RE: Will you share your food (serious question)
January 13, 2018 at 9:47 pm
(This post was last modified: January 13, 2018 at 9:49 pm by Edwardo Piet.)
(January 11, 2018 at 9:34 pm)DLJ Wrote:(January 11, 2018 at 4:06 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: It's very precise in its wording, but it's trying to weed out moral nihilists from the git go. A lot of ethics thought experiments fall flat if there is no moral obligation driving one choice over another. To just see the ideas put plainly (no interactive elements) go here:
https://openborders.info/drowning-child/
or watch this:
Granted. But I'm not a moral nihilist (by their definition - " a moral nihilist - i.e., if you think there's no such thing as right and wrong") and I still don't agree that there is a moral obligation ... as worded, it implies a universal rather than a personal/situational right/wrong.
Had the question been: "Would you rescue the child?" without any of the 'obligation' baggage, my answer would have been "yes".
Incidentally, a variation of this thought experiment was used during a philosophy group meetup I attended in Singapore. The variation being that it was a river and not a shallow pool and there was no doubt that the child was drowning. The speaker stated that you had to be a monster if you didn't dive in to attempt to save the child.
I was quietly adamant that I would not save the child so for nearly an hour I was the 'monster' of the group. Finally someone asked me to defend my position.
"I can't swim", said I. "If I tried, two of us would drown."
My opinion is that there is a moral obligation but I am rarely motivated by morality and care more about the happiness of myself and my friends for entirely selfish amoral reasons. The question would really be "What's in it for me?" or "Will people think I am a good person and therefore be nicer to me if I help this child? Will I be considered a hero?" and "Will people know I let them die if I let them die?" and "Will I worry about people finding out that I let them die and be so wracked by anxiety [most people would mistake this as guilt] that I'd be better off just saving the child to save myself that anxiety?". Stuff like that.
Objectively speaking, it would be morally correct to save the child unless there was some evidence that they would suffer a pain worse than drowning after you saved them if you saved them. I don't know why that would happen though. 99.99999999% of the time it's morally correct to save the child. That doesn't mean you'll do it. Or that you want to do it. Just that you should.
