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

[lasa.livejournal.com]

I think it takes mental gymnastics to convince yourself that the situations are analogous.

It's a bit of self-deception, to make yourself feel better, perhaps? I find the comments above interesting - that the self-deception makes the switching of the tracks scenerio less ethical than the pushing off the bridge scenerio. I can see the point.

I'm imagining a military board room where the strategists are deciding to send in a battillion to get creamed in order to distract the enemy away from their true objective, and thus, end the war more quickly. It'd be a lot easier to make that decision in a board room than in the field surrounded by the doomed soldiers.

[y-pestis.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. That's why my second-level manager made her underling lay people off instead of doing it herself. It's easier when you're removed from it.

I find myself being very aware of this process in food choices, as you mentioned. It's harder for me to eat something that looks like what it originally was (ie shrimp vs ground beef) and I think it's a combination of two elements: one is that more shrimp die to create a shrimp meal (30 lives instead of one - whether the lives are equal is another interesting question) but sadly enough the bigger thing for me is that it's hard to eat something when I've got such a stark visual reminder in front of me of what it was.

After many years of not being able to eat chicken wings or drumsticks, I eventually realized that's why - chicken strips are processed enough that I can avoid thinking about where they came from, but drumsticks have tendons and ligaments and biological details that are hard to avoid thinking about when you're picking them out of your teeth.

Apologies to the vegetarians reading this, who are probably retching right about now.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

I'm not retching; I'm wondering if you remember the stage of my protovegetarianism in which the only meat I would eat was tuna, sausages and pepperoni.

Part of it is that I really liked tuna, sausages and pepperoni, but in large part I think it was because those foods don't look like cute little fuzzy animals.

[y-pestis.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Good point. Although, for the record, shrimp SO don't look like cute little fuzzy animals either. Cockroaches of the sea, yes. And that's a great analogy to bring up when someone's eating lobster, by the way.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

I suppose "fuzzy" isn't a necessary condition for "cute," though. Remember how cute those clams were when they were spitting at us, that one time Mum got clams?

[y-pestis.livejournal.com]

No, I'd blocked that out. Thanks for bringing it back up, now I'm going to have to go see a therapist...

OK, maybe alleged cruelty to molluscs isn't worth a trip to the therapist... but I'm on Kaiser so it's only $5.

The little spitting clams were very cute... I remember thinking it was an unselfconscious defense mechanism, like the way the hamsters would stand up on their hind legs and try to be still and invisible, but actually wobble quite significantly.