Jack's answers to moral dilemmas
Dec. 10th, 2010 04:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackThere are many moral dilemmas of the form "given this unpalatable choice, how would you rate the choices?" Although I'm blessed with rarely facing such hard choices in real life (which does tend to give you a more pragmatic and less idealistic view) I find it interesting to track how my answers change over time.
A typical example would be: "A group of people from your village are hiding from insurgents who will slaughter you all if you're found. You're caring for a patient who has just become delirious and you can't shut them up and their cries are going to bring the soldiers. Do you keep him as quiet as possible and hope the soldiers somehow overlook the group? Or smother him and hope he somehow survives?"
There are many variations on this theme, for instance:
* Are you in a position of authority over the patient?
* Are you in a position of authority over the group?
* Is the dilemma horrendously contrived? (eg. "do you push person X onto the train track to stop a train full of people going over a cliff")
* Are the outcomes presented as certainties or high probabilities?
* Is the patient a volunteer or a soldier? An adult? A child? A baby?
* Does the patient stand a high chance of survival if you're caught? Any chance?
My responses now would generally be:
1. Death is bad.
2. Stuff you do carries more moral weight than stuff you merely don't prevent. (I know this doesn't make sense, but it seems to be how everyone thinks.)
3. You should choose the lesser of two evils. (Some sort of utilitarianism, given the various rankings of the other premises.)
4. "I thought of another way out of the situation" is an interesting tangent, but not an interesting answer to the question. The question is supposed to be "what would you do if there isn't". If you're genuinely unable to imagine that, say so explicitly, don't just keep pointing out "clever" answers.
5. Impinging on people's personal autonomy carries more moral weight. (Imposing a downside or a benefit on someone is worse than someone accepting it consensually.)
6. The moral weights above are deliberately quantified: I don't think I have a good heuristic for saying when one outweighs the other as the question demands, other than sensing an individual situation. Only those you're regularly faced with get rules of thumb.
7. There are great benefits in holding to general ideals as much as possible, even if they break down in situations like this. Even if there are situations where you would abandon pacifism (and I think there are), deliberately downplaying those (to yourself and others) is often an integral part in implementing your pacifism. I am very cautious of self-deception: I think it's better to have a general idea of when you may have to reevaluate your beliefs so you don't become fanatic, but I also think there is a lot to be gained by embracing them and not over-concentrating on their limitations. I think society benefits from a range between idealists and pragmatists, and that it's unfortunately implausible to find a "perfect" moral code which everyone can agree on.
8. However, I think that even if people disagree about many fundamental questions, there are vast, vast swathes of morality where everyone mostly agrees on the answers, even if they have different details, and to some extent society is a game of keeping everyone within that sphere.
A typical example would be: "A group of people from your village are hiding from insurgents who will slaughter you all if you're found. You're caring for a patient who has just become delirious and you can't shut them up and their cries are going to bring the soldiers. Do you keep him as quiet as possible and hope the soldiers somehow overlook the group? Or smother him and hope he somehow survives?"
There are many variations on this theme, for instance:
* Are you in a position of authority over the patient?
* Are you in a position of authority over the group?
* Is the dilemma horrendously contrived? (eg. "do you push person X onto the train track to stop a train full of people going over a cliff")
* Are the outcomes presented as certainties or high probabilities?
* Is the patient a volunteer or a soldier? An adult? A child? A baby?
* Does the patient stand a high chance of survival if you're caught? Any chance?
My responses now would generally be:
1. Death is bad.
2. Stuff you do carries more moral weight than stuff you merely don't prevent. (I know this doesn't make sense, but it seems to be how everyone thinks.)
3. You should choose the lesser of two evils. (Some sort of utilitarianism, given the various rankings of the other premises.)
4. "I thought of another way out of the situation" is an interesting tangent, but not an interesting answer to the question. The question is supposed to be "what would you do if there isn't". If you're genuinely unable to imagine that, say so explicitly, don't just keep pointing out "clever" answers.
5. Impinging on people's personal autonomy carries more moral weight. (Imposing a downside or a benefit on someone is worse than someone accepting it consensually.)
6. The moral weights above are deliberately quantified: I don't think I have a good heuristic for saying when one outweighs the other as the question demands, other than sensing an individual situation. Only those you're regularly faced with get rules of thumb.
7. There are great benefits in holding to general ideals as much as possible, even if they break down in situations like this. Even if there are situations where you would abandon pacifism (and I think there are), deliberately downplaying those (to yourself and others) is often an integral part in implementing your pacifism. I am very cautious of self-deception: I think it's better to have a general idea of when you may have to reevaluate your beliefs so you don't become fanatic, but I also think there is a lot to be gained by embracing them and not over-concentrating on their limitations. I think society benefits from a range between idealists and pragmatists, and that it's unfortunately implausible to find a "perfect" moral code which everyone can agree on.
8. However, I think that even if people disagree about many fundamental questions, there are vast, vast swathes of morality where everyone mostly agrees on the answers, even if they have different details, and to some extent society is a game of keeping everyone within that sphere.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-10 04:46 pm (UTC)In practice implementing that as a solution is probably pretty hard to do (there was an NCIS episode about that actually) and I'd probably be scrabbling for "clever" ways out.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-10 06:40 pm (UTC)Indeed. It's easy to imagine it would be pretty certain, but most people do react very differently when there is a chance of survival however small and when something is explicitly deadly.
saving N lives where N>1 is more important than loosing 1 life
That's a pretty sensible extrapolation of maximising benefit and minimising loss. But most people actually disagree. For instance, if someone else has a shiny toy, and you would get more pleasure from it, is it ok to just take it? Or is that wrong? I think pure utilitarianism produces all sorts of paradoxes like this.
People try to justify it by pointing out other downsides of the "unacceptable" position, but I think it generally boils down to some approximation of my #2 and #5.
Most people would agree it's right to save N people rather than save 1 person (all else being equal). But most people would NOT murder someone if they had two healthy organs that let two other people live. They would murder someone to save some larger number of people, but only reluctantly.
This is the difference from pure utility function I was trying to encapsulate. And I think I agree with it. And it is to some extent reflected in law.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-10 07:40 pm (UTC)On the other hand if Bill Gates has a big shiny pile of money and he can save quite possibly millions of lives by giving it away then I think it is a moral imperative for him to do that.
If there's an option to "kill any one of these many people to save these other two people" I think that's less clear. Because there isn't any good way (IMO) to pick WHICH person, and perhaps you could find someone conveniently already dead to take organs from. But if I were 100% convinced that killing myself would save more than one other person's life then I think I SHOULD do it, I don't know if I COULD, but that's not the same.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 10:37 am (UTC)People are somewhat uncomfortable if their moral system dictates they should make a sacrifice for other people, but I think most people would agree it's flat-out wrong to impose that choice on someone else!
I agree with the seeming-logic of a more straight-forward utilitarian position, but I think (a) there's no point endorsing a moral standard we will never keep, it's better to pick some more sensible compromise (eg. giving 30% to charity) and (b) it produces consequences (like murdering people) that I, and most people, think are Just Wrong, and the moral system should agree with what we think.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 11:44 am (UTC)The contrived situation that we begun with asks for the death of a specific individual for a specific reason, which I think can sometimes be right but not very often.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 12:09 pm (UTC):)
I also think it is almost always wrong to kill another person
I think everyone agrees, regardless of their moral system, it's normally wrong. And most people (with some notable exceptions) reluctantly agree with the example in the hypothetical.
But you argued it was purely a matter of "more lives">"fewer lives" whereas I put extra negative weight on "killing someone against their will" vs "letting someone die". And now I'm not sure if you're saying what I thought you were saying, or not.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 01:09 pm (UTC)I also think it is somewhat wrong to go around hoarding your stuff (and to a lesser extent your life) when you have good information that not doing so would materially help others to live. And that forcing other people to give up their life (and to a lesser extent their stuff) on the basis of helping people is wrong. And that the second is more wrong than the first.
I think that the difference between "this is a stick up we're taking all your $$$ to help starving orphans in Africa" and "I'm killing you because you are endangering all our lives" is that in the second case there is a specific reason why I am killing you, whereas in the first case we have made some arbitrary selection amongst a vast number of possible individuals (too vast to get to them all).
I think it's worth thinking about whether things "everyone does" are morally wrong; even if there's no clear way to encourage them to be morally right (and forcing them to be so would also be wrong). For a start we all (inevitably) make personal judgments of other people's behavior; and sometimes I want to say "well, there's nothing I can do to stop you doing X but I think X is very wrong, and on that basis I think that you are a bad person and I don't want to hang out with you".
no subject
Date: 2010-12-10 08:48 pm (UTC)With the supplies I have available in my imagination's version, I would duct tape the delirious person's mouth closed after giving them a couple shots of gin. Chances are pretty good that I would be the one making the decision because people inherently defer to me in a crisis. (I have absolutely no clue why since no one defers to me normally, the first time I was surprised and almost flubbed.)
I don't believe in people's innate right to make noise and be heard. I think it's a good idea that governments have laws protecting that, but from a sociological standpoint I don't think that is a component of inalienable rights.
So for other moral dilemmas I might choose differently, but the one where $loud_person will cause $catastrophic_result, my choice is always against the loud person.
Most of my complaints about the dominant religion where I live is that most of the practitioners seem actively immoral to me, saying things like they would step in to prevent assault of a fellow believer but a non-believer "deserves it". So my only concern about my attitude against loud people is that I am doing the same thing... Quiet people are obviously better because I am one and I should do what I can to save the people like me first.
What I find interesting when I read these responses to moral dilemmas is how much whether the answerer identifies with people in the question and how that affects the outcomes they choose.
I like the ones like where they ask a man in western Texas whether he would save the other passengers on a train in Africa and how that answer changes when the train is chartered for a safari trip his church organized. And again when they ask the question with visual aids and what cues affect his answer.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 11:37 am (UTC)I think most people think this too much, however, I think there is a moral principle there (see my reply to illusive_shell in the other thread on LJ).
Most of my complaints about the dominant religion where I live is that most of the practitioners seem actively immoral to me
Yeah. I am unsurprised. Most people -- even people who are making a genuine effort to be moral and unbiased, let alone people who feel they've fulfilled their obligations by doing religious stuff and aren't making a further effort -- are a lot worse than they think at actually showing altruism.
that answer changes when the train is chartered for a safari trip his church organized.
Yeah. It's very embarrassing, because you don't _think_ it should make a difference, and yet that sort of thing practically always tips you into noticing the possibility to do altruism, or glossing over it.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-10 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 10:55 am (UTC)I did my best to give an example which would be fairly general, and yet hopefully as least triggering to people thinking of actual examples as possible. Actual examples really throw it into very very stark relief.