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

[kit-ping.livejournal.com]

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.

[qatar.livejournal.com]

You're thinking of Carol Gilligan's criticism of Kohlberg's stages of moral development and, I think, propounding an "ethics of care" over an "ethics of justice." :-)

I can't argue that you need to have all the information vital to making a complete and informed decision. But I think the point of these thought experiments is to figure out what the myriad responsibilities and obligations we feel ARE, by constructing scenarios that differ in only one aspect (e.g. do you kill the person by commission or omission) and reflecting on whether that changes our reaction. If we only thought about ethics in context -- if we always knew who the one person was, and who the five people are -- then we'd never know if we made that decision because we discriminate between acts of commission and acts of omission, or just 'cause we liked one group of people better than the other.

I do accept the point of view that ethics can't be considered out of context, though.

(Is it then fair to set up a scenario in which you can't possibly know the identities of the six? Because there surely are situations when an ethical decision has to be made without knowing all of those non-extra pieces of information. As, say, when a government's actions may make a difference between one Israeli dying or five Palestinians. Or do you think the decision can't be made without a full dossier on each individual involved?)

On a more humorous note, I think you would enjoy this thought experiment, which combines every thought experiment I've ever heard and then some. ;-)

[kit-ping.livejournal.com]

First off, I don't know what was sillier, the brain inna jar setup itself or how many commenters didn't get the joke. :)

You're thinking of Carol Gilligan's criticism of Kohlberg's stages of moral development and, I think, propounding an "ethics of care" over an "ethics of justice." :-)

Yep, that's the one. We read an excerpt from it, after which I checked out the whole thing from the library and settled in to seriously annoying my classmates. ;) (It helps to know that, because of the time slot, my mentor III class was entirely school of business students plus three us us from the conservatory. Let's just say that people who gravitate towards business management and people who gravitate towards the arts have differing views of the world. I'm sure there are socially conscious businesspeople given to reflection and thought out there somewhere- they just weren't in that room.)

I agree that these are useful as a starting point. But that's all they are. There's an annoying tendency, especially in, for lack of a better word, layman's discussions, to presume that the reaction changes based on the one variable are somehow more pure (eh, maybe) and therefore more valid (er, no) than changes based on circumstance. That somehow taking into account the details must mean reacting solely on emotion. Pah, sez I. (You'll note I that deliberately outlined changes which weren't based on if you liked them or not, but on their actions: a great wrong currently being committed, a great good about to happen, a past injustice unpaid for. I agree, using whether or not someone irritates me as a reason to let them be squooshed by a train is somewhat suspect. :)

Is it then fair to set up a scenario in which you can't possibly know the identities of the six?

I just feel that when you try to strip it down that far it gets kind of ridiculous. Take the government action: Even if you-the-government just know that there's one Israeli and five Palestinians, that gives you a bunch of information. You know who's allied with you, who's most recently ticked you off, who's more likely to cause substantial damage in response, who has other allies you don't want to annoy... and you'll use that to make a decision.

True anonymity is so highly unlikely that it's almost self-defeating. I think that's why questions such as this are posed in a real-life context. Make it a possibility and people will see the need for thought and discussion; bring it down to "one person dead or five people dead. Choose." and the question is more likely to be "why should I?" than "What should I do?"

Did you ever see The West Wing? For some reason, I pictured the exchange being played out between Leo McGarry and President Bartlett:

L: Okay, Mr. President, we need your order on whether to target one person or five. Now.
B: Why?
L: Because.
B: Just "because"?
L: Yes, sir.
B. No.

do you think the decision can't be made without a full dossier on each individual involved?

You cannot make a fully informed, fully ethical decision without all the information, no. It's a highly imperfect world, though, so you take what you have, use it, and hope for the best. But until you fully understand the situation you'll never be able to definitively say it was the right choice.