qatarperegrine | Thought experiments

I've been having fun debating ethical thought experiments with my friends lately, and I figured I'd share the love right here on LJ.

Here's the first set of scenarios, often called the Runaway Trolley Car experiment. I'll steal the wording given in a BBC article on ethics.

A runaway trolley car is hurtling down a track. In its path are five people who will definitely be killed unless you, a bystander, flip a switch which will divert it on to another track, where it will kill one person. Should you flip the switch?

The runaway trolley car is hurtling down a track where it will kill five people. You are standing on a bridge above the track and, aware of the imminent disaster, you decide to jump on the track to block the trolley car. Although you will die, the five people will be saved.

Just before your leap, you realise that you are too light to stop the trolley. Next to you, a fat man is standing on the very edge of the bridge. He would certainly block the trolley, although he would undoubtedly die from the impact. A small nudge and he would fall right onto the track below. No one would ever know. Should you push him?

So here's the major question: was your answer the same for both scenarios? And if not, why not? Can you rationally justify why the scenarios might call for different responses, even though the results (one death or five) are the same in each case?

Threaded | Flat

a) yes
b) no

No. Because I am selfish and want to live forever.

a. yes, though I'd be tormented about killing that one person

b. I guess the difference is that in a, everyone died the same way - you're only changing the number of equally painful deaths. But pushing someone off SEEMS like a worse death. Plus, there's the obvious pushing a button vs. pushing a person distinction, the latter of which seems much more insidious.

Plus in b, you're discriminating against fat people. Sort of.

yeah, they showed us this thought experiment in my cogpsych class 3 semesters ago. though we had a third scenario, too:

You're in a hospital and there are five people who desparately need replacement organs, all different. They'll likely die that day if they don't get them. There's a guy who's visiting the doctor for his daily checkup, and he's perfectly healthy. It turns out that he could provide all the organs necessary for the five terminally ill people. Is it morally ok for his doctor to cut him into little bits for the five people?

Sorry, my brain got stuck on the statistical improbability of being the too-small person on the bridge. ;)

There are times when I wish that I hadn't so thoroughly chucked my Mentor books, such as whenever things like this come up. It's possible that, after tea, I'll be able to remember details about the study of differneces in the way men and women tend to analyze ethical quandaries (aka social web vs abstraction, aka why the problems-in-a-vacuum we had to discuss in Mentor III always drove me bugf*** insane) and why women, especially women denied schooling (as most were when these compasses were being developed and propagated), always seemed to be unable to get to the highest category of ethical thought.

It has to do with the "does it matter if..?"question that someone else brought up down below. My "typically female" response: YES, it bloody well does. It always does. The situation is changed if the five people have guns trained on the one and have been taking shots at him in such a way that his terror and pain will be drawn out for as long as possible. The situation is changed if the fat man has an EMT's pack over his shoulder and is heading for an injured child just up the bridge. The situation is changed if the lone person is the landholder who bribed public officials to take your family's farm out from under you, causing your youngest daughter to die because you could no longer afford to treat her rare disease.

This isn't "extra". It's information vital to making a complete and informed decision that has been deliberately withheld in the original scenario. Anyone who who says a full conclusion can be reached without full knowledge is being intellectually dishonest. [Relevant but highly combative concluding sentence removed for the common good.]

Yeah. My Mentor III class was ever-so-much fun. I'm not sure who was happier when I was done, me or the professor.

While I agree with my wife's upper comment on acknowledgement of risk by the people walking along the trolley track, I think there's another factor. In changing the track switch, one can be almost entirely certain that the trolley will be diverted and may kill one person. In pushing a person off a bridge, especially since the weight difference between me and the larger person is evidently critical, there's a great deal more uncertainty in whether this will be capable of stopping the trolley (or whether your aim will be good enough to land him square on the tracks, etc.).

So the second situation involves a greater chance of failure, in which you'd be adding an unnecessary death on top of the five people in the trolley's path.

I don't think it's really about the saving of 5 people at all. If you weren't there, they'd be killed. In the first scenario, it's more about how you'd feel about being directly responsible for the death of someone by your actions rather than by your inaction.

Another possible reason for different answers to the two scenarios could be the difference between killing someone by shooting them from a distance, or doing it with your bare hands.

By pulling the lever, you're once removed from the act of killing as opposed to pushing the man off the bridge.

Mise

My emotions make me more likely to shove the person in the way than to switch the tracks.

I wonder why I think that way. I will have to investigate.

I suspect it has a lot to do with how close you feel to the death whether it's justified or not. Pretty obvious, but I'll explain anyway.

Silly example. I went to a 4-H auction on Friday. Here are kids who have raised lambs for six months, who clearly cared about them. I saw them in the barn before the auction hugging them, tenderly putting ribbons around their necks and brushing them - before they brought them to the auction block to be sold by the pound to supermarkets. I got all emotional thinking about those kids and those lambs and how hard that must be.

The next day, I was in Costco, looking at a package of lambchops in shrink wrap thinking, "Those look good..."

Clearly, my consumerism, if I had bought those lambchops, would be a direct contributor to the death of lambs. But see, I didn't see those lambs or the people who raised them. It was meat in shrink wrap.

So - my hypothesis? The further removed you are from the specifics of the death, the easier it is to accept the death.

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