Survival vs. High moral

Post Reply New Topic

I don't care about the 10000 hooomans. I do care about the cat, but not enough to let it instead of me live.

It's a paraphrase of a common ethics dilemma, not something I came up with on my own. Also, I think that typical procedure in the case of an accident (like hitting someone) is to stop the train and deal with it. In this case, the engineer would likely bring the train to a stop before hitting the people further on. So, the logic is not flawed.

Another variation is you can reroute the train from a track with multiple people to a track with one person.

There's this device built into trains that is called the "brakes." When the engineer activates this device, it slows the train to a stop. It is normal to stop a train after an accident, or even in an attempt to prevent an accident.

You might have heard of similar devices in other vehicles.

Yes, this was sarcastic.

I find this difficult to answer, I'll admit.

I would put my life on the line for my husband, but not many other humans. I'd put more effort into saving my dog than most other humans, quite frankly, because it is a creature that loves me and has done me no harm and has improved my life immeasurably.

I think in previous years, I may have admitted that I would put myself in danger to save others, because I believed in an afterlife, didn't have a great concept of mortality and had little experience of the fact that there are worse things than dying. I mean in the movies the hero lives to fight another day. In reality the teacher who tried to shield the students usually just ends up dying besides them.

So unless that person was a Victor Chang, no I wouldn't die to save a stranger.

When I was a kid in school, my teacher posed a question which is a classic of this genre. "If you could go back in time to when Hitler was a baby, would you kill him as a baby or would you let him live and let the Holocaust happen". It's a similar setup, murder a baby or let 6 million people be murdered. I answered that I would do neither. Instead I would abduct baby Hitler an leave him with a family that lived far from Germany. She found this an unacceptable answer because it wasn't one of the two choices. The intended lesson was that we should think about our values and this question clarifies them. The actual lesson that I got was that binary thinking keeps you from seeing other ways to solve a problem (although a the time I didn't know the word "binary" and probably mentally worded it as "just two things'.

These questions are meant to figure out values (stated bluntly as such in the OP's title) but what if I value finding least harmful alternative solutions? Why is that never considered a value. It can't be that rare a value. You value it, so did Kirk (or the Star Trek scriptwriters) and it's what lot's of people do in real life.

As both you and Callista point out, real life situations are never like this. They happen very fast and emotions (in combination with professional training where that is relevant) are what decides, not a rumination on personal philosophy and values. In situations where there is time, such as in a world leader deciding whether or not to go to war, there are always lots of people involved in the decision and many, many possibilities even a decision as seemingly binary as war/no war has nuances such as Cold War.

I'm not vegetarian and I care about the cat much more than the people.

What do you refer to when you write this?

I said I wouldn't let anyone die, but there's a massive caveat there.

Your question is purely hypothetical.

IF I COULD SAVE PEOPLE'S LIVES BY SACRIFICING MYSELF, I would like to think I could give my own life to do that.

If it is a more generic issue that I would require others to die so that I may live, I would be skeptical that my sacrifice would actually be honored. Anyone who would demand one die to spare others likely won't do it anyway.

If it's a matter of surviving by choosing to kill others, I'd not do it unless those people were a threat to me (e.g., killing in self-defense).

For the voters: remember the 10.000 people are extremely similar to yourself. So these persons are not a random pick out of a population, but are persons you would find very likable if you find yourself likable.

Just because you did not know these persons yourself (only that they were as likable as yourself) should not affect whether they had more of a right to survive than yourself, should it?

I know the question is hypothetical, but that should be no excuse for not taking a stand. It's a matter of moral values. Is moral important to you when it compromises your own survival?

But that's the point. Is all fair in life because everyone is ultimately closest to themselves?

Or: as soon as something is not illegal, it's legal - so lying is often legal, because it's not a crime. Does moral not count anything afterall?

Go back and read Callista's and Adamantium's posts (they both made a few). The artificiality of this ethical construct is blinding you to how people make life/death decisions in real time.

It's not quite the same; the idea of pushing the fat man into the tracks is that I am using him as a tool to save the other people, while in rerouting I'm not using him; he just happened to be on the wrong place at the wrong time. Just a small nitpick here in otherwise good content.

Also, to everyone in general, the idea of these thought experiments is to go to the core of the issue, which is independent of the specific situation. There is another one: if there are seven people, each who needs an organ in order to survive, is it ethical to harvest them from one healthy person in order to save the seven? I have no good answer to that one, as I have no good answer to the train one, although in general if it must be done I'd rather put forward myself than force someone else to do it.

On the original question? Well, I'd value myself more than I value a cat. Also, I value myself somewhat more than the single stranger who is supposed to be a person like me; logically I know I have the same inherent value he has, but I do like living, and if I had to choose between either of us dying with certainty, there is no reason to choose to save him that can't be used to choose to save myself, so my self-preservation kicks in and I live. However, if there is a situation where I can save him while risking my life where it is not guaranteed I will die I would probably take it, as there is a chance both of us would get out of it. Two or more, well, the ethical choice would be to save them and die, I wouldn't really like it but I'd have to do the right thing, and as Callista said the guilt would be just too great anyway.

I'm sure you actually already do have an answer to that one, but these sorts of artificial conundrum questions are so abstracted from reality that they can steer people away from thinking hard about the real ethical questions that humans face. That is just one of the many reasons I refuse to answer such questions. Since nobody can survive losing 7 organs, the question really is "would you kill one healthy person to harvest their organs for (7) other people?" and of course in reality the answer you and pretty much everyone (with some scary exceptions) give is "no". If you read a news story about some medical center that murdered people for organ harvesting would you applaud them? Of course not. And sometimes there are stories of organ theft and they are always treated as crimes, because they are.

If the person is dead and has signed an organ donor card then there is no conundrum at all. It is standard medical procedure to harvest as much as possible for as many people as possible when a person has given permission via an organ donor card (as I have, incidentally, they have my written permission to take whatever is useable after I'm dead).

However, the organ donation medical ethics dilemma does come up with some frequency in real life so it's worth thinking about. Since the number of people who need an organ donation greatly outnumbers the number of available organs (legally and ethically acquired from dead people who gave consent while alive), the common dilemma is who gets the available organ (since there are always multiple people waiting for any one organ). The other dilemma is whether it is ethical for parents to have a child with the specific intent of having that child donate something (generally bone marrow, which is renewable) to an older and deathly ill sibling. This does come up now and then. My feeling is "no". But there is no consensus.

As to hypothetical life/death dilemmas such as the one presented by the OP and all such similar questions I refuse to answer on the grounds that the choice is never binary in reality. The hypotheticals are always framed in a neat way to try to prevent people from coming up with a 3rd way where nobody dies. This attempt to make it binary just annoys me. Real life ethical dilemmas are important and something humans have to wrestle with frequently. These all-too-neat hypotheticals dissuade people from thinking up real solutions to ethical problems. Everything is just too neat and binary. This doesn't get to the heart of moral dilemmas at all. It is just an artificial construct that avoids talking about real moral dilemmas.

I believe that you are a moral person who would not for one minute consider murdering somebody and distributing their organs to sick people. And yet you said you didn't have a good answer to just that question. I am betting that you do and that the answer is "no" but the absolute artificiality of this setup steered you away from your own actual ethics but of course just in a post. In reality there is no doubt in my mind that you would be horrified if you even read a news story where such a thing actually happened. That is why I really don't like these conundrum questions. They can actually lead people away from thinking about what the right thing is to do in a certain situation. But I don't think it would carry over to real life decision making so there's that.

The advantage I see of those hypothetical life-death dilemmas is that they are useful to isolate a certain choice out of as many variables that would normally exist in a real-life situation as possible, making things simpler and giving insight about core ethical principles. I've been working for a while already on building a complete ethical system for myself, and these kinds of questions are useful to see where I stand, and where someone else stands. And being binary, it allows clear answers. I do wonder to what extent is it possible to have a clear set of ethical rules to follow, and to what extent is it possible to leave some things unanswered and just do what feels right when the moment comes, the real ethical dilemmas are worth it for the latter cases, but I'd still say hypothetical dilemmas are better for the former.

You are right, I wouldn't sacrifice the person as I'd refuse to use them as means to and end, and I would be violating their free will. And that would translate to the "push someone in front of a train" then, as they are fundamentally the same.

And when they throw on the brakes, the train takes a mile or two to stop, because it is massive and Newton rules in this kind of situation. Trains do not stop suddenly for any reason. Even when they meet an oncoming train of similar mass, or someone has destroyed the track... the train keeps going. The hypothetical is impossible to create in real life. Once you create a hypothetical moral choice in a plausible situation, then that plausible situation will present all sorts of other options for a human mind.

You got it exactly right. The purpose was to get to the core ethical principles. Not that easy, it turns out. People involve many other variables.

The question is whether people answer one thing now when they know it's hypothetical. But what if it wasn't, would people maintain the moral standards if they actually faced some similar situation in real life?

I see that's what seems to happen in real life..."You should treat others well...but in love and war, all is fair"...if the stakes are great enough, all moral values seem to deteriorate.

If all is fair in love and war...everything is fair in my eyes...why would love be any different from other life aspects? If something just means enough to you, all is fair apparently...actions and consequences are what there are...moral doesn't seem to mean anything, because if the stakes are high enough, people neglect them...

If anybody wants to research this, I think the classic ethical dilemma is usually referred to as the "trolley problem"--so, not a big heavy freight train, but a small one a bit smaller than a city bus, like a streetcar. It's not meant to be taken really literally; it's more like a thought experiment, an extreme scenario to challenge one's set of ethical standards. It's like Schroedinger's cat--nobody ever actually put a cat in a box with a radioactive isotope; but the questions behind it are real problems. In the case of the cat, it's the problem of superposition; for the trolley, the question is whether a direct action to harm one person is ethical if it also helps others.

The interesting part of the trolley problem isn't how people answer it--whether they would pull the lever or push the fat fellow onto the track--but why they answer the way they do. It's a way to look into moral reasoning, to investigate how humans make moral decisions and how they decide on what they believe is important.