[ralfd]

I actually did find the "nightmare dilemmas" on the site more interesting.

http://www.thebigquestions.com/2012/03/22/another-nightmare/

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Today’s Dilemma In front of you are two childless married couples. For some reason, it’s imperative that you kill two of the four people. Your choices are:

A. Kill one randomly chosen member from each couple. B. Kill both members of a randomly chosen couple.

All four people agree that if they die, they want to be well remembered. Therefore all four ask you, please, to choose A so that anyone who dies will be remembered by a loving spouse.

If you care about the four people in front of you, what should you do?

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Argument 1. For goodness’s sake, they’ve told you what to do. If you care about them, of course you should respect their wishes. Choose A.

Argument 2.Once the killings are over, Option A leaves two grieving spouses, whereas Option B leaves one relieved couple. Surely two dead plus two happy is better than two dead plus two sad. Choose B.

Which argument do you buy? And what’s wrong with the other one?

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[mikeash]

I'd go for B. The experience is bound to be highly memorable for the surviving couple, which should let the dead couple be well remembered.

[dedward]

argh, option b. because i am part of this equation too.

because its the one I can live with better. the surviving couple may disrespect me, never see me again, hateme, but are likely to be happier in the long run, and the other, dead couple will not me around to care that i ignored their wishes. and I will live knowing i kept one couple i care about together instead of destroying two. in short, i would take the selfish approach, because i have to live with myself.

given more context or a different situation with a similar concept, or more coffee, i may have a different answer.

[vacri]

Caring about someone often means disregarding their wishes - see the concepts of toughlove or intervention.

[Symmetry]

That's actually a fairly neat question for sifting different types of Utilitarians. Do you care about other people's happiness, or about their utility as they define it? In B you're really screwing over one of the couples, but they won't be around to be unhappy about it.

[dedward]

you are part of the equation, no?

[Symmetry]

Yes, but unless they have a very strong attachment to one or both of the couples our hypothetical utilitarian judge is going to be a very small part of the equation. For the record, I'm not a pure utilitarian myself.

[dedward]

the question indicates you do care about them, specifically.

[roberto]

I'd go for B. Here's my line of thought:

Even though they asked me to be remembered, and I care for them, after they're dead it doesn't matter to them if they are remembered or not. There is no harm in them not being remembered, because they are not there to be harmed.

[Splines]

Keep in mind that there is a non-zero cost to the un-remembered, in that they may be cognizant that they will not be remembered prior to their death.

I would tell the couples that I am going to choose A, but instead choose B.

[noblethrasher]

> I would tell the couples that I am going to choose A, but instead choose B.

Which makes you a bad with respect to most varieties of deontological and virtue ethics.

[IsaacSchlueter]

But deontology and virtue ethics are just shorthand heuristics for consequentialism, to deal with the fact that humans tend to be very bad at doing utilitarianism properly.

When the consequences are clear, and you have no other options, the rational choice is to ignore virtue ethics.

Of course, in real life, there is almost never such a clear-cut problem as this, and pat examples are often used by those who want to throw away virtue ethics out of convenience rather than actual utilitarian benefits.

[ebaysucks]

The most basic requirement for a healthy societies is reproduction, females are the bottleneck in reproduction so killing both males is least bad in the long run.

If a war was expected in the short run, kill one couple as to forego some reproduction in exchange for a soldier motivated to fight.

Killing the two females would result in two depressed soldiers, so I would only pick this option if I was losing the war badly and needed the two males as cannon fodder - essentially killing all four.

[lathamcity]

I too found them more interesting. Is there a collection of these somewhere?

[joshuahedlund]

I think there's some interpersonal utility comparisons in there.