How would you respond to the trolley problem?
The trolley problem is a thought experiment where youre asked to either watch five people be killed or pull a lever so that only one person gets killed.
In this hypothetical scenario which choice would you make?
For those who would let the five people die by not pulling the lever to kill one person is there a minimum number of people on the track that would make you choose to kill the one person?
50? 100? 1,000? 10,000?
What is your reasoning?
In this hypothetical scenario which choice would you make?
For those who would let the five people die by not pulling the lever to kill one person is there a minimum number of people on the track that would make you choose to kill the one person?
50? 100? 1,000? 10,000?
What is your reasoning?
Comments (433)
If of course its simply a matter of numbers, the answer is obvious. The one over the five people every time. The complications come in when you consider the value of the individuals on the tracks. Hope you enjoy the game. :)
And yet doctors are not permitted to sacrifice one person to save five lives with organ transplants.
The mathematics only works some of the time.
That is a different scenario. What you have is one person on the tracks that can walk away vs five tied down. You're asking to switch the track and tell the person they need to stay there. We can't change the analogy as an argument.
The sameness in the scenario is that one acts to deliberately kill one person not in danger, in order to save 5 people who would otherwise die.
If your answer is different in different scenarios, you need to add moral principles to your analysis that makes the moral distinction clear, because it is not as obvious as the arithmetic.
Its not the same, its a variation with a similar theme. My answer is to the specific scenario they gave. Of course the answer is different with a different scenario. Changing the scenario is not an argument against the answer given for the specific scenario given. To be clear, you seem to think that from this specific scenario, I am declaring a global moral decision apart from all context. This is a contextual moral decision from a contextual context. Nothing more.
Then the arithmetic is not crucial, and your justification based on the arithmetic is not valid.
That's a statement, not an argument. Please explain how the arithmetic is not crucial when the example only indicates the number of the people on the track. Again, this specific example. Not variations or additions from what the OP proposed.
So really it's none of my business. I would keep walking. Whatever weird game they're playing over there, I want none of it.
If there is a principle that it is right to act to kill 1 to save 5, the principle should apply to both scenarios. Since it doesn't apply to both scenarios, there must be another principle that overrides the numbers principle that makes the difference. This is the idea of doing thought experiments, that you test how you justify things.
Hence another variation, where you cannot switch the points, but you can push a fat man onto the track and save the 5 at the cost of his life. Again, switching the points and having someone die as "collateral damage" seems less repugnant than actively pushing some passer-by, like @Tzeentch, into harms way. But is it? I think the callous bastard deserves it. :wink:
I think our differences are that I'm not declaring a principle. I'm declaring, "In X scenario, this is the correct answer". You seem to think I'm extending some universal principal from this that extends to other scenarios. I'm not.
Now, if I were to declare, "From X example, this is a principle we can apply to all examples," you would be right. I'm not doing that however. You'll even notice I note that it changes if you consider the value of the people, or extend the scenario out from its basic intent.
The question I'm more interested in, is if giving the exact scenario, five nameless and unvalued humans (we don't know what they have done or will do) are on a set of tracks vs one nameless and unvalued human, is it moral to pull the lever to ensure only the one person dies, or leave it for the five to die?
So to be clear, there's a lever for you to pull or not to pull. Five nameless vs 1 nameless, the track is currently set to kill five nameless humans. What do you find moral in this specific and unaltered situation and why?
The dilemma doesn't state the person has to get involved. The person has a third choice: do not get involved. So why would they choose to get involved in business that only has bad outcomes?
It's a dimension of morality that isn't explored often, but which in my opinion is a critical part of any coherent moral system: when is it morally acceptable to choose non-interference?
When there's insufficient knowledge of the outcome, or of the moving parts of a situation. Or if there's significant risk to your own health. It's not selfish to not risk your life and people who scold someone for opting out of action when there's a significant risk to their own health and life are usually not very good at understanding the pressure of such a situation.
Other than that, if there's no risk to your own health and the situation is clear and obvious, then I would say it's immoral not to act.
Unfortunately this isn't a good example. The situation adds an extra variable of expertise involved. The participants didn't fully understand the situation, and thought hitting the lever might make things worse. Makes sense. If I'm in a strange room with equipment that I'm unfamiliar with, and I know there are people who normally operate this equipment and are possibly nearby, I'm not going to switch the switch.
A better example would have been to have the people be familiar with what the switch does first and have several switch tests with the train at a particular speed so that way they knew switching the tracks would not cause the train to derail, give them agency over it, and understand the power they have. This is like the example. Only then should they put the situation in front of them and see what they do.
Quoting Christoffer
I think you cover that here, I'm just adding to your note.
Isn't this the point of what I meant by it being a real world test? As in, taking into account all the complexities that piles on top of each other when faced with a real world scenario.
It's very common to hear philosophical analogies that try to simulate a moral question, but we rarely meet such problems in real life because real life is messier. In real life, if you have a gun and need to choose who to shoot to save whoever, or something along those lines, that scenario would incorporate a lot more moving parts that affect how you morally act. Aspects that aren't as black and white as many philosophical analogies tend to incorporate.
In the end, most philosophical thought experiments in morality ends up being rather useless for evaluating morality.
You mean like life?
So here is your principle: If I do nothing, I do nothing wrong. So now you are one of the five tied on the track; do you want to persuade me to act at all?
Quoting Benkei
As is usually the case, in for instance an election, will you vote for the Dispicables or the Incompetents?
Quoting Philosophim
Quoting Philosophim
This is what I mean by a principle. but it turns out that you don't think it's every time, but only this specific time. And the only lesson I can learn, in that case, is to ask Philosophim whenever there's a moral dilemma, because he will know the correct answer, but will not know why it is correct. That is more of a cult than a philosophy.
Quoting Philosophim
I don't know what i would do, quite possibly freeze like most of the people in the video. But if I didn't freeze, I would pull the lever. But I would feel guilty about it, because I do not believe it is moral to do so. I believe it is the comfortable thing to do.
Yes, but what about one over two. I pull the switch if it's five to one, but I'm not sure what I would do if there are only two people on the car. Or what about saving ten people at the cost of nine? Is that obvious?
Yes, I hate the trolley problem. It's one of those things that gives philosophy a bad name. It's nothing like any person will ever have to face in the real world. I wasn't going to say anything and sidetrack the discussion, but you gave me an opening.
What about triage situations and organ shortages? If you have ten people who need an organ and only one organ, who gets it? Who lives and who dies? Do you save Mickey Mantle or a kid?
I vote revolution. Off with their heads.
Nothing like triage either. Triage is merely concerned with who has the highest chance of survival.
Yes, in the context of his example. You mistakenly assumed I meant for all examples, which is normal mistake. If you reread my entire passage however, you'll note that I added, "The complications come in when you consider the value of the individuals on the tracks." So you can tell that it was your misunderstanding of what I was intending, not me changing anything after the fact.
Quoting unenlightened
I thought you understood it was by basic arithmetic as you critiqued me on earlier. If there is no value comparison between the people, then saving five people over one is a no brainer to me. If you disagree, feel free to explain why. You have not been addressing the problem, but a straw man up until now by changing the example, or inserting intentions that I did not make.
Quoting unenlightened
This is a counter answer to the problem which we can discuss! So lets assume you would know what to do, as we've thought about this before. You state you would pull the lever, but not believe it is moral to do so. Why? Morality is often thought of as, "What ought to be/happen." If you think the moral actions is that the lever should be pressed, then you think its moral to do so. Your guilt or emotions over the issue don't change whether something is moral or not.
In the light of the video above, where folks were placed in a situation that they really believed that was almost exactly the trolley problem, it is clearly a possible scenario, and one has to suspect that you have other reasons to hate it.
Quoting Benkei
Not on the ballot paper. Personally, I found it bad enough beheading a chicken. I do not believe either of us would even behead Putin or Trump.
To me, yes. Because the problem as presented is a math problem, and nothing more. We don't know the value of the people on the tracks. So at that point we save the greatest number of lives.
OK, but let's make Trolley Car even more ridiculous by having 999 people tied on the track and 1000 in the car. If a person decides not to pull the switch, do you think they did something wrong? Would you condemn them?
Yes, because this is again, not an emotional problem. Morality is not about our emotions. If you can save 1000 over 999, in this very restricted situation, you do so. If all human beings are the same value in the scenario, this is what you do. If you wish to change the scenario, then of course the answer can differ. With the scenario as is, I see no other reasonable answer.
How often would that type of scenario actually happen in the real world. Answer - almost never. Given that, why has this become such a centerpiece of moral philosophy?
Quoting unenlightened
Naughty, naughty. You know that questioning motive is not a valid philosophical argument. Perhaps you have another reason to make that kind of argument.
Because morality is extremely complicated, and you can start with a very simple example that's easy for others to comprehend. In a proper philosophical discussion in which the limits are clearly laid out, it gives us a small window to evaluate what we think would be the proper decision and why. Its a starter problem one can build off of. It is not the answer to morality in general.
Sorry, I feel like I've waylaid your discussion. I know this wasn't the direction you wanted to take it.
No worry! Its not my OP. I didn't think it was off topic though.
I don't agree. Most philosophical thought experiments are silly. To have any value, a thought experiment should take into account the issues we see in the real world. It can still be simple, but it has to be real.
There's the blank vote, the no vote, the manual write in of another candidate as well. Take your pick if you can't handle the revolution.
I do not always do what I think I ought to do. I base what I thought I would do on my feelings on watching the video. But one of the things I believe one ought not do is calculate the moral value of lives in the way the problem and the situation invites, because every life has infinite value. But neither do i think it is right to make the opposite calculation of course, that one life is worth more than five. and neither do I believe there is any more virtue in inaction than in action. So I have nothing. I do not think there is a moral problem at all, there is no right thing to do, and whatever someone does in that situation,
I would neither laud or condemn, but sympathise with the stress of the crisis. In other words, I am not a consequentialist.
That's fair. If you're looking for a more complete moral theory, the trolley problem is useless. Proper philosophy is built upon several small arguments that should logically co-exist together. The trolley problem is just a small example as an introduction into philosophical thoughts. Its no surprising that a person like yourself who I feel has a much broader and deeper understanding of philosophy sees little value in it.
Which is fine. I can acknowledge that smoking is immoral, but do it anyway. We can say that lying is wrong, yet lie when it conveniences us. The question of morality is not what we do, but what we ought to do and why.
Quoting unenlightened
Interesting. That still does not absolve the issue however. There are five equally infinitely valuable lives vs one equally valuable life. And yes, there can be multiple infinities.
Quoting unenlightened
True, and that can be reasoned that one is not more than 5. But can we not reasonably extend that to 5 is more than one?
Quoting unenlightened
Why is that? That seems very important to your conclusions. This is not merely acting, this is acting with a choice on who lives and dies. What reason is behind this?
Quoting unenlightened
No, you have something here. You have some reasons, and an impetus that you haven't quite tackled yet. That's philosophical thought. Trying to make sense of what we do beyond an animal instinct.
Quoting unenlightened
No one would say you are in this limited instance. I would not fear thinking on matters because you think it will give you a 'philosophical identity'. They are simple digests of complex ideas for beginners and the masses. Real philosophers just think, and what conclusions can be gleaned from situation to situation should be based on the context and logic of the discussion at that moment.
Anyway, what would I do? I'd throw the damn switch; then, one way or another I'd hunt down the murderous SOBs who set this human-rat trap.
Ah, but I'm afraid that's an inaccurate representation of cause and effect.
My inaction didn't do anything. Whoever put those people there is the one responsible for their deaths, and not me.
Some people are just interested in morality just because they are interested in morality, regardless of practical application. For them there is no reason to cast away such thought experiments. They are just as informative about morality as anything else. Why people have differing opinions on these experiments tells you about how people think and their view of morality or what motivates moral action.
What if you had to execute the 999 people yourself?
If you change the thought experiment, then its a different question. Is what I'm stating wrong within the confines of the basic trolley problem? Equally valued human beings stuck on a track with an unstoppable train. The only decision you have is whether to press the lever to divert the train to another track with less people trapped on it. People will die no matter what you do.
I choose to divert the train to the track with less people on it because its simple math. If everyone is of unknown value, then we must assume equal value. In that case, we make the choice that sacrifices less lives. It is a problem of context, not a decision that universally applies in all other contexts. Feel free to disagree within the confines of the problem's intent. Any disagreement outside of its intent is again, not what I'm discussing.
I am not sure that I agree. For simple, totalizing moral theories, such as classical utilitarianism, it is very much relevant (perhaps as a reductio).
In other cases it depends on degree of similarity and how that factors into your moral thinking. Most of us at least contemplate public policies. Public policies not infrequently involve life-and-death decisions. Do we do this and save this many lives, or do we do that and save that many, or do we do nothing? How about emergency room or field hospital triage? Battlefield decisions? Relatively few people are directly involved in those, but it's not a negligible number.
All of the variables and so many more facts are important to understand before we can judge morality from this.
Did I just wake up and find myself at the controls of the speeding trolly somehow knowing what levers are for and immediately Im also aware that I had a few seconds to act? Or am I a seasoned trolly driver, responsible for whatever happens on either track and just having a bad day at work as a seasoned trolley driver. How did I get to be in this predicament?
Are there passengers on the trolly?
If the trolly driver thought I am less likely to derail if I hit one person, and I have to protect the passengers and other people standing near the tracks, so Ill pull the lever, would that make the driver more moral for affirmatively killing the one person? Or did they affirmatively avoid the five people?
If I found out someone was magically transported into the drivers seat of a trolly and within seconds of arriving they killed somebody or five people or twenty, the thought of blaming that person for any of their decisions, or making that person responsible for any outcomes, wouldnt even occur to me.
Who put that person in that position? Who rigged the experiment? Find that person and we can start to analyze what may have been moral and immoral. Or add all variables that would enable us to pass judgment or right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral regarding that trolly driver.
And we all have to assume we all think people are valuable and good, and that we know what good means, and what immoral means, and that our judgment of this scenario has any value or itself could be a good judgment or an immoral judgment.
The key to a thought problem is to solve it within its limitations, then afterward extend it into interesting discussion. None of the factors are relevant to giving an answer to the problem as presented. If its not mentioned "People on the trolley could be hurt" for example, its not relevant. After you give your answer, then you can ask the more interesting questions. But the question as it is is designed this way for a very specific reason and purpose. In THIS limited situation, what is more moral?
Morality has to do with intent.
So is the variable here inaction of watching people die, or affirmative action pulling the lever to kill one of them? Is this inaction versus action?
Or is the question whether it is better to kill one person or five people in this scenario?
Well, what's your answer to the different question?
Ok, but I don't understand. Moral philosophy describes how we should treat other people. How can you talk about that without talking about how it works in the real world?
Completely agree. Thats what makes these thought experiments of such limited value. Its an unreal scenario and doesnt factor in intent, which is essential to defining an ethical act between people.
Quoting T Clark
When I say regardless, I am not implying exclusion of practical application, not to say that a trolley-type problem can never arise or that people's reactions to a trolley problem won't tell you about how people think about ethics more generally.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Surely you can incorporate intent into your consideration of it though?
So the trolley driver thought that the single person was the son of his neighbor and he hates his neighbor so he intended to hurt his neighbor by pulling the lever.
And he was thrilled that he woke up and found himself in this situation.
A trolly is that from which one serves tea.
might check out The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect. The issue is not what you might think it is, and cannot be simplified into a mere calculation.
It's about the poverty of mere expediency in our ethical considerations.
Sacrifice yourself to save 5 other people instead of another person.
I believe those are both of the variables involved.
You have to figure out if you do, or do not value one life over five. The second part is responsibility. Are you responsible? There is variability within the argument, and its up to you to decide what those variable values should be.
I don't mind answering, just wanted to point out that we can make an infinite number of variables problems like the trolley problem, but the OP is trying to get an answer to the trolley problem.
If I have to kill 999 vs 1000 personally, I would still choose the 999. If you're noting that if I don't kill 999 people, 1000 people will die, I would kill the 999. We are of course speaking in absolutes where there are no other options.
This ignores what he's actually said. In the OG scenario, you have no idea about differential value. You couldn't employ such a principle.
IN the subsequent, it is available to you. Unless i've missed something fundamentally esoteric about hte cases, this seems obvious.
Neither. IMHO, wrong question as I point out (above):
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/908263
By pointing out that it is based upon impossible scenario. If such a scenario should ever arise, there's much better ethical considerations to be had than which 'choice' one would make. The focus ought be upon how we ever got to that point to start with...
:brow:
Aha, I respect that you have doubled down on this. Yes, I think my view on this can change a lot depending on how I picture the scenario or the details like you say. Many times I am inclined to think maybe there are scenarios which just do not have a best answer. I am not entirely sure on this 999 scenario though my first instinct was to not kill them. The less I think of the deed as like an intentional, culpable act as opposed to like a preference, the more I feel inclined to kill the 999. But as a culpable act, the more comes into it the thoughts of it being immoral to impose yourself on someone else's freedom of agency and being alive which seems competitively important, morally. But then again, even just changing how I conceptualize the act itself can make this part seem less salient. You can imagine some kind of rescue scenario where a decision must be made and no one would blame you for having made the decision; but the fact that there is like an initial default set of people who are going to die, then the choice seems less like a necessary thing either-or and more of a culpable act being imposed on people.
Kill 1 or kill 5. In this scenario, I choose whether the trolly stays left and kills 5 or goes right and kills one. I have the same control in my choice whether 5 or 1 dies, so sitting there and doing nothing is making the this one choice one way (by selecting left towards the five), as pulling the lever and selecting right and killing one. Its one choice and to effectuate the one choice I either leave the lever alone or pull it. So the fact that I can sit there changes nothing about the responsibility for either choice. If I sit there, I cant say it was not because of me that the five died, I just sat there.
Its one choice with me responsible for it. That is a very poor scenario (sitting still or pulling lever) to analyze the issue of taking responsibility.
Now 1 or 5. Obviously kill 1 instead of 5.
But, is that a moral choice? Did I choose rightly? Could I have chosen wrongly?
But here is the moral question: did I know which was the wrong choice and yet choose it anyway? Did I act immorally in making my choice?
In order to judge whether choosing to kill 1 or 5 was immoral or good, I need more facts. There is no morality inherent in this choice. Why did I choose to kill 5? Why did I choose to kill 1? Because 5 is greater than 1, killing 1 equals saving 5 which is greater than killing 5 to save 1? So I am moral now?
We need reality here.
In reality, I would hope I would have the courage to say I refuse to participate at all. If you think that means I am choosing to kill 5, I ask you who set this trolly in motion, who wont let me stop the trolly, who is trying to force me to participate? Who chose the 5 and the 1 man? Who is giving me this choice of who dies, but made all of those other choices without me?? THEY are killing 5 people and forcing me to see it. They have arranged to save the one person.
You cant ignore all of that and seek the morality of me playing along and thinking for a couple seconds, do I sit still or pull the lever? The only morality to question in me is any participation in the trolly ride.
We can try to play along to see if killing one person to save 5 is the right and moral choice, but not in these circumstances.
But if I didnt think of the sickness of the situation and recognize all of the apparatus and planning that had to be in place to put me here, and I just played along, that doesnt make me a hero or murderer for pulling the lever. It makes me quick at math under some pressure. It demonstrates the immorality of telling someone to make that choice in that fabricated situation. It doesnt make me any better or worse if I made a choice that someone else would have made differently.
Truly, anyone in that circumstance could not be held responsible for any outcome. (Sitting versus pulling is how the trolly goes / that remains true. But responsibility for the outcome here, sitting versus pulling is one small act in what is happening here, like the trolly wheel turning is another small act, and the engine racing is another.)
So it produces very little understanding of ethics and morality to think about whether choosing to kill 5 or 1 says something good or bad about the person forced to ride that trolly. Despite the confines of the scenario, I would not be responsible for any outcome. I am a cog in a wheel someone else put in motion. And if you thought about the trolly engine starter who gave the instructions about the lever or the sitting, dont you think wed have more to discover about ethics there than in the person nail-biting over whether 5 is greater than the number 1?
The real world parallels indeed seem apparent and relevant.
In the case of triage there's an essential difference in the fact that every person there will die unless treated, and the medic uses triage in order to save as many of them as possible.
So while the medic must choose who lives and who dies, anyone they save is a life won.
In the trolley problem, one must actively kill innocent bystanders in order to save.
There's potentially much substance here to talk about, and moral principles to test. I'm not sure why people dislike the trolley problem so much.
Exactly the point of my last post. :ok:
Nor is there any differential value in the variant examples I offered unless you have something against fat men or people who need transplants. Let me say something callous sounding.
There are way more people in the world than it can sustain, and we are destroying the ecosystem on which we depend. Therefore it is better that five people die than one. Assume the facts are true; is the moral logic wrong? This is the logic of accelerationism. Human population is in overshoot and the sooner it is radically reduced, the better it will be both for the planet and for humanity. Only the most fortunate will have a quick death by trolley; most will die of heat-stroke or starvation.
I think if a decision MUST BE made between "watching 5+" or "causing 1" human death by train then it would have to be, or shall I say, OUGHT TO BE judged in the time available...Like, perhaps it appears to be friends or a family dying together if you decide to watch 5+ die instead of CAUSE one to die alone instead. I think, sick as it is, that I might watch that instead of assisting or aiding by hand to kill just one. I am picturing the begging person. I am picturing the begging group. I think the group begging wouldnt bother me like hearing just one life beg for help. I think it would be harder for me personally to pull the lever and I think I do not consider this choice "saving lives"...
I believe the 5+ on the track should have a set limit for this to work, i dont think its realistic to imagine 10,000 bodies on the track because that is not realistic-- WHERE ARE THE BODIES COMING FROM, WHO HAS TIME FOR DOING ALL THAT? WHAT KIND OF TRAIN IS KILLING THIS MANY IN A ROW, HOW FAST, HOW BIG? MANY QUESTIONS EXIST! SO.... Lets say 50 is the max. I, personally will admit for the sake of fairness and my belief that intel exists here in this thread, think my mind changes around 10-20 bodies...
The one life vs the 20 okay...hm! LET ME THINK...Okay, well the thing is: we (by we- I mean me and brain) have to quickly decide using, judgment given the TIME we have to compare the groups... I might change my mind if I have enough time to reason with because I ought to, AND WILL BE (by my own self at least) held accountable for the decision and hopefully I can justify or explain my decision for my own sake [HOW DID I GET IN THIS POSITION AGAIN? WHERE ARE WE GOING WITH THIS? DAMMIT KIZZY!!!] WHO ARE YOU?
I might still just watch the 20 get hit. Depends how they beg I guess....thats so disturbing that I went there but am I surprised? Cant say I am. Am I enjoying myself? Not pleased to admit my truth but willing to accept the reality of it.
I think the trolley problem has been over used and literally USED differently every time it is presented by anyone after the originator...its contents can be reorganized and presented again, the probability is not going to give you any ANSWER OF USE. THE MATH IS NOT THE LESSON TO BE LEARNED. IF USING THIS PROBLEM FOR PROBABILITY YOU ARE ACTING IMMORALLY. THERE ARE BETTER WAYS TO GET THE MATH, THERE ARE NOT BETTER WAYS TO GET THE TRUTH (in some form - to be used and important not NOW BUT LATER) I am not bothered by participating in the not immoral act of thinking, but the act of thinking immorally to get more intel - I think can be excused or justified in a case by case basis - to come at a later time) and my will for seeking the greatest depths exceeds the pleasure and that pleasure in the body is distributed differently. The only pleasure, for me is in what is happening mentally, emotionally but physically I am not pleased with my ungodly hunched back position I am stuck typing this right now but I am willing to sacrifice the back pain to come to type this out of my mind now.... THAT occurs for me often. [*] My will fights back with me at times and some times the body/mind/moods determine actions while the will is left sizzling out, but still patiently waiting for some spark, it is unchanged as a whole but with unknown potentials as far as strength, timing, force, power, AUTHORITY...The wick is wound in wax, tangled and long. The speed of the burn is hard to measure, as we are waiting...waiting for what? The show? Who is lighting up these roman candles? Waiting like these people are waiting for the fireworks on the fourth of july!!!
ANYWAYS,
I think I can see one trying to justify to self by seeing if/how the family or mass group might be able to be somewhat find acceptance in the moment before passing, the solo person begging might not be convincing...they might have a look in there eyes saying, "please kill me" and for me... to kill them would get to me worse I think, am I selfish for thinking that YEAH SURE but THIS insane "problem" is only allowing participating thinking, and I dont think thinking about deciding between watching the family or group die together is totally immoral because it might wake people the fuck up.I think, either way, a strange and shocking surprise will find this person justifying this way (who me? lol) next time they (hi) look in the mirror. For it only says or confirms or shows what you are TO YOU AND OTHERS potentially only YOU (me? we? us? sure) matter here- as a, the living person with power and a choice . Here I am...I see me, I know me, what do you see? Numbers? Get real.
Here I go, you saw that I said it earlier, right? When I said I was not surprised with myself... that is/was the truth.
So, WHO ARE YOU?
Train is coming, people are dying no matter what! BAD BAD BAD! What hand do you play here? Are you willing to explain yourself? I think justification is valid and everyone who has to make a decision here in this hellscape scenario of a "problem" must be given time-- either before making the decision (not rushed ex. in a panic mode because a short amount of time is avail. to make a decision) or proper time after to be judged by their decision after, if they are valid in their explanation that can teach or filter out good and bad intentions in people maybe too? Like if people are so sure and interested in watching the train kill people, how they react is worth noting, etc. (any behaviors, signs that are observable in body, actions, reactions, tone, attitude, expressions) For then they can be held accountable, because really its fucked up any which way you look at this "problem".
BUT I think lessons do exist here, within a problem like this, and from lessons THINGS can be learned. I have seen a website that is like a simulation of this problem, it was interactive and a bit different but still equally messed up. When this proposed problem is given to people digitally, it is not realistic enough for the severity of the situation. Its almost presented in a fun, game like manner. (chose your own adventure) Its still telling, through indirect collection of data (think of it like a survey that is asking for feedback but the answers you provide (honest or not) tells them more than what they appear to be asking about. Consider data they could gather:
-Timing (like quickness of choice, how much thought going into the decision, etc) How they accessed the simulation (reference from another, how many attempts or times they accessed or shared simulation with friends or family members)
-Devices (used to access simulation, does this relate to any recent activity before and after accessing simulation?)
-Plus more like what is being "learned" or "noted" or "compiled" either of the three are true at the same time really (personalized, input based on owner-this can be adjusted and changed based on personal standards, goals, systems/technology) ....but anyways based on this simulation / game like website presenting the trolley problem, is this good or real enough for useful intel that they are gathering from its users?
I am considering realistically how close though does that get to say this experiment happening in real life... like say these people tied to the tracks, both groups 1 or the 5+, all know/knew before hand that one group was going to die and one group was going to live based on a persons choice THIS GO AROUND... say they were WILLING to die in the first place? Say all the groups on the tracks agreed to be there (tied to the tracks), while the person making the choice, (to CAUSE 1 death by PULLING the lever or WATCH 5+ die) no matter what they decide, knows nothing! Say they are going into this with no idea or existing info about the people tied to the tracks, who ALL agreed to be the fork in the road at the moment of deciding which way we lead the train... Say the decider walks into this only having the intel of what they see once at the scene of THE CRIME! Say the decider picks to pull the lever kills the 1 and saves the 5+...but then the 5 people get up from the tracks, brush themselves off and then goes right back in line to be recycled back into the whole pool of people willing, waiting and ready to die or risk death on the tracks of a train..im thinking too, what if some of the people on the track are willing to play a game of risk, kinda like russian roulette?
At least, they (death decider) WILL be recognized for what they are. Or they will remember who they are, and stand by their decision. Or remember and hate themselves all over again but learns to love who they really are.... BUT I believe no matter what--life for them will be, ought to be revalued all around ,how they see it, others and them selves being in it, doing it--it being, Life. And its values. What is matter to you? Is your mind over or above it? Think: Mind / Matter
Those who can relate to this problem and the horror of this reasoning for probability purposes, I think is immoral all around! But considering the problem and relating to it through your actual existence and pov of life currently though thinking/participating in the thought experiment is not immoral but the use of this problem in philosophy is, i think. SO I am admitting it to be not fully immoral and that depends on the best way to move on from such participation. Know what this is as a whole, not what it seems to be at the surface. As for me, I admitted how I would feel if I were in this place of deciding and I think that though my feelings are immoral if it were to take place for real not in my mind, BUT say the unlikely becomes real in reality [this DOES happen in real life (unlikely becoming real-by chance, time may factor in here)]
I searched "trolley problem" in the philosophy forum search bar and 8 existing threads appear. WHY ARE WE DOING THIS AGAIN? WE CAN DO BETTER! IF the OPoster and commenters use this EXCUSE of a problem and PRESENT problems for others to participate in, that requires honest participants to think of immoral and of ungodly acts in the first place! Unnecessary...other problems may exists that dont require such criminal considerations. You force those, like me who are WILLING TO GO THERE AND PARTICIPATE FOR PHILOSOPHY AND ITS PEOPLES SAKE, to participate in aiding or watching/letting people die?? That is a wild ask, capt! BUT I am with you for the moment.
It requires putting the self in the shoes of someone who has found themselves in a situation and those situations that people get themselves into require IMMORAL thinking and perhaps one cant grasp such a analogy because they think it is immoral to propose such a problem in the first place! I can see how people who bring up this problem in debates may have lost sight and/or consideration of people who may be able to offer insight but cant comprehend why anyone would imagine such a analogy in the first place...So the contributions, comments and of course the person initiating through the OP (many already exist,if the problem is the problem itself and who is interested in it- time and time again may point to interesting perspectives and why/ how certain versions of the trolley problem keep appearing.)
I think THAT is what makes this immoral unless one is able to see the big picture and the lessons that can be learned, then at most this immoral problem that is proposed in philosophical discussion can bring intel from thinking immoral thoughts to gain greater insight of the minds of humans. This problem is not moral, only amoral at best because of how extreme this presents itself in philosophy and the severity of it occurring in reality. Using the mind and reality as we know it to picture yourself in this person (deciders) shoes is not wise unless you are prepared for what you may reveal in your participation. People are influenced easily, and reoccurring interest in violence will easily filter out with specific immoral intentions with how they are explaining there place...HERE, in the trolley problem presented AGAIN, on TPF.
With that being said... I want to know, why you are interested in this basic, popularly used, specific analogy and why present the trolley problem here on the forum when SOOOO many answers exist already online. What do your friends, peers, family members, whomever you associate with face to face think when/if have you asked or inquired about this problem in your actual life? What do they think about the problem you present to them? Are they quick to get into it, are they equally interested or curious about it, or do they think nothing of it because they know its coming from you, who is into this sort of deep thinking? Are they quick at first or do they not know how to react, do they hesitate in participating for you? Do they have to think hard about what they chose? Do they give not a fuck? Or do they answer quickly without consideration? Do they think before they answer you?
Also, @Captain Homicide , when did you first learn of this problem, if you can recall? And what about it, this problem specifically caught your attention. What value exists in it for you? Others? You were moved enough to bring your interest of inquiring minds here. Thats something...so, What are you looking for that you havent gotten yet in your research? Are you just seeing this for the first time and mind blown?
This is a rather sick way to be particular in philosophy, unless you are honest and willing to see the GOOD in the UGLY... Who is down for that? ME! (apparently)
So, is that fair enough? I believe in fairness-- and I think it, to be not an act of immorality but thinking of acts considered immoral (watching or causing death by train lol at the extremeness and insanity in general) BUT, if/as long as a lesson is TO BE learned and adjustments CAN THEN be made accordingly -- after the decisions and revaluing occur of self and its valid / credible in its justification efforts.
Yes, its true that I appear to have gotten quite into this myself, the immoral thinking... but I consider this an amoral act overall.(my part in it, at least) I started this comment quite literally for NO GOOD REASON! Bad kizzy!!! But I am true in my efforts to contribute intel from my pov. I learned from this, although useful NOW, for me, I dont think it works the same for others...Does a good enough reason exist in the future though? I think it may! I am not acting immorally for my acknowledgment of this post and leaning into the sickness, (i like to call it, diving into the depths of darkness) but I think overusing this "problem" IS, if you cant quickly learn something from your own participation.
I am curious what is more valuable then your own answers here? Other peoples answers? I dont think so, because were not ready to judge yet! NO trust exists now here but it can come. Maybe if you are lucky maybe if you are willing maybe by chance maybe with divine timing but it is possible to come from/for all! I think this "problem" has the potential to get us to a place that can and WILL not help but make- FORCE- people see what kind of person they really are, but only if you dare to go there!!! Get ready to expose!!! Or be that. I am willing to be judged, dont you see? It is worth it. It being everything.
But you can have a kind of incidental, naturalistic reason for why the event occurred. It could be just to do with trains carrying people like they normally would day-to-day and some unforseeable circumstance happens which requires this choice.
You make an effort to save the people or stop the train. Anything less than that is cowardly business.
If one argues the bystander is morally obligated to get involved, then I suppose whoever argues this has a massive to-do list, and the question is why they are wasting their time on this forum when they're supposed to be getting involved!
All of us are after all bystanders in countless numbers of situations which are just begging for a hero.
I'm not sure where you live, but where I live, people are not dying in front of me countless times, or even ever in my longish life.
[quote=Bob Dylan]I can't help it if I'm lucky.[/quote]
Apparently there exists a moral obligation to save people from dying, even if it requires the murder of bystanders, but this obligation is limited by distance and now seemingly also does not include acts that exceed the effort of a lever pull.
Fascinating!
No, I'm on the other side of the lever pulling in theory, but i think in the moment I would be tempted. Try to keep up.
There is no obligation to act whenever there is no action one can take. If breaking the the tv would stop the war, I'd feel obligated to break the tv, but it wouldn't. I can respond to something on the tv by various means, usually involving my bank account so as to pay someone else to do something. But if I did that too often I'd have to sell the tv and then I wouldn't even have that option. What can you do heroic countless times a day if only you felt you ought ?
Well, you were challenging my comment and I worked with what you gave me.
Quoting unenlightened
Does that really count, though? :chin:
How do you know that money doesn't disappear into some embezzler's pocket?
And if it does, have you fulfilled your moral obligation?
Quoting unenlightened
The idea that the bystander is morally obligated to involve themselves creates all sorts of strange situations.
But if you don't believe there exists such an obligation then that's fair enough.
The heart of the trolley problem is this:
Without any context or explanation, if you were forced to kill either 1 person or 5 people with no other options, which would you do?
Everything else is a distraction. Trolleys, levers, instructions given to force you to make a decision, no brakes or time for brakes, etc) allow you to start to picture the scene, but these facts introduce the real world, which introduces many new questions. These questions influence what the basic hypo actually is, so they have to be answered before one could say whether they killed 1 or 5 people was right or wrong.
So to avoid the creeping presence of real world questions, and stick to the hypo, the question becomes: is it worse to kill one person or five people.
Depends on what you think of people. If its bad to kill a person, then, since you are forced to kill either one person or five people, it seems a no brainer. And since you are FORCED to kill one or five, neither choice is immoral or moral for you. One might be better or more practical, but its not your fault someone has to die.
Who is forcing the choice?
We're changing your name from BC to SP for smarty pants.
This is a tram:
I don't think I can agree on your view that the other things are distractions. These "distractions" are part of what make it interesting, and the fact you can vary these different factors and change how the situation seems I think is very informative about morality.
I also don't think the statement: "if you were forced to kill either 1 person or 5 people with no other options, which would you do? is an absolute description of the trolley problem. I think stating it like this changes the scenario a bit - from what I can gather, the most common views of it have it that 5 people were going to die anyway. As I said in another post, I'm inclined to think that framing it this way makes the situation different to a simple choice of 1 vs. 5. Viewed this way you could also argue that there is not so much a forcing element here. 5 people are going to die; you can choose to save them if you so wish at the cost of 1 person's life.
Edit: Thinking about it, maybe someone could view the last description / sentence as forcing if they wish; but at the very least, I think its not absolutely clear there is a single way to interpretate. Depends what you mean by forcing I guess. If you were to view that last description as forcing then perhaps it is not so different from many other scenarios in life someone could choose to engage in or abstain from (in similar way to what has been saying I suppose). On the other hand, does forcing really exempt you from moral responsibility?
Yep. :up: To appeal to arithmetic is to fall prey to the counterexample. To withdraw the arithmetical justification is to withdraw the only justification provided for the decision. There is an undeniable analogy which obtains between the trolley case and the organ transplant case. The similarity is strong enough to place the burden of proof on the naysayer to explain why they are relevantly different.
I dont know about exempting, so its a good question, but force certainly creates a distance for responsibility to cover.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Maybe I did over simplify. Well, I see there is a choice between 1 and 5, I can save or kill five or one and in that sense am not forced. And after giving me the instructions about the pulling the lever or not, no one forced anything further to happen, the rest is up to me. And thats where the trolly case starts.
But isnt there still a third element in any situation like the trolly vital to the conversation? There is also my willing participation in the choice and its effect enacted (as with the one person being hit by the trolley). The choosing act, about which we say I am responsible. And it is in that willingness, that consent, that we find something vital to ethics, but greatly diminished in the trolley case.
The trolly has clarified for me that, my consent, and my choice are two different pieces; I can choose to kill the five or kill the 1, and we can debate goodness among those choices, but to do either, to act, to kill 5 for instance, I must consent to the choice as I act. That consent, can only be freely given. Home of radical freedom. Maybe?
Only in a world of willing consent, (better, a world of many willing consenting ones), can there emerge an ethics. Not just a world of choices and options like one and five.
Now we look for freedom in this, freedom versus forcing a choice (by controlling the options) or forcing your consent (by commanding participation).
I agree with your simple breakdown and I think your claim brings up good points. People will argue about the distractions, but I believe its possible they do because it works for their tailored liking, or it works for their reasons. If you have to be particular in acknowledging a distraction, I think the ground standing on those distractions is not going to be solid enough. Distractions do not alter, "the heart of the problem" like you said. While it appears that those who want to favor the distractions lose sight of the more important considerations here. Fire Ologist continues, "These questions influence what the basic hypo actually is, so they have to be answered before one could say whether they killed 1 or 5 people was right or wrong." -- I do think this point is more relevant than the distractions, but I want to clarify. Do you think those "watching 5" are actually KILLING? Allowing them to die, those who got themselves in this situation in the first place. BUT pulling the lever is, to me, actually deciding that KILLING 1, by literally pulling lever (hand aiding the death) VS ALLOWING / WATCHING 5 people die....hm, what if no one was there at all, the train was going to follow the track and kill the 5 anyways. The lever option to me, is involving your self in this scenario and by wanting to make that call because of (BLANK)[insert reason why]--it says a lot about the character behind the choice.
Those who chose the lever everytime to "save lifes" offer an interesting perspective. I wonder how they see value and worth in life and if the placing of it is done properly. Do they see people as numbers? Do they have to in this case? ...kill 1 instead of letting 5 die... I believe although still horrid that, watching 5 die leaves your involvement out of it in and at justifiable distance, while on the other hand-- aiding in the outcome, you forced the direction change and killed a person...you saved nothing. You showed us yourself.
To your question (that has no real answer, im afraid), "Who is forcing the choice?" I offer another one: What if the chooser is the force?
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes you are right. I considered an omission to still be an actionas a conscious choice refraining from intervening. By not pulling the lever, you are actively deciding to let events unfold.
But yeah :up:
I did address that above but probably badly. But Ill do better.
Sometimes when you are driving you take your foot off the gas, maybe down a small hill; that doesnt mean you arent driving the car forward because you need not push the gas pedal to move forward. So doing nothing is moving forward at just the right speed..
Or better, sometimes on your Xbox controller you press A and sometimes B or sometimes nothing at all, but yet you are in total control.
Sitting on the trolley may as well be button A and pulling the lever may as well be touching nothing at all on the controller; whether one or five die is completely in your control.
This scenario does not include a sin of omission if you will. Sitting there is enacting the death of five people. You have the simple choice of what outcome, what effect you can choose to bring about.
A wrong by omission occurs when you already recognize an affirmative good deed (saving a baby that falls in a fountain) and omit the action, choose not to act. You might be able to fabricate a trolley scenario where there is a wrong of omission (maybe with babies and pedophiles on the tracks or something), but choosing to stay seated is choosing not to pull the level, as much as pulling the lever is choosing not to stay seated. I only see acts of commission in leaving 5 alive or leaving 1 alive. No acts of omission.
This highlights what I was talking about with .
The trolley case here is a bit more simple and cuts off the element of consent. 5 or 1 will die. There no other options. But in addition, you must give your consent by either staying seated, or pulling the lever. You do not have a choice but to consent to one or the other, unless you can protest the whole thing, denying any and all responsibility.
If we are able ever, to take any responsibility, we are able to take none. So there is no way to judge the one who stays seated ethically, because they could be either participating by actively avoiding the lever, or they could not give a damn what anyone else thinks is going on, they have nothing to do with this.
The trolley example has to judge what the person is consenting to in their act.
If you strip away everything of their consent and tell them: Quoting Captain Homicide, then there is nothing to consider of their consent behind either choice.
I actually think the moral choice here is to confront the trolley trap maker and say I choose neither so all that follows remains your doing. You could say that I am choosing not ro pull the lever, but no - if we are to judge my lever pulling as good or bad, we have to know what I would consent to, am consenting to as I act.
If I choose to pull the lever, I am choosing to save five people, and I am consenting to this as exemplified in my physical act of pulling the lever. So I am also consenting to participate in the experiment.
If I choose to stay seated, I may be consenting to kill five to save the one, or consenting to kill five with no concern about the one, or consenting to save the one, with little concern about the five, but if I choose to stay seated I might also not be consenting to any of this at all. This heart, my consent, that I alone can generate, must be considered in ethics.
Maybe consent is in the trolley case, by omission. And Ive been remiss in failing to give it credit for spurring the conversation.
Speeding trolley and you have kill five arguments in favor of the trolley case or kill just one argument, what would you do go!
I posted my comment before I saw this addition, you touched on some things I was getting at. You bring up the responsibility and willingness in participation, thats important. I agree with your contributions, I underlined your quote above that I didnt think about really before. Great point.
Little confused here, "I must consent to the choice as I act. That consent, can only be freely given. Home of radical freedom. Maybe?" if you care to, could you expand any more on this? what do you mean when you say that consent can only be freely given? Consent is the voluntary agreement or approval of what is done or proposed by another...I dont think consenting or approving the choice is necessary BUT IF ONE HAS TO BE MADE, (extremeness in this manner make the problem not realistic (to me),BUT I find this problem can be wildly interesting)
Decision making moments: TIME factoring is worth acknowledging...quick thinking- what/how fast comes the reasoning after the act?, how is the acceptanceor responsibility held accountable or acknowledged for being that? With the self? Or with a witness? (think of people who could be / would want to be observing) (observing and gathering intel without your awareness)
like you said responsibility but also to be valid i think credibility, and justifications need to be observed for further judgments (comparing to what? required?) and), or enough time to decide with reason A CHOICE is taking ACTION comes in these particular decision making moments.
"Now we look for freedom in this, freedom versus forcing a choice (by controlling the options) or forcing your consent (by commanding participation" freedom vs choice - now were talking! Ill be back, just wanted to get this out now.
EDIT: I read and saw you clarified "consent" further here, No need to get into it from my comment. Leaving comment as is.
Quoting Fire Ologist
:up:
I agree with that, and that it highlights the difference between the choice to save lives and the consent to make that choice, by pulling the lever. Pulling the lever to save lives shows both aspects of ethics - the choice of five over one, and the willing consent to that choice by acting, by pulling the lever.
Its right to turn over that perspective to move on to good versus bad in the one or in the five living or dying, as well as turning over the person who acted upon the world to bring about the one or the five or the good or the bad.
But the act of sitting there and doing nothing is not doing nothing - if your will is to kill the five, and if the scenario will permit the enacting of this will (which it does) then sitting there not letting anyone touch the lever is just as affirmative an act as pulling the lever.
The trolley case, for me, just doesnt set up a strong question of whether your act was one of omission. Quoting Kizzy
You mentioned the person just sitting there, keeping a justifiable distance.
So what do you mean there is no real answer to the question who is forcing the choice? Its a hypo. Someone has built a hypo. If it was a real trolley, someone else set the whole thing in motion, and put you in control of 1 or 5 deaths. They are the ones forcing you. That is where we search for ethics - between the trolley trap maker and really all the unwilling participants (willing ones would be on the trap makers side).
what if i dont feel forced, just scared?
Thats why I think it would take courage to do the truly moral thing on the trolley and not participate at all. I guess fear is a kind of force that might also diminish the ability to consent and therefore the ability to commit a moral act.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Very nice, I like this!
I may have gotten ahead of myself a bit. So we distinguished between the choices (1 or 5, good or bad) and the consent (I pull the lever, or I stay seated), and then I say consent can only be freely given.
I dont know if that is right. But I am interested in considering it further.
You said Consent is the voluntary agreement or approval of what is done or proposed by another.. That is true, but I also think when I have a choice between at least two things, those two things are the other, they are what is to be done (kill one or five); those choices are what are proposed by circumstances (save 5 or let them die). I still have to consent to one among this other in order to act and MAKE the choice.
Consent it seems to me is part of the picture in every choice.
I think whether it is only freely given is a tangent that Im not even sure how to address.
Hm, interesting...
But you are consenting to the rules by participating in this "problem" that is constrained by limits placed on participants by the initiator. So, if you chose to participate, you still are free to make decisions without forcing anything except rules that are required for the problem to exist at all. While inside the problem, your options are of 2 choices (1 or 5 human deaths) kill or watch- but since the rules have been made up and laid out for others to decide, those still in the problem after knowing rules are consenting to participate? Am i missing something else? I feel like if you are in this problem, you cant use consent as an excuse to get out of making a decision but you can get out of this hypo. freely, right?
I mentioned earlier when I responded to your question with another," What if the chooser is the force?" ---What comes from the force that this person caused from their decision? Whats the power of different impacts? Does the impact of the force after choice / act play out and the outcomes of the event are final depend on anything? Does it depend on a person to get involved with something that was already in motion to occur.
Would you agree that, one might experience this scenario with courage, like you said before and one might also experience, as I imagined, out of fear. I am thinking further, to be brave here (courage) sems to be an attribute of the individual whom must have enough strength (or thinks they do) to overcome and focus in a situation. More strength then the fear based person in the same position..
---Can they or do they reason after they decide and without valuing life at all, just a natural reaction or instinct? Are they self aware enough to make the decision while already weighing the consequence of causing the death of 1 person? They are willing to do what they can, whether it is dealing with the families and friends grieving the loss of loved ones, how are they planning on dealing with problems to come, like being blamed or accused of doing the wrong thing by those who are in NO PLACE TO JUDGE...HOW are they able to begin dealing with life after this type of tragic experience and their role in it.
Imagine the courageous one that pulls the lever killing the single person, while saving the 5 others. Do they have character and respect that aligns with that attribute? Do they show signs physically, emotionally, mentally of how this impacted their lifes? Or how strength was acclimated leading up to this event? They should align, and make sense in order to be valid in justification here. Do they express how hard it was for them to chose one vs the other 5 and DOES anyone believe this killer? OR do they see this person as a hero?
Perhaps, how much they seem to accept their part in this SHOWS how much they thought about it, its possible to measure how much they premeditated an outcome...
THEY BOTH, the courageous hero (act) and the shocked bystander (omission) HAVE TO BE PREPARED to deal with their own mind and the consequences they brought to self moving on from the occurrence. Do they have to revalue their values, ethics, beliefs, standards, etc? Do they each deal with the consequences accordingly to how they thought they would right after decision? How do they stand in their choices? We can judge that eventually. The degree of self awareness present in the act and after using info from the past to confirm can and will be brought to light.
Some might say this is a high stress, emergency, panic inducing event, where the power of authority, while in reasonable position to take action, but to be able to recognize what is going on and decide to take charge I might argue involves more complexities within the human mind and our capabilities using it...that type of attribute linked to courage or bravery might be personality based even, how could we determine that or otherwise? (another topic, another time)
Also, like @Captain Homicide originally brought up from the start, "For those who would let the five people die by not pulling the lever to kill one person is there a minimum number of people on the track that would make you choose to kill the one person? 50? 100? 1,000? 10,000?" Capt is on to something with this, i think because people CAN change their minds. Before, during and after the act of choosing---Intentions can change in decision making moments and be repurposed...trust is built and broken here and we will see this happening before judgement should occur, those judging wrongly will be also eventually held accountable and it forces almost naturally with or without authority, people to wake up and look in the mirror.
TIME thinking about what I should do, includes weighing out some sort of consequence or outcomes and still leans in favor of being the hero and saving the 5, sacrificing another life. Does it not force the decider to LOOK at the life and value it against the group of 5? How is the decider valuing and placing worth on/in life itself, on themselves and on others? How is the decision affecting them? What if there is a case of regretting the choice immediately after. What if after time, you disagree with that choice?
The reaction to the scene may cause the act of thinking about what is going on, what can i do, am I capable of dealing with the consequence of taking a life with responsibility or more capable of dealing with the trauma of witnessing and being blamed for the death of 5. I have to live with my decision from this event...and the action of the body after decision was made up in mind is swiftly if not happening/occurring together.
--Mind and body are in agreement and taking action together but separate to make a whole outcome by using force of authority to intervene or force of authority to allow time to continue as it was already in motion.
The force is especially significant in the chooser that is in no place to make these types of decisions...BUT there can be times where, they happen to be in the right place to use that authority...by not using that authority (it still exists), or deciding to watch (not use authority) and instead of involve self further, i can see how in some cases that is the best move and vice versa other times its the wrong move. It depends.
Is it worth considering after the fact, the explanation that came from the person justifying authority that claim they believe they were doing and did "what they believe is right" by pulling lever killing a person just because they could? I feel like, that would mean that they see/saw and hold true their values and how they place it and they considered themselves in this situation before acting but after they already decided. Mind to motion...I said in my first comment, think mind over matter. Perhaps, they may be misplacing value and worth even though doing the right thing is justified to them? I think because time still needs to be considered before judgement. I said that already too, right from the jump...read my first comment...Glad I am ending with this, its full circle for me now and I didnt know that was going to happen until here in this closing sentence. Just look and see, I said it before and I am saying it again. TIME is determining the measure of how long they (person with choice) had to reason...justifications can be predictable or foreseen from around here.
"In recent years, automated vehicle designers have also pondered how AVs facing unexpected driving situations might solve similar dilemmas. For example: What should the AV do if a bicycle suddenly enters its lane? Should it swerve into oncoming traffic or hit the bicycle?"
Woah, I missed this. I agree here, now. Right on! You said it best and so simply put! I, personally applaud and admire when people articulate a point without using SO many words..My words did though allow me to found my ideas, in the moment. I figured out my grounding, for myself in the moment the only way I know how. All the many words (too many, i can admit) that I have shared, even though you can get to and did get to the a similar point that I did, just before me and with far less words/space taken up...I wouldnt of gotten myself to this place where I can acknowledge THAT and THIS in you (then) and in me (now). I wouldnt have been able to comprehend this, the point of your comment before learning what I eventually did from my long winded comments in this thread. Now looking back, I am pleased to see that I am not too far off in left field... Similarities in what you said in a single comment exist in what I said but it took me 6 comments total, including a few exchanges with Fire Ologist, to figure it out. This only reassures confidence in the stance I have built up on a ground that I have always trusted to begin with. But now I can accept and ought to trust the process itself, equally! Cool! I appreciate all efforts that go into the contributions! Thanks!
Yes. I challenge the idea that we have no obligation to strangers. We have a small obligation to do something if we reasonably can to make another's situation better if they are in difficulty. The trolley situation as played out in 's video would be traumatic precisely because one would feel that one ought to intervene and take responsibility, as the the only person able to. But behind it is the real question as to what the train operator's policy ought to be and what the the professional switchman should do or not do in that situation. The stranger would not be blamed for making a wrong decision or freezing in the unfamiliar emergency, but the switchman and the rail company need a policy, based on a moral principle. And of course, the workers on the line also need to know that policy to protect themselves from random track switchers.
So if you work for unenlightened railways, or if you like to trespass on unenlightened tracks, you should be aware that trains will never be switched unless the line is thought to be clear, and no-one who is not in danger should be put in serious danger by anyone else to save others. If you are on the tracks, you are putting yourself in danger, and workmen should always be alert to the possibility of trains, and not stand on the tracks to make phone-calls or have a chat about what an arse the boss is, especially with headphones on.
In the trolley problem, save one person everybody knows is a Nazi but I secretly know he's planning to assasinate Hitler or five kids. Save 5 Nazis or 1 old man with terminal cancer. It is only useful where we know nothing about the past or the future, the situation is entirely decontextualised from reality and then we are commanded to chose. It is a game, nothing more and nothing less and we can always choose not to play. All valid moral choices.
Of course there's a moral obligations to help others but when helping means murdering others... I'm totally awesome but not so awesome to decide who gets to live and who doesn't and reducing this to statistics is not a solution as I could save the wrong person. I could save a Hamas leader or Bibi and I'd rather not.
Yes, I think most moral analogies automatically fail in that they are too simple for being actually valuable in moral philosophy. At best they are a good introduction for people learning philosophy to get them to think critically about morality, but in the end I think that these scenarios tend to get in the way of actually thinking about morality.
Reality is damn messy and the worst that these kinds of simplified scenarios can get is that society tries to judge someone's action based on a similar simplicity; rather than carefully evaluating the situation that happened. It's the prime reason why we don't have a "final" moral philosophy that can be applied everywhere, because it can't.
It's why I'm thinking that the "final" theory of moral philosophy may be in a rigid framework of practical moral evaluation, that can be applied to any situation as a framework of critical thinking, rather than being a conductor of axiomatic oughts. Malleable enough to adapt to any situation involving humans in morally challenging situations.
As it happened the lone bomber was dead. Dilemmas happen, and sometimes even the experts get it wrong.
Quoting Benkei
I think introducing another calculation as to the moral worth of the individuals is a completely false move. This is what doctors are expressly forbidden to do, but their oath is to do their best for PolPot and Mother Theresa without distinction. The War Crimes Tribunal is the place for such judgements, not the railway line or the hospital.
You're suggesting that you feel a sense of moral obligation to all strangers, are you not? And yet I'll go out on a limb and assume that you don't spend the majority of your time trying to fulfill that moral obligation.
This is starting to sound like "I have an 'obligation', but only when I feel like it."
And that's the thing about moral obligations: whether we feel like it or not, we should abide by them.
I think you're throwing the term around too loosely, and in the process either claiming the existence of moral obligations which are impossible to fulfill, or 'obligations' which are so vague and subjective that they lose all their meaning.
Which is why the Hippocratic oath and triage have nothing to do with morality either but with survivability of the patient irrespective of moral considerations.
Edit: to add, I think I would be forgiven to not help an attacker, favouring a victim, even when the attacker had a higher chance of survival. Maybe even in obvious ways even to me as a layman at the train station. It would be a moral choice for me personally to decide at that moment the smaller chance of the innocent surviving is more important to me, personally, than that of the aggressor. But I wouldn't condemn the layman for making the other choice either. Whether that's a triage decision or not. There's simply not much good either of us can do.
And I think you are confusing moral obligations with legal ones. Of course moral obligations are impossible. And if you try very hard indeed, you get crucified for your pains.
Hmm. No. Legality has nothing to do with anything.
Quoting unenlightened
How so?
"Thou shalt not kill" seems like a perfectly realistic moral obligation, for example.
So, you reframe the problem to be not about making what is best for others, but about what is best for your self-image.
(Playing a devil's advocate here, I don't have my own answer yet.)
Thou shalt not kill 1, or thou shalt not kill 5? In this context, that seems a particularly foolish comment. It happens rather frequently to train drivers that people are killed by the train they are driving.
https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/looking-after-the-railway/delays-explained/fatalities/
Not sure why you've suddenly started linking railway death statistics.
Right. Understood.
I think there are layers to agency in the sense that one could be forced to make a harmful choice by someone, in which we might reduce responsibility for the action; but then, within that choice context, if there is room to choose a better or worse option, then I think that is still up to you unless that specific choice was forced on you by someone else. So there is a nuance in the sense that you were partly forced but also had some choice.
Some might even layer it up even further in the sense that some people might argue that in a deterministic world no one has actual responsibillity. But then again I don't think many people strongly commit to that idea, at least in practical ethics.
Nonetheless, that last point brings up the fact that sometimes we just have to make choices. No one may have forced us to make the choice but it seems that a choice had to be made just as a matter of how events unfolded. You keep talking about the trolley problem as if a choice had been forced (commanded participation by another agent); but I don't think there is anything explicit in the trolley experiment saying this. The trolley problen could have a natural cause - a freak train incident due to no ones fault. Maybe this could be forcing in some sense of diminish responsibility... but it is unremarkable and does not especially stand out. Almost all other difficult moral choices are like this and not participating in a scenario like that would be immoral I think most would agree. The way that the trolley problem is set up, 5 people are going to die anyway so refusing to participate is practically the same as making a choice. But even so, refusing to participate in a rescue mission where either one or 5 people must die would not be deemed to the moral thing to do in that context by most people.
Again, if there is still wiggle room to make a better or worse choice then I think that one still has moral responsibility for that I think, though obviously people may attribute less responsibility if the choice was unusually extreme or difficult people didn't have the correct information (but trolley problem gives us the correct information). But then that doesn't mean there are not better or worse choices. You may be forced to kill 1 or kill 5 but if you knew you were doing fully in the moment then surely you have to justify the choice. Contrary to what you say, I think morality emerges precisely because "consent" is broken. There is no need for morality if it is just about getting what we want and agreeing to play the game. Morality comes from the fact that we are forced to play games we might disagree with. We wouldn't have all these moral rules if people didn't have conflicting wants.
Edit: some tidying up.
Quoting Christoffer
I'm not sure I agree that scenarios like the trolley problem never happen - I think they probably do a lot in a messier way and in some ways the fact that the trolley problem has no perfect outcome reminds of the messiness of reality sometimes.
Nonetheless, I think the value in these analogies is not necessarily in trying to find out what the right thing to do is, but why we have the moral preferences we do and how they differ. Its like an experiment. Scientific experiments need controlled and independent variables to figure out whats going on. If you have a simplified scenario and you change certain aspects of it and see what people think then it may give more clarity as to why we make certain choices or what our preferences are. If you just present a scenario with lots of different factors then its not always clear what is actually guiding peoples decisions.
Quoting Banno
That was informative, thank you. We call the first montacargas and the second tranvía. I thought you were interested to know this, and maybe (just maybe) it can help us to solve the trolley problem.
To not-pull-the-lever is an omission. This is what you have left out of consideration. Whether such an omission is wrong will depend on the analysis.
You said that the heart of the trolley problem is, Without any context or explanation, if you were forced to kill either 1 person or 5 people with no other options, which would you do? The trolley problem gives two options: pull the lever or don't. Someone might construe those two options as "kill one or five," but all sorts of people do not construe the options that way, and therefore the trolley problem does not reduce to those two options. In fact, "Kill one or five" is not a dilemma; but the trolley problem is.
Quoting Fire Ologist
When you say "consent" what you seem to mean is "intention" or "rationale." In ethics it is common to ask about what should be done. This is not an exclusion of intention or rationale, largely because the question will soon follow your answer, "Why?"
Beyond that, to say, I dont consent to the dilemma is not an option. The question is simply, What would you do if you were in this situation? You can refuse to answer the question, but if you find yourself in that situation you will not have the option to avoid it on the basis of consent. Life happens whether we consent or not, and at times it involves tough decisions.
The trolley problem says, "If you didn't know anything about the individuals, what would you do?" This is not decontextualized from reality given the fact that there are times in reality when we do not know anything about the individuals who will be affected by our choices. It is a somewhat tidy way to instantiate meta-ethical presuppositions within a simple problem.
I would say that the trolley problem is limited but not pointless. In particular I think it is pedagogically limited. The only strongly principled opposition to the trolley problem that I can see would be on the basis of something like "situation ethics," which is wary of moral principles per se. To speak about moral principles is already to have abstracted away from concrete reality, but it does not follow that consideration of moral principles is morally irrelevant. Most would say that consideration of moral principles is highly morally relevant, and that the trolley problem gets at moral principles. Thus I think it is useful if we were to find ourselves in similar situations (as others have noted), but it is also useful whenever we are in a situation where the moral principle in question comes to bear (i.e. whenever we must choose between two groups of people the principle contained in the trolley problem should be part of our analysis so long as we think the trolley problem is decidable).
Quoting Apustimelogist
If you go to the YouTube channel of <this video> the philosopher has another video on real-life parallels to the trolley problem (I currently have YouTube blocked to avoid wasting time, so I don't have the direct link). Off the top of my head, the case of Dudley and Stephens is fairly similar, and went to English court.
Not self image.
Just trying to locate where the moral question really is, where the moral issue really arises.
The moral question is why does ANYONE have to die here? Did someone rig the whole situation intentionally? The driver certainly didnt. They are just forced to pick a lane. Is this a case of negligent brakes on the trolley and no trained trolley driver to make the decision? How is a bystander any more responsible than any other person in this situation?
If it is wrong to kill people, it is wrong first and foremost to build this situation. Period. Whoever rigged the whole scenario is doing the intentional killing. The driver forced to pick a lane is incidental to the trap builders intentional act.
So when the driver intentionally chooses one lane or the other, they are probably going to recognize that mathematically, saving five is better than saving only one. But I dont see holding them responsible for killing anyone.
But the messiness of reality strips the simplicity out of the scenarios adding so many moving parts that the scenario in itself has changed so much that the parameters of measurement becomes skewed.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Yes, as an introduction to philosophy it's great. But it's not very good at higher level thinking about morality as it's already clear how complex morality can really be.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Yes, but in that case I much rather look at the scientific experiments that have already been conducted. Since experiments that cannot be actually conducted only becomes theoretical and at best very surface level. The fact that people regularly over-estimate their ability to act morally in every single situation makes it hard to actually get a good "scientific" result.
Most moral analogies usually only pinpoints the banalities in people's confidence in their own morality, but those people were usually not very involved in critical thinking about morality to begin with. The same people who would most likely freeze like a deer in headlights when they actually face a real moral dilemma and situation.
Since the complex parameters always matters in real situations, I'd much rather try and find a method of thinking that can incorporate variables and speed up decision making within moral situations; a more holistic approach with a focus on having a trained mental state and a practical moral methodology to be able to act regardless of pressure.
No its not. What if in this situation I want to kill five people? My choice is killing five people. How do I actively effect that choice - by actively refusing to pull the lever, but intentionally sitting still. These are not omissions.
There is stuff to ponder in the trolley problem but the difference between a wrong of omission and a wrong of commission is tough to find here. There is first, the act of the trolley trap builder who commits an act of murder of either five or one person. You cant build this scenario to be a moral problem without knowing the intention (or negligence, or just lifes predicaments) behind it.
If the whole situation arose innocently, and for some innocent reason five men were tied to the trolley tracks, and one standing on the other, and you innocently knew how the lever worked the tracks, and you innocently knew no one else was going to take responsibility for what happens, then you might be forced to decide whether your own participation in things will help improve the outcome, and quicker save five and kill one. But I dont see how given the innocence of every other aspect of this scenario we have to all of a sudden focus on the morality of the person thrust into that fast moving scene. Its not a moral question - its a practical one, and whatever happens isnt the drivers fault whether he chooses to switch lanes or chooses to stay in one lane.
Suppose someone walking by a lake sees a child fall, hit his head on a rock, and start floating face down in the water. They only have to get a little bit wet to save the kid's life. If they don't, can't we judge them? Wouldn't it be wrong to let the kid drown?
Quoting Fire Ologist
It obviously is.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Yes, it is. Just as you can be culpable for an omission, so too can you effect some outcome via an omission. Your claim that because someone can achieve an intended outcome by not-doing something does not invalidate the fact that not-doing-something is an omission.
Quoting Merriam Webster | Omission
To not-pull-the-lever is to leave the act of pulling the lever undone. This is particularly obvious when the whole question is one of whether to pull the lever. The one who considers this question and then decides not to pull the lever has omitted to pull the lever. Whether this omission amounts to killing or murder is part of the point of the trolley problem. It can't just be stipulated away.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Moral questions are always practical.
If I had a duty to save the most people when riding a trolley that had no proper conductor, than sitting still would be an immoral act of omission.
But do I have any duty to participate in this situation at all? That has to be addressed first.
I have not spoken of "immoral acts of omission." I have spoken about omissions. See:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
Its not an omission if you intend to kill five people. Its how you carry out your intention. Its a physical act to stay seated in order to kill five.
You said you can omit pulling the lever. If you omit pulling the lever, are you omitting everything then, or choosing and physically enacting the killing of 5? If you can omit pulling the lever, are you committing to staying seated? Or are you merely omitting all acts? Which goes to participating in the whole rigged experiment.
This argument has already been addressed:
Quoting Leontiskos
Specifically, here is your argument:
(1) is false, and the fact that one can be culpable for an omission proves that it is false. If nothing which is intended could come about by omission, then one could never be culpable for an omission. But this is mistaken because some omissions bear on volition, and these kinds of omissions are called negligence. Whether omitting to pull the lever involves negligence is part of the problem at stake.
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Quoting Fire Ologist
One of the central aspects of the trolley problem gets at the question of whether one is equally responsible for omissions and commissions:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't see this much different to how scientific experiments are always much simpler than everyday reality. A dice roll is presumably describable via Newtonian / classical forces but no one creates a direct Newtonian / classical model of a dice roll and then conducts an experiment to validate it.
Quoting Christoffer
For me, the point of it isn't to produce moral thinking and correct moral answers but to uncover the underlying reasons and intuitions of moral thought.
Most of us would assume those reasons are consistent across many different scenarios regardless of complexity or if "the experiment [has] already been conducted".
Quoting Christoffer
The thought experiment itself is the conduction of it. I just want to see what the opinion or judgement is of it. The fact that people may over-estimate their ability to act morally would apply to any thought experiment regardless of complexity or realistic-ness.
Quoting Christoffer
I disagree. As far as I'm aware there is no consensus on the correct solution to the trolley problem. The fact that people disagree brings up the question of why they disagree and what this says about their moral thinking and what kind of variables make them change their moral choices, which imo is an interesting thing in its own right. The question of how people act and actually behave morally in real life (and whether they actually do what is in agreement with the beliefs, judgements, moral frameworks they have) is also another interesting question in its own right.
I think my disagreement with people in regard to these things maybe stems from me finding these questions interesting in their own right as opposed to just a vehicle for prescribing practical morality.
It just does a poor job of highlighting the omission.
So the other guy on the trolley who is just sitting there unaware of anything, omitting to do anything at all, does he have a duty to choose a lane and save some people? Is he omitting his duty of vigilance over what lane the trolley should be in?
The whole reason there might be a duty to save the right people is because you were given the responsibility to do anything at all. Or you take responsibility to do anything at all. But the raw facts of the scenario dont address any duties at all. There is no reason to blame someone for failing to act when they had no duty to act.
So if we are allowed to bring in exterior facts, like a duty to save anyone, we can rework the scenario any way we want. The scenario as it stands, to me, doesnt present a moral question about saving or killing human lives, it presents a moral question about whether there is a duty to make any decision at all, to take any action at all, to participate and consent to one or the other committed acts (5 or 1) dying.
Arguably, yes.
Quoting Fire Ologist
As you say, whether a duty exists is part of the problem. The fact that the problem does not explicitly mention duties does not mean that duties are not relevant to the problem. Moral questions of this kind almost never explicitly mention duties.
Again, my point here is that what you described as "the heart of the trolley problem" is not the heart of the trolley problem. What you boiled it down to is not a problem or a dilemma at all. Everyone knows that the death of five is worse than the death of one, ceteris paribus. If it were that simple then there would be no disagreement over the trolley problem.
Exactly.
So ethics arises not in the practical facts, but in the intentions behind them.
So you are saying the scenario is asking us whether, in these circumstances, a duty arises to act at all, and then complicates it by then asking if you fail to act at all, or pull the lever, are you culpable for committing murder, or culpable by omission for committing the murder of five?
The question really is, does one involve oneself by pulling the lever, thus killing one and saving five, or does one refuse to get involved (and thus omit to pull the lever).
Negligence, culpability, these are legal terms, and I think under most legal systems you would be charged with second-degree murder if you pushed some innocent bystander on the tracks, regardless of your intentions.
If you are talking about these terms in a moral sense, I think they need to be explained in more detail. When is one morally culpable? Negligence implies a failure to do a duty - what duty are we talking about here, and when can one be said to be morally negligent?
Thats not what I am saying about omission. I am saying there must be an affirmative duty prior to there being an intentional omission of acting on that duty.
If you intend to kill five you can sit still, but you are committing an act of sitting still.
If you see you have a duty to save five and you sit still intentionally, you are committing a wrong because of your duty by your act of omission.
Not helping a kid floating face down can easily be wrong morally/objectively, even if they have to get soaked.
Thats not comparable to being given instructions on how to work trolley levers, told people are (for some reason) tied to train tracks, told another person is standing on the other track, and being told you alone have to take responsibility for the outcome.
Does anyone think the people on the tracks (or their families of the deceased) could blame the person who pulled the lever for the death? There is much more to it than the decision to pull levers or not. The ethics lies in those places, not in the lever predicament.
Its more immoral to ask a person to make this decision than it is for the person to kill 1 or kill 5. The rigging of the outcome - death or more death - that is where the wrong doing occurs.
Exactly the point I am trying to make. The moral questions in the trolley problem are more about the trolley builder, the trolley driver who abandoned his post, the person who rigged the whole scene, the story of the five guys tied to the tracks, the circumstances that thrust someone to make this awful choice - not the person who picks one or five deaths. In the person who picks the one or five deaths, I think the moral question is, should he or she do anything at all - is it right for them to trust someone teaching them about levers in the moments before certain death around the corner?
This isnt about whether it is better to let one person die or let five people die, or put another way, to kill one person or kill five - thats easy. And none of that can be murder under these circumstances, and the single lever puller or ass sitter should not be the first held accountable in this scenario. They might be last to be held accountable. Where are the brakes anyway? Its the big trolley corporations fault! This is basically a James Bond villain scenario. Its all practical considerations here. The ethics is not on the table.
My take is the most ethical thing to do would be to refuse to participate. You can call that choosing to kill five, but thats not what I said. That is choosing to leave the responsibility for creating this scenario where it lies before you were told about the lever.
There is no duty here.
Nobody argues that these thought experiments aren't contrived. J.J. Thomson's violinist analogy is even more implausible, and still one of the most famous thought experiments of all time. It does a great job of showing the permissibility of abortion in cases of rape, even if one concedes a fetus is a person.
In the case of saving five at the expense of one, I think a case could be made for a policy of non-interference, but that case falls apart when the numbers get extreme. For example, suppose aliens arrive at Earth, and demand to play a game of chess with Magnus Magnusson. If Magnus refuses, Earth's population will be sentenced to work to death in the aliens' salt mines. If he agrees, they'll bestow tech for cheap fusion reactors. Does Magnus have a moral duty to play chess against the aliens? Are we justified in cursing his name while we dig for salt if he refuses? I think the answers to that are obvious.
It also falls apart when the scenario is accidental / incidental and hasn't been engineered by some evil agent.
I would never pull the lever, no matter how many people I would save by doing so. Killing an innocent person is always wrong; and one cannot commit an immoral act to avoid a morally bad outcome.
What if the person is not innocent? What if the person being run over is a death row inmate?
Couldnt you just as easily say I would never sit still on that trolley, no matter how many people I would save by doing so. Killing an innocent person is always wrong; and one cannot commit an immoral act (sitting still in the knowledge that by doing so five people will die) to avoid a morally bad outcome.
Whats the difference? You are killing someone mo matter what you do. So if you wanted to uphold one cannot commit an immoral act to prevent a morally bad outcome wouldnt you have to pull the lever? Just like you would have to sit still?
Which points to the non-agency of the choice, and therefore the a-morality of choosing to kill one or five.
I refuse to add premises until someone gets somewhere with the basic scenario.
I agree one cannot commit an immoral act to prevent an immoral outcome, because by committing an immoral act you have already facilitated an immoral outcome, avoiding nothing you intended to avoid.
But in the scenario, if you are part of the game, you are not permitted to avoid killing. So its no longer about the morality of killing since we all want to avoid killing anyone. You are not free to avoid killing so, if you are playing the game, you cannot be held responsible for committing an immoral act to avoid an immoral outcome. Thats not what you did. You simply choose one or five deaths. You didnt choose death or no death. That choice was made by the trolley master and lever trainer.
Quoting Apustimelogist
How so?
It doesn't matter whether one is asked to murder to save five, a million or the rest of the human race. There's no onus on the bystander to involve themselves.
There's no magical number at which participation becomes mandatory and murder becomes a moral deed.
Your not pulling the lever is perfectly reasonable, is internally logical and no one can (correctly) fault you for your choice. However, pulling the lever is also reasonable for someone else (with a different logic system) to choose. As to your reasonable declaration that killing innocent people is wrong, sure it is, but folks do things that are wrong all the time (though perhaps not with such severe consequences). Thus wrongness is not a complete barrier to performing an action.
If I am a convicted felon, can you just walk up to me 5 years after my conviction, when I get out, and kill me for fun? Of course not. I was, in the instance that you do, innocent.
It would be immoral to avoid helping save people if there is a morally permissible way to go about it. Letting something bad happen isnt always morally permissible. I think we can hold people accountable for what they didnt do just as much as they what they did.
There is an avenue whereof one can save them without doing something immoral; unless you are stipulating that sitting still is immoral, is that it?
ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!
This is the mistake of the consequentialists that makes it so appealing: they dont understand the nature of moral responsibility, and how it relates to actions and intentions.
If I let something bad happen to someone else to avoid doing something bad, I am not morally responsible for the bad that happened to them; because my actions are not what is causing the bad to happen to them (it is someone elses doing or natures doing) and I cannot intervene to save them without actually doing something wrong.
For example, imagine a someone walks up to you and says that they have 12 people that they are torturing in their basement; and that if you stab the innocent person that is about to walk passed you to death that they will let the 12 people go. Assuming you can trust what they are saying, would you do it? You shouldnt. But your response would be: but either way, you are doing something bad (because either you let them continue to be tortured or you kill an innocent person). However, this is flawed thinking: the person morally responsible, in the event that you refuse to kill the innocent person, is the guy who kidnapped and is torturing 12 people in their basement---that burden of responsibility and culpability does not transfer to you just because you refuse to do something immoral. On the other hand, if you do something immoral, then you are morally culpable for it.
The key difference is that they aren't experiments, they are theoretical in nature only. You cannot really do these experiments practically and the ethical requirements today are so high that they can't ever be done. Therefore the scientific relevance without any form of actual experimental validation makes these quite useless in the same way we can't use string theory as a foundation of thinking about physics as the only form of validation for that is how well the math matches up to the rest. But without any actual correlation between that math and the wild statements of that theory it becomes useless as a foundational theory of everything.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Yes, they work as introduction courses to philosophy, but since there's no validation past the theoretical, and real world examples of similar events show much more complexity in their situational circumstances that they become unquantifiable as statistical data, they end up being just introduction material, nothing more.
Quoting Apustimelogist
The problem is that since the main point of moral philosophy is to find truth in what constitutes and defines human morality, it requires accuracy in how we determine morality and situations of moral thinking. These thought experiments aren't valid in any scientific manner other than to conclude just how people over-estimate or under-estimate their ability to think morally, but they're not really good as actual components and premises of moral theories.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with since it's the fact that there's no consensus that's part of putting a spotlight on people's banalities when thinking about morality. It rather shows the weaknesses and lack of depth that people have around the subject of morality as their justifications for their solution to the trolley problem becomes arbitrary and sometimes just a question of their current state of mind and mood.
Quoting Apustimelogist
But still, the problem is that people's justifications rarely correlate to how they actually behave in real moral situations. Their "critical thinking" about their choices in a moral thought experiments just becomes self-indulged fantasies about their ego, rather than a true examination of their morality. The problem with these theoretical lines of thinking and discussions end up being fiction rather than examinations of truth.
And I'd say that fiction actually manage to be better at promoting moral thinking as the thought experiments in themselves rarely have an empathic dimension to them. But investing yourself in characters of a story that make decisions on your behalf, or even have yourself in control of them like in games, usually promotes much better critical thinking about morality. Just reading the audience discussion around the moral actions in The Last of Us part 2 and how people had problems with everything that happened in that story is more fascinating and revealing as a case study in morality than how people justify their choices in the trolley problem.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I found them interesting when I started out studying philosophy, but the further I've dived down into the complexity of moral philosophy the more trivial I've found these thought experiments to be. Especially when taking into account the complexity of human cognition and psychology and the entire experience of the human condition, both for the individual and the social realm.
I think the only way a consequentialist can consistently go is to deny that it is immoral to kill an innocent human being: they would have to say that sometimes that is true, and sometimes false.
Are you saying the switch operator is guilty of murder no matter what she does?
Yes, thinking about it I see what you mean. When I made this comment I was still stuck on the question of whether this had to be some evil agent concocting the whole scenario. One could then look at it in the sense of someone refusing to participate in their game. At the same time, you could argue that in this context, if there is abetter or worse outcome then one should still make it. One could go even further and argue that if the whole scenario waa concocted by an evil genius then some of the moral responsibility is alleviated from making utilitarian-type choices.
If the scenario was totally accidental then one could say that there is no reason to refuse to participate. But then again maybe this applies most to non-trolley scenarios: e.g. a basic rescue mission where you could choose to save 5 or 1 or 0... then the choice is pretty obvious. I see though that the trolley-problem complicates this in the sense of the fact that 5 people were always going to die. I guess then one could refuse to participate in the sense of refusing to make such a choice if it meant killing someone. Then again though, the trolley scenario is constructed in such a way that refusing to participate is indistinguishable from making a choice... did you really refuse to participate or did you make the choice based on the idea that killing someone and encroaching on that person's freedom is worse than allowing 5 people to die who were going to die anyway.
Very interesting. Even if it was the whole human race (including your self?)?
There then comes the irony and absurdity of committing to your moral standards so strongly that you would allow the human race to die and, arguably in doing so, render your value system meaningless.
One could also plausibly argue almost a kind of immoral dimension in the sense of someone would sacrifice the rest of the world just so they personally didn't have to bear any moral culpability (though maybe from someone elses perspective they may still be morally culpable for ending the human race).
Im not a consequentialist.
And I agree that the trolley hypo in general doesnt account for intention and responsibility, so it misses the mark as a real platform for a discussion of morality.
And the only time the conversation gets interesting is when people change the hypo because it barely presents an ethical issue, if you play along with it as written.
I hate building off of it to make points, but I do see it reducible to this: This trolley cant be stopped and will kill someone in a few seconds; if you sit there it will kill five people, or if you pull that lever it will kill one person; you get to choose. Go make your choice.
Sitting there is choosing to kill five and pulling the lever is choosing to kill one.
I see people disagree with that but I only see that as people trying to give the hypo more credit than it is worth.
If you play along with the hypo, there is one choice here - five or one die.
But there is no moral responsibility taken for making either choice, because of intention and duty - which are utterly undeveloped in the hypo and why the hypo barely presents an ethical issue.
You need to know the intentions behind all of the pieces here. The moral issues lie with the person or people who rigged the whole scenario. Why isnt a conductor who has responsibility and duties regarding the trolley making this decision? Did he leave intentionally as part of the rigged situation or was he thrown off the trolley to bring about this scenario? Why is anyone tied to trolley tracks and who did that? Does the idiot standing on the tracks have any responsibility for standing there?
The moral question for the person on the trolley having this choice thrust upon them by other people (other moral agents) is whether to participate in this at all and make a choice. I actually think it would be immoral to play along with the scene and do anything.
That goes to intention. The person on the trolley who plays along still wouldnt be guilty of any murder. People can kill people without any intent and its not murder.
But if the person on the trolley said oh, wow, I finally get to hold lives in my own hands - Ive always wanted to kill people so Im going to sit here and kill the most people I can. Now, because of intent, I think he he is culpable for murdering five.
But if the person on the trolley said I need to save the most innocent people I can and pulled the lever he wouldnt be culpable for murder because that was not his intent.
This hypo has no analysis of duty (responsibility taking) or intent (what the act is to the actor).
To bolster the idea of omission versus commission (this hypo not capturing the concept of omission properly) here is an example of a wrong done by omission. A lifeguard sitting on his chair sees a kid drowning. He watches and does nothing and the kid drowns. That is killing by omission because he had a duty to act and omitted his responsibility. It could even be murder depending on how additional facts about intent play out.
On the trolley, why would a duty to make this decision arise in some random person thrust into the situation? It wouldnt. There is no duty to choose a lane for a passenger. And there is no duty when told about levers and people tied to tracks to quickly choose who dies. Its an insane world that trolley is riding through and to see some sort of duty here we need that person to have some understanding of insane-world trolley rules like by agreeing to ride this trolley you agree to take control of the lever (whether you pull it or leave it) as soon as everyone else on the trolley magically disappears and some number of people are on the tracks. Without a duty, whatever action is taken cannot be called an omission of that duty.
And to say a duty to save the most lives arises in this situation is ridiculous. If you want me to picture myself in a real world situation like this, I need the real world. In the real world, the person who pulled or did not pull the lever would be interrogated for his intent before murder charges and moral judgment could be contemplated, and in the real world the person would be saying I dont know! I just thought I should save the most people, or I just thought I would be doing the wrong thing if I pulled the lever. End of interrogation. The deaths are not his fault or his responsibility.
Quoting Christoffer
They are experiments. What is being measured is not what someone would do practically but their judgement or opinion. You don't need actual experiments to assess someone's opinion.
An actual moral experiment where people are acting arguably might bring in many more factors than simply someone's belief or opinion on a moral scenario.
So imo your criticisms that these may not be representative of real scenarios is misplaced because the goal I have in mind here isn't to talk about what people actually do, its to yalk about the beliefs they have.
People don't necessarily behave consistently; however, it is usually difficult for people to maintain inconsistent beliefs. People carrying inconsistent beliefs tend to try and explain away the inconsistency with reasoning which is more internally consistent (e.g. you think its bad to hurt living things but okay to kill animals... you need to find an additional reason to explain away this inconsistency).
Asking about people's opinions or judgements as opposed to their actual behaviour is invaluable in understanding what people hold to be a consistent moral framework and why they hold it.
When it goes into the real world then things change... people are perhaps more likely to miscalculate the correct option... people get scared... peoples judgements are clouded... peope turn out to not care or not value morality over other motivations for their own behaviour.
Quoting Christoffer
So are you suggesting that people change their morality when it comes to complex vs. simple scenarios? Do you personally change your whole moral thinking when it comes to a complex scenario vs. a thought experiment? Or do you believe you are using the same moral framework to tackle different problems? If you agree on the latter then I don't see the obstacle in using simplified scenarios as ways to tap into and clairfy people's reasons on moral scenarios.
Quoting Christoffer
Well your comment looks like its saying these experiments only pinpoint flaws in people's thinking but I don't see how that can be the case when there is no consensus on a correct answer. I don't really understand how strength and depth in moral reasoning would bring about an optimal, uncontroversial solution to the trolley problem.
Quoting Christoffer
This regularly happens in real life. People often behave in the wrong way and then only realize they were shouldn't have afterwards.
Quoting Christoffer
Again, it depends what you are interested in - the psychology of moral behaviour or moral beliefs, reasoning and frameworks - and no doubt there is overlap.
Quoting Christoffer
Well I can only take your word on that because I don't know anything about that.
Quoting Christoffer
Trivial in what way? To me, the lack of consensus
makes the trolley problem non-trivial.
Quoting Fire Ologist
What if it was about their own life and not innocent people? What if it was about tge reward of a tasty cheeseburger: " I didn't intend to kill anyone, I just wanted that cheeseburger so bad".
I think the question the hypo poses is: should the person who either pulls the lever or sits still be held responsible for anyones death? And the answer is no, under the existing facts. Or should the person be held responsible for anyones death and culpable for their murder as a co-conspitator in the whole trolley of death scenario? And the answer is, it depends on their intent and whether they can be held responsible for anyones death by participation in the scenario.
If we are going to start changing the hypo and adding intentions and cheeseburgers, we would have to conduct a new analysis of responsibility and intent and actions in furtherance of these.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think this is a strawman because clearly what is not interesting about the trolley problem is not the trolley problem on its own, but the underlying reasons that people make decisions on it. Changing the scenario is relevant because by exploring counterfactual scenarios we are testing and probing the underlying reasons why people make these choices and how they would react in different scenarios.
Changing the context to cheeseburgers is relevant - not in the sense of wanting to analyse a new scenario with cheeseburgers - but in the sense of analyzing whether your use of the notion of intent is really consistent here. If the answer to the question of culpability for murder changes when we replace the goal of saving innocent people with eating cheeseburgers, then clearly lack of intent in the sense that has been described in this scenario is not sufficient to remove culpability.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think there are layers. Someone may not be blameworthy in some sense that they can't help being forced into a situation where someone had to die. But does that mean there was not a better or worse decision ethically? Not necessarily.
Correct.
Essentially you are saying: it can be absurd to do what is moral or/and not to do what is immoral. Do you really believe that?
Assuming John Wayne Gacy was not moral responsible for anything bad which was occurring in that trolley situation (which is to say that he has not forfeited his right to not be killed in this situation); then, no I would not.
It is always wrong to kill an innocent person; and by 'innocent' I mean innocent in the specific situation---otherwise, it is irrelevant (even if there is other information that would emotionally move us). I would love to pull the lever in the case of John Wayne Gacy but that would still be immoral.
Well, let's take it to the most absurd level: unless you run Hitler over with a trolley, the whole world gets destroyed. What do you do?
You don't think there is an absurdity in letting the whole human race die because you don't want to kill an innocent person?
I think regardless of what you think of the morality of that behaviour, it is most definitely absurd.
Im not against augmenting the facts to continue the conversation and add more layers. Im saying that as it initially stands, the hypo has very few layers. The only ethical question posed in the basic formulation of the problem is: should you participate at all in the demand that you make the decision? My answer to that is no - you didnt set up the scenario, and it would be irresponsible of you to take action on these facts. And I still dont know that, if you do decide to participate and take action (and so act irresponsibly towards the overall scenario), you could make a wrong decision on who dies or a right decision on who lives. 5 versus 1 living certainly seems better but why did someone give me this choice? Why didnt they just say pull the lever, pull the lever! ?
Do I trust the murderer who set up this predicament for me that pulling the lever will save five people by killing only one? I dont know how you build that trust - maybe you can see the people coming fast, but are you supposed to know that the lever will effectuate the choice the murderer who set this up is telling you it will?
Before we can judge the passenger, we have to know they heard and understood the instructions, and that they believed them to be true. They werent just playing around with levers.
These arent incidental facts. These arent facts that can just be layered on top. They are essential considerations before you could analyze any moral/ethical issue for the passenger.
If you stick to the raw, initial facts first, before moving this into more layered situations and questions - what do you see as the moral issues?
I see only whether to make any choice at all as the moral question - should you trust anyone who drops this into your lap and do anything they say? Or if you do trust them, are you implicating yourself in a wider conspiracy that you would likely agree you would not intend to be a part of?
Quoting Apustimelogist
So not blameworthy, but worthy of a judgment of worse ethically. Hmm.
You need to define (so layer into the hypo) some things to clarify that.
If you are forced to either kill one or five people, with seconds to choose, and you had no interest in killing anyone at any point, and you cant be held blameworthy for the outcome, how is the decision you do make better or worse ethically? I would say the decision (should you decide to risk participation in this death trap) is a practical one, not an ethical one. Less death is practically speaking a better outcome. Why ethically? What is the duty on these facts?
Yes, part of the trolley problem requires us to determine the nature of such omissions.
Quoting Fire Ologist
This is a different point, and it goes back to my claim that an omission and an immoral omission are two different things. You have continually been unable to make this distinction.
What you said is, "Its not an omission if you intend to kill five people," and the premise is almost certainly that, "Nothing which is intended can come about by omission." You're mixing up two separate arguments. This latter claim says nothing about duties.
No its not almost certainly, because its not the premise at all. Im saying sitting still doesnt reveal an intention, you have to seek more facts (such as ask the person) what their intention is by sitting still.
A lifeguard sees a person drowning and does nothing and watches the person drown. That is intentional conduct. It is a wrong done by omission of a duty.
I don't claim that the paper exactly parallels the trolley case, but later in the paper that portrayal is specifically disputed, so it does not depart in this manner.
Quoting Tzeentch
This is a fair point, although I do not think that negligence and culpability are primarily legal in the sense of being non-moral. My guess is that the etymology and cultures within which they arose did not think of the legal sphere as a non-moral sphere. Our age which tries to talk about non-moral legal realities strikes me as odd indeed. So I think they are legal and moral.
Here is what you said:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Here is how I characterized it:
Quoting Leontiskos
Sure, and people get math problems wrong all the time, too. That doesn't mean anything with respect to the question at hand. Suppose you are on a math forum and they are discussing a math problem and you say, "Ah, well it seems that you have arrived at the right answer, but people get the wrong answer all the time. Thus wrongness is not a complete barrier to arriving at an answer." This is an ignoratio elenchus at best, unless it is being proposed as an argument for mathematical (or moral) relativism.
You may be right on something I said and meant to say. Im not sure I agree I was wrong.
But my simple point is, you need a duty in place before you can perpetrate a wrong by omission. Its omission of a duty. The act is not the point. Sitting still is an act. Sitting still doesnt tell you anything about whether that act perpetrates a wrong by omission or a wrong by commission, or anything.
The trolley problem, to me, creates a simple switch, if you switch the switch one way, five people die and the other way one person dies. The way you physically operate that switch is by sitting down or pulling a lever.
If we all have a duty to save the most lives at every opportunity to do so, then sitting still could be wrong by omission of that duty. If you switch the people on the tracks and put 5 on the lever side and 1 on the rolling side, then failing to pull the lever would be a wrong by omission as well.
Here is the original statement I disagreed with:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Here is what Bob Ross said (and I agree):
Quoting Bob Ross
This is precisely the sort of answer that your construal cannot account for. You can't conceive of an omission, and therefore you assert:
Quoting Fire Ologist
The point at stake is omissions simpliciter. When you refuse to talk about any kinds of omissions that are not immoral omissions you are missing the point. Bob is omitting to pull the lever in order to omit killing. Is he allowed to do that? Bob thinks his omission is morally praiseworthy and someone else will think that his omission is morally blameworthy, but we first need to simply recognize that it is an omission.
I think it is "most definitely absurd" to justify killing innocents as a means to an end. Hitler was already brought up, and that's why we think Hitler was bad, after all!
Well, actually, I would not pull the lever either. Because by pulling the lever I would be demonstrating my willingness to participate in the whole scenario at all.
I take the hypo to be an attempt to force you to participate. It assumes you have to make a choice - choose five or one deaths. And under these circumstances, they are all innocent deaths.
Then, now playing along, now playing your role in this scene, you then have to choose how many innocent deaths happen. To effectuate that choice you either sit or you pull a lever.
But a third option that the hypo was trying to block is to instead say no - Im not making any choice, Im not conducting any act towards your goals for my participation in it. My act of sitting here has nothing to do with which way the trolley goes because I have no duty to follow any of these instructions or participate in any way. I take no responsibility for any of these deaths - rightly so.
That, to me, is the right moral response - to stay out of the whole bloody death trap scenario.
Failing to pull the lever could be wrong by omission, and sitting still could be an act of intentional murder. To answer that you dont look to what the act is (sleeping in your seat or flipping lever), you look to what duties exist, what intentions exist and then what actions are taken.
Then I would say you are misunderstanding the trolley problem. But the deeper problem is that you are unaccountably assuming that the trolley problem was set up by an evil genius. It wasn't. It's just supposed to be a dilemma. The question is simply, "What would you do if you found yourself in this situation?" It's not, "Would you like to participate in the machination of an evil genius?"
Quoting Fire Ologist
It assumes you have to make a choice between pulling the lever or not pulling the lever. Everyone who finds themselves in that situation would be forced to make that choice. But there is a difference between choices about levers, choices about deaths, and choices about killing. You are claiming that by refusing to pull the lever Bob has killed five people, and this is a controversial claim on your part.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Quoting Leontiskos
No Im not!
If we are supposed to think that no one set this up, that it is just one of lifes predicaments that we get to decide, then we are further from a moral dilemma. No one can be charged with or accuse themselves of murder of killing an innocent person. No one could be faulted for action or inaction. Pulling the lever is both killing an innocent person and saving 5 innocent people. Sitting still is both killing five people and saving one. Those are just the facts. Why would anyone hold whatever happens against the random person who made a choice quickly to do anything there? Their involvement was part of the accident! Pulling the lever is saving 5 people. Sitting still is saving one person. Or both of these are a rash decision exigent circumstances. If you can assume the whole thing is just an accident that you are caught up in, there is no moral culpability or wrongness.
If you had the poise to think you could make this ongoing accident better and intended to make it better by pulling the lever, you are not intentionally killing one person.
Quoting Fire Ologist
You literally say it in this very post:
Quoting Fire Ologist
-
Quoting Fire Ologist
Why not? (enter the doctrine of double effect)
Whats wrong with the doctrine of double effect? But I dont really know what that is.
What was your intention?
I thought if I pulled the lever I would be preventing a horrible accident that killed five people.
Did you know you would be killing one person?
Well, yes.
So you intentionally killed one person?
No I intentionally steered the trolley away from five people - should I have done something else?
Yes, you murderer, you should have realized that by sitting still you would not have been called before we moral adjudicators for sentencing your unethical, immoral heart.
Bring in the next participant.
What was your intention?
I hate you! And all society. I contemplated pulling the lever to feel the power of killing as I killed, but quickly realized I could kill more people if I sat still - so I intentionally sat their on the seats edge so that I could know I was the reason four more than just one would spill blood.
Ok, as long as you didnt touch the lever. Good man.
It's the intellectual part of the trolley problem. Clearly not meant for this thread.
I feel like you just pulled a lever on me. Honest conversation over here.
Looks like caricature to me.
Can you lay out the reason it is ethical right to pull the lever, or not pull the lever?
You said you would not pull the lever because then you would be killing an innocent person, and killing an innocent person is always wrong. Is that your position?
Do I need to know anything more to capture your assessment of how to respond riding the trolley of death?
Is it essential to this position, that the circumstances are accidental (meaning no one has rigged the trolley and the tracks to create this situation) or does it not matter whether the situation is rigged or accident, since killing innocent people is always wrong, you cant justify ever pulling the lever?
(To answer your last question: I would make the same decision whether or not the situation was "rigged.")
I see.
I read the paper. Liked it. Agree with it. Think I am speaking in line with much of it.
Much better example of the situation with the tyrant killing five unless you kill one. Avoids the whole ridiculous omission versus commission discussion too. Brings in intent, agency, and duty in much more express and clear way than the stupid trolley.
But I guess you are above all of this, with your intellect surpassing my caricature of an honest conversation. Fairly unjust way to treat someone dont you think?
Well we are using absurd in different senses I feel. You're using absurd in a sense to express your moral disagreement while I am using it in the more existential sense. As I said, regardless of the moral view on the issue I think its kind of an incredible thought letting the entirety of human existence die at what is comparatively such a tiny cost. Then with the human race gone, morality has gone with it - what was the point of upholding that moral decision then! I guess you might view that outcome differently if you believed in the afterlife and God. I guess justifying the killing of an innocent by saving the human race could be absurd for you in this existential way also if you were inclined to believe the justification was justified in this scenario - saving the world being a choice you would make even though you thought it was wrong because of the killing of an innocent.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Its about killing innocents to save more people. If just sticking to the initial facts, I feel like the only reason to not make a choice is that you object to the idea of not killing innocent people, and that is indistinguishable from having msde a choice - to not pull the lever.
That sums it up. It highlights the distinctions between people dying, and people killing people.
But it leaves no room for a distinction between people killing people, and murder.
It asks us to adjudge ethics between people dying, and people killing people, where I think ethics comes into play where killing is distinguished from murder.
I would let the whole world get destroyed; assuming hitler, notwithstanding his past egregious transgressions, is innocent in the actual trolly incident. You can substitute whoever you want in there, it will make no difference to me: it is wrong to kill an innocent human being (and by innocent I mean in the instance which they may be getting killed), no matter who they are.
Would I want to kill Hitler? Would it emotionally feel like a good choice? Yeah. Is it morally right? Absolutely not.
I can appreciate what you are conveying insofar as it is morally counter-intuitive to the untrained mind; but I think one can appreciate my position more, even if they disagree (ultimately), when they have to build out their own consistent normative ethical theory.
:up:
No, you wouldn't.
Lol. I guess we will never know for certain......and I am surely not going to argue with you about what you think are my ethical commitments.
I probably shouldn't have said that, but deontologists annoy me. If the axe murderer comes looking for your friend, you're going to tell him the truth about where he's hiding? If the Nazi's want to know where the Jews are, we're supposed to tell them them the truth? Because we should value the truth so much? No. When the chips are down, nobody acts like that.
I am not a deontologist: I am a virtue ethicist. I just happen to think that rights are inherently deontological; and consequentialism utterly fails at accounting for them properly.
No in both cases, because both people that I would be lying to have forfeited their "right" (although I know there isn't a legal right to it) to be told the truth because they are actively trying to violate someone else's rights.
This is the same with self-defence: I am not advocating that it is always wrong to kill people. I am advocating that it is wrong to kill innocent people; and it is wrong to lie to innocent people. See what I mean?
Some people do and, although I disagree with them if they tell the truth to a Nazi or the axeman, I respect the courage, authenticity, and spine that it takes to stand by what one believes and not coward out.
I think I forgot to read these bits:
Quoting Fire Ologist
Well I don't think its necessarily a black and white issue.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think the only reason less death is a better outcome here is because we are speaking ethically. There is no practical benefit in the scenario from less death. We want less death because we think that not killing people or perhaps saving lives is some kind of moral goal. I still think you can have ethical scenarios about killing regardless of whether you put the label of murder on it. Death is bad and reducing it is an ethical issue because we think that is the right thing to do.
Quoting Bob Ross
I'm not sure this is about training but preferences. Some people think saving the human race is pretty reasonable thing to do and I am sure many would-be survivors would agree. That said, killing an innocent person isn't really right. Then again, saving humanity is a right thing to do on its own, and benefits people (at least under some opinions, because I think that the belief that humanity is bad and a creator of suffering is also kind of a reasonable view in some ways) so surely its fair to say there is both good and bad in the choice? I would say it seems to be a similar case in your morality too where people can forfeit their right to life and its okay to kill them in self-defence or if they are not innocent. You permit bad things for an end. Sure, you would say they are justified in a special way, but then there are probably some people who are even stricter than you are on when it is permissible to kill.
I agree with you, but you seem to be unaware that many do just that.
I'm using "wrong" to mean: violates one's moral code, not a final conclusion after considering all possible points of view (including but not limited to morality).
Thus in that context your math problem analogy and your similar commentary, is, alas oversimplified to the point of uselessness. Math problem answers are, of course judged on a single axis: rightness. Human decision making is a complex process involving many, many variables, of which moral code adherence is but one. For example, one could conclude that if someone goes through the trouble and expense to build a sidewalk along their lawn for others to tread upon and a Don't Walk on the Grass sign, that it is a violation of someone's moral code, ie it's morally wrong to walk on their grass. I don't disagree with that analysis. Yet considering the quantity of moral wrongness (miniscule) and other (nonmoral) factors, I have routinely cut across lawns, as I suspect you have.
Could you say the person standing on the track has forfeited his life? I mean, we all know to stay off the trolley tracks. Does that person have any duty to the trolley driver to stay off the tracks and avoid being killed?
Quoting Bob Ross
Couldnt you say the person on the tracks who wasnt tied down, has forfeited his innocence?
Im a huge proponent of virtue ethics. I dont think anyone could ethically participate in the trolley problem because it wreaks of killers and to kill five or one people because they would then be participating in an immoral scenario.
But if we were stuck on that train and knew there was no trick, no murderer behind the scenario, this was just a horrible accident about to happen, then are you killing anyone or is the trolley killing the people?
A plane is going to crash in a city. The only way to reduce the destruction and death is to quick land on that baseball field with kids playing. Its either two teams and some fans die, or probably fifty or one hundred or more people everywhere else. But to land in the field one has to commit five intentional moves and aim the nose of the plane at the pitcher and land quickly before anyone can run. Since the pilot has to essentially pull the lever to land on the baseball field, is he wrong because it is wrong to intentionally kill innocent people? Should he just chug past and see what happens, or does he have any duty now thrust in his lap to kill as few people as he can?
If killing an innocent person is wrong, then you cant do: period. You cant turnaround and permit yourself to do it in instances where you could avoid a bad outcome or create a better outcomethat would be akin to saying that some immoral acts are morally permissible, which is a manifest contradiction.
The difference is that the trolley problem posits that all victims are innocent.
I dont. I will not permit anyone to kill an innocent human being for any end; because it is wrong.
Thats true: some people believe killing any life form for whatever reason is wrong; but I disagree.
It is an avenue worth exploring, but I simply disagree with it. Usually, they will agree that in-itself killing an innocent person is wrong, but there may be contexts where it is right. What they don't realize, is they are committed by my view if they even admit just the former.
To admit that killing an innocent person is morally permissible, is to lack a proper moral compass; just as much as a person who thinks rape is morally permissible. The nature of the act dictates, quite obviously, that it is wrong.
Thats a great question. Firstly, the trolley problem stipulates all else is equal; so we cannot consider that in the original hypothetical. However, it is worth exploring as an addendum.
Secondly, yes, I think we can blame people for obvious negligence; so if you are stipulating that a person was informed clearly that they should not be on the tracks, that they have the freedom to easily move off of the tracks, they refuse with no good reason to be on the tracks, and the other five people (on the other tracks) do not have the freedom to move nor are they being negligent; then, yes, I would pull the lever because I am no longer killing an innocent person.
I guess I am not following this one: whether or not someone orchestrated the trolley dilemma, has no bearing on if you are about to kill an innocent person to try to save five other innocent people.
He should never intentionally kill innocent people: even to avoid a bad outcome. He should keep flying, and try to find a place to land where he is not intentionally sacrificing innocent people.
Now, there is an interesting discussion, from Anscombe, about the difference between intentionally killing someone and doing something which has a statistically likelihood or certainty of killing an innocent person. I am still chewing over that part, so I cant comment too much; but I am guessing @Leontiskos can probably inform us better on that.
This is very interesting. Much more ambiguous as to whether this is a "kill 5 kids to save 1000" or "To save 1000 you must do a certain move which itself has risk of almost certainly killing kids."
Quoting Bob Ross
I think a question is whether someone can be justified in doing something they think is generally morally impermissible because there is a benefit which is morally right.
Maybe one factor is that we tend to talk about moral claims in terms of absolutes which are context-independent - "killing is wrong" - but realistically, everything happens in a context and some contexts really test the limits of those principles. I'm inclined to the view that maybe we create these rules as a way of simplifying the moral process even though realistically, things aren't so simple in some contexts.
By emphasizing the absoluteness of these things we get some weird contradictions like in these examples. On one hand you say "If Killing an innocent person is wrong you can't do it". But then on the otherhand, can you not easily make a claim something like "Saving the human race is right and you should do it.". And there we have a weird contradiction. Both I think are strong valid moral claims that when you ignore context would say are almost imperative. In general, I would say most people would think saving the world is a hugely important imperative - so compelling that so many stories and films are based on this concept, and perhaps it is a large part of the basis for the climate-crisis fixation. Is there a single absolute way of valuating these claims and comparing them? I really doubt it. Its not obvious.
I think the scenario of killing one life vs. saving humanity is not really representative of the intention of either of these absolute claims which come head to head in direct contradiction. We can wonder whether the fact these claims seem incompatible is because the contexts they tend to occur in don't overlap. In our typical world, it seems pretty reasonable, unproblematic, imperative to put the preservation of innocent life at the top of the list with nothing to push it away or threaten that position. Similarly, saving the world usually implies either accidents or "evil" agents that arguably could justifiably be killed if there were no other way. Thinking about that, that isn't even so clear though; for instance, one might say if Hitler was going to destroy the world, we must stop him! If killing him was the only way, then maybe that would be justified. But arguably the table can be turned in the sense that to stop Hitler you probably would never need to actually kill him unless he was a very powerful entity that needed to be brought down personally. But he is a normal man. Once you had him in captivity, he can't do anything and arguably many would say you shouldn't kill him but try him in court and put him in prison (others may say death penalty though). On the other hand, it is almost necessary to kill lots and lots of men in battle to save the world in this case even though they are arguably much more innocent than Hitler. They fight because they are forced to, to feed families, because they are brainwashed by propaganda.
But I digressed a bit. Maybe it is still fair to say that generally these concepts regarding saving humanity and the preservation of an individual human life have primacy in different contexts which don'ttend to conflict. But a question is whether if it was more normal for these contexts to overlap, we would find it more permissible to kill an innocent life to save humanity. Do we not already do this with regard to animals? Other innocent living things we kill to survive? And these sentiments have been changing in the western world as it seems people are becoming more and more considerate of animal welfare, and in a world where harming animals on a daily basis is something people generally do not need to do. At the same time, even most vegans probably don't look upon meat eating people in the same way they would look on a murderer or someone who enabled murder. Realistically, we have caveats and context-dependencies in how we treat these moral absolutes. Either that or they are not as absolute as we think. Realistically there are some scenarios where avoiding contradiction is not possible.
Quoting Bob Ross
But killing is wrong, period! You are permitting a bad thing! Your moral position is more lax than someone who believes it is wrong to kill at all! For instance, what you say here from another posy just above:
"I think we can blame people for obvious negligence; so if you are stipulating that a person was informed clearly that they should not be on the tracks, that they have the freedom to easily move off of the tracks, they refuse with no good reason to be on the tracks, and the other five people (on the other tracks) do not have the freedom to move nor are they being negligent; then, yes, I would pull the lever because I am no longer killing an innocent person."
Actually seems pretty brutal. Now obviously I completely get this reasoning and it is very pragmatic, but it seems that this pragmatic pull [b[does[/b] seem to be something that was already in place in the scenario. What does no good reason even mean here? If they believe the track is a sacred religious site is that a good reason? What if they just feel extremely passionate that they have to sit on this track for no good reason through no fault of their own, is that any different? What does innocent mean here? Surely, if this was just a man on a regular rail track you would not run him over and you would say he had not necessarily forfeits his life... or would you? Clearly there is no clear delineation of the context for forfeiting someone's life here. The forfeiting doesn't precisely depend on what that person has done but on the presence or absence of 5 victims. If the person doesn't forfeit their life when there are no victims then what makes them forfeit their life just because victims are present? Its not clear from your paragraph whether the forfeit is because the victims are there period or they shpuldn't be on the track, period. Maybe you can just stipulate that but then I guess this brings up the idea that it is not entirely clear what innocent means, how arbitrary that might be or what degrees of non-innocence mean the forfeit of life or not. From the perspective of someone woth a stricter view of the permisibility of killing, this may seem very lax and context-dependent.
Quoting Bob Ross
No more or less an absurdity than allowing the world to die to avoid culpability - leading to a world where no people existed and morality was meaningless. I said before maybe someone who believes in God or an afterlife would have a different view but I do not believe in an objective fact of the matter about moral truths. Morality arises in social interaction out of biology. So when society is gone and everyone is dead, then morality is pointless and doesn't exist. I think there is also an interesting question of whether someone letting the world burn to uphold their moral integrity could be seen as selfish and immoral in some sense. You refuse to killin ocent people but at the same time you find it reasonable to not get involved or attempt to intervene in a world where other people kill people. You could try to prevent other deaths but generally people think it is fine to not so this. So when someone allows the world to be destroyed, it is because they want to avoid a bad thing happening or is it because they want to avoid their own culpability? Some see it as admirable to sacrifice their own life for the good of others. Would someone sacrifice themselves in terms or moral culpability in the same way? Is the need not to be blamed greater than other's wellbeing? I'm not necessarily entertaining these things very seriously and the last thought seems to de-emphasize the innocent life at stake in order to look at the motives of the agent. But it is interesting how seemingly you can be very flexible with how you frame moral issues to emphasize one thing or the other. And perhaps that is the very reason why deontological positions are attractive, even useful.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, ultimately in some respects its all turtles going round and round. Sometimes people disagree just on intuition though I think all moral discussion depends on at least some shared values through which we can persuade. But then again, if there are situations when consensus simply does not exist, then its even more difficult. Some moral situations are by their nature insoluble in any way that is totally satisfying. I doubt anyone is totally satisfied with the trolley problem even when they commit to one correct choice.
Edit: In bold, doesn't changed to does
I agree there is an absolute law that killing an innocent person is never permissible.
The reason killing an innocent person is wrong is because of the unique value of each person.
New hypo: a whole bunch of innocent people are dying, dropping like lemmings off of a cliff. You cant save them all but you are given a choice and tools (big net and a helicopter) that can save one or save five of them. All will surely die without you, its just a choice of whether you take the bigger net and helicopter to save five, or the little one.
Is there a duty to take the bigger net because it is wrong to kill an innocent person? No. You arent the cause of any of the deaths so you are not culpable for any who are not saved.
I think the same reasoning may apply in the inverse with the trolley. Whether you pull or do not pull the lever, you arent responsible for any of the deaths. You are not responsible for the death of the person alone on the tracks if what you were doing was trying save as many lives as possible to address a situation that was otherwise beyond your control.
That also means that you wouldnt be responsible for not pulling the lever either - just choosing the smaller net during a time of crisis.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I feel like there is a funny kind of "paradox" in itself here in the sense that in that if I had the mindset that I was not morally responsible for the outcome, it would be extremely easy for me to just pick saving more people in the trolley example. If I did not pick the 5, then I would still feel guilty and feel like I did something wrong by saving less people than I could have. But then if I felt bad about not saving 5, I would probably also feel bad about killing the 1 and then its back to feeling that moral responsibility (I guess the net example doesn't have this particular point though). I think it would be impossible for me not to feel some even under the circumstances you lay out.
Then you're using it dishonestly or equivocally, for not only is that not what the word means, it is also not what the word means to your interlocutor. Ergo: you are involved in a very low-level begging of the question of moral relativism.
And that's only because you're pulling the lever.
The debates over double effect get pretty tricky. I touched on some of that in <this post> from another thread.
Suppose a pilot runs out of fuel over a large music festival and his airplane will crash somewhere in the festival no matter what he does. The pilot has a duty not to kill, but he also has a separate but related duty to cause as few deaths as possible in the event where he cannot avoid causing deaths (whether or not we decide to call this "causing of death" killing). So the good pilot will land in the area with fewest people to minimize injury and death.
The question arises: did the pilot intentionally kill (or injure) the people in that area? I think not. This is what I would call a legitimate case of double effect, where the pilot's decision is morally sound even though he knows it will result in the death of innocents. It is an easier case on account of the necessity involved: given that the pilot literally has no choice but to cause the death of innocents, the consequent death of innocents cannot be imputed to his free actions. Nevertheless, he does have a choice over how many innocents die, and this choice is morally imputable to him. Some might reasonably argue that this falls short of an authentic case of double effect insofar as the act with the double effect (or side effect) is involuntary (i.e. the act of landing the plane, which is not strictly speaking a choice at all).
(This is all reminiscent of the Tom Hanks film, based on a true story, "Sully.")
Folks argue over double effect, but a common moral principle which double effect presupposes is the principle that one cannot do evil that good may come. This intersects with the trolley scenario via the difficult question of whether the evil effect is a means to the good effect. The lever-pullers often involve themselves in what I (and Anscombe) might call "intention games" where they profess to have intended one outcome but not the other, despite the fact that both outcomes are certain.
As a parallel to the airplane scenario, folks who pull the lever tend to see themselves as being in a state of necessity, similar to the pilot. Those who do not pull the lever do not tend to see themselves as being in a state of necessity. The key is that they view omissions differently. The former think that to omit pulling the lever is the same as intentionally killing the five (or is at least as intentional as the parallel commission), whereas the latter think that the omission is not intentionally killing the five, and is certainly not as intentional as the commission.
Quoting Fire Ologist
:up:
Isnt there an argument that by pulling the lever you are landing the trolley in the area with the fewest people?
Under a general duty to cause as few deaths as possible in the event (one) cannot avoid causing deaths?
The exigent circumstances remove all intent to kill anyone from the actions taken by the person on the trolley or the pilot.
Sure, as I said in the same post:
Quoting Leontiskos
So, now factoring in intent, if one refuses to pull the lever because one will never willingly kill an innocent person, they are acting morally; and if one pulls the lever because they see the necessity of reducing death, they are acting morally.
Correct?
I have a potentially interesting question for you Bob. Lets say it wasn't some other person, but yourself. You are presented with the following choice:
If you voluntarily choose to die, the world is saved.
If you decide not to die, the world dies and you die as well.
The thing is, you are an innocent person are you not?
How do you rationally reconcile the conflicts that arise from this scenario and your decision?
I appreciate that answer.
In this case, would you have a duty to save more lives, and thats why you would pull the lever, or does it matter that the people tied to the tracks are innocent?
Perhaps: if the instance is not applicable to the general principle, then that would work. I am saying that killing an innocent person is alwaysnot generallywrong.
That is fair; but I am saying killing an innocent person is always wrong; just like rape. Those arent general principles...unless thats what you are advocating? Do you think rape is sometimes morally permissible?
You would be right if I was claiming that saving the human race was always morally obligatory; its not.
Saving humanity is morally permissible but not obligatory: it is not wrong, per se, to not save humanity. You are forgetting about moral omissibility.
I happen to think that only beings of rational kinds have the right to not be killed if they are innocent.
I was keeping it generic on purpose: one doesnt need to know what exactly counts as a morally relevant factor or reason to understand that what obviously isnt is stubbornly sitting on a track just for the fun of it (or whatever).
How is that no fault of their own? You just said they are standing on the tracks because they desired it. Are we not held accountable for our actions, even if they spring from our desires?
It means that the person, in the event which is being analyzed, has not done anything which would cause them to forfeit certain rights.
No, because he is innocent until proven or reasonably demonstrated to be guilty.
But you are. If you pull the lever, you have killed an innocent person, and, worse yet, you intended to.
Good question! Voluntarily choosing to die is morally permissible because it is voluntary. In the case of myself, I cannot involuntarily force myself to do something: that's paradoxical (at best). Therefore, it is morally permissible for me to sacrifice myself to save other people.
However, it would be immoral for someone else to try to force me to voluntarily sacrifice myself to save other people because it is no longer voluntary if I do it.
When I say it is wrong to kill an innocent person, I am assuming that they are getting killed against their will. This does bring up an interesting topic of euthanasia and assisted suicide; but I will refrain for now (;
For me, it was that the five are innocent. If you are amending it such that no one is innocent; then I would have a duty to save more lives.
And if all of them were innocent, one should not take hand in killing innocent life by pulling the lever so one would have to let the five die. Is that your take?
Quoting Bob Ross
I wasn't suggesting general in that sense. My point is that killing an innocent person could be wrong. But saving the human race could be right. At the same time. Irreconcilably.
Quoting Bob Ross
I haven't been assuming anything about obligations but I struggle to see how someone who refusing to save the world wouldn't have any moral significance.
Quoting Bob Ross
Fair enough!
Quoting Bob Ross
I guess I am just not as sold on this forfeiting right to life thing, at least, how it was framed in your paragraph. That's obviously not to say I don't understand why the driver might think it morally better to run over the person (afterall I putforward the killing innocent vs. saving the world thing). I am just not necessarily sold on this conceptualization or language in terms of forfeiting life. But maybe I am reading that idea too strongly. Obviously someone can have a strong impulsion to go on the tracks when they have been told not too. I am not entirely that makes it right to kill them. I am not sure I agree with this kind of retributive aspect of it where surely their life would not be forfeit if they were just an idiot on the tracks in a normal situation. But because of these 5 victims, you say now its okay for someone to pull the lever and and change tracks on them. I would have to think that scenario over.
Quoting Bob Ross
Alright, sure.
Quoting Bob Ross
Oh, so what he is guilty of in this scenario is not saving lives ans thats why he deserves to die? Yup, its a tough one for me.
Interesting analysis, better example of the plane scenario.
Obvious to you (and me), how about a sociopath? I think not.
This seems like a slippery slope here, assigning individuals "value." To believe that someone is objectively more valuable than another is
A) dangerous, as such a thought natural leads to the preservation of "valuable" individuals and the sacrifice, or perhaps even the culling, of "undesirables," to increase the amount of "valuables."
B) absurd, as it would imply either an objective decider of one's value, or that you are the objective decider (which, noone is).
C) an oversimplification of a person. One cannot simply assign a number (ex. a "value") to a person, because the person behind the number is forgotten. While it is my belief that yes, we are all simply variables in a grand calculus, and that we don't truly matter, to reduce another man to a number is to waste the power you have to make him truly valued. We are all insignificant to the universe, and we can only ever be significant to one another, and by refusing to acknowledge them as people, you waste this power.
I see, so while innocence is a factor, the an important ingredient here is self-agency. So I assume in the case of the one person on the track yelling, "Do it!" dramatically like out of a movie, you would be ok with throwing the track to hit them instead of the five who yelled, "No, please don't!".
That leads to two more scenarios then. What if:
a. The five plead with you to kill them instead of save the one, while the one is pleading with you not kill them, but kill the other five?
b. What if both sides plead with you to kill them and save the other side?
Its a nice ideal to not do this, but practically we do this all the time. Parents will throw themselves in danger to save their children. Men will sacrifice their lives by going to war to save their families. If we have an old person vs a young person who need a kidney transplant, and we only have one, most people would want the younger person saved.
A. It is only dangerous if we have no objective standard of morality. If we say, "Whatever you feel is moral is moral", then yes, any morality is dangerous because subjectivity is a terrible way to judge the value of others.
B. Again, this only happens if morality is subjective.
C. Our government does this all the time. WE do this all the time. Did you know there is enough money in America to feed the entire world? Did you know we could pay the medical bills of all Americans and no one would ever have to die of starvation or lack of medical care again? Most people could probably live comfortably on far less and give to the less fortunate so they have a better quality of life and don't die, but most don't.
Quoting Frog
You don't actually believe that. If you actually believed that, you wouldn't care. But you do. What you can't do is create an objective reason why beyond your own emotions, so you come up with the only thing that can make rational sense without saying, "There must be an objective morality I'm not aware of." The thing which actually does make sense is, "There must be an objective morality I'm not aware of." But we would have to admit we don't know it. Some people have a hard time with this.
Quoting Frog
Yeah again, you don't actually believe this. Here's the thing. Emotionally? I hardly care about anyone. I could kill, steal, and lie to people and it wouldn't impact me negatively. Also, I don't feel any particular joy or triumph from committing evil to another person either. Meaning, I have every right to believe that there is no objective morality and that nothing matters, but I don't. Why? Because emotions are guides, but they are not ultimately why we should make rational decisions.
My observations demonstrate to me a strong objective pattern of morality that belies subjectivity underlying human cultures. Not that I'm saying I've figured it out. But the idea that there is no morality or that it is purely subjective just doesn't seem to coincide with the smaller and larger patterns of interactive reality among living things. In the same breath you say it doesn't matter, but then berate me that we shouldn't waste our power in your beliefs. I would much rather you say "nothing matters" but act like it does however. And I'm sure you would for me too.
I say lets work on figuring out the patterns of morality instead of saying things we don't believe in, possibly confusing other people like me who have little emotional guidance to guide them. AI is coming, and we better have a morality to teach it. We can't afford to pat ourselves on the back with moral nihilism. Its not clever, and it helps no one.
You make a good point. Thank you for your response!
There is only one thing I can disagree with within your response, and it is this:
While I see your point, and I now realise my cowardice in not being able to admit this, I must disagree with a complete, objective morality. If morality is truly objective, and our emotions are guides to help us follow this morality, then why does this "objective" morality differ from culture to culture? Why do the Chinese value upholding their honour more than we in the west do? Why do the Slavics find it correct to hold in their emotions rather than to "burden" others with them? Why is politeness and discipline considered a core trait in Japan, and not so much in, say, the Baltics?
Now, I don't mean to say that all people of these cultures act and value the exact same, and these are simply observations I myself and those around me have noticed, one must admit that there are different "objective" moralities around the world. I would instead argue for a sort of cultural morality, wherein the morals of a person are shaped by their culture mainly, rather than being completely innate.
You've just raised the most common argument for relativism - the fact that morality varies from place to place and across time. Your examples appear less to do with morality and more about etiquette. Don't forget that treating women as chattel, having sex with children and owning slaves are accepted in some cultures too. Now and in the past.
But the usual response to this common argument is the fact that just because morals differ between cultures and over time does not imply the absence of objective morality. From this perspective the point is to determine which actions and moral positions are correct and which ones are not.
Quoting Frog
I tend to agree with this. But one can still evoke the naturalistic fallacy and maintain that just because people are shaped by culture does not mean this leads to correct moral thinking. So this still leaves us with the question which behaviours are morally justifiable and which aren't.
I think there are two different conceptions of morality which are butting heads: one which is based on justice and individual rights, and another which is based on social well-being or lubrication. At the end of the day the (innocent) individual's right to not be killed is not necessarily in sync with with a morality that privileges the whole over the individual.
But at this point the contrived nature of the trolley problem may become problematic, for the claim that one might be forced to kill innocents in order to save the race or community may be nothing more than a contrivance. Further, cases where this sort of thing is required usually create volunteers (e.g. those who volunteer to be soldiers, or those who volunteer to be guinea pigs for a novel vaccine, etc.). When there is legitimate communal need the members of the community are given to satisfying that need, thus adverting a transgression against individual human rights.
Its always pleasant to interact with people such as yourself! Thank you.
Quoting Frog
They key is to look at what's in common, even among their differences. For example, there is no culture that values murder or stealing. In cases where there is variation, I've found if you look at the environment or political system, you can see that its all about preservation of a certain power dynamic.
For example, in a place with scarce resources, a culture may honor the land more. In a monarchy system, loyalty to higher status individuals is emphasized, while in democratic cultures, higher status loyalty to lower status individuals is more highly praised.
I'm working on my ow proposal for objective morality where I note that if an objective morality exists, there must be a minimal fundamental to build on. Its here if you're curious. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15203/in-any-objective-morality-existence-is-inherently-good/p1
(CC: @@Fire Ologist
To me, the principle of Double Effect rests on a vague and (typically) biased distinction between intending to do something and intending to do something which also has bad side-effects. It seems like, in every example I have gotten my hands on, a person could equally reasonably tie the known bad side-effect as a part of the persons intentions.
For example, in the terror vs. tactical bomber example it is not clear at all (to me) how the tactical bomber knowing they are going to kill an innocent person as collateral damage is not intentionally sacrificing them for the greater good. What proponents of the principle seem to say, is that the tactical bomber is intending to bomb the military building and not killing any innocent bystanders: their deaths are just unfortunate side-effects of the good deed.
I also think that this principle Double Effect would equally justify consequentialist thinking on the 1 vs. 5 trolley problem; because a person could just say that they are intending to save the 5, and killing the 1 is a mere bad side-effect of it.
To me, this is no different than the trolley problem, and you are here affirming, analogously, to sacrifice the one to save the many. You are saying that the pilots lack of action will result in innocent deaths (just like not pulling the lever) and their actions to avoid it would result in innocent deaths (just like pulling the lever); so I am having a hard time seeing how you agree with me on the trolley problem, but dont agree that the pilot should, in your case you have here, do nothing.
If the plane is out of fuel, and it is not the pilots fault that it is out of fuel, then he has the choice not to perform any action that would kill an innocent person; instead, he can let innocent people die.
You have setup the same trolley problem with an airplane: what if the fuel runs out in an airplane and the plane is about to crash into 5 innocent people, but the pilot could divert the plane to kill one innocent person insteadis that permissible? It is the same dilemma.
If the pilot diverts the plane to kill less people, then they have intentionally sacrificed those people for the sake of other people; just like how a person who pulls the lever intentionally sacrifices the one to save the five. Am I missing something?
Correct. I cannot commit an immoral act to avoid a morally bad outcome. Letting them die, is morally ommissible because I cannot save them without doing something immoral.
I would say both are important. Not everything one does to themselves is morally permissible (in virtue of self-agency).
Not necessarily. I would have to be certain that they really mean it: otherwise, I would error on the side of assuming they dont consent.
For example, a person that would scream out for me to divert the track could quite plausibly be mentally ill; and not doing it as a heroic deed.
Assuming both parties really mean it and are in their right minds to mean it genuinely (e.g., they arent mentally ill, impaired, etc.), then I would pull the lever. If a person has the choice to limit the amount of human deaths in a morally permissible manner, then they should.
This is just the same thing, unless I am misunderstanding, as the five, who are already going to die, telling me (assumingly genuinely and validly) that they dont want me to pull the lever to avoid sacrificing the one person who is innocent and has not volunteered to be sacrificed: so this scenario doesnt amend it in any way that would change the morally relevant factors. I cant sacrifice an innocent person, absent their consent (and even then sometimes I still cant), to save the five. Did I miss something about this scenario?
Well the pilot is flying the plane, but the person in the trolley problem is not driving the trolley. Therefore to "do nothing" would seem to be quite different in the two cases. In the case of the pilot he would not be doing nothing, but would instead (or also) need to stop flying the plane.
Quoting Bob Ross
A locus classicus for double effect is Aquinas' ST II-II.64.7:
Quoting Aquinas, ST II-II.64.7: Whether it is lawful to kill a man in self-defense?
I accept a relatively uncontroversial form of double effect whereby the unintended effect must only be possible and not certain.
Regarding a more controversial form, we could think about Aquinas' example. Self-defense must by nature be at least proportionate to the aggressor's level of force, if it is to be adequate. So if a child attacks me I could restrain them easily without risking harming them. But as the aggressor's level of force increases, the level of force required to repel the aggressor in self-defense also increases. So if the aggressor has a knife then I will need to at least disarm or incapacitate them to successfully defend myself. If the aggressor has a gun then I will very likely need to shoot them with a gun to defend myself (if I cannot escape). As the level of necessary force rises, the risk of killing the aggressor also rises, but this rising risk does not necessarily imply that I am no longer justified in using adequate self-defense. The doctrine of double effect at this point seems to be a foregone conclusion, namely at the point where lethal force is necessary to repel an aggressor. At that point you say, "They might die, but I am nevertheless going to defend myself."
For my money, <Aquinas> accepts the principle that one intends any effect which is known to be "always or frequently joined to" an act, and therefore in order to not-intend to kill one must perform an act that does not necessarily result in death. But this opinion is controversial.
Are you saying it is absolutely right to save the human race, and absolutely right not to sacrifice an innocent person; and that sometimes they are in conflict?
If so, then I would say that one has to trump the other; or some other principle has to supersede them both. This is a half-baked ethical system (otherwise).
You are saying that one is obligated to save humanity and not to sacrifice a person to do it. Without further elaboration, you just have a moral antinomy in your view.
I personally think that saving humanity is only obligatory if it can be done in a reasonable and permissible manner.
It helps avoid morally counter-intuitive (and immoral) conclusions; like in the axeman example where someone may say it is wrong to lie, so I must tell the axeman the truth even though it will help them find and kill an innocent person.
The meaningful difference between lying in general being wrong and these sort of cases where it is right to lie; resides in the fact that when one should lie to a person that person is actively doing something which causes them to forfeit their right to be told the truth (for that instance). The axeman is trying to violate someone elses rights, and so they have forfeited the right to be told the truth about where that person is.
Same with self-defense: an attacker has forfeited their right to be unharmed or killed by the fact that they are actively trying to illegitimately harm or kill another person.
I was agreeing with you: I would not pull the lever because he is presumed innocent. I would have to know, without a reasonable doubt, that he is on the tracks due to some sort of severe negligence or stupidity to find it permissible to sacrifice him to save the innocent five people.
This is a difference, no doubt; but not a relevant difference (to me).
If one amends the trolley example such that the person who decides whether to pull the lever is actually, instead, the train operator and can choose to divert the train to the track with the 1 or stay on the track with the 5; then I would say it is immoral for the operator to divert the track. They cannot intentionally sacrifice one person to save five: they are still using that sacrificed person as a means towards an end.
Same with the airplane.
By doing nothing I mean that they let the train run over the five: it is stipulated that them stopping steering will do nothing to help save the five, but nevertheless they should stop steering. In normal circumstances, where this stipulation would not exist, one would be obligated to try to do everything they can besides sacrificing someone else to get the train to stop before it runs the five over.
Isnt one certain, in your airplane example, that they are going to kill innocent people to save more innocent people?
With respect to self-defense, I would say that the aggressor has forfeited their rights proportionately to their assault; and this principle of forfeiture is doing the leg-work here, and not a principle of double effect.
Does a pilot have a duty to fly his plane?
Quoting Bob Ross
Suppose you are driving your car. Four people appear on the road, two on each side. If you keep going in the same direction you will hit all four. If you swerve left you will only hit the two on the left. If you swerve right you will only hit the two on the right. You don't have time to stop. What do you do?
(See also 's thread)
Quoting Bob Ross
I would highlight two things that I said earlier:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
Beyond that, the further question lies here:
Quoting Leontiskos
In the airplane or car scenario it is not at all clear that the evil effect is a means to the good effect. The good effect would be chosen with or without the evil effect. Of course the trolley introduces an obvious counterargument...
-
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, interesting. I suppose the question is whether someone can forfeit their right to life vis-a-vis a private party. A criminal forfeits their rights and then the community or state punishes them accordingly, but it's not clear that this sort of forfeiture and punishment is applicable to private citizens.
This is incorrect. The means they are using to save the 5 is the lever by which they divert the train. The 1 who dies is not the means, but merely someone who unfortunately happens to be on the other track. In this way the trolley problem differs from the transplant problem, where the healthy patient actually IS the means of saving the 5 unhealthy patients.
Quoting Bob Ross
I haven't proposed an ethical system but I haven't seen any that successfully resolve this issue in a fully satisfactory way... which I guess is why it is being talked about in the first place.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, this is the point I was conveying. Sometimes these kinds of paradoxes just exist. But I don't like the word obligated. I find that term a bit loaded. I don't even know what it really means to be obligated to do something unless this obligation is being enforced by some kind of legislative body or something like that.
Quoting Bob Ross
Well I think people can avoid this kind of issue in other ways. I think I am probably more comfortable with it as maybe more along the lines of legal concepts but morally it seems a bit too dispassionate for me and sometimes a bit too absolute in how you can suddenly just lose a "right". Maybe my thinking is along the lines of : just as how many of these antinomies don't feel satisfactory when I apply a black-and-white wrong/right label to their outcomes, I don't think that the idea of losing or gaining "rights" should be so black and white either. Again, I think in a setting more explicitly about law or formal rules, I might think differently.
Quoting Bob Ross
I think some of our wires must have been crossed in this particular conversation, perhaps when I was talking about the "a man on a regular rail" where I meant (maybe unclearly) just a man on a single pair of tracks walking about, no other people involved. My thought then was that even if the man had refused to obey the rules of being on the track we wouldn't normally think he deserved to be killed by the train or that it would br acceptable for the train driver to acknowledge that there was a man on the tracks and plow him down anyway without any intent in trying to stop.
Its not clear to me either, that if we have a variation of the regular trolley problem where the 1 person on the tracks could have got off but didn't or knew they shouldn't be there but chose to, that it would be vastly more acceptable to pull the lever and run him over than in the regular scenario. I am not entirely sure.
Yes, but this does not permit them to sacrifice innocent people to fulfill such duty.
This is a really good example, that tripped me up a bit (:
Firstly, I would like to disclaim that this is different than the airplane example because you are stipulating that the people being sacrificed are actually already victimswhich spices things up significantly (;
Secondly, I would say that one must continue to go straight, assuming they cannot try to veer away to avoid all 4 altogether (and have to choose between intending to kill the two to save the other two and letting all 4 die), because, otherwise, they would be intending to kill two people as a means toward the good end of saving two people.
A person that says otherwise, would be acting like a consequentialist full-stop: they would be allowing a person to intend to kill an innocent person for the sole sake of the greater good. I dont see how the principle of Double Effect gets one out of this without it becoming inherently consequentialist.
Now, in practical life, since such stipulations are not in place, I would veer away intending to miss all 4 and would not ever intend to kill two to save the other two. If I happen to kill two instead of four because I didnt manage to swerve far enough away; than that is a bad outcome but I had good intentions and thusly didnt do anything immoral (unless, of course, there is reason to blame me for reckless driving or something).
The bolded is the important mistake you are making, that consequentialists make in the trolley problem: letting something bad happen is not the same thing as doing something bad. The pilot is not, in your example, in a situation where they are morally responsible for the deaths of innocent lives. If they keep flying because there are no ways to crash land without intentionally killing innocent people and the plane eventually just crash lands itself (by slowing falling to the ground) and it kills innocent people, then the pilot would be without moral fault. Just like how the person who doesnt pull the lever would be without moral fault.
You dont think that that pilot, by intentionally veering into an area of innocent people to crash land to avoid crashing into more innocent people in a different area, is intentionally killing innocent people? I dont see the reasoning there. It isnt merely an evil effect: the pilot has an evil intention (to sacrifice innocent people for the greater good).
I think so; but only proportionally to whatever they are doing to forfeit it. For example, the axeman should be lied to (even though one should normally tell people the truth) because one knows the axeman is using that information to actively hunt and kill an innocent personthis causes the axeman to forfeit their right to be told the truth (in this instance).
If one diverts a track to save 5 people knowing 1 person will die as a result of it (that wouldnt have otherwise), then they are intending to sacrifice that 1 person to save the 5. They cannot validly say the 1 person was merely a bad side-effect of saving the 5. That doesnt cut it, nor has anything remotely similar cut it in the court of law.
Thats fine. I just think this indicates that your ethical view isnt fully fleshed out; and you will have to hierarchically adjust your moral principles to fix this paradox/antinomy. I have my solution, which you already have heard, but if you dont like it then you will have to come up with your own.
I would say obligation is a duty towards something; and duty arises out of commitment to what is (actually) good (viz., commitment to being moral).
Well, I dont mean forever. I mean that in a given circumstance a person may be morally obligated or permitted to do something to another person which is normally impermissible as a proportionate reaction to what that other person is immorally doing. E.g., the axemen doesnt deserve to be lied to their entire lives because of that one incident.
Assuming there arent innocent people on the current track, then I agree.
You think that the five innocent people should die because the one person was being extremely negligent?
Quoting Christoffer hmm, interesting
also an interesting take...
Quoting Frog interesting...you are onto something but although I have an opposing overall take (I believe an objective reality) I think what you bring up is and has been before worthy of mention.
That it is important to consider the range of affect each person has - the reach of their impact, based on their birth-death places, families origin and where their parents parents settled to where they currently are located, geographical range of impact of individual. I believe a person can live out a fulfilling life without being actually effected whatsoever by another persons life, because paths wont/dont cross and they were never made to cross from the start because of TIME amongst other things [in some cases-(distance in geolocations )]
Reading your words while brain is ringing a bell...Memory from another thread on TPF...maybe a few threads but I know it definitely was brought up a few times because I agree with you that it may be worth considering location, positions, paths, range, scope, kinda like a carbon footprint but more details from this traced / followed specific path and see it to be important to consider for a further deeper understanding of the nature of human and its conscious mind....
While I think I agree with the point you bring up and acknowledge the matters relevance...I want to sayI think while its true nurture vs nature plays a role, I think its important to keep in mind when considering moralities It gets a bit tricky especially when you begin to categorize the standards of morality and hold the specific (bounded) group you to those standards (beliefs) that can be then used and compared from group to another group (improper judgement may happen and that is immoral at this wrong time right place situation perhaps) but these same individuals can represent the group as each subject is complex and of a unique make up--its possible to mask intentions within groups and may use the religion, culture, association, community, society, as an excuse to act a certain way --whether they believe it is the "right" thing to do or not, the choice is made to practice life the way you present in day to day experiences and behavior is observable and ought to be verified by a source that can vouch for their being, who knows them best, who do they live with, who do they see everyday, who is the neighbors, who do they work with, who are the parents?
its telling....and quickly a story can be and is painted. In a world with an objective reality we hold up subjective experiences that show the complex subjects human nature and especially links can be made between people who can relate culturally within a similar realm of reality of another culture or group both experience reality in a similar manner, its relatable enough for results or patterns to be spotted (transcends more than just geolocation similarities)
Shared experiences from appeal to emotions triggered from a sensation and caused by an outside force (from your body mind being self) into your senses communicated from body to mind, emotional state is revealed and usual behaviors parallel with how subject is displaying emotional states...behaving is the display of emotions in action, the control of them differs but is that linked to the source of it from the individual?
See below for quote i felt like including from the long read of a contribution i shared to the thread "A Case for Moral Subjectivism" that i believe is saying something along the similar lines you mention. I think what you are trying to explain by saying "objective moralities exists for different people and cultures" I underline where I directly mention my views explained above.
"The chance doesnt exist, that my life will not interact or be known to many or anoher person whom is far far away from me and my world, that is my realm of reality and theirs is theirs but we both can live objectively without even knowing that we are moving together without bounds, doing our part, living our lives is doing our part and losing our lives is also our part, life and death, starts are ends...but we are unbothered by eachother because we dont know what about the existence of another, its impossible to know....I always think about stuff like that, that someone exists out there that cannot be bothered by me, even with all the authority I have.
Free will? Or free from a will to worry? That is a choice, i think...What do I know? I know that we can get to the bottom of things, but where we chose to go wont tell us anything about a real ETA because we dont have a GPS that takes us, we dont have an address to type into one! We dont even have the means to get there...but we dont stop...we keep moving, not just in time WITH IT..."
AND another time I can reference the point being repeated, of the same one you made here:
See https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/898453 for thread where old old pal Chet called my comment a "word salad" and fairly so. After questioning my way of articulating "relevant realms of reality" [fair of him to doubt and reasonable as well to question] but i can see how i could be more clear because of how this was mistakenly read, he sensed something was off but he decided to assume his assumption was correct and ran with it... wrong on my part, makes it (his doing) justified on his end.
--- its like, how i assumed your use of "different objective moralities" was a bit off, Chet thought my idea of "relevant realms of reality" was wrong too and he thought I was implying that more than one reality exists...I was not saying that, [it was wrong on his part, not in general but in his assumption-which can/is excusable after further clarifying resulting from continued reciprocated discussion its made right from a wrong (my poor communication of complex ideas(give me a break)]
--- BUT STILL we can see in his reply that Chet and I both agree on some ideas surrounding an objective morality existing and its in that we understand that reality is just one thing.
I look at it like: Objective Reality exists but it has just not been attained yet at this time regardless if not known [though knowable] to some it may exists in the future from our subjective parts as one objective whole for what its worth at end. (we cant know because human lifespan is not long enough to see the long term results to come from acts taken today in motion)[thats why seems impossible or pointless of trying to understand, time constraining learning and there is not more than one objective reality like you seem to see it (how i understood you, correct me if I am wrong)]
Quoting Chet Hawkins"
This just serves as confirmation. I agree with a pieces of what you mention in the original quote that I used. The quote holds a piece of your comment, that moved me to reply because i believe too that it brings up relevant questions surrounding cultural standards held in a community and of course it deserves more attention and deeper considerations worth acknowledging to see root of intentions and surety of self within group based on roles/life you lead.
But their duty as pilot allows them to stop flying the plane, even though they know that by doing so innocent people will die?
Quoting Bob Ross
:wink:
Quoting Bob Ross
Did I? Not that I know of...?
Quoting Bob Ross
It seems to me that you have given two different scenarios, one to which you have given a theoretical answer and a different one to which you have given a practical answer. In the scenario I gave, the driver knows that if he swerves left to try to avoid the pedestrians he will hit the two on the left, and that if he swerves right to try to avoid the pedestrians he will hit the two on the right. In your "practical life" scenario he has gained a new option: swerve without knowing that he will hit anyone. But it is not permissible to change the constraints of the problem in this way, and this makes sense because we intuitively know that one problem cannot simultaneously have two different solutions. There are two solutions because there are two different problems. We must go back to the single problem, the single scenario.
According to the standard Catholic version of double effect, one can swerve with the intention of avoiding pedestrians even though they know with certainty that they will hit pedestrians on the left or the right. They are permitted to do this only on two conditions: 1) that the evil effect is not a means to the good effect, and 2) that there is a sufficient proportion between good and bad outcomes to justify acting thusly (note that this is a consequentialist condition, necessary but not sufficient). Cf. <One interpretation>.
In the case of the car I would say that the second condition is clearly fulfilled: hitting two people instead of four is a significant improvement. I also think the first condition is fulfilled, but this has been one of the points of controversy within the thread. It is therefore needful to think further about what it means for one effect to be subordinated to another as a means.
Quoting Bob Ross
I agree, and I talk about this in my analysis.
Quoting Bob Ross
In my analysis I claimed that the pilot has two duties, not just one:
Quoting Leontiskos
... if the pilot takes your recommendation then he would apparently be without moral fault according to his first duty, but not according to his second duty.
Quoting Bob Ross
The proximate question at hand is whether the evil effect that the pilot foresees is a means to the good effect that the pilot desires. In the first place I would want to stress that the two effects are intended in wholly different ways.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, interesting response. For now, I am going to leave this issue of self-defense to the side for the sake of time.
Curious if you agree with the thrust here but for different reasons.
Quoting Bob Ross
Although I wouldnt pull the lever, I dont think we precisely agree on the reasons. So you are not missing something (we do disagree a bit).
I see what you are saying, about the primacy of moral agency, that the moral law (that one can never intentionally kill innocent human life) must be acted upon, so that in any circumstance, if one would be forced to intentionally sacrifice an innocent life (pull the lever), one cannot act. One cannot be an agent of dead innocent lives and have acted morally.
And I do see that the plane example can be seen as the same as the trolley. But it can be different.
I agree that there are moral laws we cannot break and be justified as moral, or good. Not killing innocent people is one of them.
And I would not pull the lever on the trolley example. But the plane and trolley can be viewed differently from each other and used to show why I would land the plane intentionally where there were less people.
You said: Quoting Bob Ross
In the trolley example, the situation is thrust upon me from nowhere and I am shown how to direct the trolley - left or right. I am sitting there, and then I have to make a decision with innocent lives about to be killed.
In the plane example, I am the pilot. There is no scenario where the pilot has not caused the outcome at least in part; the pilot has already pulled the lever so to speak and has implicated himself in the innocent death.
If I was the pilot, even unintentionally running out of fuel and blown by the wind over a festival, I have already intentionally flown the plane into that scenario. I have flown the plane. I have created this danger. And if I know the plane is going down, I already have to take responsibility for innocent death, so I have killed innocent people. Its done for me the minute I see my plane is going down. I know this before the plane lands because I am the pilot, the intentions and some of the reasons the plane is in the air at all.
So now, being responsible for innocent death, I have a second choice to make; I can choose to also be responsible for killing as few people as possible. This is why I intentionally land the plane in a less populated area.
Its not the principal of double effect that permits me to land where there are fewer people. (I dont really like the principal either.). Its because the choice is now more or less equally innocent people I will kill, its not whether or not I can kill an innocent person, because I know Ive already done that.
In the trolley example, I didnt start the trolley. I didnt put it on those tracks. I am being asked to go from sitting there taking a trolley ride to implicating myself in the trolley ride of death. Either five or one die depending on whether I stay seated or pull the lever. No, I will not do either, because it is wrong to kill any innocent life.
To ask me to treat the trolley ride where drivers disappear, where people are tied to tracks, where I learn what levers do on trolleys - and to then be the cause of five or one innocent deaths? No. No one can be expected to decide which track to take in that circumstance. Who is telling me about the people and the lever? As a moral agent, provided the option to let five tied to trolley tracks die or pull the lever, it would be irresponsible (immoral) of me to just join the scenario. Irresponsible because people are now asking me to participate in the killing of innocent life which is always wrong. . If there is a voice telling me about the tracks and the lever and the people, but not telling me what to do with the tracks and the people and the lever, nothing makes sense and I should not act.
The same could be the case for the plane, say if the pilot dies when the plane runs out of fuel and you, a passenger, are told how to land a plane. Where all things are equal prior to the moment where you are asked to guide the plane or the trolley - the question what would you do then is equal too. You can see the trolley as the same as the plane - but this is how I think we differ. If there is nothing to consider prior to that moment, then you can only be implicated in its outcome if you participate - if you take the yoke of the plane or stand up and pull the lever. Once you know in advance (as when you are told on the trolley that five or one will die, or when your engine shuts off over a festival), it is then a matter of whether you are implicated in that certain outcome. In the trolley example, you can avoid participating in the possible outcomes, and can remain separate from any outcome. Its not because pulling the lever is you killing one or sitting still is something else killing five. Its because something else that you are not a participant of is killing any of them. But if you are the pilot (or a trolley driver who knows where he is going and what pulleys to pull to get there), you have to take some responsibility for the outcome already, for the fact that any of them will die, so the choice that is now thrust upon you is how many innocent deaths will you be responsible for, and how many innocent lives can you spare.
Hoo boy, this is going to be fun.
There is a patent difference between not knowing the identity(and potential value) of the people, and knowing the identity (and potential value) of those people. Ignore it? Sure. That's probably more moral. But if you simply don't see it - well, that's something for you to have a look at.
The bolded is clearly wrong. If you've had a look at the concentration of populations (take Bangladesh as an extremely inarguable example) resource management is clearly humanity's problem. Not space or available resource. Particularly not now (as opposed to say 1400AD (pretend the population was comparable globally)). It is absolutely stupidity to think that humans have somehow outgrown the planet. Like - that's Mikie level delusional.
That takes care of hte remainder, save for one thing: As against your suggestion, it is better for humanity and the planet that we go extinct over a reasonable time-line. These are simply positions we can claim without argument. I don't really understand how this comes along with 'the arguments' anyway.
Besides, it's easy enough to come up with a scenario where doing nothing would result in more deaths than, say, two other options.
Say, pulling lever left results in x deaths, pulling lever right results in y deaths, doing nothing results in x+y deaths.
Inaction is just one aspect of the conundrum, it's not so much about rejecting personal responsibility, more about pitching ethics against psychology, I think, or something, where there may not be a definitive answer.
Another (minor) aspect could be: swift decision-making.
Given no time to think it over, what would be the most likely decision?
Right, a la:
Quoting Leontiskos
---
Quoting Fire Ologist
Good thoughts. I agree with some angles and disagree with others, but I see no need to intervene. I think your post will help stimulate fruitful discussion. :up:
Well, firstly, you can't decide questions in moral philosophy by appealing to courts of law. The most a study of legal systems can tell you is what the people who drafted the laws thought was morally right; it won't tell you if they were correct.
Secondly, I agree that the operator intentionally sacrifices 1 person to save 5. Since either 1 or 5 people must die, and he can't prevent that, and since 5 lives are more valuable than 1, sacrificing 1 to save 5 is the morally right thing to do. The fact that he may be punished for doing it is irrelevant.
Thirdly, you did not answer my point, which was that the 1 person who is killed is not the means of saving the other 5. I may be wrong here, but I wonder if you think that if X fails to treat Y as an end, then he must be treating him merely as a means. This is not true, because there could be another reason: it could be that something prevents X from treating Y as an end. This is the case in the trolley problem: someone is bound to die, and therefore not be treated as an end, but the operator can't do anything about this. His only choice is between failing to treat 1 person as an end, and failing to treat 5 people as ends. The morally right thing to do is to fail to treat the least number of people he can as ends, which means switching the train.
Quoting Bob Ross
I disagree. I don't see the need to come up with a fixed solution to this problem if there is no fully satisfactory choice. No ethical view will do that and imo, choosing a strongly well-defined ethical framework may even lead to more unintuitive consequences elsewhere, as I find with your ethical framework from my perspective. Not only am I unsure about the ethics of killing the disobedient man on the tracks in the trolley problem, but this view you have stated below I find explicitly very unintuitive:
"Secondly, I would say that one must continue to go straight, assuming they cannot try to veer away to avoid all 4 altogether (and have to choose between intending to kill the two to save the other two and letting all 4 die), because, otherwise, they would be intending to kill two people as a means toward the good end of saving two people."
It seems very straightforward to me that in a scenario where either everyone was going to die or only two people, it is better to choose two.
In general, I feel like people can have a reasonable sense of right and wrong without an explicit moral framework. I would say maybe people are picking preferred moral frameworks after the fact based on their intuitions of right and wrong - they are clarifying their own prior beliefs rather than choosing some framework which will reveal to them beliefs that they probably did not already hold.
What do my intuitions say? That flexibility and vagueness (rather than restrictiveness) in terms of a moral framework is more likely to resonate with my moral intuitions as opposed to picking a single more rigid or rigorously defined moral framework which occasionally gives outcomes that I don't morally resonate with at all. And this is the thing with moral frameworks - they all do this from what I can tell. Imo, that is because they all attempt to simplify moral thought into clear, tangible latent principles. I feel like different moral frameworks will then emphasize different intuitions about the underlying regularities of morality, but usually in order to articulate this clearly, they exclude other intuitions. For instance, deontology and consequentialism I think both capture and isolate different aspects about people's moral intuitions in daily life.
Quoting Bob Ross
To be honest, I can almost give the same reply as before:
I don't even know what it really means to have a duty to do something unless this duty is being enforced by some kind of legislative body or something like that.
Quoting Bob Ross
I didn't either! By black-and-white I mean it seems implied that once someone gives up their right to something like life then it removes the badness of killing them, which isn't intuitive to me. But again, possibly this is better in some kind of legal or other legislative context.
Quoting Bob Ross
There is no scenario that has been discussed in this thread I think where the five people should die or deserve to die or that it is morally good that they die. It's not clear to me either that one person deserves to die for being extremely negligent; and so this dilemma doesn't seem a great deal less problematic than the regular trolley problem to me.
Edit: lots of cleaning up
No disagreement, I agree.
Quoting Bob Ross
I'm not trying to play any hidden tricks here. We'll assume they mean it and are just very dramatic about it. :)
Quoting Bob Ross
This is the point I was trying to get to. For you, if the case of human agency is a non-factor, you'll pull to save the greatest number. But you favor human agency over the the greatest number. I also don't disagree with this.
[quote="Bob Ross;909452"]The five plead with you to kill them instead of save the one, while the one is pleading with you not kill them, but kill the other five?
This was just to see if numbers ever came into play. No worry.
Does this not seem like a case where the whole problem just typifies the fallacy of the excluded middle? Like there is a right and a wrong answer? If anything, what the problem reveals is that there will always be multiple answers. Ultimately, one does not even require justification. What if someone puts a gun to my head and forces me to choose or die? It's a concocted scenario designed to highlight the complex nature of morality. In fact, in a real moral scenario what we perceive as choices will normally not be so equally balanced in theatrically catastrophic consequence. Do you sacrifice something to benefit someone else? Or do you always put yourself ahead of others? Those are the important motives underlying everything that people do. Trying to turn it into a a complex equation is just misleading rationalization.
Exactly so. The whole point about the greater good is that it IS the greater good, i.e. is better than the alternative. That is precisely why one should aim to achieve it. (And yes, I am a consequentialist. Tell me what you think is wrong with that.)
You need to show either that killing only 2 people instead of killing all 4 is NOT the greater good, i.e. that it is a mistake to label it so, and if so, wherein the mistake lies. Or you need to justify your apparent belief that killing 4 people is morally preferable to killing only 2, which frankly just looks callous and irrational.
Let me clarify, as I may have said differently before: the pilot wouldnt let go of the steering wheel but, rather, would keep flying as best they can to avoid any collisions. My point is that they are not permitted to sacrifice other innocent people to avoid an otherwise inevitable collision with another set of innocent people. Thats no different than the trolley problem (in my eyes).
Maybe I misunderstood, then. Were you positing that I could either (1) continue and run over 4 people or (2) swerve and hit 2 of those 4 instead of all 4? Or were you positing that I could either (1) continue and hit 4 people or (2) swerve and hit 2 separate (to the 4) people?
Either way, I would say that I must continue driving and hit the 4 (given those options).
Correct. The practical one was just an additional FYI; and not an intended answer to your question. The theoretical one is my answer.
Like I said, my answer is that I would hit the original 4; because I cannot intentionally sacrifice 2 people to save those 4.
See, this is where it gets interesting; because, to me, this is a cop-out: it is a consequentialism-denier coming up with a way to be a consequentialist on some issues. If one swerves to the left to hit 2 people to avoid hitting 4, then they have absolutely intended to sacrifice those 2 people to save the 4 and, consequently, used those 2 as a mere means toward a good end. Am I missing something?
This seems to sidestep the issue: to justify this Double Effect, you would have to sufficiently demonstrate that swerving to hit 2 people instead of 4 is not an intention to hit those 2 people to save the 4...what say you? Your analysis in the above quote just assumes it is merely an evil effect, without commenting on the intention.
A duty towards something cannot excuse a person from their other duties. A pilots duty to fly cannot excuse them from their duty to not intentionally kill innocent people.
The pilot would be without moral fault in both; because one cannot blame a person for not fulfilling their duty to A because the only way to do so would have been to violate a more important duty to B.
I dont see how
This is, indeed, a difference; but I dont think it is a relevant difference. Lets amend the trolley problem: imagine you are the train operator...does that change your response? It wouldnt for me, because, as the driver, I still cannot intentionally sacrifice the one to save the five. The principle remains the same.
This is false. Just because the plane goes down and kills people, DOES NOT mean you are responsible for those deathssame as the train running over those people. You are not morally responsible if you abstain from saving those people because your only other option was to sacrifice other innocent people. It doesnt matter (to me) if you are the driver or a passenger.
Your argument rests on the same false assumption as the consequentialist in the 1 vs. 5 problem: they think that they are responsible for the deaths either way, and so it becomes a simple calculation of saving the most. This is false, and misunderstands the nature of moral responsibility.
It was an analogy, and perfectly sound.
This rests on a false understanding of moral responsibility; that most consequentialists have.
It absolutely is, if you intentionally kill one person to save five. No way around that.
Thats fine. If you arent convinced, then suspend judgment. For me, I am convinced.
Hmmm. Ok. Imagine a serial killer has 12 people in their basement and are torturing them. Imagine the serial killer tells you that they will let 11 people go if you personally go kill 1 of them: would you do it?
If so, then you do not think it is immoral to, per se, to kill an innocent person; which is incredible to me.
An easy example is self-defense: a person is morally permitted to kill another person if that person is an aggressor and their response is proportional. This only works with this kind of counter-intuitive thinking your profess here.
For me, it is that I cannot intentionally kill an innocent person (where it is implied it is against their will) period.
The biggest problem with consequentialism I have is that it rests on a false assumption of how moral responsibility works. Not sure how deep you want to get into that debate though.
Arguments by analogy are never sound, they just confuse the issue.
Quoting Bob Ross
A means is something that facilitates or enables the performance of some action. The presence of the 1 person on the track does not facilitate or enable the switching of the train to another track and the consequent saving of 5 lives; it's the lever that does that, the presence of the person on the track is irrelevant.
Quoting Bob Ross
There is no such thing as moral responsibility, because it would require free will, and there is no such thing as free will.
This is a completely different scenario though witli different connotations where you are introducing another malevolent agent who you are bargaining with. This makes the scenario a lot less straightforward. You have also completely complicated the choice because here it is not about an arithmetic of deaths but also torture.
This is a totally vastly different scenario to one where you're driving in a car and for whatever reason, lets say just a horrible accident, there are 4 people in the road and you can make a choice to save 0 lives or 2 lives. The scenario you have brought up just now cannot be compared and the car one is much more straightforward.
Quoting Bob Ross
My point is that just because its we can mitigate much if not all of the blame for killing someone in self-defence doesn't mean that killing anyone still isn't bad. To my mind, the idea of this forfeit you talk about implies that this badness is completely removed. Thats why I dont like this language. It works better in a kind of legal context, not a moral one imo.
Interesting. So if we have the trolley problem, both sides have innocent people, and both sides plead for you to save them by throwing the switch or walk away, what would you do?
Does the pilot have "a separate but related duty to cause as few deaths as possible in the event where he cannot avoid causing deaths"? ()
Quoting Bob Ross
So I am wondering if they have a second duty at all. If they do then we have a case of what is sometimes called moral perplexity, where two duties come into conflict.
Quoting Bob Ross
I was thinking of the former. Presumably you are saying that the relevant difference between the airplane and car scenarios is that in the car scenario all of the potential victims were initially in the path of the vehicle?
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, sounds good.
Quoting Bob Ross
Well, the second condition is a consequentialist condition. I admitted that, but it is not a sufficient condition (and that is what we mean by consequentialism tout court).
Quoting Bob Ross
If two people are dying of heart failure and two others are dying of liver failure, and I kill the former two, take their livers, and give the latter two liver transplants, then I have sacrificed two to save two. It's not at all clear that the same thing is happening in the car scenario.
Indeed, it is not clear that they are a means to an end at all, much less a "mere means." Perhaps when I see people in front of my car on the median I have a rule to swerve into the ditch. My swerving is a means to the end of not-hitting the pedestrians on the median. If someone is on the shoulder, and I hit them, and I knew I was going to hit them, it does not follow that hitting them was a means to avoiding the others. The circumstances here are very different from the transplant case. In the transplant case two literally need to die in order to save the four. How do you differentiate these two cases?
A police officer might investigate and ask my why I swerved. I might say, "I swerved to hit the guy on the shoulder, because I knew that if I could hit that guy on the shoulder then I would be able to avoid the two on the median." Or else I might say, "I swerved to avoid the two on the median. I didn't want to hit the guy on the shoulder, but I couldn't find a way around him." Are these legitimately different answers?
Quoting Bob Ross
No, not really. I could turn this around at you and say, "To deny 'Double Effect,' you would have to sufficiently demonstrate that swerving to hit two people instead of four is based on the intention to hit those two people to save the four. What say you?" I am not saying that there is no possible case where someone would act with a bad intention (and Aquinas says this explicitly, if you recall), but rather that a bad intention is not necessary. On the other hand, if double effect is wrong then you would be required to show that the bad intention is necessary.
The key in these scenarios is that there are two acts (or two sub-acts, depending on how you parse it). The first is the act "to cause the death of innocents," and the second is the "choice over how many innocents die" (). The plane/car will cause the death of innocents no matter what, and therefore the first act is inevitable, and one is not responsible for the inevitable. But the second act is not inevitable: more or less people could die, and here the second duty comes in.
(Again, I have no idea how I would square my own reasoning with the trolley :lol: )
Quoting Bob Ross
Why is B a more important duty?
Killing one person to save the five is what enables the person to save the five. Without being able to kill the one person, they cannot save the five.
I agree they arent the same; but I brought it up to counter your view that: It seems very straightforward to me that in a scenario where either everyone was going to die or only two people, it is better to choose two..
Are you saying that it is bad to kill a person in self-defense, to some degree, while still being morally permissible to do so (in appropriate self-defense scenarios)?
Walk away. I cannot sacrifice innocent human beings to save other innocent human beings: the consequences are not what dictates what is right or wrong but, rather, the actand the act is immoral.
You didn't strike me as one to believe in fate. So because one innocent person would die if you saved five people, you would let the five people die because other forces that are already in motion would lead to their death. If that is your answer, how do you arrive at that decision?
Yes, if by he cannot avoid causing deaths you mean his actions. If he has to either (1) kill 2 innocent people or (2) 4 innocent people; then I agree he should go with 1. But that is not the situation the pilot is in in your hypothetical.
I guess. I would say that the duty to fly the aircraft safely is a duty which does not obligate one to commit anything immoral for its own sake; whereas it seems like you may think that it might.
Yes, that is what tripped me up for a bit.
How? Both situations have a person who knows they have to sacrifice someone to save someone else, and they act upon it. To me that is a sufficient condition to say they intended to do it.
I think the difference you are talking about is merely that it seems like the person in the shoulder example is intending to save the pedestrians and the person on the shoulder is just an unfortunate side-effect; whereas the two in the transplant are definitely not a side-effect.
I disagree; and heres the real difference between us: when you speak of intentions in these two examples, you are referring to only what the person is aware of what they are doing. I, on the other hand, attribute what they know into what they intend even if they dont realize it.
For example, if I see someone in need of water (as perhaps they are thirsty) (lets call them the first person) and I see someone else with water (lets call them the second person) and I walk over to the second person and take their water to give it to the first person, then I am intending to take the water from the second person to give it to the first person even if my self-explicated intention is to get the first person water. You are saying, by analogy here, that if the person is just intending to help the first person in need, and isnt executing consciously a plan to take it from the second person, that the taking of the water of the second person is merely a side-effect of the intention.
The difference between the transplant and the shoulder example, is merely that in the former the person is consciously aware that they are using people as a means. The latter example is iffy: someone may realize they have to kill the shoulder person to save the other people and continue anyways (thereby making it a conscious intention of theirs) whereas another person may not realize it and only think to themselves that they are saving the pedestrians.
I am seriously struggling to see how the police officer would not communicate in their report, just based off of your statement to them here, that you intended to kill the guy on the shoulder to avoid hitting the two on the median; and this is essential to your argument that you provide a basis against this.
If they know that swerving will most certainly (or as a probabilistic certainty) will kill those two people and they continue with their plan of swerving, then they thereby intend to kill those two people to save the other people. I am tying the sufficient knowledge the person has, to what they intend to do. I think this is pretty standard practice in law.
But you are responsible if you veer the plane/car to sacrifice innocent people .. (:
To be completely honest, I think your line of reasoning entails that one should pull the lever.
So, this just boils down to the hierarchy of moral values. I think that rights are more fundamental than social duties (like flying airplanes, driving buses, etc.): the latter assumes the duty to protect and are birthed out of the former, so the former must be more fundamental.
I don't believe in fate; and I am not following how that relates to the trolley problem.
My position is simple: it is immoral to kill an innocent human being. In the trolley dilemma, I am not morally responsible for abstaining from committing an immoral act (e.g., sacrificing the one person) to avoid a bad outcome (e.g., the five dying). If I can only do immoral acts to prevent something bad from happening or I can do nothing, I am always going to do nothing: one cannot commit an immoral act to avoid a bad outcome or produce a good outcome.
Letting something bad happen is sometimes morally omissible.
From what you said (in the above quote), you are implying that I would be equally morally responsible for the five deaths as the one; and thusly it wouldn't make sense to, then, let the five die at the expense of the one. However, this rests on a false understanding of moral responsibility: especially how it relates to intentions and actions. Letting something happen is NOT an action, and some inactions are morally omissible exactly because no action can be taken which is morally permissible.
Does that help? I wasn't sure how fate got sprinkled into the conversation (:
Quoting Bob Ross
Its not a counter because it is a completely different scenario with new constraints that change the issue. It's totally reasonable to have a completely different answer to these different scenarios and still be coherent or consistent but the things that make this scenario more difficult are not in the other one at all.
Quoting Bob Ross
Well yes, killing anyone is bad. A death is bad. Its preferable that no one dies during an altercation. If someone does die then that is still a negative thing even if it was due to justifiable self-defence.
No, I wasn't trying to imply that you had responsibility. I was asking what you felt would be right.
Quoting Bob Ross
I think I see our difference here. I don't hold morality is a responsibility. I hold it as a choice. So for you, its not about choice, but responsibility. Thus you can be absolved of responsibility in certain situations no matter the outcome. The 'fate' part was more about outcome, so we don't need to focus on it.
I view morality as a matter of preferable outcomes based upon our choices. Responsibility doesn't enter into the equation for me. Mostly because I don't know what would be dictating responsibilities, and it seems to add a layer of complexity on a topic that is already complex enough. So to that point, what is dictating moral responsibilities? How do we rationally determine what we are, and are not responsible for?
I see! I agree that being moral is a choice; but being a moral agent, which is a choice, entails that one has, upon choosing to be such, moral responsibilities. I am NOT actually a moral agent, even if I make the decision to be one, if I don't have a duty to not do immoral acts and to do moral ones: that would be akin to saying that a firefighter doesn't have a duty to put out fires. Likewise, we determine what we are morally responsible for by way of analyzing deliberate acts and lack of acts (e.g., negligence) in relation to what is (intrinsically) good and bad.
Without moral responsibility, an ethical theory cannot supply any analysis of moral agents; which is arguably the most practical and, consequently, important aspect of ethics.
Quoting Bob Ross
According to what you say here the driver should be convicted for murder, no? You seem to think he murdered the pedestrian on the shoulder.
No worries at all.
Correct. I am assuming you disagree: the fact they are swerving to avoid other people, although they are still intending to run over other people to save them, seems to be the relevant difference for you that makes it (presumably) morally omissible.
You are saying two different things here. Let's take them separately:
"Killing one person to save the five is what enables the person to save the five. "
This is false. Suppose at the last minute the 1 person rolls off the track and saves himself. The operator has still managed to save the other five, and that is because it was using the lever that enabled him to save them, not the presence of the other 1 person. The means is the same whether the 1 person is killed or manages to save himself.
"Without being able to kill the one person, they cannot save the five."
If you mean that they would be unable to save the 5 if they lacked the ability to kill the 1, that is true. But this is not because the 1 is the means of killing the 5, it is because to be able to kill the 1 person they need to be able to switch the train, and it is this switching that is the means of saving the 5, not the killing of the 1.
I think what is preventing you grasping the obvious fact that killing the 1 person is not the means of saving the 5 is your belief that intention to kill innocent people is enough to convict someone of moral guilt. Even if there were such a thing as moral guilt (which there is not, because as I have said, there is no such thing as moral responsibility), this would not be the case, because, as in the trolley case, an agent may be in a situation where they cannot avoid killing innocent people. If they did not choose to be in such a situation, then no blame can attach to them for being in that situation, and consequently no blame can attach to them for then intentionally killing some of these people, as long as they intend to kill as few as the situation allows.
Yes - Ive changed my mind regarding the trolley case. I now hold that pulling the lever is permissible if the conditions of double effect are being adhered to.
The reason I am wary of the trolley case is because when a modern mind asks if it is permissible to pull the lever, they are almost certainly asking whether it is permissible to do evil that good may came; they are almost certainly attempting to justify consequentialism. So in this sense I think @Fire Ologist is correct when he says that the problem unduly prescinds from questions of intention. Only if one is not intending to kill the person (and one is not willing their death as a means to the end) can one pull the lever.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay.
Quoting Bob Ross
It seems like he is in that hypothetical. You are positing a significant difference between steering away from a large group of people and killing others as a side-effect, and ceasing to the fly the plane and killing others as a side-effect. When the pilot decides to cease flying the plane he knows the death of innocents will result, and therefore on your definition the advice you give is also intentional killing (i.e. the advice to cease flying the plane).
Quoting Bob Ross
This is instructive because you speak about "committing an immoral act for its own sake." This is obviously not what is happening any any of the scenarios. Not even someone who does evil for the sake of a good end is committing immorality for its own sake. :chin:
Quoting Bob Ross
They don't intend to do it in different ways? Again, on your principles to cease flying the plane is to intentionally kill.
Much of this comes back to the first sentence of Aquinas' response:
Quoting Aquinas, ST II-II.64.7: Whether it is lawful to kill a man in self-defense?
You are denying this principle insofar as you are saying that everything which is foreseen is intended. Or more precisely, every effect which is foreseen to be necessary is intended.
What is your analysis of intent? What does it mean to intend something?
Quoting Bob Ross
Right: because in the first case the bad effect is not a means to the good effect, but in the latter case it is. Thus the transplant is not permissible on double effect.
Quoting Bob Ross
This is another case where the bad effect is a means to the good effect, and is therefore not permissible on double effect. In order to give the first person water I must steal from the second person. Contrariwise, if there were one drink of water and two persons dying of thirst, I could give it to the first person even though I knew that the second person would die of thirst, because the bad effect (of their dying) is not a means to the good effect (of the other person drinking). The bad effect is not necessary in order to bring about the good effect; it is a side effect.
Quoting Bob Ross
In order to give the first person water I must obtain water. In order to obtain water in your scenario it must be stolen from the second person. So what is happening is that I am stealing water in order to obtain water in order to give water to a thirsty person. The bad effect is a means to the good effect, and is therefore impermissible. Without the bad effect there would be no water for the thirsty person; just as without their deaths there would be no organs to transplant.
Quoting Bob Ross
Suppose an act has two effects: I press the accelerator and two things happen: my speed accelerates and my fuel is consumed. Do you think Aquinas is right, and it is possible to intend one effect without the other? When I press the accelerator do I intend to accelerate and do I intend to diminish my fuel? And even if so, do I intend them in the same way? Is the word "intend" being used in the same way for both of these effects?
Quoting Bob Ross
I brought up murder because it is obvious that this person would not be convicted of murder. They may be convicted of manslaughter, but not murder. At the very least your analysis doesn't sync with our law system. It follows from this that the police officer would not write that I intended to kill the guy on the shoulder. Police officers and judges accept that side effects exist, and that not everything foreseen is intended.
Quoting Bob Ross
But this doesn't answer the question. If I have a duty to not-kill one person, then why don't I have a double duty to not-kill two persons? At stake are two duties.
...so it does seem like we can make some progress in our moral reasoning. :grin:
I am glad we can at least agree on the full consequences of your view (:
I think I see a bit of the confusion and mistakes on my end; so let me explicate it more clearly.
I was originally thinking that: if a person knows A is an (reasonable and probable or certain) implication of B and they intend B; then they intend A. This is not true: an intention is a purposeful course of action; and sometimes the purposeful course of action can have consequences which are not in the purposeful plan (of action) one had.
However, I dont think this changes much in my view at all. Lets go through an overview of each example weve had so far:
1. Standard 1 vs. 5 Trolley Problem: the person who pulls the lever to save the five is purposefully taking a course of action of sacrificing one as a means to save the five. This is immoral.
2. Same as #1, but amended such that the person deciding to pull the lever (or not) is the operator of the train. The train operator that veers into the other track to save the five at the expense of the one is purposefully taking a course of action that sacrifices the one to save the five. This is immoral. The train operator continuing to steer the train on the tracks that has the five on it is not purposefully running over the five; because they are not purposefully running over the five but, rather, continuing to drive because they cannot sacrifice their passengers (in the event of steering off both tracks unsafely) nor the one on the other track to avoid a bad outcometheir intention is to avoid deaths without committing any immoral acts.
3. The Pilot Example: I would say the same as the train operator example. The pilot is not intentionally killing the group of people by continuing to fly until the plane naturally crashes because their purposeful action is to try to save lives without committing any immoral actstheir intentions does not include killing people but, rather, their purposeful course of action is to avoid doing immoral acts.
4. The Car Example: Ditto.
5. The Water Example: I agree that if one has water and has to choose between quenching the thirst of one person or another and they intend to quench one persons thirst, then they are not intending to deprive the other of water. This is because their purposeful course of action does not include depriving them of water; whereas in my original example, it did.
By its own sake, I was referring to the duty to safely fly the plane and not the immoral act.
I would say that they dont intend it in different ways, because both have the purposeful course of action of sacrificing one person for the sake of others.
I would also like to add that sometimes knowledge of B implying A and intending B does implicate one in intending A: the knowledge one has can implicate them in a purposeful course of action that they may not have been sufficiently aware of (self-reflectively). E.g., if I am aware that I am intending to quench the thirst of person A and I know that that requires me to steal the water from person B, then, even if I am not aware that I am intending to, I am thereby intending to steal water from person B when I intend to quench the thirst of person A. The relevant question is the actual and full course of action implied by ones purposefulnessnot what one is aware of as the course of action implied by their purposefulness.
I genuinely believe that the police officer would say you intended to sacrifice the person for the other people; and I am surprised that is controversial to say. If your purposeful course of action is to save the people you are about to run into and you know the only way to do so is to sacrifice someone else, then the full course of action that you are purposefully taking is using one person as a means towards saving the other people. No?
What do you mean double duty? It doesnt compound: one has the duty to not kill innocent people intentionally, and that duty applies to any being of a rational kind.
This is changing the scenario: thats not a valid option for the person pulling the lever. They either pull the lever, thereby sacrificing one to save five, or they dont and five people die.
Since they know that pulling the lever necessarily results in killing one person and that this is the only way for them to save the five; then they are intending to sacrifice the one to save the five.
What you are noting is that the mechanism being used to save the five is the lever; which is uncontroversially true.
You are confusing using someone as a means towards something, with the means of using them as a means. E.g., the lever is the means to using the one person as a means to avoid the bad outcome [of five dying].
Okay.
Quoting Bob Ross
First, I don't know how helpful this is given the fact that "intent" and "purpose" are synonyms. Now you've just said all the same things you were saying before, but with the word "purpose" instead of the word "intent." This is apparently only a superficial shift of which word is being used.
So the principle we now agree on is:
Now I have claimed that Q is intended when it is the means by which P is achieved, or else when it is willed as an end. For example, when I shoot a "bank" shot in basketball (off the backboard) I intend the ball to ricochet off the backboard into the basket. In this case the ball hitting the backboard is Q and the ball going into the basket is P, and the very fact that Q is a means to P shows that I intend the occurrence of Q. For the second example, if I try to hit two birds with one stone, then I am intending both P and Q (hitting bird 1 and hitting bird 2) as ends. Only in these types of cases do I intend Q.
You haven't given any explanation of when Q is intended. You just said, "It's not always intended," and then you went on to give your exact same opinions with the word "purpose" instead of "intent." To take your fourth case:
Quoting Bob Ross
So for the car:
Remember that we agreed on the principle,
Or the trolley:
Quoting Bob Ross
Why would one think that the lever-puller is intending or purposing to kill the one person?
Quoting Bob Ross
Now how is this any different from the other scenarios? To merely assert that their purpose/intent does not include Q is to beg the question. If I can not-intend this Q, then why can't I not-intend the other Q's?
Quoting Bob Ross
Here you are actually responding to my counterclaim that if the pilot ceases to fly the plane he intentionally kills:
Why isn't the pilot responsible for Q? He knows Q will occur if he stops flying the plane, so on your reasoning it seems that he intends Q.
I think what is happening here is that you are hoping that the deaths that occur via the pilot's omission are better than the deaths that occur via the pilot's commission, even if more people end up dying on the omission. But Q still occurs on the omission, it does not go away.
Quoting Bob Ross
I agree, along with Aquinas.
Quoting Bob Ross
Again, this is just an assertion. I could do the same thing if I said regarding case 5, "He intends/purposes to sacrifice the second person for the sake of the first person." This is not to reason or explain; it is merely to assert.
Quoting Bob Ross
I suppose we could look up some cases like this to see if they are convicted of murder, if you actually believe they would be so convicted.
Quoting Bob Ross
Hergs point is that the death of the one is not a means to the saving of the five, and we know this because something could happen where the one frees himself from the track and the five would be saved all the same. This is completely different from the transplant case. In that case if the one frees himself and does not die then the five do die. In one case the bad effect is a means, whereas in the other case it is not.
This would be true if the second supposed means was, in fact, needed to save the five; but as Leontiskos has pointed out, it isn't:
Quoting Leontiskos
Since the second supposed means is not needed, it isn't a means at all. You really need to accept this so that this discussion can get somewhere more interesting (e.g. moving on to consider the fundamental dispute between deontologists and consequentialists in the trolley problem, the transplant problem, and. if I may be allowed to widen the scope a little further, the Omelas problem).
Actually I think Bob is taking the straightforward position that it is always wrong to deliberately kill an innocent person. If I understand him, he regards this as an absolute moral truth, completely non-negotiable, so that 'you must not deliberately kill an innocent person' is a moral imperative that admits of no exceptions, however bad the consequences of obeying it. He will no doubt correct me if I have misunderstood him.
If I have understood him correctly, then I would like to ask him what, in his view, underpins this truth? Does he, for example, think that it is a moral truth because God makes it so?
It seems to me that the question at hand asks what it means to deliberately/intentionally/purposefully kill. Although you and I may disagree on a great deal, we do agree that to pull the lever is not to use the death of the one as a means. My claim is that if his death is not intended as a means and it is not intended as an end, then it is not intended, and he has not been intentionally killed.* Bob Ross has his foot in the door insofar as he has admitted that not every effect of an act is intentional, even if it is known that it will occur.
Good posts, by the way. :up:
* I think it would be helpful for Ross to understand that if the trolley scenario were changed so that instead of one person there were ten people on the second track, then the doctrine of double effect would not permit switching the trolley to the second track, even though doing so is not necessarily to intentionally kill the ten. One cannot intend to kill, but even when one is not intending to kill it does not follow that their act will be moral.
Quoting Leontiskos
Certainly 'to deliberately/intentionally/purposefully kill the single person' is not an adequate or accurate description of the operator's intention when he pulls the lever. An adequate and accurate description would be 'to minimise the number of people who are going to be killed'.
However, I'm not sure that this means that I can agree with you that:
Quoting Leontiskos
because after all, the operator intentionally pulls the lever in the belief that by so doing, he is going to kill the single person. And this surely is the same thing as killing him intentionally.
I don't believe, even if there were such a thing as moral guilt, that this would make him morally guilty, because I believe his moral responsibility would be to minimise the number of people who are going to be killed, and killing the single person intentionally is unavoidable if he is to do this.
CC: @Herg
By intention, I just mean a deliberate or purposeful course of action; and I dont know how else to explain it than that. An intention is not merely a purpose nor a deliberation: it is a deliberation or purposeful contemplation of a course of action. Perhaps that is just to reiterate what what already there in the term intentionbut doesnt it suffice?
I agree that if I intend A and A causes effects P and Q, then I do not necessarily intend Q even when I know A causes Q and I agree that Q is intended when it is a means by which P is achieved. However, heres what I think you are missing: letting something happen is not the same as doing something: the former is inaction which has its consequences (due to its absence), whereas the latter is action which has its consequences (due to its presence).
I didnt explicate this very clearly before, because quite frankly I am having to dive in deeper into this (conversing with you) than I have before, but letting an innocent person die is not necessarily immoral; whereas killing an innocent person is. This is the relevant difference in your examples.
To determine whether or not one is killing an innocent person or letting them die, one needs to determine if an action which they committed is responsible for their deathviz., if action A from P1 results in P2s death, then P1 killed P2. This is separate from whether or not a person intentionally kills or lets them die; and what we are discussing is the combination of one killing (i.e., taking action which results in a death) in conjunction with ones actions being deliberate (or having knowledge which would implicate them).
To allow us to dive into our differences, I am going to pick one of our examples, specifically the car one, and dive deeper into it. If we can make ground on the car one, then we can move on the rest; because they all have the same commonalities vital to our differences.
Multiple things to note:
1. Q is intended in this case because it is a means towards P. Without hitting the two people, one cannot avoid hitting the four peoplethats exactly what it means to use something as a means (i.e., it is a necessarily utility expended to produce an desired outcome). This is no different than the case where one steals the water to quench someones thirst.
2. Continuing to drive, thereby hitting the four, does not result in any action from the driver that caused the four to die: they are letting them dieas it is a result of their inaction that causes them to die.
3. Hitting the two people to save the five is an action which results in the deaths of the two; which is thereby an act of killing (as opposed to letting them die).
4. You might say that, in #2, continuing to drive is the act which causes the four peoples death, and so it is not a case of letting them die but, rather, a case of killing them: continuing to do something is NOT an act. If I sit down in a chair, then I have thereby acted in such a way as to sit down in a chair. Every second I am just sitting there is not another action of sitting in the chairto continue sitting there is not an action: it is inaction. Therefore, to continue to driving, when was driving all the same before, is not itself an action; and so to continue to driving when one cannot avoid hitting four people (because they would be sacrificing other people to save them) is an inaction. On the contrary, swerving to the right is an action which results in the death of two people; and so it is an instance of killing two people, and, separately, was intentional (so it is immoral).
5. It follows from what I have said thus far, that you are right that I intend to let people die by not swerving; but I am not killing them.
6. That the act of swerving is the immediate means of saving the four, it does NOT follow that killing the two people was not a means of saving the four. If the course of action intended requires the sacrificing of an innocent person, even if it be mediated, then the sacrificing of that innocent person is a means towards that course of action (i.e., end). I understand that you are making a (valid) distinction between an effect which is vs. is not necessary ideally to bring about the end; but in the scenarios we are discussing it is necessary for bringing about the end. Saying that technically the same end could have been accomplished differently in a different scenario such that it was without X (where, for example, the two people arent on the side of the road) does NOT takeaway from the fact that one cannot in this scenario achieve the end without X.
Ceasing to fly the plane would be immoral; because it is an action which results in the deaths of (at least) the passengers. Doing nothing and continuing to fly is an inaction which results in people dying BUT not an immoral act being committed.
A should be Continue flying the plane.
Exactly.
See #6.
This is correct insofar as it applies to beings of a rational kind.
I would say the immediate underpinning is that beings of a rational kind have rights, rights are inherently deontological, and they have the right to not be killed if they are innocent. The ultimate underpinning is that eudamonia (viz., flourishing, well-being, and happiness in the deepest, richest, and most persistent sense) is the highest moral good; and the best way to pragmatically structure society is to give people basic rights to best promote and progress towards a world with the richest and most harmonious sense of eudamonia.
Sure - I edited up that post after I realized this, but it looks like you began replying before my edit went through.
Quoting Herg
Sure, I can see that point of view.
Okay good, but the key thing you need to do is explain the case in which Q is not intended. Are you saying that it is not intended whenever it is not a means to P?
Quoting Bob Ross
So as I said, "I think what is happening here is that you are hoping that the deaths that occur via the pilot's omission are better than the deaths that occur via the pilot's commission, even if more people end up dying on the omission." What is at stake is a distinction between a commission and an omission.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, fair enough, and I agree with that, although you would apparently disagree with my opinion that killing a person must necessarily involve an intention to kill them.
Quoting Bob Ross
This business about judging one's responsibility for an omission vs. a commission comes from my charge that the pilot's omission of ceasing to fly the plane is a culpable omission. I am going to set aside that question for the time being given that it places too many dishes on our plate.
Did P1 kill P2? Or to be more precise, did P1 intentionally kill P2, or else did P1's action merely cause P2's death? "Kill" is ambiguous as to whether intent is involved. So I propose we avoid the verb "kill" altogether, and talk about murder vs. causing death. "Murder" isn't a perfect word, but it's better than anything else I can think of.
Quoting Bob Ross
Your argument is that .
This is unwieldy. I like @Herg's definition better:
Quoting Herg
You responded:
Quoting Bob Ross
Now Herg's point was that pulling the lever is what enabled the person to save the five, and killing the one person is not what enabled the person to save the five, and I agree with him.
A point that Herg and I have both made is that a clear case of using one as a means to save five occurs in the hypothetical where one person is killed so that their organs can be transferred to five people in dire need of an organ transplant. When this case is compared to the trolley case, it is clear that the death of the one is a means in the transplant case but not in the trolley case.
I gave two cases of intent: "two birds with one stone," and "the basketball bank shot." Consider the metaphor of passing an electrical current through the shape of the letter "V" and the number "7". We feed current into the bottom vertex and our goal is to get current to the upper left vertex ("P"), as can be seen at <this link>.
Now Q[sub]v[/sub] is not a means to P[sub]v[/sub], but Q[sub]7[/sub] is a means to P[sub]7[/sub]. Do you see the difference? In the language of one way of expressing double effect, P[sub]v[/sub] and Q[sub]v[/sub] both follow immediately from A[sub]v[/sub], but P[sub]7[/sub] follows Q[sub]7[/sub] mediately from A[sub]7[/sub]. Because P[sub]v[/sub] and Q[sub]v[/sub] follow immediately from A[sub]v[/sub], Q[sub]v[/sub] cannot be a means to P[sub]v[/sub].
Quoting Bob Ross
The problem with this analysis is that to discretely decide to continue sitting is an act. It is a decision to omit standing. If someone decides to omit an act then they have acted, by deciding to continue in the course they were already in. But again, I am going to leave this omission vs. commission question for another day.
I actually have to run, so I am going to post what I have so far and return to this tomorrow. Most of what you say relates to the omission vs. commission question, which I think is better left for later. Still, I will try to revisit anything I have missed in your post. Hopefully what I say here will be enough to go forward.
CC: @Herg
I already explicated this in my response: Q is not intended if Q is not a means towards P and P was intended.
No. I explicitly stated in my response that it is immoral for them to cease flying the plane.
I am assuming you meant to draw up a scenario where P1s action results in P2s death. If so, then it obviously follows that P1 killed P2.
Whether or not P1 intentionally killed P2 is a completely separate question, which you cannot conflate. That is going to rest on whether or not P1 deliberately did it.
By murder do you mean an unlawful, premeditated, killing OR an immoral, deliberate, killing? I am going to straight up reject the former (legal) definition if that is what you meant; because it is going to derail the conversation substantially.
I dont see any difference between our definitions. Everything I said in #6 still applies with Hergs definition.
Everything you said in this section of your response was a reiteration of what you already said and did not address the #6 point I made; so it was unhelpful. I understand already what you both are arguing, and addressed it in #6.
Nope. You are right to say there is a valid distinction between the two cases, but it is not that one is a means and the other isnt: it is that one is an immediate means and the other isnt. Again, it does not help your case to demonstrate that ideally an act can be carried out without X when X is necessary to carry out that act in the specific scenario we are discussing. You completely ignored this part of my response.
This rests on a false understanding of an act. Deliberating staying seated is not an act: it is choosing to NOT act. One is choosing to NOT get up.
I don't think you addressed anything really that I said, to be completely honest.
No, you have not already explicated that. You gave a case when Q is not necessarily intended, and this is different from giving a case where it is not intended.
So now you say
But what you have failed to do over and over again is to tell us when Q is the means and when Q is not the means. You have been begging the question by repeating, Q is a means in the trolley/plane/car case! Herg and I have been providing analyses of when something is a means and when it is not, and we have been trying to lure you into a real analysis of what it is for something to be a means. Of course you have now provided an analysis in terms of conditional necessity.
What I am going to do is focus on the water case, because that is the sole case where you claim that Q is not a means to P. If it is shown that your claim fails there according to your own analysis of what it is to be a means, then it will become more apparent that you have offered no substantial analysis of what it is for something to be a means. For parity let us assume that the water is necessary to live:
If we look at the quotes from your previous post, we find that you must hold that Q is intentional killing, because you must hold that Q is a means to P:
Quoting Bob Ross
In the water case, without the second person dying for lack of water, one cannot avoid the death of the first person. P cannot be achieved without Q. Therefore on your reasoning, Q is a means to P, and is therefore intended.
Quoting Bob Ross
In the water case, depriving the second person to save the first is an action which results in the death of the second person. On your reasoning, this is an act of intentional killing, where P cannot be achieved without Q.
Quoting Bob Ross
One cannot achieve P without Q, therefore on your reasoning Q was a means to P.
Your error in all of this is conflating conditional necessity with the presence of a means. You are trying to say, If in causing P I necessarily cause Q, then Q was a means to P. This is actually contrary to our mutual premise that
Or else, go study the diagram I drew up, paying particular attention to the V shape. If we are aiming to provide current to vertex P, then we must apply current to vertex A, and this will necessarily result in current flowing to vertex Q, but it does not follow that the current flowing to Q is a means to the current flowing to P! A will supply current to P whether or not Q exists, and this is completely different from the 7 shape.
Its not so hard to logically demonstrate the contradiction:
(If (4) were true then Q is necessarily intended given that P is intended.)
Your error is (1). It does not follow from the conditional necessity of Q that Q is a means. Note that, "One cannot achieve P without Q," is the same as (P [math]\to[/math] Q).
The other absurdity that results from your view is that Q is a means to P and P is a means to Q, which is of course impossible. This is because in (2) (P ^ Q) is interchangeable with (Q ^ P), and what this means is that A leads both to the conclusion that Q is a means to P and to the conclusion that P is a means to Q. In other words: (A [math]\to[/math] (P ^ Q)) [math]\to[/math] (A [math]\to[/math] (P [math]\leftrightarrow[/math] Q)).
Quoting Bob Ross
By murder I mean intentional killing, and by causing death I mean killing that is not necessarily intentional. The simple word, killing, is completely inadequate to our purposes given its ambiguity with respect to intention. I suggest we avoid using that word unless we prefix it with intentional or non-intentional.
Quoting Bob Ross
When you say that 'eudamonia is the highest moral good' is the ultimate underpinning, do you literally mean that nothing further underpins that? Because if so, then I must ask you, what reason do we have to believe that the proposition 'eudamonia is the highest moral good' is true?
You are claiming here that sacrificing the two people is required in order to avoid killing all four in other words to save the other two. Let's see.
There are four people strung out across the road: from left to right, they are Alan, Betty, Charles and Dora. If the car does not swerve, all four will be killed. In the event, the car swerves to the left, and only Alan and Betty are killed: Charles and Dora are saved.
If you are right, and the killing of Alan and Betty is required in order to save Charles and Dora, then that must mean that if Alan and Betty had not been there, the car could not have swerved and saved the lives of Charles and Dora. But this is clearly not true: whether Alan and Betty are present has no bearing on whether the car can swerve and hence save the lives of Charles and Dora. So it can't be true that their presence, and their being sacrificed, is required in order for Charles and Dora to be saved.
If it really was true that Alan and Betty's presence, and their being killed, was required in order that Charles and Dora can be saved, then I would agree with you that the killing of Alan and Betty is a means of saving the lives of Charles and Dora. But their presence, and their being killed, is not required, and therefore it is not a means of saving Charles and Dora.
BTW, I hope it is clear that you can give up the belief that the killing of Alan and Betty is a means to saving the lives of Charles and Dora, without also giving up the belief that it is wrong to kill an innocent person. I agree that it is wrong to kill an innocent person, except in circumstances where it cannot be avoided, or where it is necessary in order to prevent some greater wrong. The point is that the driver (if he is a moral sort of person) would save all four innocent lives if he could, but the situation prevents him from doing so, and for that, he is not to blame.
By means, I mean a necessary utility expended to produce an desired outcome.
By intention, I mean a purposeful or deliberate course of action.
Because I accept the premise that if I cannot achieve A without causing B, then I cannot intend A without intending to cause B, I reject the premise I previously accepted (that If I intend A and A causes effects P and Q, then I do not necessarily intend Q, even when I know that A causes Q).
Correct; and I like your diagrams for explaining it. I understand that, from your perspective, P is not a means to Q in V because if one removes P from A then Q is still connected to A. The problem is that when Q and P are necessary utilities for bringing about A, then A cannot exist without being connected to Q and P: you cannot remove P and keep Q connected to AA disappears.
If I draw out your diagram without having to share a dropbox, then I would represent the V like this:
P ? A ? Q
The problem is that this doesnt completely represent the relationship whereof Q and P are necessary for A. I dont know how to represent it this way, but in logic it would be A ? (P & Q): you cant say that A ? P is true when Q is false given A ? (P & Q).
What you are doing is conflating the necessary conditions for facilitating A in specific example E with in a general example G. In G, you are absolutely right: A ? P is fine. In E, this is not necessarily true; and is false in the case of the examples we have been using.
Now, an easy way to understand the flaw in your reasoning is to reflect on your 7 diagram; because it implies that if you were to remove P that Q is still connected to A, which is not true, for example, in the case of the car swerving example. If A is swerving to save four people and P is saving four people and Q is hitting two innocent bystanders, then removing P does not result in A ? Q. Viz, if the intention is to save four people, then the effect of hitting two innocent bystanders is no longer connected with the intention in the event that there are no four people to save.
Fair enough--except for the killing part: it is not a killing. Yes, from what I have said, and I did not catch it on my last response, it follows that letting the second person die is a means towards saving the first person: I accept this.
Correct.
NO! You lack a distinction between letting something bad happen and doing something bad. My action was to give the first person water to save them; and the simultaneous deprivation of water (from that act) of the second person is an inaction: it is a negative counter-part to a positive. You do not seem to have fully fleshed out this kind of distinction, and instead insist on everything being an action.
I intentionally let, in this example, the second person die: I did not kill them. This is morally permissible because (presumably) there was no morally permissible way to save them.
This premise is false in the examples we have given: A entailing P and Q does not imply that A entails that P entails Qyou are thinking in terms of the 7 diagram instead of a reciprocated V diagram (where A cannot exist without being connected to both Q and P). Take the car example, I am actually saying (as opposed to this premise 2):
{A ? (P ^ Q)} ? {![(A ? P) && !(A ? Q)]}
If you remove Q (or P), then A no longer exists (in the diagram).
Thats exactly what it means for a thing to be dependent on two other things that are independent of each other. Operating this computer with two screens requires two different monitors. Monitor 1 and Monitor 2 are independent of each other analogous to the V diagram, but A (which is the operation of the computer with two screens) requires both. If you remove 1 or 2, then you cannot operate the computer with two screens (A); and it is not like the 7 diagram either: the monitors are independent of each other and mutually required for A.
I would prefer we just refer to it as intentional killing vs. killing: that is the most clear way of presenting it. Murder is usually defined differently than what you said here.
@Herg
Please see me and @Leontisk conversation which I am responding to here as well. I addressed this with their diagrams above.
I agree that an exception is when one cannot avoid it; but we are differing on what we mean by avoid it. I make a distinction between letting someone die vs. killing them that doesnt appear in your view at all.
It doesn't appear in my view because I don't think it is morally significant.
Here's the car driver barrelling along the road. He turns a corner and suddenly sees four people in front of him. (Perhaps he is in a road race and these people are from out of town and didn't know it was happening.) He realises that they are too close for him to avoid altogether: avoiding all four is therefore not an available choice. He has two choices: if he doesn't turn the wheel, he will kill all four, whereas if he turns the wheel, he will only kill two. To kill four is worse than to kill two, so he turns the wheel.
The point is that not turning the wheel is just as much a choice as turning it. The decision whether to turn the wheel is his and his alone; if he chooses to turn it he will be responsible for the outcome (or such part of the outcome as is under his control; the fact that he will inevitably kill at least two people is not under his control), and if he chooses not to turn it he will be equally responsible. Since he is equally responsible whether he turns the wheel or not, he is just as morally responsible whichever he chooses to do. There is no sense in the suggestion that he is less morally responsible if he doesn't turn the wheel: the moral responsibility attaches to the act of choosing, not to the physical action of turning the wheel, and there is no special exemption for acts of choosing that do not result in physical movements of the body or of machines moved by the body; that is not where moral responsibility has purchase.
It is morally significant if one accepts that they cannot commit immoral acts to avoid bad or produce good outcomes.
If one agrees that it is immoral to intentionally kill an innocent human being and they cannot save a person without intentionally killing an innocent human being, then the only morally permissible option is to do nothing.
He should continue and kill all four; because doing so is not an action. He is deciding to not change the course he is already on, thereby letting four die instead of swerving (which is an action resulting in intentionally killing innocent people).
You are confusing decisions (or choices) with actions. Deciding NOT to do something, is NOT an action.
I meant in the sense of what morally grounds it. Being the highest moral good, it is the ultimate good which everything else is assessed under. Of course, I believe there are reasons to believe that it is the highest moral good.
Quoting Bob Ross
I didn't say not turning the wheel was an action, I said it was a choice, so it is not true that I am "confusing decisions (or choices) with actions". You are changing what I wrote. Please don't do that.
Quoting Bob Ross
I don't agree that it is UNCONDITIONALLY immoral to intentionally kill an innocent human being. As I've said, I think it is morally acceptable if either one has no other choice, or it is done in order to prevent a greater wrong. This is perhaps the essential bone of contention between us. I think we owe each other an explanation of why we take the positions on this that we do. I will start by explaining why I think the way I do.
I am an ethical naturalist and hedonist: I believe that the only intrinsic good is pleasure (strictly, pleasantness), and the only intrinsic evil is pain (strictly, unpleasantness). If you wish to go into further detail, I can explain further why I believe this.
From the fact (as I see it) that pleasure and pain are the only intrinsic good and evil, I derive the more or less Benthamite view that the entities that have moral status are all and only those entities that can experience pleasure and pain. These are therefore the entities we should treat as ends, not as mere means.
We do not treat an entity as an end if we kill it without good reason. We also do not treat it as an end if we let it die, when we could save it, without good reason. The mere fact that letting an entity die does not involve physical action, whereas killing an entity does, is not a good reason, because the only intrinsic evil is pain, and the good (i.e. pleasure) that that entity would have experienced is equally lost either way. The physical act of killing has no intrinsic value, either good or bad: its only value is whatever value it acquires through being instrumental in a course of action (or inaction) which either treats an entity as an end or fails to do so, or (subject to the primary requirement to treat entities as ends) increases pleasure or decreases pain (or the reverse). Killing an entity and letting it die are therefore, morally speaking, on all fours.
There you have my reasoning. If I have left anything unclear, let me know and I will elucidate if I can.
I would now like you to tell us the reasoning that leads you to conclude that it is UNCONDITIONALLY immoral to intentionally kill an innocent human being.
The floor is yours.
Quoting Bob Ross
Can you tell us at least some of the reasons?
This post is pretty up-to-date on my ethics (although I have sublated it a bit since then). Let me know if you have any questions or would like to discuss it further. Perhaps we should go into that thread to avoid derailing this one.
I apologize: I must have misunderstood what you said then. It sounded like you were considering them both actions.
Either way, the issue, as will be expounded later hereon, with your idea of having no choice is that you tie it to killing--viz., it is morally permissible to choose to kill someone when they have no choice to not kill them.
The scenarios you keep giving, are NOT examples of a situation where one does not have any other choice than to kill peoplethats what you keep missing. Letting someone die is a choice, but not a choice to kill someone. Killing is an action.
Ah, I see where we disagree. You dont believe an innocent person has the right to not be killed (or you hold a view of rights which is confused and incoherent [such as claiming that they can be revoked for the greater good]).
I think people have rights, rights are inherently deontological, and that the most basic one is to not be killed if one is innocent.
In the case of the latter, you are denying that a person has a right not to be killed; and in the case of the former, this is muddied (as exposed in your examples you keep giving): saying one cannot choose to not kill someone because they only have the option to kill someone or let them be killed is just to confuse what it means to make a decision to (1) kill someone vs. (2) let them dieeither I accept the face-value of your assertion that one has no other choice and in the car example it would then (according to you) be morally impermissible to swerve (because they have the choice to not kill people but, rather, let them die), or I have to, again, interpret your assertion as ~one has no other choice but let someone die or kill someone and then I simply disagree (because letting someone die is morally omissible in some cases).
Fair enough.
Cool. I am an ethical naturalist and a neo-aristotelian.
I believe that there are plenty of intrinsically good things (because intrinsic goodness is identical to intrinsic valuableness and intrinsic valuableness is grounded in intrinsic motivational-ness). Hence, I completely agree that pleasure and pain are intrinsically good and bad (respectively) but disagree that they are the most intrinsically good and bad. E.g., a state of deprivation and decadence is surely worse, in terms of its power to intrinsically (negatively) motivate, than pain; and the sate of supreme flourishing is surely better, in terms of its power to intrinsically (positively) motivate, than pleasure.
The most intrinsic good is to be a eudaimon; because it is the richest, most persistent, and deepest state of flourishing, well-being, and happiness.
I can mostly get on board with this. Living beings are special, insofar as they are the only beings capable of these intrinsically valuable states; and the more complex the living being, arguably, the more potency of well-being they can achieve (and thusly making them more valuable than simpler living beings).
As a side note, I dont think a principle of ends-in-themselves is compatible with your view; but thats a separate issue (I guess).
I would not say that we should always treat living beings as ends-in-themselves and never merely as a means; because I find it perfectly permissible for higher living beings to use lower living beings as means towards their ends (within certain limits and with certain stipulations) because they are more valuable and there is no feasible means for them to survive otherwise.
without good reason is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here; so I am not sure how to address this.
I would say that beings of a rational kind deserve rights which beings of irrational kinds do notsuch as not being killed when innocentand, although we do need to treat all life with a certain amount of respect, we can use beings of non-rational kinds as means towards good ends (to some extent). E.g., if pulling the lever in the trolley problem results in killing an innocent cow to save five people, then I am morally obligated to pull the lever.
I agree one can be held morally responsible for letting someone die; but letting someone die can be morally omissible--specifically in the case that one cannot do anything to save them that is morally permissible. That is the big difference between our views. I hold that one cannot commit an immoral act to save someone, whereas you do.
Hopefully I answered this adequately; but to elaborate a bit more: beings of rational kinds have rights which beings of irrational kinds do not havesuch as not being killed when innocent. The reasons for this are that beings of rational kinds are:
(1) capable of rational, civic, and social contributions to societies. A human being that contributes, as a citizen, to a society deserves some basic rights that cows do not (for example) since they are engaging, rationally, in a social contract with society.
(2) rational beings have the sufficient free will to engage in projects, which makes them significantly more valuable than irrational beings because they are significantly more capable of being moral agents.
(3) rational beings have significantly higher levels of complexity, awareness, and consciousness than irrational beings. They are impacted, in terms of well-being, more potently and at a wider-range than irrational beings. E.g., if I kill an ant, the other ants will not be as impacted (in terms of their well-being) than if I kill a human beings brother or sister.
All of these render, to me, a warranted belief that beings of rational kinds have these innate rights that we typically associate with human beings in well-developed societies.
What if sadistic aliens come down and offer us the following deal: if you give us a little kid so that we may torture them, we will gift you with fabulous technologies. If you don't give us the kid, all humans will become our slaves.
On a purely hedonic calculus, isn't the moral thing to do to give them the kid to torture? What would you do?
It would be, indeed. But I take the view that the hedonic calculus should only be applied subject to the imperative to treat sentient beings as ends, and handing the kid over for torture would be treating him or her as a mere means, not an end.
The moral thing to do is what it has always been in such situations, e.g. in 1939 when we were made a not dissimilar offer by the Nazis: you fight the bastards.
I agree, but let's tweak the scenario a bit. Suppose that instead of wanting a kid to torture, the aliens really really want to play Magnus Carlsen in chess. If he agrees to play, humanity gets gifted technology. If he refuses, we all get sent to the salt mines, except Magnus. The aliens like him and will gift him a good life no matter what he decides. But Magnus refuses to play! His ego is such that he would rather the world burn then being coerced into a game. Should humanity force Magnus to play? Maybe by threatening to execute him if he doesn't? Wouldn't that be treating him as a means?
Quoting Herg
This is exactly right. As I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
Now I would say that a decision is an act, but the larger point is that we are responsible for our decisions, and therefore we are responsible even for decisions that do not terminate in (external/transitive) "acts."
Quoting Bob Ross
Strictly speaking I admit a distinction between commissions and omissions, but I would say your theory simply cannot support this distinction in our current context. This is because your only tool of analysis is conditional necessity. "I let them die," is (arguably) equally applicable to all of our other cases. For example the lever-puller will say that they merely let the single person die in order to save the five. If we analyze these cases according to conditional necessity, then each case is the same insofar as you perform an action in which you "intend" and "cause" the necessary death of someone (according to your own claims). To intend and cause the death of someone is to intentionally kill them. It makes no sense for you to say that you intend and cause their necessary death but you do not kill them. Some of this will hopefully clear up when I respond to your full post.
Quoting Bob Ross
Herg's analysis was quite good, and should be addressed. He is making the same claim I am making but doing it in a more natural way. As he says, "whether Alan and Betty are present has no bearing on whether the car can swerve and hence save the lives of Charles and Dora."
Edit: If Bob Ross were right, then one would have a magic get-out-of-jail-free card for any moral quandary: just do nothing! For example, if a pilot (like Sully) found himself in a difficult situation, then he would just do nothing and apparently on Bob's theory he could never be blamed. This is incorrect because it is often wrong to do nothing (and the choice to do nothing is often the wrong choice to make).
Okay, so you are doubling-down and rejecting the premise.
Now I should say again that your definition of a "means" is not a good definition. I understand the word itself better than I understand the word-salad definition you are giving. Because your definition is less clear than the word, it is a bad definition. If you don't like 's definition then I suggest we take Merriam-Webster as a point of departure, "something useful or helpful to a desired end."
Quoting Bob Ross
One of the fundamental problems here is that your account is unable to distinguish between the "V" and the "7" in my diagram. So then either 1) There are no relevant moral differences between "V" situations and "7" situations, and therefore your inability to distinguish them is unimportant, or 2) There are relevant moral differences between "V" situations and "7" situations, and therefore your inability to distinguish them is problematic. Note that in both "V" and "7" Q is conditionally necessary for P (i.e. P ? Q).
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, but let's continue referring to P as the good effect and Q as the bad effect. So it would instead be, "Q is not a means to P in 'V' because if one disconnects Q from A then P is still connected to A." Note that Q is not a means because it does not mediate A and P.
Quoting Bob Ross
Let's get back to fundamentals again. There are two basic principles in conflict:
(I take it that Chisholm's contemporary approach will be more accessible.)
You have a good grasp of P[sub]dfs[/sub] but you are letting it override P[sub]ndiv[/sub]. Let's go back to my example that you did not respond to:
Quoting Leontiskos
You seem to be committed to the position which says that when I drive to the grocery store I am intending to consume fuel. This isn't correct. I intend to get groceries, and the consumption of fuel is a side-effect that I would prefer not occur. I only assent to it because I don't know how to get to the grocery store without consuming fuel.
Brock uses the terms "direct intention" and "indirect intention." I directly intend to get to the grocery store; I indirectly intend to consume fuel. Key here is the relation of each to my purpose: if my direct intention does not come about then my purpose has not been achieved, but if my indirect intention does not come about it does not follow that my purpose has not been achieved. If for some reason fuel is not consumed during my trip, the trip is successful all the same. If I get back to my home and see that the fuel has not been diminished, I do not say, "Oh no, my purpose was not achieved!" Yet I do precisely this if I get home and realize that I have no groceries in the car. Direct and indirect intention are different, and any theory that cannot make sense of their difference is inadequate as a theory.
I would suggest reading Aristotle's account of the sailors who throw cargo overboard in Book III, Ch. 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics (link). It is very often referred to in this area of philosophy. A key element of that story is that the cargo is thrown into the sea even though doing so is undesirable and not directly intended.
Quoting Bob Ross
Right: this is the antecedent of (2) of the argument I gave: < 2. (A ? (P ^ Q)) ? (A ? (P ? Q)) >.
Quoting Bob Ross
On the contrary, the premise is tautological, and is therefore always true. It is nearly the logical representation of what you said just above, "you cant say that A ? P is true when Q is false given 'A ? (P & Q)'." The point is that you cannot say that (P ? Q) is false when (P ^ Q) (i.e. given A, both follow). Remember that the key is the relation between P and Q.
Quoting Bob Ross
Sure, that's fine. It is true that (A ? (P ^ Q)) ? ((A ? P) ^ (A ? Q)). But again, to know whether Q is a means to P we must understand the relation between P and Q, and the conditional necessity that you are betting all your chips on is represented by (P ? Q).
Quoting Bob Ross
So first, A is not "swerving to save four people." Saving four people is impossible, and we do not intend the impossible. Here is what I already said:
Quoting Leontiskos
Now if we are aiming at Q then we don't need to achieve P (although we could). So we can remove P without removing Q. But in fact we are not aiming at Q; we are aiming at P, and Q is not a means to P as so helpfully demonstrated.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, and I addressed your claim about "killing" in my post above. As I said, that seems to be a tangent. The central point has to do with whether Q is a means to P. If you want to say that Q is still intentional killing even in the "V" case then that is a separate argument from the claim that Q is a means to P.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Bob Ross
No, not at all. Some points:
Now you want to make A "Operation with two screens." Erm, okay, but then this would be the "two birds with one stone" scenario, not the (Car ? (Groceries ^ Gas)) scenario. Remember that we are talking about double effect, where P is a good effect and Q is a bad effect. You are talking about a different thing, where there are two good effects (two effects directly intended). The computer scenario and the car scenario are both "V" scenarios, but the crucial point is that the intention is different in each of them. Your desire to have a second monitor is not parallel to my desire to consume fuel. You want a second monitor and I don't want to consume fuel.
The question of a means can be represented by a particular sort of counterfactual, "Supposing !(A ? Q), would I still choose A?" On "7" scenarios the answer is no, whereas on "V" scenarios the answer is yes. Again, this is not to deny that (A ? Q) might dissuade me from choosing A, but it does mean that whenever I answer 'yes' to the counterfactual it follows that Q is not a means to P.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes of course you would, for that would aid your position. Likewise, I would prefer if we just refer to it as killing vs. non-intentional killing. So again, I suggest we not use the word "killing" without a prefix.
First of all, let's be clear: there is nothing wrong with treating someone as a means, provided you also treat them as an end.
I don't think the threat to execute him is your best option. Ex hypothesi, we are not going to follow through on that threat, and he may know that, so the threat may not work. Suppose we hypnotise him instead? Then his will is under our control, and we can make him play.
Clearly we are then using him as a means. The question is, can we also treat him as an end?
Many people would no doubt say no, because in effect we are treating him as a slave. I'm going to say something now that a lot of people would probably disagree with: treating a human being as a slave does not entirely preclude treating them as an end. This is because it is possible to treat a slave well out of a concern for their own feelings and welfare. It is even possible (though very rare) to treat someone as an end precisely by enslaving them (if, for example, the only alternative to slavery was that they be put to death). I am able to take this view because, as a strict hedonist, I do not regard freedom as an intrinsic good. Freedom is good only insofar as it conduces to greater net pleasure.
So my solution to your problem is to seek some way of getting Carlsen to play, such as hypnosis, that will still enable us to treat him well for his own sake, which is what I understand by treating someone as an end. This is a different solution from your original problem, because in that case we were treating the child as a means but very definitely not treating him or her as an end.
Which would be clearly false under my view, because them killing someone is not an inaction.
No it is not: letting someone die is not an intentional killingkilling is an action. By cause, we could be saying that ones action or inaction caused the persons death.
Do you not agree that killing is an action which results in the death of a living being? If you do, then it should be very apparent to you that letting someone die is not a killingirregardless if you believe that, in some or all cases, letting someone die is morally impermissible.
This is either the biggest straw-man of my position I have had yet (to-date); or you have not grasped what I have been arguing. Letting someone die is morally permissible IF one cannot save them without committing an immoral act.
You just keep asserting this, and I keep responding with the fact that I see no difference between Hergs vs. my definition. Demonstrate why it isnt good.
Thats fine, and essentially the exact same as how I defined it.
Like I said before, the V diagram is an incomplete representation of the examples we have had. Lets take the car example: Q is required for P in this specific scenario S, although Q is not required to bring about P all else being equal (lets call it E).
In S, one can represent it with the V diagram but with Q and P being both required for A; and one cannot remove Q without removing P.
Which is an inaccurate representation of, for example, the car example. One cannot save the two without running over the other two, so Q is required for A.
I reject P
P
Firstly, I am saying that if you intend to get groceries and you know that you have to consume fuel to do so, then you intend to consume fuel to get groceries.
Secondly, intending to consume fuel to get groceries does not result in the purpose being uncompleted if fuel didnt end up getting consumed: consuming fuel was the means to the end (i.e., purpose) and not the purpose itself.
My point is that if one has a purpose X and knows that they need Y to achieve X, then they have the purpose of using Y to achieve X. You seem to be confusing this with the claim that Y is itself the purpose.
In the car example, one cannot achieve P without Q, so Q is a means to achieving P because a means is something useful to a desired end, and Q is useful towards the end P. Not only that, but it is also necessary for achieving the end; so it is a necessary means.
No I am not. P does not entail Q nor does Q entail P in the car example: A ? P & Q. Q is a means towards A (A ? Q), and A is the intention towards P (which cant be expressed in the logic we have been using) and results in P (A ? P).
That was a slight typo on my end, and you completely missed the point. Swap out swerving to save four people with swerving to save two people in this:
The point is that if we are aiming at P then we have to achieve Q: that we dont need to achieve P if we aim at Q is irrelevant (at best).
Q is a means to P, because one cannot achieve P without Q. Q is a necessary, utility towards P.
This is the central point for our debate whether or not, in our examples, the person is intentionally killing anyone; but it is not the central point for our debate about whether or not letting a person die is always immoral.
I would say they cannot be separate, because I hold, which you accept, that Q is intentional if it is a means towards the intentional end (that is being actualized).
Sure, thats fine: maybe I misunderstood what you were originally saying. I am saying is that Q is a means towards A, and A is an intention towards P. Q is intentional then, if one accepts that Q is intentional if it is a means towards A (that is being actualized).
What you are noting is the original intention, stripped of the necessary means towards A in the application of A in scenario S. Thats fine, but you cant stop there: irregardless if I would still choose A if !(A ? Q), in S A ? Q and, therefore, Q is a means towards A in S.
How does that aid my position? And how is a distinction between killing vs. non-intentional killing and intentional killing vs. killing any different? They are both the same distinction as intentional vs. non-intentional killing.
Quoting Bob Ross
Egads. A is not an intention and has never been an intention. It is an action. In the trolley case it is to pull the lever, in the car case it is to swerve, etc. A is carried out for the sake of the end, P, but A is not an intention. It is an intended means to P. Similarly, your claim that Q is a means towards A makes no sense. It is not true in the trolley case that, Killing the one is a means towards pulling the lever, or in the car case that, Killing the two is a means towards swerving (even though both of these really would follow on your dubious claim that anything which is conditionally necessary is a means).
Now you still havent managed to recognize, The other absurdity that results from your view is that Q is a means to P and P is a means to Q, which is of course impossible (). For example, take your claim:
Quoting Bob Ross
As I have noted multiple times, (P ? Q). We cannot achieve P without Q and we cannot achieve Q without P. Again, therefore on your own reasoning, P must be a means to Q and Q must be a means to P, which is utterly impossible.
I gave the logic for this earlier: "In other words: (A ? (P ^ Q)) ? (A ? (P ? Q))" ().
Feel free to check it to make sure that it is valid (link).
Quoting Bob Ross
Quoting Bob Ross
Again, (A ? (P ^ Q)) ? (A ? (P ? Q))
Note that contained within this is, for example, "2. (A ? (P ^ Q)) ? (A ? (P ? Q))" ().
At this point you are committing formal logical contradictions. You are affirming the antecedent and denying the consequent of a tautology.
Note too that given (A ? (P ^ Q)) ? ((A ? P) ^ (A ? Q)), your strange theory would have it that P and Q are both a means to A, as well as being a means to one another. This is yet another absurdity of your view.
Quoting Bob Ross
How is hit two people useful or helpful to the desired end of avoid hitting all four people? Or in the trolley case, how is the death of the one useful or helpful to the desired end of saving the five? Again, I would suggest you try to actually respond to s excellent analysis.
Quoting Bob Ross
You have all sorts of different, overdetermined arguments for your conclusion, like a castle with multiple walls. Whenever one suffers a defeat you silently switch to another. One has to do with intention via means, one has to do with direct intention, one has to do with omissions, etc. I am only interested in the question of intention via means, namely determining whether Q is a means to P. Your persistence even in the midst of formal logical contradiction makes me think that it will be a miracle if we ever settle that simple question.
Quoting Bob Ross
Diagram V only makes sense relative to diagram 7. Diagram 7 represents Q as a means between A and P, whereas diagram V represents Q as a non-means effect of A.
We can use a temporal argument to give another reason why Q[sub]v[/sub] is not a means. In the trolley example as soon as I switch the track the five people are saved, and yet the one person does not die until the trolley eventually runs over them. Now Q cannot be a means to P if P occurs before Q in time, and yet that is precisely what happens in the trolley scenario. By the time Q occurs, P has already been accomplished and completed. How could anything be helpful or useful to a desired end that has already occurred?
Quoting Bob Ross
I was hoping the grocery case would help illustrate why. As I said:
Quoting Leontiskos
Again, Do I intend them in the same way? That was the key question I was asking.
Quoting Bob Ross
If the intention were, Consume fuel to get groceries, then the purpose would be uncompleted if fuel didnt end up getting consumed. Then I would get back home, look at the fuel gauge, and say, Crap! I didnt manage to complete my intention of consuming fuel to get groceries! I got the groceries but I didnt consume any fuel. What a failure of a trip! The very absurdity of such a thing shows that the intention was not, as you say, Consume fuel to get groceries. But I grant that the fact that fuel is a causal means complicates the example, and that is why I didnt press it when you ignored it. What it shows is that even known causal means can be indirectly intended, and this is probably too subtle.
A better example than fuel consumption might be emissions, in the case where my exhaust system is broken and therefore my car emits especially harmful pollution. If the direct intention before was not accurately captured by, Consume fuel to get groceries, then the direct intention now is certainly not captured by, Emit pollution to get groceries. The emission of pollution and the getting of groceries are not intended in the same way, and you are in need of a theory which accounts for this fact.
But if you want to see how Brock elaborates a bit, here is what he says:
Also relevant:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Bob Ross
Sure I can, because this is what it means for Q to not be directly intended.
So at this point in the conversation I am guessing you will have the good sense to reject your claim that "1. (P ? Q) ? (Q is a means to P)" (). Remember that earlier in our conversation you doubled-down against my proof and decided to reject our mutual principle instead of your false (1). The mutual principle was, "
Quoting Bob Ross
Then I would say that you need to refine what you mean by a cause.
Quoting Bob Ross
Sure, but I would hold that if I have not killed them then I have not caused their death. In general you are lacking distinctions regarding causation and intention. You are making these things more black and white than they are.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay that's fair, I retract and apologize for the claim that you think "letting happen" is morally indifferent.
You have a lot of good points, but I am, to be honest, losing track of the course of this conversation. So I am going to take your advice and wipe the slate clean. I am going to attempt to provide a more clear and robust analysis of what I am trying to argue: consider anything in here that is contradictory to what I have previously said as a concession.
I am going to keep it short and sweet, and let you navigate the conversation from here.
An intention is an ideal meant to be actualized.
An intention can have two aspects: what is essential and what is accidental.
The accidental aspect of an intention is the part of the ideal which is only in virtue of the particular circumstances in which it is being actualized.
The essential aspect of an intention is the part of the ideal which is not dependent on the circumstances whatsoever; and comprises the essence of it.
The course of action chosen in a situation to actualize the intention is a part of the accidental aspect of it. E.g., if I intend to quench my thirst and I decide that I should walk into the kitchen to get a water bottle (or fill up a glass with water), then doing so is something I intend to do but merely because in the particular circumstances it is best for actualizing the essential aspect of my intention (which is to quench my thirst).
A means is something useful for an intention.
A means is not necessarily necessary. E.g., if I have the intention of getting groceries, then using my car or my bike would be a means towards that endbut neither are necessary per se (since one could be used instead of the other).
Something that is necessary to accomplish an intention is necessarily a means towards that intention. E.g., if I have the intention of getting groceries and I can only get them by way of using my car, then my car is a necessary means towards that intention.
A means that is utilized for an intention always becomes a part of that intention. E.g., if I have the intention of getting groceries and I can use my bike or car and I choose to use my car, then using my car becomes a part of the ideal (but as an accidental aspect of it).
The foreseen consequences of a means always become a part of the intention which utilizes that means. E.g., if I have the intention of getting groceries and I choose to use my car of which I know will pollute the atmosphere, then my car polluting the atmosphere is a part of the ideal (but an accidental aspect of it).
It follows that in the V diagram, Q is not a means towards P; and P is not a means towards Q. A is a means towards Q and P.
It follows that swerving to kill two people to save two other people is a means towards saving the two people; but that the killing of the two people was not a means to saving the two people but, rather, an effect of swerving.
It follows that the effects of swerving are twofold: killing two people and saving two people; and that both are intentional, because the foreseen consequences of a means (which, in this case, is swerving) are always intentional (albeit a part of the accidental aspect).
It is always wrong to intentionally kill innocent people; so utilizing a means which has a foreseen consequence of killing an innocent person (thereby making it a part of the accidental aspect of the intention) is wrong.
What say you?
Suppose the Allies can destroy a Nazi heavy water nuclear facility, and disable their nuclear weapons program (pretend the Nazi's have a robust program) by causing the death of one innocent German janitor. You're saying it's wrong for them to bomb the nuclear facility?
ETA: Forget the nuclear facility. Suppose the Allies know Hitler is touring the nuke facility and they can bomb it and kill him and only one innocent janitor gets killed. You're saying they shouldn't do it?
Okay, fair enough, and this is a good post. I will offer a few more posts, but I don't know how long I will stick around. I was limiting myself to the "means" question in large part because I don't have time to get drawn into all of the other related topics.
Quoting Bob Ross
Somewhat, but I would not call it "an ideal." That has connotations of optimality. We could say that an intention is an action or effect meant to be actualized, or that it is something that one plans to bring about, or something that one aims to bring about. So if I intend to build a computer, then I plan or aim to bring about a computer. Looking now at Merriam-Webster's 'intend', it gives, "to have in mind as a purpose or goal : Plan."
Quoting Bob Ross
I think it is right to distinguish essential (per se) intention from accidental (per accidens) intention, but in all such cases we want the essential/per se to be primary (whereas you made the per se definition parasitic on the per accidens definition).
On an Aristotelian view intention is something like the force by which will/volition has an effect on things. It is how volitional beings exercise their volition. Because of this the essence of intention has to do with what is most central to the will/volition of such a being. So if I will the end of getting groceries, then it is natural to me to plan or aim to bring about the getting of groceries, namely to intend it. Once this intention is formed the first step in the execution of my will has been formed, and as Aquinas says, "The end is first in the order of intention; the means is first in the order of execution." After recognizing my will to eat, I first intend to get groceries (end), and then I think of driving my car to the grocery store (means). The end precedes the means in the order of intention. But in executing my plan I begin with the means by getting into my car, and finish with the end by purchasing the groceries. The means precedes the end in the order of execution. This structure is divisible: for example, I must turn the key in order to drive my car (and this is a means to the end of driving the car, which is a means to the end of getting groceries); and I must collect my key in order to start the car, etc. The intermediate ends are also a means, and each means is a means to each subsequent end.
My essential or per se intention is that which adheres most closely to the aim that my will has formed. As a metaphor, the fastest and most efficient route to the grocery store adheres most closely to my end, my intention to get groceries. A circuitous route to the grocery store does not adhere as closely to my end, my intention to get groceries. Thus if a road is closed and I am forced to take a detour, then although I intend to take the detour for the sake of my end, the taking of the detour falls under my intention in an accidental manner. The accidental part of my intention is that which falls away or fails to closely adhere to my proper intention (end). As you recognize, accounting for accidental or per accidens intention requires the explanation of something that is circumstantial in one way or another. It is worth noting that essential and accidental intention differ by way of a spectrum, and are not black and white logical categories (i.e. they are contraries rather than strict contradictories).
Quoting Bob Ross
The danger here is attaching intention too strongly to ends such that it becomes unattached to means. It is true that intention is most perfectly found in the end, and that all means are "accidental" to one degree or another. Nevertheless, we do intend the means to an end. You have an intention to quench your thirst but you also end up forming an intention to walk into the kitchen. The obtaining of the water bottle is also something you plan or aim to bring about, even though it is subordinated to your aim to bring about the quenching of your thirst. Both are intended, but the force of will that intention serves is always stronger and more direct in the case of the end, and therefore the quenching of thirst is more fully intended than the obtaining of the water bottle.
Quoting Bob Ross
Means and ends are both kinds of intentions, and both must be appropriated by an agent. There may be a cup of water sitting nearby that you are not aware of. This cup of water is "something useful for [the intention of quenching thirst]," but it is in no way an actual means to that end if you are not aware of it. This is tricky, because we can talk about means and ends apart from appropriation by an agent, for example, "You could aim at that end. You could achieve that end by such-and-such a means," but what is being proposed is the possibility of appropriation; the possibility of intentionally using the means in order to achieve the end. We could say that an unknown means is a kind of per accidens intention ("he would intend to use it if he knew about it"), and in relation to this a known means is a kind of per se intention. But it is simultaneously true that, in relation to one another, the end is a per se intention and the (chosen) means is a per accidens intention.
This is part of the subtlety of Aristotle's thought: that essential/accidental constitute a relational dyad more than two distinct and clear-cut categories. Intention is one of those things that modern modal logic can't really capture, for example:
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, exactly, and what this means is that the nature of a means is neither necessary nor merely possible. It is not modally representable. It is the actuation of a tendency or final cause; to intend is a kind of tending towards, not a merely logical reality.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, but:
Quoting Bob Ross
So we have it that a (chosen) means becomes a part of the intention of the end, and the foreseen effects of a (chosen) means become a part of the intention of the end. But the same crucial question that I asked earlier arises here: do they become equal parts in the intention of the end? Do they become parts in the same way? They do not, because whereas the means is a kind of accident of the end, the foreseen effect is a kind of accident of an accident of the end (i.e. it is an accident of the means). What follows is that the foreseen effect does not adhere as closely to the formal intention (the intention of the end) as the means does, and therefore the foreseen effect and the means fall under the intention of the end in different ways. (Aquinas talks about the essence/accidents of the intention as well as the matter/form of the intention, which provides some additional resolution).
This is what Brock means by direct intention vs. indirect intention. A means is directly intended whereas a foreseen effect is only indirectly intended.
Quoting Bob Ross
A is a (chosen) means to P, and Q is a foreseen effect of A, but does it follow that A is a means to Q? Are all causes means to their foreseen effects? With respect to Q, A is the cause of an effect, not the means to an end. Only with respect to P is A a means to an end. This is where it becomes important to recognize that a means must be appropriated by a volitional subject in order to truly be a means. Consider the question, "Why did he cause A?" There are two main answers on offer:
1. "He means to achieve P"
2. "He means to achieve Q"
3. (both)
I would say the correct answer is (1). If Q is merely a foreseen effect then he neither means to achieve Q, nor does he mean to not-achieve Q. The fact that he does not mean to achieve it shows that it is not directly intended (in Brock's language). The fact that he does not mean to not-achieve it shows that it is indirectly intended on the presumption that he chooses/intends A. If he means to not-achieve Q then he would not choose/intend A. As I said above, "Supposing !(A ? Q), would I still choose A?"
But the same sort of conclusion would seem to follow on your own definition:
Quoting Bob Ross
If A were a means to Q, then you would say that A is useful for some intention (with respect to Q). But what intention is that? The intended end is P, and A is only intended because it is a means to P.
A is "a means" to Q in the abstract sense, but it is not a means that you appropriate via intention. A is a cause of Q, not a means to Q. If we intend an end, we also directly intend any (chosen) means to that end; but if we are using A as a means to P, it does not follow that we are also using A as a means to Q. The intention of an end flows into the means, but the intention of a means does not flow into all of its various effects. Q is indirectly intended given A, but we are not using A as a means to Q.
Quoting Bob Ross
Throughout you have been making dozens of very minor mistakes which I overlook for the sake of time. Here is an example of that. Your first clause is technically true, but the description is inaccurate. Action A (swerving) is not done "to kill two people to save two other people." This is like the claim that driving to the grocery store is done to emit pollution to get groceries. The bolded "to" indicates that Q is a means to P, which is exactly what you deny in your second clause. That "to" should attach to "swerving," and, "to kill two people" should be omitted altogether. One is swerving to save two people, not to kill two people to save two people. Throughout this thread you have been committing these minor infelicities which subtly bolster your position.
A driver could do what you represent here, but if I were the driver I would not do it that way. My actions would only be properly represented if those four words were omitted. A is a means to the intended end, and that intended end is P, not Q. A is done for the sake of P, not for the sake of Q. Therefore I am "swerving [for the sake of] saving people," not for the sake of killing people. A is a means to saving, not killing. Only if I intend Q would A be a means to killing people, and in that case I would be committing murder. In that case I would be using A as a means to my intended end of Q. If I were the driver I could perhaps be charged with manslaughter, but not murder. Your approach can't seem to distinguish the two.
Quoting Bob Ross
So the whole point of my conversation with you is to demonstrate that a means and a foreseen effect are both intended, but in different ways! As Brock says, the means is directly intended and the foreseen effect is indirectly intended. If a foreseen effect were a means then there would be no difference between a means and a foreseen effect. For insight into the import of this, see the most recent quote from Brock that I provided.
Quoting Bob Ross
Is it always wrong to accidentally-intentionally kill innocent people? More precisely, is it always wrong to indirectly intend to kill innocent people? Is voluntary "manslaughter" always negligent? Those are the questions that need to be answered.
P.S. Another thing that we haven't directly delved into is the difference between causal necessity and logical necessity. For example, in the trolley case we can think of two logical propositions, 1) If I pull the lever then the track will shift, and 2) If I pull the lever then the one will die (A ? Q). (1) is causal and (2) is merely stipulative. Because the lever is physically connected to the track, to pull the lever is to shift the track. The movement of the lever has a per se causal ordination to the shifting of the track. Track-levers always shift tracks. (An even more direct and per se cause is that to pull the lever is to cause the lever to move spatially.) But (2) does not have a per se causal ordination to the death of an individual. (2) is merely a per accidens cause, and this is why it needs to be stipulated within the problem itself (i.e. we need no explanation that track-levers shift tracks, but we do require an explanation for why pulling a track-lever would result in someone's death). This relates to intention because indirect intentions and per accidens causality tend to go hand in hand. The closer to per se causality an act approaches, the less plausible is the idea that the effect was not directly intended. For example, it makes some sense to say that you pulled the lever without (directly) intending to cause the person's death, but it makes no sense at all to say that you pulled the lever without intending to switch the track. Pulling the lever and switching the track are very nearly the same thing.
We aren't; that's the bit where we're treating him as a means.
Quoting RogueAI
You don't have to save someone's life or better their condition to be treating them as an end. If you're playing chess and enjoying it, then my leaving you alone to enjoy yourself is treating you as an end.
Quoting RogueAI
Of course, but you said this:
Quoting RogueAI
So we can treat him as an end by letting him go to the aliens. Of course he didn't want to play, but we have hypnotised him so that he now does, and presumably he will enjoy doing so. If you want to tweak the scenario so that he suffers while he's playing, then in effect we're complicit in torturing him, in which case the situation is essentially the same as it was with the kid, and so we shouldn't hand him over, we should fight the aliens instead.
I want to put this train of thought in your mind:
If you kill someone, then you are not treating them as an end (unless it is mercy killing).
If you let someone die when you could save them, the same is true.
Therefore, if you let your car kill four people instead of two, you are not treating the additional two as ends.
Why did you let your car kill the additional two people? Because you believed in the principle (which I will label IP) that it is wrong to kill innocent people by positive action.
So you had an end in view when you let your car kill those additional two people, the end being that your behaviour should conform to IP. And letting your car kill those two additional people was a means to that end. We have already said that you did not treat those additional two people as ends; so in fact you treated them merely as means, which according to the principle that we should treat people as ends rather than just as means (which I shall label EP) is morally wrong.
We now have two conflicting principles: IP and EP. Which should we obey?
I think we should obey EP. For one thing, it is applicable in all situations, whereas IP is only applicable in situations where someone dies. For another, the range of persons (or sentient beings, if you want to cast the moral net wider) is as wide as it could be: in fact it is coterminous with the entire class of persons (or sentient beings). And this is unsurprising, because if beings have moral status, then it is arguably a tautology to also say that they should be treated as ends. There is also the point that there is a fighting chance that we may be able to derive, if not IP itself, then something very like IP, from EP, while clearly the reverse is impossible.
I would say that EP is really the entire point of morality. It is the principle that we should try as best we can to respect (and, where necessary, look after) the interests of others. We do not respect their interests by letting our cars plough into them. And if there are supposed principles where, when we obey them, we find ourselves trampling over the interests of others rather than respecting them, I think we should at the very least be very suspicious of those principles.
Surely the point here is that if let Hitler live, he will continue to fail to treat millions of people as ends by murdering them; and our only way of treating those people as ends is to fail to treat Hitler, and unfortunately the janitor, as ends. So we either fail to treat two people as ends, or we are complicit in the failure to treat millions as ends.
Fair enough.
It is an ideal insofar as it is an idea about how reality should be. When one takes on a purpose, they are implicitly conceding that they believe reality is not the way it should be. To your point, it may not be an ideal insofar as it is ultimately how reality should be.
:fire:
Not quite. The per se intention would be the ideal which you are trying to actualize, and any means of achieving it would be accidental. That which adheres most closely to that aim is just a means that adheres most closely to that aimand so it is accidental, not per se.
So:
Getting groceries is the per se intention; and the fastest and using the most efficient route to the grocery store is the per accidens intention.
I think we are distinguishing per se and per accidens differently, perhaps?
I would say a means is NOT an intention; but means can be intentional.
But a means is not identical to an intention: there are means which one doesnt not intend (e.g., they are not aware of them). The intention towards walking in the kitchen is a separate intention from quenching my thirst, but they are closely connected: the latter is the essence of what I am intending to do, whereas the former is just an accidental means towards it. I still intend both, just differently.
Likewise, if I did not intend the former, it would not change the fact that it is a means to the latter.
Not in the sense as I defined it. I guess, what is your definition of a means? It cant be how I defined it, because that definition does not preclude unintentional means.
Not in the sense that I think you mean it. I only intend to walk to the kitchen because I intend to quench my thirst.
Ok, thats fine then.
A is a means to Q because A is useful for facilitating Qeven if one accidentally intends or doesnt intend at all Q.
You are right that Q is a foreseen effect; but that doesnt absolve A from being a means toward that effect.
Then you reject the definition I gave, and dont know what definition you are using.
I can appreciate what you are going for: he means to achieve P and not Q in the sense that P is the main, primary goal and Q is not at all. But this does not absolve him, in this scenario, from intending Q; because a foreseen effect of a chosen means is intentional.
It seems like, then, you are agreeing with me with different words: Q is, in this example, intentionalbut indirectly. Then it is not true that He means only to achieve P: he means to achieve P, and this requires him to achieve Q as well (simply because A is a means towards both and never one or the other).
It is useful for achieving Qwhich has not direct relation to any intention. There could be no intention towards Q, and it would still follow that Q can be facilitated by way of A.
It is appropriated via intention if one accepts my premise that if one foresees an effect (Q) of a means (A) and chooses to use that means (A) to achieve their intention towards another effect (P), then they thereby intend Q.
to in that sentence does not imply that it is a means: it is referring to an intentional effect facilitated equally in order to achieve the other effect. I think you may be splitting hairs here a bit.
Thats fair and I agree now.
This is why I was wary to call it per accidens, because I am NOT referring to a colloquial usage of the term accident: the latter is used commonly to refer to something someone didnt intend to do. Manslaughter is when someone unintentionally kills someone: having a per accidens intention to kill someone for the sake of a per se intention to save someone else is NOT an unintentional killing.
The accidental aspect I am referring to, is the part of the intention, which is still an intention, that is required in the specific circumstances to achieve the original, per se, intention. Both are intentional, even if they are intended in different ways. Thats not how manslaughter works.
Yes, thats fine; it was stipulated in the trolley problem to avoid that kind of conversation.
I would say that what you are truly getting at, is that knowledge one should have about what they are doing is tied to what we believe they intend. This is absolutely true, and can ride, pragmatically, on a per se vs. per accidens causality.
I agree with you up to this point. I think we have to force him to play. Being forced to play a game of chess is not even close to turning over a little kid to be tortured. However, threatening to shoot him is an empty threat because he knows you need him alive to play the chess game. I think we should at least try that and see if it convinces him to play. You can't let the selfish actions of one person doom humanity.
But your position is absurd. If the Allies could end the war in one bombing raid and the collateral damage is only one innocent person, of course they should do that.
Quoting Bob Ross
A problem with that definition actually manifests here:
Quoting Bob Ross
Here you seem to confuse an intention with an ideal. An intention is not "the ideal which you are trying to actualize." This is a common slip given the way you defined an intention. It is like saying, "A hamburger is the thing which you are trying to eat." To put it starkly, 'intend' is a verb whereas 'ideal' is a noun. When we talk about an intention we are really talking about something that is being intended. Intention therefore needs to be centrally defined in terms of intending, in terms of acting, in terms of verbs. It is the difference between eating-a-hamburger and a hamburger. Your construal here makes the specific noun, 'ideal', the grammatical subject of the clause, and this gives the impression that what is at stake is a noun with some accidental properties. The problem is that the "doingness" of intention is not accidental, it is central. Ideally I would want to talk about what it means to intend, not what it means to have an intention. Everything depends on what it means to intend, as this is the more fundamental reality.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Bob Ross
The idea with that detour metaphor was that intention of the end must be understood in relation to the power of will/volition, and intention of the means must be understood in relation to the intention of the end, and foreseen effects must be understood in relation to the intention of the means. Each stage is more accidental/per accidens, but it must simultaneously be recognized that within each stage there are differences between what is more essential or more accidental. An intention of the end can be more or less essential depending on how it relates to my telos and my will; an intention of the means can be more or less essential depending on how it relates to my intended end, etc.
Quoting Bob Ross
Yes, you are using them as if they are strict logical categories, which is what I opposed in my last post. Essentialism always has a muddy boundary between what is essential and what is accidental, and we essentialists think of this as a feature rather than a bug. An essential property vs. an accidental property is not quite the same as a necessary property vs. a non-necessary (contingent) property, although there is some overlap here. The basis of this is the idea that the forms of natural things are not logically circumscribable in that strict manner. We are trying to understand the whatness of intention rather than to merely enumerate its properties or define its boundaries.
Quoting Bob Ross
So if you intend to quench your thirst and you begin filling your glass at the faucet, you would say that you did not intend to fill your glass? Filling your glass is a means.
Quoting Bob Ross
First, we agree that you "intend both" (the means and the end).
Second is this problem of appropriation. You are claiming that an unappropriated means is a means. You are claiming that the nearby cup of water that you are not aware of is a means to your end of quenching thirst.
Colloquial we use "means" in two related senses: actual means and potential means. Suppose I am about to play a tennis match and I have three racquets in my bag. Each racquet is a potential means to playing tennis. But once I choose the Wilson racquet it becomes an actual means (or an appropriated means, a means that is intended). I have been using the word 'means' to mean 'actual means', and I think this is the more primary and precise sense of the word. You have been using the word ambiguously to refer to either actual or potential means.
Quoting Bob Ross
I think we agree that an actual means is intended whereas a potential means is not. In my last post I was referring to an actual means as "a (chosen) means."
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Bob Ross
Walking into the kitchen is an actual means, and quenching your thirst is an end, and both are intended. I was asking about the relation between the actual means and the foreseen effect, not the relation between the end and the actual means.
Part of the difficulty is that you are tying up foreseen effects with potential means. A foreseen effect is a potential end, and that which causes the foreseen effect is a potential means to that potential end; but because the foreseen effect is not an actual end that which causes the foreseen effect is not an actual means (to that end). What follows is that a foreseen effect is the effect of a potential means, but not an actual means.
Quoting Bob Ross
A is a potential means but not an actual means to Q. Because A is not an actual means to Q, A is not intended vis-a-vis Q. A means is only intended if it is being used to achieve some intended end, and therefore A is not an actual means to Q because Q is not an intended end.
Quoting Bob Ross
I would not say, "a foreseen effect of a chosen means is intentional," although this is true. The problem is that you are falsely implying that A is an actual means to Q. I would rather say, "a foreseen effect of a chosen act is indirectly intentional." Aquinas would say that Q is not intended, but that Q does fall under the agent's intention (as an accidental part of that intention). Q is not intended because only means and ends are intended, and Q is neither. Nevertheless, Q falls under the agent's intention because it is accepted as a known consequence of his action. But sticking with Brock's language, we can simply say that Q is indirectly intended.
Quoting Bob Ross
We agree that Q is indirectly intended, but I would not say that he means to bring about Q, nor that he is required to achieve Q. I would not say the first because A is not an (actual) means to Q, and I would not say the second because it is not an accurate use of the word 'achieve'. I would say that he is required to accept Q, not achieve Q.
Quoting Bob Ross
It is useful for achieving Q but it is not being used to achieve Q, and therefore it is not being used as a means to Q. It is not an actual means to Q, but it is a potential means to Q.
Quoting Bob Ross
A key problem is your idea that the word "means" does not indicate a relation. To talk about a means only makes sense in relation to some end, and therefore a means always involves a relation to an end. You are saying that A is a means and then you are equivocating on the end. A is a means qua P but A is not a means qua Q.* This is subtle, but Q is not an effect of a means, it is an effect of an act. A is simultaneously an act and a means, but it is only a means in relation to P. We should not say, "Q is the effect of a means," we should say, "Q is the effect of an act," or, "Q is the effect of a cause." Similarly, we should not say, "P is the effect of a means," but rather, "P is the end of a means," or, "P is the goal of a means."
Quoting Bob Ross
Indirect intention does involve a kind of absence of intention. Involuntary manslaughter does work that way. Negligence is a form of indirect intention. The trolley lever-puller might be charged with involuntary manslaughter, but they would not be charged with murder.
So the first wall of your castle was the idea that a necessary condition indicates a means, and we have overcome that wall. The second wall is the idea that A is a means to Q, and I think we are close to overcoming that wall. The third wall is now in play, which is the idea that A is impermissible because Q is indirectly intended.
Regarding this third wall, suppose there is an evil and it is morally impermissible to directly intend this evil. Does it follow that it is impermissible to indirectly intend this evil?
I think not. Take the matter of the especially bad car emissions due to a faulty exhaust system. Is it impermissible to directly intend those emissions? For example, to allow your car to idle for the sake of the emissions? I think so. Does it follow that it is impermissible to get groceries in the car, even when you know it will produce those emissions? No, I don't think so.
* Or if you like: A is an actual means qua P but A is only a potential means qua Q. The point is that a potential means has no effect qua means, for it is not actualized as a means.
Firstly, my argument, which has been refined quite a bit with the help of @Leontiskos, does not hinge on a principle of never treat a person as a mere means, but always simultaneously an end-in-themselves (EP) because I dont think it is enough: I am thoroughly convinced, by the help of @Leontiskos, that swerving is the means to saving the two and killing the other two is not a means towards that. However, killing the two is still immoral; because I maintain that it is an intentional killing of two innocent human beings.
I hold a much stronger principle than EP, which is something like never treat a person without the dignity which they innately deserve. We can call this DP. IP, as you called it, stems from this principle (ultimately).
Secondly, what exactly do you mean by treating someone as an end vs. not <...>? I would say that, although one is not treating the sacrificed two as a means towards saving the other two, one is, by intentionally swerving with the knowledge that it will kill them, violating those two sacrificed peoples right to not be killed when innocent and, in virtue of that, are thereby not treating them as an end-in-themselves. Your distinction rests on the assumption that not treating someone as a means entails that they are treated as an end-in-themselveswhich is a false dichotomy in my view.
Thirdly, letting something bad happen to someone because one intends to not do immoral acts is not a means towards that intention. A really easy way to explain why is by example: if I intend to abide by your EP principle and I am faced with either (1) doing nothing or (2) treating them as a means, then by your own logic if you choose #1 you have actually treated them as purely a means towards EP and so #1 collapses into #2.
The reason this absurdity occurs, is because you are using the term means entirely too loosely (which I have done as wellso you are not alone in this [; ). Nothingness cannot facilitate anything, so it cannot be a means; that is, not acting can never be a means because it cannot facilitate anything (since it is purely negative: it is nothing) nor can whatever is inacted upon as a means be a means because nothing was acted upon.
What you are implicitly doing, is thinking of non-activity like activity. If I act in a manner where I pull a lever with the intent to save the five, then the lever and (arguably the) action is a means towards that intention; but if I dont pull the lever (which is purely a negation of what could have been done) with the intent to not sacrifice the one (or simply to not save the two), then there is nothing being used, by the agent which did not act, all else being equal, which facilitated that intention. Instead, in the latter case, what facilitates the intention is already in play--and that is the whole point of not doing something for the benefit of an intention.
It follows that the consequences of not doing something can never be a means, nor can the inaction itself. So I reject that when I let the four die, that I am using them as a means towards my intention.
However, I would like to note that because I do not use them as a means by letting them die it does not immediately follow that my inaction is morally permissible; because, although I am not intentionally killing them, it may be wrong that I am letting them die (e.g., if I could save them easily without doing something immoral, then letting them die is morally imperissible). You simply do not have this sort of distinction in your view, because you just view it through the lens of means vs. ends.
Again, my whole view hinges, in this case, on whether one can save the millions without committing anything immoral; and, to keep things simple, this hinges on whether or not they are intentionally killing innocent people. We are just approaching it totally differently. Your conclusion here is utterly consequentialistic.
I disagree. You have fallen into the consequentialist trap. You think it is ok to use people as a means towards (or at as sacrifices for) good ends.
Similar to what has said, I don't think (1) or (2) violate EP. (1) and (2) fail to treat someone as an end, but they do not treat that person as a means. EP requires that we "treat people as ends rather than just as means." (1) and (2) violate the separate principle that we must always treat everyone as an end, which is not a commonly accepted moral principle.
Quoting Herg
This is the same equivocation between EP and the separate principle. Kantian morality does not admit of perplexity, where there are cases where we must decide who to treat as an end. It is not true that "our only way of treating those people as ends is to [treat Hitler and the janitor as mere means]."
The reason I edited my last substantial post to you is because I went back and read more of your posts (). I am not sure how well Benthamite utilitarianism mixes with the second formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative. It is a bit of an odd mixture, and this movement from (Kant's) EP to the separate principle is a case in point. As I see it, the difficulty is that EP can't really fit the role of a "subordinate end," to use Bentham's language. Bentham's approach seems opposed to Kant's, and Kant seems directly opposed to consequentialism.
Leontiskos: I haven't forgot about your original response: I will respond later to it, as I don't have enough time right now.
I just wanted to clarify something about my response; because I think I slightly blundered in a couple spots.
If I let something facilitate my goal, it does not follow that I used that something to facilitate my goal: the latter is an action, but the former is about inaction. However, something which facilitates my goal, even if it is already in play (and so I didn't actually use it), is something which is a means (and, to Leontiskos other point, an actual means) towards my end; because that something is facilitating my goal. So it does follow that my inaction of not pulling the lever, which is to say that the lever not being pulled, is the means by which I achieve my intention of having no effect on the situation.
In the example you gave, letting the five die nor killing the one is a means to my desired non-effect: not pulling the lever, or more precisely the lever not being pulled, is that means. The five people dying is an effect of that means being utilized, which in this case is already being utilized because it is already in play. So, to recap:
1. I did not use the five, by letting them die, as a means because there is no action I took which leveraged a means towards that end; and
2. Letting the five die is not a means towards the end of doing nothing: it is, rather, an effect, in some cases, of doing nothing.
In short, it is mostly a private matter for us to meditate upon and tinker with. Some will find use in tinkering and others will be repulsed by what they find and run away screaming.
Consequentalism gives the proper result in the scenario I was talking about: You bomb Hitler and end the war, even if it means the death of one innocent person.
In the case of Alan, Betty, Charles and Dora, where the driver let Charles and Dora die by not turning the wheel, can we at any rate agree that you consider the lives of Charles and Dora to be less important than obedience to the rule that you should not kill an innocent person by positive action?
It's 50 years since I read Kant, so I am horribly rusty. But when I look up Kant's second formulation of the categorical imperative, I find that it reads as follows:
"Handle so, dass du die Menschheit sowohl in deiner Person, als in der Person eines jeden andern jederzeit zugleich als Zweck, niemals bloß als Mittel brauchest
Google translate renders this as:
"Act in such a way that you use humanity both in your person and in the person of everyone else at all times (1) as an end, (2) never just as a means.
I have inserted the numbers here. I take (1) to be complete as it stands, and (2) to be entailed by (1). Because (1) is complete and is not dependent on (2), I question your statement that "the separate principle that we must always treat everyone as an end... is not a commonly accepted moral principle," because that is in fact (1). (Unless you mean that few people accept Kant's second formulation. But I don't think you mean that.)
Whatever Kant meant by what he wrote, the emboldened rendering above is what I was aiming for (except that I think all beings capable of pain and/or pleasure should be treated as ends, not just humans: "The question is not, Can they reason nor Can they talk, but, Can they suffer?" ).
[quote]Surely the point here is that if let Hitler live, he will continue to fail to treat millions of people as ends by murdering them; and our only way of treating those people as ends is to fail to treat Hitler, and unfortunately the janitor, as ends. So we either fail to treat two people as ends, or we are complicit in the failure to treat millions as ends.
Herg
Quoting Leontiskos
I'm sorry, I don't know what you are getting at in your second sentence here. Can you put it another way?
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't see the EP as a subordinate end, and I apologise if I gave the impression that I did. It's rather the other way round: I see the EP (in my two-part formulation) as primary, and the hedonic calculus, if we need it all, as secondary.
In fact I am no longer sure whether we need the hedonic calculus. I am a hedonist, and so I think that treating people as ends must in the end be a matter of trying to give them more net pleasure: but I don't think this necessarily commits us to the traditional utilitarian hedonic calculus. But I must confess that I only recently stopped being a utilitarian, and my ideas in this area are still somewhat in flux.
I believe so (if I am understanding correctly). What you are saying is that, under my view, saving Charles and Dora is less important than not doing immmoral acts; and that I certainly agree with (and I think so should you).
I am a virtue ethicist, so I think a moral compass is the most vital and important aspect of normative ethics--it is the kernel so to speak. Being a moral agent, in the sense of embodying what is good and not what is bad (by doing at least morally permissible and obligatory actions), is of central and paramount importance. Any theory that posits otherwise seems to be missing the point of normative ethics entirely (IMHO).
Okay, fair enough.
Quoting Herg
I have never seen a translation imply this, including the quick Google translation that you provided. You could interpret the Google English that way, but it does not require that interpretation. For example, the Cambridge Groundwork gives, "For, all rational beings stand under the law that each of them is to treat himself and all others never merely as means but always at the same time as ends in themselves" (4:433). See also SEP, "This formulation states that we should never act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as a means only but always as an end in itself."
Quoting Herg
I don't think it makes sense to say that we must always treat everyone as an end. Are you currently treating everyone in the world as an end? How about the 235 million people in Pakistan? Surely not. But even if you walk down the street and there are, say, 15 people within your eyeshot, are you positively treating each of the 15 people as an end? I don't think so. To divorce, "Treat everyone as an end. . ." from the rest, ". . . , never as a mere means," does not seem to be a reasonable principle. The second formulation is a limiting principle, primarily specifying how we cannot treat others. It is not a requirement about how we must positively treat each person at each moment of their existence.
You could also think about Kant's formulation this way: "When you are interacting with someone, [insert second formulation here]." If we are not interacting with someone then we are not bound to treat them as an end. Treating someone as an end requires an interaction, and obviously we cannot interact with everyone.
Quoting Herg
Then to expand, all of the following are examples of failing to treat others as ends (the first two are your own examples):
The problem here is that anyone who you do not positively interact with or engage is necessarily not being treated as an end. In fact they are not being treated in any particular way at all.
Quoting Herg
I am morally perplexed when I find myself in a situation in which I cannot fulfill all of my duties, and I must therefore choose between them. The received understanding of Kant's second formulation does not result in moral perplexity because it is a negative duty, not a positive duty. Your dilemma with Hitler and the janitor relies on perplexity and this positive construal of EP.
Quoting Herg
Ah, okay. I had it backwards, then.
Quoting Herg
Yes, well, to give EP priority over the hedonic calculus is a departure from classical utilitarianism, especially in its non-rule-based varieties. It makes sense that you are in a transitional phase away from utilitarianism, and are trying out some new approaches.
I am not entirely understanding your critique for this part. Heres a basic google definition: have (a course of action) as one's purpose or objective; plan..
As far as I can tell, all I have to do to avoid this critique is refurbish my definition to to have an ideal of which one is planning or trying to actualizenow it is a verb, and is still closely connected to ideality.
If you are just noting that I was using ideal somewhat interchangeably with intention; then you are correct: that was a mistake on my end.
I think we are just analyzing the essentiality (or lack thereof) of different aspects of the examples. I agree with you that a means may be essential to actualizing my intention; but thats NOT what I was distinguishing with per se vs. per accidens intentions.
You are determining what is essential to actualizing an intention; whereas I am determine what is essential to the intention. E.g., if my intention is to get groceries and the only means of doing so is using my car, then my car is essential to actualizing the intention but unessential to the intention which I have (viz., if the car wasnt essential towards my intentions, I would still have that intention and it would be unaltered by the omission of the car as a meansso the intention to use the car as a means towards my intention here would be a per accidens intention).
You have to be careful with what one is analyzing. Filling your glass is a means and an intention in your example here; and not in the sense you would like it to be (viz., that a means is itself an intention): the entity is separately attributed both.
The intention is to quench ones thirst.
The means towards that intention is filling up your glass.
The intention to quench ones thirst requires another intention to fill up your glass.
Filling up your glass is a means, and it is intended (with an intention separate from the other intention, but closely connected).
This is not a gradient of intention: they are separate intentions (but closely related).
This is a fair assessment; and, yes, I was referring to one sometimes and the other sometimes. E.g., pulling the lever is a means towards killing the one, but if I intend to save the five then pulling the lever is not an actual (albeit potential) means for killing the one because it is not a means towards my actual intention.
I would be wary to call it potential vs. actual; because some means towards ones intentions arent necessary used. It seems cleaner to distinguish between means for this vs. means for that. Potential means for this do not relate to potential means for that; and potential means for this are means for this, but not necessary utilized (actualized) means towards this.
The foreseen effect(s) are always intentional, because they, even if they are not means towards ones intended end, are enveloped into the original intention as per accidens intentions. E.g., if I pull the the lever, which is a means towards my intention to save the five, knowing that it will also result in the effect of killing another person; then I am intending to kill that other person, per accidens, to achieve my, per se, intention of saving the five.
Although I see your point, it could be an actual means towards Q; but the intention here (stipulated) is towards P; so A is not a means towards Q when working towards P.
This indirect intention is what I mean by per accidens intention.
This is just because he means to is being used vaguely: we have circled back to using intention vaguely. I would say, more precisely, that he per accidens intends Q (viz., he indirectly intends Q), and this is a form of intentioni.e., it is intentional. All we are disagreeing about is what kind or type of intention is at play.
I think that any intentional killing of an innocent human being is immoral; whereas you seem to disagree with that in the case that it is indirectly intended.
NOOOOO. I see now why we are disagreeing. The indirect intention you previously described is not accidental in the sense that the person doesnt know what they are doing (i.e., that it is not intentional). Now you are using the term intention is weird ways and incoherent ways.
If a person intends to do P by way of A and they know A also results in Q; then they thereby intend Q. Either you have to reject that Q is intentional (and thusly is not a form of indirect intention) or you have to agree that the person is at least intended Q. You cant turn around and treat intentions as if they ARENT intentions.
Manslaughter is unintentional: thats its defining feature in contrast to murder. No court would ever agree with you that manslaughter is a form of intention.
I think what you are trying to convey is the following:
if a person intends to drive while texting and they know that there is a chance that they might be too distracted by it and kill someone, then they have not thereby intended to kill someone in the event that they do become too distracted and kill someoneand this you are trying to describe as indirectly intended. Notwithstanding the previous problems I outlined with your use of intention here, another problem is that, even by both our analysis of indirect intention, knowing there is a chance of killing someone is not enough to implicate someone, in itself, in intending (even indirectly) to kill someone. Instead, a better example would be:
if a person intends to drive while texting, and they know this will result in them getting too distracted, crashing, and killing an innocent bystander, then they have thereby intended to kill someonealbeit an per accidens (indirect) intention. THIS IS MURDER, although perhaps not in the first degree.
:up:
Fully agree. All of that is true. It is our duty to find the moral rule, to develop our own consciences, and then live accordingly.
But the moral compass is off if you think that, all other things being equal, you must sit idly by when you could save some people from dying. Inaction isnt the cure all for moral agency, and action isnt the immediate imposition of responsibility for breaking particular moral rule. You need to include intent to find something to judge morally.
You are intending to uphold the moral law, but destroying the reason the moral law is good, which is that moral law promotes life.
An act doesnt immediately correlate to any specific intent, and it is intention that most of all makes one a moral agent, not the act.
One guy says I dont care who lives or dies, Im not turning the wheel. Another guy says Im not defying the moral rule not to intentionally kill, so I have thoughtfully decided Im not turning the wheel. These are two different acts because of the intent alone.
A third guy says, I want to kill Dora and turns the wheel to kill Dora. A fourth guy says people are going to die, but I can at least avoid some of their deaths and turns the wheel. These are two more different acts, different because of the intent.
The moral compass is there to uphold the lives of the moral agents, not to merely forbid acts like some sort of bureaucratic check-box. Our actions cant contradict the moral laws, but our moral laws cant cause actions that contradict the purpose and use of moral laws and being moral. Morals are for the good of human lives. They arent in themselves the goal. We are the goal. We dont live for the sake of morals. Morals are for the sake of human lives. So, in some circumstances, the moral thing to do is to grab the wheel and point the vehicle where less people will die, and only kill those fewer people. The intent here is to reduce the number of deaths - in this circumstance you arent intending anyone die.
This begs the question between us, which is whether killing Alan and Betty is an immoral act if it is the only way of saving the lives of Charles and Dora.
Quoting Bob Ross
How do you know which actions, on the one hand, are immoral, and which, on the other, are permissible or obligatory? You need to work that out first, and then that will tell you whether someone is a moral agent or not. So actions are more central to normative ethics than being a moral agent.
I think your third example is not necessarily correct. Suppose I sit next to a guy on a train and I see that he is listening to music on his headphones with his eyes shut. He's clearly enjoying the music, tapping his feet, smiling, and so on. I've had a shitty day, and I really want to talk to someone, I have left my phone in the office, and we are the only two people on the train, so he's the only person available. But if I interrupt the guy's listening, I am being selfish, so I decide to leave him alone. Eventually I get off the train. He's still listening with his eyes shut. We never interacted, I don't even know if he knew I was there, and yet I treated him as an end by not spoiling his enjoyment of the music.
Interaction is not a necessary condition for treating someone as an end. If I give a donation to a charity that works to help people in Gaza or Ukraine, I am treating those people as ends, but it can't be said that I interact with them: I don't even know who they are.
Quoting Leontiskos
That is where I disagree. And perhaps, if Kant understood his second formulation the way you understand it and not the way I understand it, I am disagreeing with Kant. But in the end I don't think that is what really matters..
I was just answering your question.
Ultimately based off of what is Good; and how best to progress towards and preserve it.
Actions are a part of being a moral agent; and what one needs to work out first is knowledge of The Good.
In terms of what I think the highest good is, and why I think it is immoral to intentionally kill an innocent human being, I have already explicated this to youbut you never responded to them. I would suggest you reread them and respond if you want to engage in that aspect of the conversation.
I never suggested otherwise.
Correct; but they are closely connected.
I would class the counterexamples you are presenting as examples of interaction. You are consciously interacting with someone. It makes no difference that they are not consciously interacting with you. In the cases you present you interact with someone in a conscious way who is interacting with you in a non-conscious way (by their demeanor, or their need of a charitable donation, etc.).
The point here is that we can easily broaden the concept of "interaction" that you are presupposing, and even then the problem that I posed to you does not go away. You are still not interacting with the 235 million people in Pakistan even on this broader notion of interaction, and therefore you are failing to treat them as an end. I think interaction is the right word, but we could rephrase it as follows: "If you are not engaging in an activity (in the philosophical sense) towards someone, then you are not treating them as an end. Therefore in order to treat each person as an end we must be engaged in an activity towards each person."
I was traveling today and so I listened to a recent talk by a good philosopher, Kevin Flannery (who is not the best public speaker). He talks about the way that Aquinas views the relation of the means and the end at 18:08-22:19, which is what you are speaking about. (For the whole section on Aquinas' view of intention, see 17:41.)
The idea is that the intention of the means and the intention of the end are both separable and inseparable. We can view them under different aspects, but to say they are entirely separate is not correct.
Flannery speaks of the means as, "The things [the agent] believes or hopes will lead to [his] end."
Quoting Bob Ross
You have missed the distinction between a potential means and an actual means. Go back to my tennis racquet example. Before I begin playing the three racquets are each a potential means to playing tennis. Once I choose the Wilson racquet and begin playing, the Wilson racquet is an actual means to playing tennis. A potential means is that which can be used to realize some end. An actual means is that which is used in order to realize some end.
Quoting Bob Ross
A scissors is a potential means to cutting my hair, and a saw is a potential means for cutting down a tree. Obviously this does not mean that a scissors is a potential means for cutting down a tree and a saw is a potential means for cutting my hair. As I said in my last, a means involves a relation to an end. There are no free-standing means. If I have a hand saw and a chainsaw, and I use the chainsaw to cut down the tree, then the chainsaw is an actual means to cutting down the tree whereas the saw is only a potential means to cutting down the tree.
What you tend to keep doing is dallying in ambiguities, and this prevents the conversation from moving forward. Simple distinctions and clarifications would solve most of our problems. For example:
Quoting Bob Ross
Our whole proximate goal is to distinguish a means from a foreseen effect. I think I have demonstrated that this distinction is necessary, for example by pointing to the fact that the car's polluting emissions are not a means to getting groceries, but they are a foreseen effect. So then you tried to make a distinction on intention to clear this up, with "essential intention" and "accidental intention." But now you say that both a means and a foreseen effect are intended per accidens, thus failing to distinguish a means from a foreseen effect in the way that the essential/accidental distinction was meant to do in the first place. You have sabotaged your own project, or else provided us with analytic tools that are inadequate for the job at hand. I have been trying to get you to distinguish a means from a foreseen effect, but you are reluctant to do this on a number of levels. If you can't make that distinction or find the tools to make that distinction, then obviously the conversation cannot move forward. You will then just keep asserting that they are the same without being able to account in any way for their obvious differences.
The reason I distinguish potential means from actual means is because we have been talking past each other by using different definitions of what a means is.
Quoting Bob Ross
But note your very next clause, "if the car wasn't essential." If your car is essential to actualizing the intention (i.e. it is an essential means) then it is not right to say that the car is "unessential to the intention which I have." If a car is the only way to achieve some end, then the car will be necessarily connected to the end, and in the absence of a car the end will not even be able arise as a possible end.
Quoting Bob Ross
Well this may be too subtle, but the "mistake on your end" flows from the questionable definition. You are building your definition around a noun, 'ideal.' Even on your redaction, the Google definition is still built around something that directly refers to the verb of acting, "a course of action." The genus of intention is acts, whereas the genus of ideals is ideas. An intention is some kind of act, not some kind of idea or ideal. This may seem like a quibble, but it's really not, as many people make this mistake about intention. They think that when we intend something we are basically positing some kind of idea. But to intend is not to posit an idea or a plan, it is an act in which we apply our will to an end. It is a bit like committing ourselves to some goal. It is a dynamic reality, not a static reality. It centrally involves setting ourselves in motion towards some end.
Quoting Bob Ross
To say that "it could be an actual means towards Q [but in this case it is not]" is just to say that it is a potential means towards Q. That's what a potential means is.
Quoting Bob Ross
No it's not, because for Brock an actual means is directly intended. An indirect intention is what distinguishes a foreseen effect from an actual means, and you are insistent that your "per accidens intention" is not capable of this act of distinguishing. You are insistent that both a foreseen effect and an actual means are intended per accidens. This is why I was trying to get you to think about the nuance of the way that Aristotle employs the concept of per accidens.
Quoting Bob Ross
Hopefully what I've already said clears up some of the confusion here.
Quoting Bob Ross
Right, and you don't yet have the tools to even see the difference between a means and a foreseen effect. At this point it is invisible to you, and as long as it stays invisible you will necessarily be able to maintain your assumption that any form of killing which involves any kind of intention is immoral.
Quoting Bob Ross
This is the sort of ambiguity that your whole position depends on. We did all this work to distinguish different kinds of intention, and then you forget all of it immediately and talk about "intending Q" in an entirely unnuanced way. Your sentence here simply ignores the last two or three exchanges we have had in this thread.
Quoting Bob Ross
No, this is a case of negligence, and is quite different from what we are considering. As I said earlier:
Quoting Leontiskos
Here is an edit from my last which you may have missed:
Quoting Leontiskos
One simple solution would be to refuse to buy products from companies who use children in that way.
Quoting Herg
Quoting Kizzy thats what i was saying...kinda. Suffering part, particularly... (minus what was mentioned in your parenthesis-my opinion differs [good thing that is a non-factor) BUT nonetheless, progress is made.
I'm starting to see your point and/or others with similar stances and points (all whom agree, with their own takes though -- alike) from a different ground...or in a new light, whatever works for YOU...I am seeing now, as I wasnt before, why treating people like ends are understood or believed to be acceptable or moral in this case.... Its the interaction and relationship connections...they are clearly different as far as the connection between the two, or what comes from the connections, what emotions are expressed based on this connections...the strength of interactions is tested and more prominently measured, but those values are weighed differently because it is closed off to a stronger connection.
It is clear who is initiating and maintaining interactions more heavily than the other...so we have two different feelings about the interactions, but with no connection it can stay one-sided... While the strength of relationships are literally a balancing act between subjects not just as interactions or ends but as a person/people too. Bad relationships, bad judgements, bad rats of course make things interesting....but its measurable in behavior, observed and verified...love? I guess the stronger the connection the stronger a relationship stands, sustains, and if lucky thrives through any test of time... good stuff!!! The interaction is where the ground is laid, can we see each other or not? Doesnt matter, you will see some thing and some thing will see you.
Always good work from Bob, I have been able to grasp my own thoughts a bit better through your exchange with Herg in here. Thanks for all the work and intel you share consistently, it is appreciated. Many others to be thanked in this from me as well, good stuff all around. Cool.
That would probably end up being most of the stuff we buy.
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/nov/24/child-labour-what-can-we-do-africa-modern-slavery
But this is a digression.
The answer is clearly to pull the lever, if you value all humans equally.
The idea of killing vs letting die is a silly distinction, the value of our actions can only derive from their consequences.
The idea that a doctor can kill 1 to save 5 is a completely different situation since it is not an isolated insident. People would stop going to the doctors, our medical institution would lose all trust and collapse, and more people will thus die. People who can only see moral choices through actions themselves and not the consequences of such actions, do not understand long term effects.
I think it's a crucial distinction, and also a more accurate representation of cause and effect.
If one refuses to involve themselves in the dilemma, the deaths are not a consequence of one's actions. They're a consequence of the actions of whoever put the people on the track.
At any given moment we are choosing inaction towards countless situations which are in dire need of a hero. Equating action and inaction would make one morally responsible for neglecting every single one of them.
It's the inaccurate representation of cause and effect which leads to absurd conclusions.
Our individual action is the only factor we get to influence, hence this is the sole cause. Any cause outside of us is essentially already determined since we cant influence it, so referring to it as a cause is meaningless since it cannot change and so isn't relevent to the situation. What matters is your potential actions and the assumed effects of those actions. In this scenario being to pull a lever and let 1 die, or not pull the lever and let 5 die.
Time doesn't allow for no action to take place, to stand still, to watch, to walk away, to continue breathing, or continue standing; these are all actions, and any suggestion otherwise must argue why we make such a strange distinction and define what it means to not act.
Yes, you are morally responsible for the money you spend on your entertainment which you could use to fund malaria nets and save lives, to suggest otherwise is (for a lack of a better term) cope. If you dont give to them regardless, then you simply dont value their lives over your entertainment, which I think is fine as an egoist, but if you're not an egoist then you need to justify that.
-------------------------------------------------
To formalise, this appears to be your argument:
P1: No distinction between killing and letting die would mean we are morally responsible for many situations where people require help.
P2: We are not responsible for situations where people require help.
C: There is a distinction between killing and letting die.
I disagree with premise 2, it must be justified.
(I also disagree with premise 1 since we dont neccesarily have to value the lives of others, but its not that interesting of a line since its based on subjective value).
Right. :up:
There is no legal system in the world that does not recognize a difference between a commission and an omission.
The discussion is about ethics, not legality. Clearly you cannot force everyone to give all their money to charity as the economy would collapse, but this isn't an argument for such a distinction in ethics but one in law.
A distinction made in one domain does not neccesarily transfer to another. Anyone can create a distinction between 2 concepts, but it doesnt give that distinction any true weight in terms of action, what we're concerned about in ethics.
If you merely believe in the distinction but believe it holds no weight in your decision making then its meaningless. If you believe it does hold weight then it must be justified with an argument.
No, and such a question proves you havent read my response.
I am an ethical egoist, I believe an action is good if it supports my self-interest. I value my own entertainment above people I have no connection to.
The distinction between commissions and omissions is a distinction on the causality of human acts, which pertains to both ethics and law (indeed, law is a subset of ethics).
Just read what I wrote. You havent justified why the distinction has weight. Aka, why it has influence over ones actions.
I don't believe I have a responsibility to help others. I am an ethical egoist. If you dont understand what that means then read up on it or read what I've written and use some inference.
Quoting Ourora Aureis
?
I've made my posts perfect and you've barely responded to them. It's clear to anyone sensible that you read the first line I wrote and responded before even understanding my argument and why I said this discussion is about ethics and not law.
You clearly have no interest in an actual discussion and your being hostile now, bye.
Quoting Bob Ross
My point is that I consider YOUR position to be immoral. It is universally held that a human life is among the most valuable things in the universe; perhaps THE most valuable. Yet in the trolley and driver scenarios, you take the view that human lives are less important than the supposed principle that it is always, irrespective of all other considerations, wrong to take an innocent human life. Why you introduce the notion of innocence, I have no idea, because in both scenarios there is no difference in the innocence of those you think should not be killed, and those you are willing to let die. At the same time, you draw an entirely sophistical distinction between a moral choice that results in the loss of a life by way of a bodily movement, and a moral choice that results in the loss of a life without any bodily movement. You fail to understand what has been pointed out to you, that moral character attaches to the choice, not to the bodily action or inaction by which the choice produces its result.
If you wish to defend your position to me and I suspect you don't, because you show a marked impatience towards those of your interlocutors who wish to tackle you on the morality of your position, rather than on technical details such as the exact meaning and scope of 'intention' then you need to post a sound argument that derives your contentious principle from agreed facts, such as facts of nature (you have said that, like me, you are an ethical naturalist). If you have already posted such an argument, then please direct me to it; so far, you have only directed me to your ideas about the concept of goodness, which, while obviously relevant and of interest, will not by itself stand in the place of a sound argument from fact to moral principle.
Quoting Bob Ross
See above. There is not nearly enough detail here to show how you derive the principle that it is wrong to kill innocent people by positive action.
Quoting Bob Ross
No, this is just loose talk. There is an obvious distinction between an action and the agent who performs the action.
Quoting Bob Ross
I agree (though your ideas and mine are rather different in this area), but as I say, you need to show how to derive your contentious principle from this knowledge.
Quoting Bob Ross
The first, yes, but not, as far as I can discover, the second.
Quoting Bob Ross
I will respond to your post about goodness if I have time, but since my main objection to your position is that I strongly disagree with your contentious principle, I would prefer to read a proper argument from you justifying the principle, and respond to that.
As I've pointed out earlier, if someone were to push a person on the train tracks, even if their intentions were good, they would be going to jail for murder. There's not a country in the world where this would be seen as the correct thing to do.
I'd agree that legality is a very limited scope of viewing moral problems, but when the world unanimously agrees on something one would have to concede that arguing for pulling the lever is fighting an uphill battle, to put it mildly.
In my view, we can't just go around instrumentalizing the lives of uninvolved ("innocent") bystanders whenever we deem the outcome to be good.
Besides, in the face of morally ambiguous problems we have a perfectly morally acceptable option open to us: do not get involved.
I understand the allure of such a view - on the surface it seems to make sense in certain situations - but the implications are absurd.
Lets say person A murders person B, is person C now responsible?
I listened to it briefly, and it sounds promising. I will listen to the whole video sometime, but I dont have the time right now.
I would say, to clarify, that an intention is an activity of the will + reason such that one aims at an ideal. You cant strip out the ideality of it: that makes no sense.
Taking this on face value, it is incoherent. I think you are definitely getting at something, but it isnt fully fleshed out yet.
I think that is a bad definition, because it converts an actual means into a believed means and conflates the two. E.g., I could intend to quench my thirst and go to the store to get water bottles and someone else points out that I could have just went into the kitchen to get water (viz., the fact that I am unaware of the means does not make it less of an means [potential or actual] towards my intention).
I was just commenting that the semantics seems a bit confusing and in need of refurbishment; but I understand the distinction you are making (although it doesnt make any relevant difference to me with respect to our discussion). The racquets you dont choose to use are actually a means to your end (of playing tennis): to say they are potentially a means is to imply that they are not currently a means; which is clearly false.
They are still a means because they can facilitate your end. Remember, we defined means in such a way where what you call a potential means fits the definition of a means simpliciter. Saying it is potentially a means is to say it isnt a means right now, which is clearly false given the definition I outlined before.
I am pretty confident I have already clarified this; but let me do so again. A means is something which can facilitate an end (i.e., intention). A foreseen effect is an effect that one knows with sufficient probability is going to occur before it happens.
I agree: the pollution emissions is an effect of the means used to achieve the end (in this case).
Both a means and a foreseen effect can be intended (per accidens or per se); it just depends. Ive already outlined what I mean by all the concepts involved here.
A means is intended, if one is aiming at using that something (which is question) to facilitate their intention (i.e., end).
A means is intended per accidens, if it is intended only for the sake of another intention which they currently set out to achieve.
A means is intended per se, if it is intended for the sake of the primary intention which they are currently setting out to achieve.
In the trolley problem:
1. A means to saving the five is the lever.
2. Saving the five is an effect (of pulling the lever).
3. Saving the five is an intention (that one is aiming at achieving).
4. Killing the one is an effect (of pulling the lever).
5. The effect of saving the five is per se intentional, because it is directly related to the initial, primary intention at play.
6. The effect of killing the one is per accidens intentional, because it is indirectly related to the initial, primary intention at play.
7. The means (of pulling the lever) is per se intention, because it is directly
You are just getting confused in colloquial speech. Ive already clarified that the unessentiality is to the ideal which one is aiming at; and which it can be readily seen that the car is unessential in this sense because if there was no car one would still have the exact same intention.
Saying it is potentially a means is to say it isnt a means right now. A, in the V diagram, IS A MEANS to Q even if one directly intends Pthats what you are missing.
To your point, what you are really conveying is that if one doesnt use the means, then it wasnt used; but, to my point, it is still a means.
I agree; and you just arent seeing that yet. By actual means, all you mean is a means that was used; and I completely agree that only the means that are used for ones aims are per se, directly, intentional. Theres no problems with that.
Can we at least agree that indirectly intending to kill someone is murder? You cant possibly think that the legal definition of manslaughter would encompass indirectly intentionally killing someone. That was my point.
I think this is a bad example, then, because I dont see bad car emissions as necessarily evil (i.e., intrinsically bad). Whereas I do think that indirectly intending to kill someone is wrong and is an example of indirectly intending to do evil.
For example, imagine that the only way you could get to the grocery store was use a car that you knew would (somehow) result (as a side effect) in raping someone: is that permissible under your view? Or do you revert back to some sort of consequentialist view at that point?
It may or may not intersect with your interests, but the few minutes I pointed out are relevant.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, that's better. But why 'ideal'? I would say that what one is aiming at is an end, not an ideal. Not everything that is aimed at is ideal. I might intend to walk through mud in order to get home. Walking through mud is an end or goal that I intend, but it is not an ideal. Or I might eat Ramen noodles for dinner if I am almost out of food, but eating Ramen noodles is not an ideal. Our ends are self-consciously better than the alternatives, but that something is better than the alternatives does not make it ideal.
Quoting Bob Ross
I have no idea what you think the difference between an actual means and a potential means is supposed to be. That distinction seems incoherent given the way you speak here.
Quoting Bob Ross
No, you are just asserting your own definition. I have not agreed to your ambiguous definition of a means.
Quoting Bob Ross
So if the racquets in my bag that are not being used are an actual means, then what is a potential means? Again, the distinction is nowhere near coherent the way you are wielding it.
Quoting Bob Ross
And, as I said, on your definition here a foreseen effect is a means pure and simple, lol. You have provided yourself with no way to talk about a foreseen effect that is not a means, and therefore you have no way to distinguish the intentionality of an actual means from a foreseen effect.
Part of the problem here is the way that you are not respecting colloquial usage, and this will end up leading you astray. Every cause of an effect can be used as a means to achieve that effect, but people would look at you like you are crazy if you always refer to causes as means. "The tornado destroyed the town, therefore the tornado is a means." What??! A means is something that we use in order to achieve some end. It is not incorrect to speak about potential means (i.e. things that we could use to achieve an end), but a means must always be connected to intention, either proximately or remotely. "Means" does not mean "cause."
Quoting Bob Ross
The crux is this question, "Is killing the one an intended means?" Presumably you want to say that it is intended (per accidens), but it is not intended as a means, because "One is not aiming at using it to facilitate their end"? In common English what we say is that killing the one is not a means (to anything) in this scenario. To talk about a means apart from intention makes no sense. Thus killing the one is an effect that falls under our intention (or an indirectly intended effect), but it is not a means because it has no relation to our intention qua means. An unintended means is an oxymoron, and therefore an intended means is a redundancy.
Quoting Bob Ross
If you had read what I wrote you would perhaps see that if there was no car then one would not have the intention at all: "... and in the absence of [an essential] car the end will not even be able arise as a possible end." For example, we didn't entertain the end of going to the moon before we knew how to fly. That end is not separable from the means of flying.
Quoting Bob Ross
And what could this sentence of yours possibly mean? Give one example of a potential means, if you think your distinction is coherent.
Quoting Bob Ross
This is incorrect because your "per accidens means" has nothing to do with the direct/indirect intention of Brock's. What you apparently mean by "per accidens intention" is any intention that is not identical with the "primary intention." Else you should clarify what you mean by a per accidens intention.
Looked at in another way, you are omitting an important caveat. You should say, "I completely agree that only the means that are used for ones aims are per se, directly, intentional, [except for a means intended per accidens, which is also used for one's aims]." ...unless you want to persist and say that intermediate ends do not count as one's aims, such as walking to the faucet. I think you need to understand that walking to the faucet is simultaneously an end and a means to a further end, just as quenching your thirst is simultaneously an end, but also a means (to, say, health). Walking to the faucet is surely one of our aims.
Quoting Bob Ross
Hmm? This is precisely what we disagree on. The death of the one in the trolley scenario is indirectly intended.
Quoting Bob Ross
I think you are the one mixing up colloquial understandings, now. You have very obviously forgotten what it even means to indirectly intend something. You keep reducing
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Bob Ross
Stay with what I already wrote. Is it or is it not morally prohibited to directly intend these emissions? That is the first question you need to consider.
Quoting Bob Ross
This goes back to the problem about the distinction between natural necessity and logical necessity. If a tyrant says, "I will rape this woman if you drive to the grocery store," then is it permissible for me to drive to the grocery store? Of course it is. And if you cannot substitute some other scenario that better accomplishes the aim of your hypothetical, then I would say that you have again fallen into a strange reliance on merely logical necessity (where I am not allowed to do P when (P ? Q)).
Now I refuted (2) earlier, and you seemed to accept that refutation. But one could support (1) independently of (2), and you seem to be half-trying to do this now. The problem with such an approach is that the "means" in (1) is clearly an actual/chosen means, not a merely potential means. We can infer intention from a means only when that means is actualized or chosen. It does not follow, for example, from, "The tornado is a means to destruction," that the tornado is intended.
In the trolley case the death of the one falls under (indirect) intention not because pulling the lever is a means to their death. I repeat, it is not indirectly intentional because pulling the lever is a means. The reason their death is indirectly intentional is because it is an effect of the cause of pulling the lever, and that cause is intended. You keep sneaking in this word "means" in very dubious ways, and this has the effect of bringing (1) to bear in a false and misleading way. There is no reason at all that we should be talking about the word "means" when it comes to the relation between the lever and the death. Again, a cause is not the same thing as a means.
The deeper issue here is one of pedagogy:
Quoting Leontiskos
If I were teaching philosophy I would not allow my students to examine the trolley problem until we had studied causality, intention, and responsibility in depth. A very bad way to do philosophy is to take extremely controversial cases and begin there. If someone begins with controversy then the foundations that inevitably get laid to account for the controversy are biased in favor of the emotional-controversial cases. This is a poor approach because controversial cases are by definition difficult to understand, and one should begin with what is easy to understand before slowly moving to what is more difficult. If the mind does not have the principles and the easier cases "under its belt" then it will have no chance of confronting the difficult and controversial cases. This is perhaps one of the most basic problems with modern philosophy, but I digress.
But note that this is what is occurring in the thread. You have your conclusion, "Pulling the lever in the trolley case is impermissible," and you are trying to sort out all the foundations of causality, intention, and responsibility in order to account for that conclusion. This is placing all sorts of strange pressures on colloquial usage and the more obvious, uncontroversial cases. As far as I'm concerned, this approach is backwards, and that's why I don't really like the trolley problem. That's why I've been trying to get you to think about what intention is in itself, or how causal necessity differs from logical necessity, or how responsibility applies in simpler cases of car emissions.
Yes, it's an ever-present assumption in these problems. Consequentialism is the air we breathe, and for the consequentialist there is no clear difference between an act and an omission. Put differently, Foot's understanding of morality as a set of hypothetical imperatives is widely accepted, and on her model there can be no impermissible means. Granted, this does not exactly square with her own analysis of the trolley-adjacent cases, but I do think an impermissible means implicates a non-hypothetical imperative.
I don't think it is ever right to isolate a principle in this manner, as if you yourself are not using a different principle to oppose their principle. There is no alternative to principles.
Now you are not a consequentialist, but the objection usually comes from consequentialists. They will say, "You care about your principle, but I care about human life!" Well, no. The deontologist cares about human life via deontological principles, and the consequentialist cares about human life via consequentialist principles. There is no one who bypasses principles altogether and just cares about human life in a way that overrides all principles and all rational analysis.
Eh, I think Ive changed my mind again. :lol: As I said earlier, "I accept a relatively uncontroversial form of double effect whereby the unintended effect must only be possible and not certain" (). After reading a book by Kevin Flannery a few years ago I became convinced that it is not permissible to pull the lever in the trolley case.* I think that is still correct. Flannery shows that Anscombes critique of Cartesian intention is correct, and that circumstances are always relevant to moral questions.
The problem I encountered in this thread (and the reason I changed my mind in <this post>) is that it seems that double effect would allowbut not requirethat the lever be pulled. First, I dont think the principle of double effect is altogether mistaken, for there are obvious cases where it applies and it is known to be a very unwieldy principle. The problem with the trolley case is that the foreseen effect is simply too problematic given both its certainty and the form of strong deliberation that the case involves. That is, it is too intentional, even if it is, strictly speaking, indirectly intended. This is basically what you yourself have been saying.
The case where the car is about to hit four people is artificial in the sense that it conflates a case where there is almost zero deliberation with a case where we have ample time to deliberate. It is like asking, What would you do if four people suddenly appeared in front of your speeding car, and you had infinite time to deliberate? This case is confused given the way it equivocates on the ability to deliberate, and it was a poor example on my part. Nevertheless, it is still a very difficult example to handle, and I think it is probably permissible to swerve in order to minimize damage. It seems a relevant difference that you are actually driving the vehicle in this case.
But in the airplane example I think the pilot does need to aim at the area with least people. This isnt a matter of double effect but rather of minimizing damage, and the fact of the matter is that in this scenario no one is tied down to trolley tracks. Both the certitude and the deliberation of the trolley case are absent. The plane is reacting to people and people are reacting to the plane, and by aiming at the area with the fewest people the pilot minimizes damage and provides the optimal opportunity for people to get out of the way of the plane as it lands.
* Cooperation with Evil: Thomistic Tools of Analysis
My argument is relatively simple:
P1: It is morally impermissible to intentionally kill an innocent human being [against their will].
P2: One intentionally kills an innocent human being [against their will] by pulling the lever.
C: It is morally impermissible to pull the lever.
Now, you are contending with P1 (obviously); and I explained that it stems from the idea that beings of a rational kind have rights:
P1*1: It is morally impermissible to violate a living beings rights.
P1*2: One is violating the rights of a being of a rational kind by intentionally killing them [when they are innocent and it is against their will].
P1*C: It is morally impermissible to intentionally kill an innocent human being [against their will].
Now, Ive given many reasons for the idea that beings a rational kind should have rights in this comment which you completely ignored.
I will briefly recap that comment:
1. Rational beings are sufficiently civic and social whereof they engage in a social contract; and this social contract must guarantee certain irrevocable entitlements of power about themselves which can be exercised on other peoplei.e., rights.
2. Rational beings have sufficient free will to engage in their own projects and, in this regard, makes them capable of (1) being moral agents and (2) significantly richer degrees of happiness.
#1 is a point that stems from the idea that rights come from social contracts; and #2 stems from the idea that rights are innate. Personally, I go for #2; but either sufficiently demonstrates the bulk of my point (although #2 does it more completely).
With respect to #1, one cannot be fair while extracting work from another being which is engaging and contributing in society and not reciprocate anything back to them. Likewise, they cannot revoke the entitlements which may be granted by way of being a citizen (of said society) when it is convenient.
With respect to #2, the rational capacities of a human, as opposed to other animals, (e.g., free will, self-consciousness, etc.) seems to set them out as (A) more important and (B) an object of respected action and will. With respect to A, I dont think we disagree on this point; but you dont see B yet: to treat a rational being with respect, one must respect their free willed decisionswhich is not present in respecting irrational beings.
:up: You too, Kizzy!
No worries at all! As you know, I change my mind all the time :smile: . I commend your efforts to genuinely strive after the truthwhich is a rare quality these days.
How can you deploy the principle of double effect, even possibly, in the airplane, trolley, and car examples if your definition of double effect precludes the permissibility of indirectly intentional acts, effects, etc. ?
Viz., your elaboration of the principle of double effect whereof the side effect is unintended: wouldnt it need to be unintended or indirectly intended for your view to be consistent?
I put that in my queue of books to read; thanks for the heads up!
Unfortunately, I am unfamiliar with cartesian intention; so I cannot comment on this part.
We are closer to agreeing now, but we have slightly different views here: you seem to be saying that it is always wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being when it is of a high enough degree of intention (deliberation), whereas I am saying period.
When one aims at an end uses a means with two effects, one of which is to the benefit of the end and other merely accidental, then their act of using the means is an act simultaneously towards both effects; and those effects are both intentional (either indirectly or directly) when one deliberately does it with knowledge of both effects; and if that act is producing something bad, like killing an innocent person, even if it simultaneously produces something good, then they should never intentionally do it (i.e., it is morally impermissible) because a moral agent, not in the sense of just being capable of being moral but actually being moral, does not do bad things.
To me, it doesnt matter how extensively they deliberated about doing the act; if they did it deliberately at all it is wrong.
Thats fair; but it doesnt change anything because you stipulated that they can only either run over the two (and save the other two) or run over all four. In real life, we can both agree one should swerve but with the intention of missing all four. Thats the key: youve setup the hypothetical where the person would have sufficient time to deliberate on whether to run over just the two or the entire four. What you are noting about the difference in deliberation time is a practical critique that doesnt apply to your hypothetical.
In practicality I agree, because the pilot would not be intending to kill people in area A as opposed to B to limit the deaths: they would be intending to land somewhere with no people.
Perhaps, you would still say that it is morally permissible for the pilot to intend to kill one person on the ground to avoid crashing into a festival; but I wouldnt (for the previous reasons above).
In terms of the way I define intention as a power of the will whereof it aims at some ideal, I am using ideal in the sense of what should be not what ultimately should be: you are confusing these two. If you intend not to get your feet wet and thereby decide to jump over the puddle in the street, then you had set forth an ideal to not have wet feet but, to your point, it is not an ideal in the sense that ultimately jumping over the puddle was exactly how reality should be (e.g., you might think that ideally there should have been no puddle at all, etc.). I am using ideal and end interchangeably here: they both refer to some sort of dictation a subject gives about reality such that it should be a way it currently isntand thats the nature of aiming at an end.
Okay, thanks.
Quoting Bob Ross
Sure, so in that quote I used "unintended" because Brock's terminology of indirect intention had not yet been brought into the thread.
Aquinas will say that the foreseen effect falls under the agent's intention, or else is "beside" his intention. Brock will say that the foreseen effect is an indirect object of intention, but he also uses things like "indirectly intended" as a shorthand. I think Aquinas' statements are more careful and helpful on this score, but the point is that there is a large difference between an intended effect and a foreseen effect.
Quoting Bob Ross
For Anscombe the Cartesian approach to intention is more or less the idea that one can simply and straightforwardly choose which effects of their act to intend and which effects to not-intend.
Quoting Bob Ross
Somewhat, but I am saying that it is different to directly intend the death of an innocent and to indirectly intend the death of an innocent. All directly intended killings of this sort are impermissible, and this is what we call murder or killing simpliciter. As to indirectly intended killings, some are permissible and some are not.
Quoting Bob Ross
So you are engaged in the use of that word "means" in precisely the dubious and misleading way I explained above. I have explained this many times, so I don't feel the need to do so again.
Quoting Bob Ross
The question that is being begged is whether a foreseen effect is a "doing."
Here is what you need to address if you want to deny double effect:
Quoting Leontiskos
-
Quoting Bob Ross
The hypothetical is physically impossible. In that situation you simply do not have sufficient time to deliberate. If one wants a case where there is sufficient time to deliberate, then they will need to cook up a new hypothetical.
Quoting Bob Ross
As a remote intention they may be trying to land somewhere with no people, but practically speaking they may foresee the effect that at least some people will die. In that case they are trying to minimize death and injury.
Quoting Bob Ross
That's not what "ideal" means, and that's why your definition fails. You are trying to make a word mean something it does not. "Acceptable" and "ideal" are not the same thing, and your view would make "ideal" sometimes mean nothing more than "acceptable." It is simply a fact that no one would ever go home to their family and tell them a story about how it was "ideal" to walk through the mud. Words cannot be stretched so far.
Edit: The contentious claim you are making is something like
Even under your characterization of the two, they are both intended effects. If you accept either Brocks or Aquinas characterizations that you gave (above this comment), then it necessarily follows that a foreseen effect is intentional (albeit it of a meaningfully different type thereof).
I dont see how it makes sense in your view to make a dichotomy between an intended vs. foreseen effect in this way. It would only make sense if you accepted that some foreseen effects are not intentional whatsoever; which I do not understand you to be making that claim.
Interesting. I am not sure I followed, though. This sounds like a view whereof one gets to dictate what they are intending, as opposed to what they end up doing to aim at their intention being intentionalirregardless of what they believe they are intending to do.
Again, all intended killings that are illegal are murder: that includes indirectly intended ones. The only way around this is to deviate substantially from common terminology.
There was nothing dubious with my statement (other than a syntax/grammar mistake): if one aims at an end by using a means, that means has two effects, one effect .
Wouldnt you agree, that all effects relevant to an analysis of intention stem from a means utilized to aim at the direct intention.
The other issue I just realized, is that the direct vs. indirect distinction is not the same as the per se vs. per accidens intention I made. A direct intention points out the flow of the aim, from start to finish, in the particular practical application (and so, for example, a means utilized for the end is directly intended, but a side effect from that means is indirectly intended); whereas a per se intention points out the final cause, or original intention stripped of all accidental aims enveloped into it by the practical circumstances, which is being set out as the original end.
Thats why we havent been able to agree on the terminology here; because we are talking about two separate things, but both vital to our discussion.
It is important to note the directional flow that is set out, like the aiming of an archer at their target, to understand what is essential to achieving the end in the given circumstance; but, likewise, it is important to note the bare end which was set out to begin with, and is not dependent on the circumstances. E.g., an archer that intends to hit their mark on their target directly intends to release the arrow from their bow towards their target in a most optimal manner and they indirectly intend to scare someone if they can foresee the person next to them being alarmed by their release of said arrow; whereas the archers end (here) may require releasing the arrow at an odd angle due to windy circumstances (and this release in said manner would be, if it is foreseen, directly intended) but this is NOT a part of the per se intention that they havefor their purposive final cause is to hit their target, which has no relevance itself to the particular windy circumstances of a nuanced, practical situation they may be in (viz., if there was no windy circumstance, then they would still have the same end in sight).
These two distinctions are not the same at all; and our dispute really hinged on a conflation between the two.
How??? It is simple: one does something which results in the foreseen effect.
I already answered this. I do not view doing something that results in emissions necessarily immoral; so this is a bad example.
Then your car example makes no sense, and cannot be answered. It presupposed that one knows that they either can swerve and kill two, or not swerve and kill four. You are now saying they lack the proper deliberation to know this; which contradicts your stipulations.
Yes, but it isnt a certain foreseen effect; which matters. I was saying that one indirectly and per accidens intends killing the one when pulling the lever because they are certain of the foreseen effect of killing the one and still did it anyways to save the five. If you stipulate that there is a 10% chance of killing someone if one pulls the lever and one knows for certain that pulling the lever saves the five; then I would say it is morally obligatory to pull the lever.
I looked up the term, and that is fair. I was thinking of idea and not ideal. A intention is an act of volition which aims at some idea (end).
That is not my claim at all: I can accept that there is a morally relevant difference between a direct and indirect intention and between an end and a foreseen effect while also accepting that it not relevant to the moral fact that one should never intend to kill an innocent human being [against their will]. You find these distinctions to provide some morally relevant reason for making this kind of killing sometimes morally permissible (or omissible), but I dont see itbut thats not the same thing as me not seeing or agreeing about the fact that such distinctions are distinctions.
I apologise for not answering your posts. I haven't gone away, but the past week has been difficult. I shall try to reply to them in the next few days.
(Apologies for not linking to you guys in this post, I don't know how to do that.)
No worries at all. PS: to mention people, you have to use the @ symbol followed by the person's username in double quotes (or use the @ button)(e.g., @'Bob Ross' but with double quotes ["] instead): otherwise, they don't get a notification.
If done properly, when you preview your comment it should turn the @ blue.
To link people, you can either use the @ (like explained above) or reply to a comment that they have made.
Hypothetical 1
You are walking along a path in the woods with a group of 6 strangers and reach a cliff face, when suddenly the cliff collapses and they all fall. Each person falls a seperate distance, requiring a different amount of time to climb down and rescue them. You determine that there is a limited amount of time before each individual will lose their grip and fall to certain death. After some thinking you determine a method to save 5 people, but you wont have enough time to get to the last.
What should you do?
Well, if you do not act then all 6 individuals would die, therefore saving the 5 does not cause anyones death. I'm sure most people who would not pull the lever, would save the 5 in this situation.
Hypothetical 2
Lets imagine a seperate scenario where the same events take place. However, this time there exists a 7th person who is behind you and is the partner of that 1 person. You know that if you do not act then the 1 will be saved by the man and less time will exist to save others, resulting in 2 people dying instead. You know that the cliff is too unstable for both you and the other man to save people at the same time.
Assume for the sake of both hypotheticals that you and the 7th man are both pro rock climbers and are sure in your judgements of the situation. Im sure there are better ways of presenting this idea than I am doing so here, but the underlying moral dillema is equivalent.
Argument
This situation is now functionally equivalent to the trolley problem. Choosing to do nothing will cause 4 people to be saved, while acting will allow 5 people to be saved. If reduced down to remove the overlapping individuals then its killing 1 to save 2. However, the only difference is the existance of an individual who intends to act in such a way that it would cause more deaths. So lets make a similar situation with this new found knowledge.
Assume you are a politician and you have the ability to make a decision that will improve the world, whatever that means to you. However, you have a rival who intends to improve the world in a different way you view as less impactful, resulting in more unnecessary deaths but saving lives you would have not saved. According to your ethical theory, you are morally obliged to allow this individual to gain power and make this choice.
You are completely capable of just responding "yeah, so what?". The only argument I am making here is that this is the logical extension of your actions if you choose to act in the 1st scenario and not act in the 2nd.
Potential Objection
I assume a potentital rebuttel to this would be for people to say that we should still save the 5 since we aren't the cause of their death still, we just dont allow a scenario where they are saved to exist. This to me seems like another distinction is need of definition and explanation of moral revelence. If ones action can lead to someones death who would otherwise not have died, then how can that action not be considered a "cause"?
Clarification of my thoughts and the extent of this idea
I believe this to be a clear conclusion that the morality being expressed is self-defeating, as someone else need just come along and oppose it. If you do not act in the trolley problem, but you allow another to act in your stead, then your entire thought process is meaningless since its preferred result did not come into effect via your action. And if you did oppose someone then I would consider that act to be immoral as it would be causing more deaths than would happen without your input.
To be clear, I dont care for the distinction of "cause" or "effect" myself, Im asking people to justify their own definition and the relevence of "causing death" between the trolley problem and this scenario. I believe actions lead to different experiences, the process and interaction between different agents or objects that leads to such is irrelevent. You cannot zone in on any "cause" and "effect" outside of the action and experiences themselves.
It depends. If person A is a child and person B is an infant, and C could very easily have stopped the act? I don't think you can get a free pass on allowing some little kid to throw their baby sibling into a pool (with or without malice) just because you do not want to get "involved."
The uninvolved bystander isn't responsible for the well-being of other people, and that includes children.
Of course, why on earth somebody who is interested in behaving morally would let a child drown is a fair question, but also irrelevant to the question of whether or not they are responsible.
Quoting Bob Ross
Quoting Bob Ross
Quoting Bob Ross
In these sorts of claims you continue the strange move whereby you reduce indirect intention to mere intention, contrary to Le1. The reason I have spilled so much ink on indirect intention is because it is morally different from mere intention, so this reduction of yours is obviously counterproductive.
Quoting Bob Ross
Again, I have already addressed your equivocation between a cause and a means in detail in <this post> and <the following post>. You never responded to those posts, and I'm not sure if you even read them.
Quoting Bob Ross
I would agree that all foreseeable effects of our intentional acts are morally relevant. One problem with your statement is that some effects relevant to an analysis of intention may stem from a non-means, such as an end.
Quoting Bob Ross
You are avoiding the question and engaging in what I described here:
Quoting Leontiskos
If you cannot bring yourself to analyze the way that something evil becomes acceptable when it is merely a foreseen effect, then you will not be able to assess cases like the trolley case, for you will have no principled way to distinguish an effect that can become acceptable from an effect that cannot become acceptable.
Quoting Bob Ross
Right, hence my point.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, interesting. What if there is an 80% chance, say?
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, good, although above I gave similar critiques regarding 'idea'.
Quoting Bob Ross
As I've said, you don't seem to acknowledge any morally relevant difference. To acknowledge this you would need to identify it and explain why and how it is potentially morally relevant. That is what you have taken pains to avoid doing. If someone cannot demonstrate that they understand the moral relevance of a distinction, then their claim that the distinction is not relevant in a certain case is not principled.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Bob Ross
I'm glad you finally agreed with me on this point. Note though that I am not the one who was conflating the two.
In the Groundwork, after he has introduced the 2nd formulation, Kant says this:
"Fourthly, as regards meritorious duties to others, the natural end which all men seek is their own happiness. Now humanity could no doubt subsist if everybody contributed nothing to the happiness of others but at the same time refrained from deliberately impairing their happiness. This is, however, merely to agree negatively and not positively with humanity as an end in itself unless everyone endeavours also, so far as in him lies, to further the ends of others. For the ends of a subject who is an end to himself must, if this conception is to have its full effect in me, be also, as far as possible, my ends."
Kant is clearly saying here that one can only be fully an end to oneself by positively adopting the natural ends of others (namely their happiness) as one's own ends. This is one of four passages meant to illustrate the 2nd formulation, so it seems to follow that he intended the 2nd formulation to be read as requiring positive efforts in that direction.
Treating someone as an end, in Kant's view, therefore means positively seeking to further the ends of others; there is no mention of interaction, or any similar condition that might place a limit on one's responsibility to further those ends. I think the idea that such a condition is required stems from mistakenly reading the 2nd formulation as a purely negative injunction; but I think the above passage shows that Kant intended it to be read as a positive injunction as well. If he did, then the notion of interaction is superfluous, and the 2nd formulation simply enjoins us to treat everyone (including the 235 millions in Pakistan) as ends at all times, and as part of that (but not the whole of it) to refrain from treating anyone merely as a means.
I think that, whatever we think Kant meant, he could have put the 2nd formulation itself better: it is rather terse, and the exact nature of the relation between treating someone as an end and not treating them as a mere means is not made clear. But as I've explained, I think the ensuing text resolves the matter.
I think we should also consider the fact that Kant was a Christian, and would have had in mind Christ's injunction to love our neighbour as ourselves. Kant's exhortation to adopt the natural ends of others as our own end is saying much the same thing. If the 2nd formulation requires there to be interaction before we are able to treat someone as an end, then a millionaire who never watches the news or reads the papers, lest he find out that there are people who are starving or in dire need who could benefit from his money, would pass the test of the 2nd formulation; but he would not be loving his neighbour as himself, nor would he pass Kant's test of adopting the starving person's natural ends as his own.
So let's streamline my argument. Let's pick one of those 235 million people in Pakistan who we have never met or interacted with. Call him "Ahmad." You are telling me that we must treat Ahmad as an end. 1) Are we treating Ahmad as an end? 2) Should we be treating Ahmad as an end? 3) How does one treat someone as an end?
Now it seems to me that you and I are neither treating Ahmad as an end nor as a means, because we have no interaction with Ahmad. If I am not interacting with someone then I am not treating them (in any way whatsoever).
This is the heart of the question, I think. One problem I have with your reading is that it divides humanity into two groups those we interact with, who we are required to love, and those who we do not interact with, who we are not required to love. We see all too often what that division leads to: at best, neglect; at worst, racism, sectarianism, oppression, enslavement, war.
Another problem I have with your reading is that it puts the cart before the horse. Surely the idea is to love first, and seek to interact because of that love? Or, in Kantian terms, to think of all humans as ends, to think of their happiness as if it were our happiness, and then seek to interact with them so as to promote that happiness?
How do I treat Ahmad as an end? By thinking of all humans as ends, so that if Ahmad crosses my path and I see that he needs help, I am ready to help him.
Consider Putin. Prior to his invasion of Ukraine, he didn't interact with most Ukrainians. So according to your reading, he wasn't required to treat them as ends. But isn't what was wrong with his invasion precisely the fact that he didn't treat the people of Ukraine as ends?
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Leontiskos
So let's go with this more philosophically precise notion of activity towards, call it "acting-towards."
Quoting Herg
Okay, but I could not in good faith say that I am treating Ahmad as an end on this definition. On your definition I don't even need to know if someone exists in order to treat them as an end and love them. I would say that in order to treat someone as an end I must at the very least know that they exist (under one description or another). The same would go for loving. I do not love someone if I do not know they exist.
Quoting Herg
The first problem is to say that Putin did not interact with Ukraine prior to his invasion. He surely did, and he undeniably acted-towards Ukraine.
But suppose a bully like Putin does not interact with or act-towards a person, Jake, in any way. Even if this is true, as soon as the bullying begins (and in fact before it begins) they are already interacting with the person. Bullying is a form of interaction and a form of acting-towards, and therefore one cannot bully without interacting. The brunt of Putin's transgression against the Ukrainians began after his invasion, not before.
Ahmad lives on the other side of the world. I am not required to positively treat him in any way whatsoever, including treating him as an end. In fact I do not treat him in any way whatsoever. I am not acting-towards him in any way. If things changed (and he, say, 'crossed my path') then perhaps I would be required to act-towards him in some way, but given the way things currently are I have no such obligation. I do not believe it would be true for me to claim that I am loving Ahmad and treating Ahmad as an end. I think those acts require more than universal good will.
Edit: Forgot this part:
Quoting Herg
No, I do not think we love what we do not know exists. Knowledge is one of the most basic forms of acting-towards, for it involves an act of knowledge where the object of that act is the person in question. We must first encounter someone before we can love them.
At the moment I don't know if I'm a consequentialist or not. Some sort of weird Kantian-Benthamite deonto-consequentialist hybrid, I think. A philosophical chimera, perhaps.
Be that as it may, I must pick you up on your claim that "the deontologist cares about human life via deontological principles." If the driver follows Bob's deontological principle and does not turn the wheel, all four people in the road end up dead. How is this consistent with your claim that "the deontologist cares about human life"?
Added later: I'm sorry, this post is not up to standard. I am finding it impossible to find the time to participate properly in these discussions, so I am leaving the thread. Thanks to all who have talked to me, and in particular yourself and @Bob Ross.
I think the answer would have something to do with Plato's insistence that it is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice, and that the man who chooses injustice is impoverished in a way that suffering could never achieve.
But you're right that if we consider the consequentialist goal of preserving the maximum number of human lives, then the deontologist's principle does not achieve this goal. Still, the consequentialist's principles are ordered to their end/goal, and the deontologist's principles are ordered to their end/goal. For each side there are principles in play, and there are intuitively difficult counterexamples for both of them.
Quoting Herg
No worries. I am thinking along the same lines. Take care.
No problem. I will do my best to summarize from my end.
Our real dispute has finally been elevated to the surface, in complete clarity. I find it both immoral to per se and per accidens as well as to directly and indirect intend something bad, but the formers of each are more immoral than the latters; whereas you think that some of the latters are morally permissible, and I still have not heard any real justification for why: providing an elaboration of what the distinctions are is not a justification of why any of them are or are not immoral.
Ive already elaborated on why it makes no difference to me and what principles I am using, but for a substantial response here is my post to Herg that outlines it in even more detail.
You have provided no justification, e.g., for why some indirectly intended effects or actions are morally permissible other than laying out the landscapewhich is not justification for it.
Both are intentions: they inherent from the concept of intentionality. What you are doing is complaining when I say all Xs are immoral where all Ys are Xs, but not all Xs are Ys. All intentions are either indirect or direct, and I already elaborated on why they are both immoral in the case of intentionally killing an innocent human beingto say that is not a conflation, it includes both subtypes of intention in it.
If I didnt, then I apologize: I must have missed them.
A potential means to getting to the grocery store is my rusty, old go-cart, because I lack sufficient knowledge to say it is a means towards that end. Thats standardly what a potential is: it isnt actual.
Your use of the term potential means is semantically weird: you are implying that you know that the means is a means towards the end, but since it wasnt chosen and used it isnt a means. Saying it is an actual means is a double positive, and saying something is potentially X means it may not be X in all probability.
I was finishing reading the eudemian ethics the other day, and came across the exact distinction I happen to be making in Aristotles Book VI p. 103:
This is not the same thing as your indirect vs. direct intentionality distinction. What is per se intended is what is chosen and pursued non-coincidentally (viz., as the real end). You are completely overlooking this distinction; but it doesnt make much a difference with respect to the crux of our dispute. I would just add that per se intending to kill someone is worse than per accidens intending to kill someone; and they are both immoral in the case of an innocent person.
Thats different than my example I gave: I was saying that using the car as a means would result in a side effect of a woman getting raped; whereas your refurbished example makes the rape completely unrelated to any means used to achieve the end.
Right, it is indirectly intended because one uses the means and that means causes the effect which is not an effect aimed at (directly). I never suggested otherwise.
The means causes the effect we are discussing; and because the means was utilized by a person intentionally, it will be relevant to our discussion about whether or not the effect is intentional.
For me, it has to be a certainty; otherwise we are not discussing the same dispute. So I would say, under what I have been outlining, it would not be necessarily wrong to pull the lever in that case; but because my principle doesnt apply here: I was talking about a certainty.
In the case of statistical certainties, which may include this 80% chance you speak of, I would say that it is morally permissible (and maybe even obligatory) if the intended good end is consequentially better than the bad end which has an 80% chance of occurring. I resort to consequentialism here, because I see no other route to take.
So:
1. If I am certain that the pollution emissions from my car is going to kill a person (like in the case that I start my car in a closed garage with a child in it), then it would be immoral for me to start the car.
2. If I am certain that I have a 0.5% chance of killing someone accidentally by simply driving on the streets, as a mere statistical fact, then I am permitted to go to the grocery store because (1) if I were to kill someone in this manner it would be indirectly intended and (2) the good effect (end) greatly outweighs the potential bad effect.
3. If I am certain that I have a 99% chance of killing someone accidentally by simply driving on the streets, as a mere statistical fact (or perhaps I am drunk), then I am NOT permitted to go the the grocery store because (1) if I were to kill someone in this manner it would be indirectly intended and (2) the bad effect greatly outweighs the good effect (end).
The problem is that I think this is what you are trying to advocate for, but the examples you give stipulate certainty simpliciter and not high probabilities, which is a paramount distinction under my view. The airplane crash was stipulated as certain of each outcome happening for example.
Fair enough, and hopefully we are doing that now (;
I think I see the confusion now. My principle is really:
This principle does not hinge on the direct vs. indirect distinction. To your point, I don't think that it is always wrong to indirectly intend to kill innocent people in the event that what is indirectly intended is not certain. Is that what you are getting at?
No worries, Herg! We all get busy. We can chat anytime. :victory:
Okay, I will let yours be the last word. Thanks for the interesting conversation.
But let me elaborate on this:
Quoting Bob Ross
Here is Simpson's rendering:
Aristotle is here considering the different reasons why one may assent to a proposition or course of action. As I said above, for Aristotle the per se/per accidens distinction is nuanced, and is more than a merely logical distinction. So in this case Aristotle is saying that assent is per se concerned with truth, and therefore someone who assents to something because it is true assents to it per se, whereas someone who only assents to it because he is stubborn and wishes to maintain his opinions assents to it per accidens (cf. 1151b4). Both the end and the nature of the assent as characterized by that end are what is per se or per accidens. Everyone who assents to something is at the same time affirming its truth, but not all are motivated by a desire for truth qua truth. Some affirm its truth for a lesser reason, and in that case the interest in truth is secondary. Of course there is also the analogy between belief and action operating here, for the subject is continence and incontinence.
Very interesting :up:
As always: a great conversation Leontiskos, and I look forward to our future encounters! :smile:
If it feels good to hear this, you're welcome:
Silence is not violence.
You can be without, rather than with or against.
Not acting is literally not acting. It is incoherent to assign blame because of inaction. The laws around this is utterly absurd and make no sense. Importing obligations on members of society to endanger themselves is fucking WILD my guy, and this is based on the idea tha tnot acting is at least some way toward committing hte act.
Bollocks. Absolute bollocks. "Well, I would have helped" is usually a lie.
Hey, welcome to the forum. I hope you stick around, because I like the substance of your first post.
Quoting EyE
It follows the course you allow it to, methinks; it isn't a deterministic process in which you cannot intervene; you can choose such that two different outcomes are possible.
Quoting EyE
I think the point of the thought experiment is that the two outcomes are indeed not weighted equally according to consequentialist reasoning. You are choosing between losing five lives or saving four. Not acting to save the four lives is a choice.
Furthermore, if you aren't responsible for the lives lost for not switching the tracks on the basis that you didn't actually start the train down the tracks (which I think is what you are saying), then who is? Do we just trace the chain of causes backwards until someone took an action that you would consider direct enough to cause the loss of life and impose responsibility there?
It sounds like you are making the claim that determinism leaves no room to explore a thought experiment on the basis that the ethical actor didn't create the scenario, and therefore is exempt from any sort of ethical imperative or responsibility. Is this correct?
Sure, there is room for you to get involved but ultimately the decision you are making is whether you would sacrifice 1 life to save 5. That's not to say if there wasn't someone on that second track I wouldn't pull the lever because of "fate" haha, but at least then I can entertain the choice.
Why might you switch the track if doing so would save the five lives without resulting in a death?
So, for you at least, the important thing to consider here is the freedom to choose when and where one dies, and for what. That is 100% not what I expected you to say. It is an interesting take on it.
How would you apply this view on freedom in situations where it is not so cut and dry, though?
For instance, what if the lone person on one of the tracks had the ability to redirect the train such that it would kill the five? The lone person's choice over when and where they want to die could lead to five other people losing that choice. Does the choice of the lone person not to die potentially have less value than *six combined? And if so, why? If you don't impose some means of valuing and weighing freedoms against each other, I think we run into a problem that is almost intractable when we zoom out. Or at least I couldn't solve it.
*It would be six choices preserved if the lone person decided not to redirect the trolley because by definition, they would be honoring their own choice to die when they want, and this choice would allow the five on the other track to still choose when and where they die. Thus, the freedom of everyone is preserved in a selfless act. And don't say the lone person could've just stepped off of the tracks.
Sorry if I'm straying too far from the traditional trolley problem.
Quoting ToothyMaw
If somebody wanted to sacrifice 5 people to save themselves...that's none of my business :lol:.
Seeming that the only way to stop them would be to sacrifice them myself I'd be doing the same thing.
Quoting ToothyMaw
When I say six choices would be preserved, I'm saying that the choice of when and where one dies for five people are preserved if the person on the lone track sacrifices themselves. I'm not saying that there are six different choices the lone person on the track could make to kill only one person on the other track, if that's what you think I'm saying.
Quoting EyE
I'm a little confused by this. I'm talking about the choice of the lone person on the tracks to willingly sacrifice themselves to save the five on the other track. If they chose to do so, then they would be honoring their own choice with regards to when and where they die, and for what, which is the thing you said makes saving lives important. It might be a choice made under duress, but it is still a choice; it isn't like we don't already know that one's idea of what is right and wrong can interact with whatever idea one has in one's head of the circumstances under which one might intentionally end one's life without robbing them of agency. But this point is less important than your answer to the question I asked you in my last post.
I have no idea how predestination fits into this except insofar as sacrificing oneself might prevent one from dying in the ideal way one might want to. So, with regards to this sort of ideal death, what I said earlier doesn't really apply, although it isn't clear whether you are talking about that, or just the condition of having the agency to be able to intentionally end one's life when and where one wants.
I see now that my last post wasn't particularly well-written. If I need to clarify something, just say so.
This is logically correct.
So going back to the original problem, why are you choosing to pull the lever? 6 as a value is what I was referring to when I said "6 choices" your including the 1 person on the other track when you shouldn't be, they are not part of the problem. Just because they've come up in the conversation it doesn't change the reality of it. Anyway morals and ethics are derived from truth (logic) you can't come to your own conclusion without following it.
If my logic is correct as you say, then if the lone person does not pull the lever, then the ability for six people to choose how they die is preserved or honored. I'm saying that the lone person on one of the tracks is the one pulling the lever, not me, to potentially save themselves, at the cost of the other five people on the other track. I should have made that clearer when I proposed the modified thought experiment.
Quoting EyE
Can you expound on this? I think you are on to something, but it sounds a little circular.
Lol I mean't the original trolley problem as in the one they gave us in the beginning.
Yeah, I realized that we must have been talking about two different things. Oof.
And I suppose that if a child that cannot swim is shoved into the pond, you are also not responsible for the outcome of the child drowning even if you could've jumped in and saved them.
Most people recognize that inaction can be wrong even if they don't directly cause the relevant bad outcome they could have prevented - in fact so wrong that they might break a rule against killing to prevent the outcome. Thus, I think that the point of the thought experiment, as presented in the OP, is that at some threshold of loss of life, most people will take a life to save more lives. But I don't think anyone is saying that the person who might pull the lever is literally responsible for all those deaths if they don't pull it.
Quoting LuckyR
You are getting lost in the details; this isn't a substantive criticism. In the OP it just says you allow five people to die, or directly kill one person to save the five. There is nothing about it being "runaway" or whatever you might remember from the classic formulation of the problem, which could probably be modified to deal with these concerns.
Quoting LuckyR
You very much are open to logical criticism. If you don't choose to kill one person to save a net four lives, or five, or six, or three hundred, you clearly care less about horrific consequences and more about not breaking rules, which might be considered myopic. One might even argue that you must do bad things for good consequences sometimes.
Anyone is free to sacrifice themself. Fine if the one says, "Throw the switch! Better I die so many can be saved!"
Are you against conscription in all cases?
What if we raise the stakes to ridiculous levels where the fate of the world rests on running over the guy on the tracks?
Hey, what's the movie from decades ago when a terrorist executed a woman in (possibly) Times Square. Her fiance wasn't getting much help from the authorities, so he worked and worked, eventually tracking the guy down. Turns out the guy was CIA. They decided to execute a random person publicly, so he could convince the terrorists that he was on their side, and he could infiltrate them. DAMN!
We should fight the aliens to the death. Not only because it's wrong to sacrifice people (Did we learn nothing from Omelas?), but also because we would be their bitches from them on.
If you make the scenario something like they are impossible to resist, maybe they are doing this from a light-year away, but we know they can back up their threat, then we die as humans. Captain Pike said:
Giving up our values in the name of security is to lose the battle in advance.
Do we want to live like that, sacrificing another person every time they tell us to? When they demand multiple? When they demand our children instead of death row convicts? Sounds like the Hunger Games. The galactic community would speak of the pathetic humans, and they'd be right. Better to die defiant and with our humanity.
We live in societies, with laws. The point of it all is to ensure our rights and freedom, and make our lives better. Not take our freedom, quality of life, or our very lives.
But. Since we want to live in these societies, it can't always go the way we want. There are also responsibilities. As they say, freedom isn't free. There are times when we have to do what we have to do for the society. Regardless of the risk.
Obviously, this trolley thing is not that kind of situation.
You`re alone in a self driving car going 55 mph down a two lane road. All of a sudden another car filled with people pulls out in front of you and stalls (maybe its driven by a person or maybe theres a mechanical failure). Well assume the technology is sophisticated enough to tell that there is more than one person in the other car. Your self driving car cannot swerve around it because theres another car coming the other way. The only options are to plough into the stalled car or or to swerve off the road down a steep hill and over a cliff. Your self driving car has air bags and other safety equipment so if your car crashes into the side of the stalled car you will survive with minor injuries but the occupants of the other car will be seriously injured and possibly die. On the other hand if your self driving car chooses to serve off the road then likely you will die.
How should the programmers of the self driving car handle this situation? Beats me.
Quoting EyE
Lol so what are your thoughts on this now.
Quoting Patterner
Quoting Patterner
You would sacrifice all of humanity because you personally believe not even one person should ever be forced to sacrifice their life? Even in the situation that they would be executed anyways? I mean, clearly we should draw a line with the aliens, and if they cross that line, we do indeed fight them to the death. But should it really lay where you claim it should?
Quoting Patterner
Let's say the aliens do indeed come to Earth and demand a death row inmate for some known or unknown, potentially nefarious reason. Let's say the world leaders listen to you and refuse to capitulate because of their high-minded stance on never sacrificing a person unwillingly. A bunch of people's sons and daughters are then drafted to fight in a war against these far more technologically advanced aliens. Many millions of them die. While they would indeed now be defending our freedoms and lives, this would not have happened if not for adherence to an arbitrary, as of yet unjustified rule.
Let's say that we fight back the aliens, against all odds, and they decide to negotiate with us, demanding the United States' entire foreign aid budget as a sort of tithe in exchange for peace. This might directly result in millions of deaths but will stop the war. Alternatively, we keep the money and fight until every last human is dead. Should we accept the terms of the agreement?
I don't have any thoughts on it, as I thought that that was the result of a misunderstanding. Do you mean what are my thoughts on the last sentence?
I think most people would sacrifice a person if the stakes were that high. However, the wisdom of the general rule that noone should be sacrificed for the greater good is also pretty intuitive.
The problem, from a deontological perspective anyways, is whether you can formulate a general rule or maxim that can account for particularly dire circumstances without undermining the force of the command for all other circumstances. In other words is it possible to draw an abstract and general line between the exceptions and the rule.
A consequentialist does not directly have this problem, the consequentialist does need to decide though how to integrate concerns about moral hazard and respect for the individual into their calculation.
Yes, agreed. I myself always leaned naturally towards consequentialism, so the trolley problem has always been relatively straightforward to me. The OP is clearly trying to get at whether or not, or at what point, one will make this exception to the rule of not sacrificing people for the greater good.
That being said, a deontologist could create rules such that the protection of humanity in general takes precedence over the protection of individuals by nesting them. Asimov's Laws of Robotics did this in a simple and concise manner: his Zeroth Law, which says that no robot must harm humanity, supersedes all of the laws protecting individual humans or robots. But the challenge with this approach is resolving the unexpected conflicts that arise from people (or robots) applying the hierarchy of rules in situations far less straightforward than the trolley problem.
My response is that I would pull the lever and sacrifice one life to save more lives, although I think it is a little vulgar to speculate at what threshold. My reasoning is that sometimes good rules that generally apply (do not sacrifice people) need to be broken to effect good consequences, and that to do so is not wrong just for breaking said rules. To choose any alternative - in this case inaction - to pulling the lever is wrong because more people will die than if the lever is pulled. The decision procedure implied by what I just wrote, however, is only useful because the trolley problem is a contrived thought experiment and definitely isn't reflective of how I think we should approach moral problems in our daily lives.
Uuuumm, no. There is a societal concensus where "responsibility" lies. No personal injury lawyer will try to hold a citizen standing next to the lever (or someone who knows how to swim walking along the shoreline of the pond, to use your example) legally "responsible" for the trolley or pond tragedies, not because they (like you) can't concoct a legal (or "logical") argument to do so, rather because no group of 12 citizens would agree with the argument. No, the trolley maintainance people and the individual who pushed the kid are responsible. It is a common error to confuse a missed opportunity for excellence with incompetence or malfeasance.
The reason why I focus on responsibility specifically is that despite your protestations to the contrary, when most answer the trolley problem they use wording such as "I could never pull the level since I wouldn't want to be responsible for the death of an innocent bystander".
As to logical criticism of action or inaction, you're missing why the trolley problem was invented in the first place. It is an example of a situation where a logical argument can be created for both choices, thus why some casually refer to it as a paradox. If it was a choice between one person on one track and five mannequins on the other track, there would be a single logical answer (whereby those who don't choose it could be logically criticized), but no one would care about or repeat such a trivial "problem".
Are you capable of reading? I granted your point about responsibility, saying that the person near the lever would not be literally responsible for the deaths of the people on the track:
Quoting ToothyMaw
Neither was I saying that the bystander is responsible for the death of the drowning child. I was just trying to demonstrate that people often view inaction as being evil too:
Quoting ToothyMaw
You clearly didn't take much time to read and understand what I was saying, as I literally say that they are not causing the bad outcome.
Quoting LuckyR
I don't doubt this. I made no claims about the wording someone might use, and I think you are right. But the point of the OP is clearly focused on whether or not someone's desire to create better consequences might overcome their desire not to be responsible for the death of an innocent bystander. Thus, he asks at what number of lives lost would one pull the lever.
Quoting LuckyR
You are getting the fat man on the bridge vs. diverting the trolley via lever things mixed up with what is in the OP. Unless I'm mistaken the only paradox there is is that people will sometimes intentionally kill the person on the tracks via a lever but are mostly unwilling to push the fat man off the bridge to stop the trolley because that seems more like intentional killing, when really both are clearly intentional.
Quoting LuckyR
Yeah, that's not really a paradox.
Let's say they aren't the most honest, moral beings running around. They certainly wouldn't have any credibility with me. So maybe they were faking, and only wanted us using up our time and resources on this useless task, then they resumed their attack after we gave them the money.
And are we really still managing to send out our foreign aid as we're battling against far more technologically advanced aliens for the gate of the world?
Let's say they demand the USA's entire foreign aid budget in pennies. Maybe they need the metal.
It's not an arbitrary, as of yet unjustified rule. It's how I feel.
I said "let's say" too many times, therefore?
Quoting Patterner
Not important, although I acknowledge it might be approaching absurdity.
Quoting Patterner
It kind of sounded like you were saying it was a rule (perhaps a personal rule?), but whatever.
Quoting Patterner
The difference between your post and mine is that I was trying to go somewhere I find philosophically interesting, whereas you are just throwing up roadblocks.
Not roadblocks so much as I'm just done. No scenario you come up with can possibly be anything but lose/lose, lesser of the evils. I think it's wrong to sacrifice people. Going to absurd lengths to try to trap me, and my addition of absurdities to try to point out your absurdities, isn't going to change that. What if you knew the person to be sacrificed was on the verge of solving world hunger? Or inventing an energy source that would power the entire world forever? Or was making huge strides toward showing the world how to live in greater peace, allowing us to put our time and resources to much better uses? We could go on and on.
Well then have a good day.