Thought experiments

[qatarperegrine]

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.

1. 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?


2. 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?

Comments

[thebenedictine.livejournal.com]

the first option equates choosing whether someone lives or dies with a maximization problem, like an equation to be solved by cold robot calculations

the second option makes it my decision, and one that i have to make as much on impulse as on philosophical and moral justifications

i would feel dishonest switching the trains like i wasn't 'really' killing someone

pushing someone directly into a train to save lives, and then like in U-571 sending some young submariner to drown while fixing to sub to save the rest of the crew's lives, you have to take responsibility for that. that's a part of your character.

in the first option you can say 'well anyone would have done it'. that is why i am ambivalent about it, it doesn't say anything about who i actually am, just how i would appear to other people.

i don't know why i'm going at it in this manner, it might be because i've heard the first problem in the context of 'some ethics professor once said to me' or in a book. it's like the 'quintessential problem' or something, and i guess talking about it feels ingenuine to me, dishonest, like for all the talking we can do about it to figure out why we might feel a certain way, why we might want to appear to others in a certain way, it is too removed from emotion to be an accurate depiction of behavior.

wow it's late and i'm running on

[qatar.livejournal.com]

"it is too removed from emotion to be an accurate depiction of behavior."

I'd be curious to find out how people's ACTUAL behavior in ethical dilemmas compares to how people talking about thought experiments SAY they'd behave.

Probably CMU's Institutional Review Board would not approve research that involved making participants shove people in front of runaway trolleys, though!