Dilemma
Suppose an epic disaster is about to hit your town, and there aren't enough shelter spaces for everyone. Anyone not sheltered has a 100% chance of death (it could be a nuclear attack, but those details don't matter). Because you're important to the town, you've been allocated a shelter ticket along with a few +1s you can bring. Your last choice comes down to:
A) Your dear 80 year old mother who you love deeply, who's in fair health but whose life expectancy is probably under 5 years with the oncoming disruption of medical services and shortages of her meds.
or
B) A healthy 20 year old acquaintance who you generally like but you're not close to.
Defend your choice with your preferred ethical system. I'm particularly interested to read a utilitarian defense.
Does your choice change if B is a friend, or a stranger? Do they have to be a best friend? Would your choice actually involve any ethical considerations at all, or would it be a selfish decision which you'd attempt to invent a post hoc ethical justification for?
A) Your dear 80 year old mother who you love deeply, who's in fair health but whose life expectancy is probably under 5 years with the oncoming disruption of medical services and shortages of her meds.
or
B) A healthy 20 year old acquaintance who you generally like but you're not close to.
Defend your choice with your preferred ethical system. I'm particularly interested to read a utilitarian defense.
Does your choice change if B is a friend, or a stranger? Do they have to be a best friend? Would your choice actually involve any ethical considerations at all, or would it be a selfish decision which you'd attempt to invent a post hoc ethical justification for?
Comments (41)
I might ask my mother if handing the ticket to the 20 year old would be OK, perhaps just because she's lived a lifetime, which the 20 year old hasn't.
So, I'd lean towards the younger person, which I then voted.
Or, I might panic and toss a die. :)
A variation of the trolley problem.
The correct solution would be for me to give both my tickets to two children. If they wouldn't let me do that, I would refuse to go and tell them to give the tickets to someone else. That's what I say I would do and it would be the right thing to do, but we won't ever know what I'd really do.
Yes, I know I'm not playing by the rules you laid out. Like most such thought experiments made up by philosophers, this one is over-simplistic, unrealistic, and misleading. The correct answer is "none of the above."
And welcome to the forum.
My choice would be completely selfish.
My ethics would only kick in if the difference was really big, i.e save 1 million people or someone you love deeply.
This is Paul who ran old PF. He's been around (if you consider both forums) longer than any of us. Good to see you active again, @Paul.
I see this as a Sartrean-type dilemma where the ethical thing to do is to simply choose and take responsibility for our choice rather than try to justify it by any particular theory that would abstract us away from such responsibility and in any case could provide nothing more than arbitrary grounds for judgement when considered meta-ethically. Given that, if I couldn't talk to mum and ask her opinion I'd choose her, I suppose for selfish reasons to do with attachment. Just as, if a relative was dying of cancer and I had money to save them by paying their medical bills vs save ten strangers by giving it to charity, I'd save the relative. This highlights how we all choose selfishly every day based on proximity rather than ethics. As Peter Singer has pointed out, every time we spend money on luxuries rather than give to a charity where we can be reasonably sure it will save lives we are doing the theoretical equivalent of walking past.a drowning child because we don't want to jump in to save them and ruin our new expensive clothes. We see a huge difference because the child is not in front of us but in the abstract world of ethics there are few theories that would consider that difference valid. We are inescapably evil and selfish, unfortunately, and moralising serves more to obscure our real state from ourselves than to indicate any particular virtue.
Then I noted that in the question there was the fact that I was "important to the town" and so I had gotten a ticket. That role is actually very important. I do have some role after the disaster, hence I should think of that also.
Now as the positions are picked on "importance" to the town, I guess the obvious nepotism of choosing my mom could raise some frustrations from those that would have survived and had their families and friends left to die while being "not important" to the city. And yes, there would be those. Yet if I choose to leave behind my mother and choose the younger person, any idiot who accuses me and those of us that averted death by being in the shelter of just "saving our own asses and those that we love", I can say to them that I truly put the benefit of the people before my personal feelings.
And the obvious question here is, why should I make the choice? This would have to be something likely to be discussed with my mom and the 20-year old. Let them, my mom and the 20-year old, themselves carry the burden that someone else has died for them. It would be more likely that 80-year old mom would give her seat to a younger person.
Even if with this dilemma we want to approach moral/ethical and philosophical questions, we should remember that people actually are very logical. In fact, I would question the total asshole who in the first place that had this wonderful idea of the "important to the town"-people then picking up some seats of their own choosing. Fuck that guy! Put him or her on a place where the asshole has 0% of surviving the disaster. Besides, if everybody outside the shelter has zero chance of surviving, likely the people in the shelter have just a bit longer death waiting for them in the shelter turned into a coffin as nobody is around to dig them up from the rubble.
* * *
The classic event of having "children and women be rescued first" from a sinking ship is quite real: assuming if there is the time for people to organize an evacuation, that would be still the way. Helping the weakest person first is the most logical issue in a disaster. It is something that total strangers can understand and obey. Not so when the ship goes beneath the ways quickly: then it's about the just who can climb the quickest the maze where the walls have become the new walkways and freezing water is pouring in and make it to a life raft.
Quoting T Clark
I agree that thought experiments are fairly dreadful.
That's what's good about them! They have the potential to expose us to certain false assumptions about ourselves by creating highly artificial scenarios we'll likely never have to deal with but that contain elements in common with our basic mode of self-judgement.
Nice to meet you @Paul.
"Mom."
The 20 year old has more of a chance, no matter how minute, outside the shelter than an 80 year old woman. I can live easier with the consequences of the 'young person for my old mother' trade off than I can with the alternative the existentially decisive factor for me since 'sacrificing one life in order to save another life' is never, I think, ethically justifiable (thus, the dilemma).
That's exactly what I wanted to say!
I don't know what the world will be like after the emergency, but if it's much more of a mess than it is now, I couldn't cope with it anyway, so I'd stay with my 98-year-old mother and 78-year-old life partner to watch the end of our world.
Me too! I think this shelter will be full of kids who will be surprised to be there!
:up:
Quoting Baden
The only thing I disagree with is this opposition of "selfish" vs. "ethical." If you do as you say above - choose responsibly - that means you do what you think is the right thing to do (why else would you choose that course of action?) And that, by definition, is the ethical thing to do, theory or no theory. I don't see what selfishness has to do with that.
Hiya Paul!
There will no doubt be a few selfish adults ready to put 'em to work as soon as the all-clear sounds.
Need more information. If places are being allocated by the town on the basis of importance, how come my friends and relations are also important, and my decisions about them are also important? There's a smell of nepotism about this that I do not want to be part of. I'm sending all the tickets back, until the allocation system is changed.
John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids goes into the way extinction threats change morality, though, and how some folks are slow to adjust. But "women and children first" is an old survival trope, but applies more to women of childbearing age and their offspring than to VIPs and their olds.
Upon deliberation I don't think it's much of an ethical dilemma, though.
Saving someone's life is a good thing, regardless of whose life you save. You're not responsible for the death of the person who dies, so it's hard to imagine how the chooser's moral fibre is at stake in any way.
For me, the dilemma - more pragmatic than ethical - might be in contemplation of the post-disaster quality of life. Who is best suited and prepared on the hardships and privations that are bound to follow? How many able-bodied young people will be available to take care of the children?
I know I'm not fit, and my mother certainly would not be. I would only be saving either of us for protracted suffering. In that case, I should stay and do what I can for the others left behind.
It seems to me that sometimes taking responsibility requires providing justification, and then taking responsibility for that justification. A failure to provide justification could equally be seen as giving way to arbitrary grounds for judgement.
Quoting Baden
I don't find Singer's argument persuasive, but the ethical principle at play here is subsidiarity, which says that we have a greater responsibility for our family than for our neighbors; for our neighbors than for our fellow citizens; for our fellow citizens than for non-citizens, etc. Responsibility moves outward in concentric circles, and each agent is a locus of responsibility for those around them.
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Quoting Paul
Probably my mom would be willing to sacrifice her life for the younger generations. If she were unwilling, I would take her. A lot of this depends on why I was granted a +1 in the first place.
I think each of us would save our respective mothers. Love and a sense of family belonging is stronger than "utilitarian" choices. Whenever our family - or loved ones - are at risk, our sense of "rationality" falls apart.
I personally think that there is not a dilemma at all. Option B is "A healthy 20 year old acquaintance who you generally like but you're not close to."
I, myself, interpret that the person of option B is just a stranger. I do not care if he is 20 years old and healthy. If it is not close to me, he will not be above my mother in terms of priority.
Quoting Paul
No. It will not change my decision if my mother still be one of the options.
Quoting Paul
I must admit that involves selfish decision. I save my mother because of the familiar attachment. Maybe this is not so "ethical" and some can consider this as a pure act of selfishness.
Why would your decision depend on knowing that specific data?
The 20-year-old because they are more likely to contribute to the survival of the entire group. Unless my mom has a very useful skills set for this sort of thing, she is going to lose out.
This is in the abstract. In concrete terms, my own mother has several times expressed that she has absolutely no desire to live in a post-apocalyptic world and would just accept her fate, so this makes it easy for me.
Plus, in concrete terms I don't need to choose. My parents live very far away, and even if they were visiting, I live in a rural area that wouldn't be a prime target for any military attack, have a large deal of grazing land around me, numerous cattle on my land, my neighbors have pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, etc., we have a garden, the woods are rife with deer and I have a bow and a stupid number of arrows because I lose them and find them again, and I have a stockpile of .30-06 and shells I inherited. Also, a pond stocked with bluegill, coy, and catfish that is fairly self-sustaining.
I don't love where I currently live, but it is quite good as far as apocalypses go.
IDK, I don't think a bunker full of five-year-olds has good survival odds in the long term.
I agree.
Humans can label this or that distribution strategy as better or worse, but of course these relative descriptors are entirely subjective and completely dependant on perspective.
It is the norm, yes. But the context gets serious when your mother is involved. You would not speak about "folks go without" because your sense of attachment to a beloved member would make you think otherwise or at least more seriously. I think this is the "dilemma" that @Paul proposed. The context changes fully when a mother is included.
So be it. Then let them decide who the other person will be while I'm unconscious.
Because my own ticket is apparently based on some sort of mandate, as it derives from my importance within the town. Does that mandate extend to my +1's? Was I given +1's because I have good judgment about who should be saved, or perhaps only for my own personal comfort and well-being as someone whose future is tied to the town's future?
We receive +1 shelter because we are "important", just that. I do not interpret this premise as mandatory or an accessory of the two main options of the dilemma. I interpret that the +1 shelter was given randomly in the present scenario.
On the other hand: let's say we use your premise and we say that this +1 shelter is mandatory. What would be your choice and why has it changed from the original position?
A mandate is "an authorization to act given to a representative" (Merriam-Webster). The idea was that our ticket derives from a mandate or charge that we have received from the community on account of our importance. The question inquires into how our +1's are related to that mandate.
Thats your idea.
Yes, but the only other way to read it is that you were given a ticket on account of celebrity, which would be a rather strange reading.
Greetings, Paul. Glad to see you visit your grand child (TPF, child of PF) every now and then.
Time is of the essence here, since whatever is going to happen is already on its way. Given a shortage of time, and given the faster speed of emotional decisions (as opposed to decisions based on working out the logic of it all), I would choose my mother. Most people would.
"Reasons of the heart" may be quite different than the reasons of utilitarian logic. Mother dear will be a burden once the first wave of the epic disaster is over and we leave the shelter. She was a widely respected art dealer, for which the demand will be seriously diminished. Aside from art, she promoted nouvelle cuisine. Soon people will be lucky to have skinny cat for dinner. Hang out at your gallery, mom, and the bomb, meteorite, tsunami, level 6 hurricane, or shit storm will be your last customer. I hope the 20 year old who is taking your place will have loads of practical skills. We didn't have time to administer aptitude tests. He was close to the door so we grabbed him.
I will advise the in-shelter survivors not to dither over who survived and who didn't. Mass death obliterates morality. "The living will envy the dead" Nikita Khruschev said.
Sartre wrote a short story in which a member of the underground resistance was captured and under torture revealed where the rest of his 'group' would be located. The captive made up as unlikely a location as he could, but it turned out to be exactly where his comrades had gathered. The Nazis killed them all.
I can't remember the name of the story, and perhaps it took place in Spain. The 'lesson' I took away from the tale was that 'absurd', even tragic consequences can flow from our best-motivated decisions.
Exactly, it does change. You pick your mom, therefore no dilemma. The 20 year old just stands in line with the 30, 40, 50 and 60 year olds.
Also, if I'm important enough in this town to decide who lives and who dies, the town is fucked regardless.
Soooo... if your mom is crazy hot, that changes your calculation how?
In that case the 20 year-old might actually be attracted to him. The truth table gets tricky.