Moral dilemmas

[Angrboda]

One physcological moral delima often brought up in psychology classes and articals, one I read in Newsweek a few years goes something like this. The point of the article is that there in many cases cannot be a wrong answer.

But paraphrazing the example would go something like this:

There is a speeding individual train car that has disconected from the rest of the train with faild breaks about to pass under a bridge you and a fat guy are standing on. If you push the fat guy off the bridge, it will stop the train and save the 50 people in the car, but the fat guy dies. Or you don't push the guy onto the tracks the 50 people fly off the rails and over a cliff and die, but you don't kill the fat guy. What do you do?

Neither is wrong because the future is still a crap shoot. Say you don't push that fat guy, the 50 die, and then that fat guy goes on to be a cerial killer. Or you do push him, but one of the 50 you save is a kid who grows up to be a ceerial killer.

You have critically misunderstood the nature of the hypothetical in question. In the actual example, the choice is between, a) you are standing by a switch, throwing the switch will divert the train away from killing 5 people and only end up killing 1 (5 people on one track, one person on the other), or, b) pushing a fat guy off a bridge, where he lands on the track, causing the train to stop, thus preventing the death of 5 people further down the track.

The stated point is, that while both throwing the switch and pushing the guy result in identical outcomes (five people saved, one person killed), we have very different moral intuitions about each. Throwing the switch is an easy decision to make. Intentionally pushing someone to their death is not as easy to do (either psychologically, or physically). If the result is the same, why do our minds react to the two as being very different. That is the mystery.

I would argue that the principle of mutatis mutandis has been violated, and the situations are not in fact sufficiently similar in act and outcome for a ceteris paribus to be acknowledged. Imo, the situations aren't sufficiently identical. Still, that's not to say we could not construct a successful hypothetical of this sort in which it was. It seems clear that not pure "rational" outcomes are what feeds the moral bulldog.