. If it was 100 lives vs 1, I would definitely take action (sorry fat man). I'm not still not sure about 10 vs 1. I guess in the moment I'd go with my intuition.
Utilitarianism assumes we have all the facts, yet we never do. We talk of "saving" lives but that's incorrect: no life is ever "saved"; the inevitable moment of death can be postponed a little -- and with unforeseeable consequences.
Utilitarianism and its more recent avatars like "effective altruism" intends to replace moral questioning with math from elementary school. The world doesn't work that way. Never has, never will.
(It's also quite perverse, because there's this underlying assumption/insult that if you're not utilitarian, then it means you don't quite understand that 5>1, and therefore you're beyond stupid and shouldn't be part of the conversation.)
> Utilitarianism assumes we have all the facts, yet we never do.
All the facts, while helpful, are not necessary for utilitarianism.
> "effective altruism"
I think you're attacking a straw man. You won't find Peter Singer attacking people for engaging in suboptimal charity.
> there's this underlying assumption/insult that if you're not utilitarian, then it means you don't quite understand that 5>1, and therefore you're beyond stupid and shouldn't be part of the conversation.
You can certainly say you'd sacrifice five to save one, but you need to back it up. The moral indulgence critique says, more or less, if you refuse to do it because you don't want to do something distasteful you're being a coward, not stupid.
Rule utilitarians can coherently refuse to pull the switch. I happen to disagree with their moral framework, but they can mount a vigorous defense of the position. Personally I come down hard on the side of rejecting the status quo bias. Commiting to symmetry in moral decision making is useful for avoiding contradictions. I also don't care much for act utilitarianism, since it's susceptible to non-utilitarians putting their fingers on the scale (ex. "buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog".)
It would seem the whole setup of the experiment is designed to rule out personal courage. The question isn't "would you fight a terrorist" to save five people, or would you climb a dangerous mountain, or swim a violent stream, or defeat some incel with a machine gun...
The question is "would you flip a switch", and the subtext is "with zero risk to yourself". How does flipping a switch become an act of courage and not flipping an act of cowardice.
Also, movies. I don't think there's one (successful) movie where the hero voluntarily and coldly sacrifices even one completely innocent and unrelated individual, in order to save any number of people. When the hero kills someone, every movie goes to great lengths to explain that person somehow deserved it or was an enemy.
In movies, it's the villains who are utilitarians. That should tell us something.
I don't watch many movies but in the ending of the Spiderman video game (Spoilers:) there is a deadly virus going around and aunt May is on her deathbed from it. Spiderman gets just enough antiserum to save her or to study it and make more but she will not live long enough for that. It's an emotional scene and they don't weasel out of it by having her decide for him, or giving some signs that she wouldn't make it. He ultimately gives the vial to a doctor and the scene fades as he is crying on his knees over aunt May in her hospital bed.
> The moral indulgence critique says, more or less, if you refuse to do it because you don't want to do something distasteful you're being a coward, not stupid.
Logically it makes more sense to flip the switch. 5 lives vs. 1.
But when you change the situation. There's no more switch. Just a single track with 5 people tied to it. You're on the side of the track with a really fat man. You push the man onto the track you can save the lives of all the people because the really fat man stops the train. But the fat man will die.
Two situations with equivalent logical consequences but experiments show that people will consistently flip the switch but they will not push the fat man. Why do people act one way but not the other when both situations are logically identical?
This moral conflict is one of the greatest pieces of evidence that our morality is made up of biological instincts. First it shows morality is not logically consistent. Second the same moral hiccup is shown across all cultures and demographics consistently indicating that morality is genetic and biological and not learned.
That is the significance of this moral conflicts. It says something deep about humanity, biology and the true nature of what morality actually is.
The switch scenario implies that the individual has responsibility for the entire system. The switch and the train have a strong cultural component that implies responsibility for the system as a whole (employee). Even if you state it explicitly people simply don’t believe that a train switch is going to be left unattended and put into the hands of a completely independent third party. If you state that the train switch operator dies while you are visiting the station leaving the switch in your hands there is an implication that you are stepping into the switch operators role.
Society expects that someone with responsibility for the entire system would make trade-off decisions that would be immoral in the second scenario. For example, a politician would be expected to make policy of when it is acceptable to harvest organs from a donor while a doctor making a decision unilaterally would be morally repugnant.
The questions are more interesting in getting insights into cultural expectations of responsibility than deep biological biases about morality. It turns out that we have very finely tuned expectations on what rises to the level of “responsible” that moves a decision from one category to another. A health minister making a decision about which medical treatments are medically necessary are seen as less morally ambiguous than an insurance executive even if the process to make the decision and the outcomes are exactly the same.
So morality depends less on the choice and more about the role of responsibility? One would think that the focus is purely on the choice.
Anyway the point isn't to examine the details of the moral conflict. The point is to examine why the moral conflicts even exists. It points to the fact that morality is arbitrarily biological in origin. It's a set of random arbitrary behaviors that helped with our survival in the caveman days.
Thus given how arbitrary it is, it's sort of pointless to analyze morality too deeply as if there's some higher hidden meaning. There isn't, it's just random instincts with no logical cohesion. Pointless to explore philosophically.
How does it make logical sense? People are not numbers. What right do you, or anyone else, have to decide who shall live and who shall die?
Reducing people to numbers is a logical fallacy in itself.
Increase the numbers then it will become more logical.
Change the 5 people to millions. Now it's one person vs. millions.
The choice is now even more obvious. And if you don't consider the numbers in this case people will call you a psychopath if you can't see the difference in moral weight between millions and one life.
It is difficult to create scenarios that trade-off one life for millions without implying responsibility of the person being asked to make the decision. People are grappling less with moral trade-offs in these decisions than they are with the dual axis questions or morality and responsibility. Create a scenario that trades off one life for a million but doesn’t imply the person choosing is in a position of responsibility and it becomes morally unambiguous.
For example a researcher choosing to sacrifice a healthy individual to donate their immune cells to save a million terminal cancer patients is considered morally reprehensible because people can’t to see how the researcher could be considered responsible for the a healthy individuals life. If the individual goes from being healthy to being in a coma and researcher becomes family member the question then becomes morally ambiguous.
That's my point. Moral ambiguity is evidence for the fact that morality is an arbitrary biological concept. It stems from evolution. It's a set of competing instincts.
If morality was a universal concept there would be nothing ambiguous about it. It would be logically consistent. But what we observe is that we can trigger inconsistent moral situations.
The concept you're describing is known as moral indulgence or moral self-indulgence: When a person refuses to do the right thing because they want to keep their hands clean. When you're standing at the switch you have agency and should be prepared to own your action. "Five people were struck by a trolley because I lacked the moral fortitude to save them."
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