Trolley Problem/Consistency in Ethics

[The Grand Nudger]

However for a very real world situation.... terrorist have hijacked an airplane, and are redirecting the airplane towards a large city/population group.  Do you shoot down the plane, along with the innocent people on board before it gets there?

Sure do, and then we invade small countries like bloody dominoes as a warning to anyone else who might have been thinking about pulling similar shit (or because we were bored that day).

 Here you are actively killing some to save more.   Why would this be any different from the organ transplant scenario?

We have no other, more ethical, option...as the doctor does..however much he may not want to avail himself of it. We cant save both groups of people, doing nothing consigns them all to death..and sets a dangerous precedent. If, instead, you'd set it up as a hostage trade to more adequately express a similar situation..we've been known to do that - but not when we're pretty sure they;re going to kill the one hostage they're willing to trade for five.

At least not publicly, not officially (lol).

Does an unspoken social obligation outweigh any ethical or moral underpinnings.... I have trouble saying that it does.

Social obligations, by their nature, are the very opposite of unspoken.....we're speaking them with all those fun little morality plays we love so much.  They are expressions of our ethical and moral underpinnings, not something we choose or weigh in their stead.

[vulcanlogician]

Wow.... this is about the best version of the problem, that I have seen.  I think someone mentioned, that in a common form of the dilemma, one is pushing some fat guy onto the tracks.  And at this point, I was fairly confident in my answer... No you can't do that.   Changing it to a switch somehow makes it different.  But why?  The addition of the similar scenario of the doctor and the organ transplants highlights the issue well.  Here, I think it is natural to have more difficulty.  

I'm glad it challenged you. It really challenged me too. That was the intent. On a side note, the OP links to a paper where a professional philosopher puts the two problems side by side and examines differences. I have only breezed over it-- I plan on finishing it tonight though. Just if you were interested.

Also I had seen a couple of answers that where extreme in concrete (literal) thinking. You need to work on your abstract though and thinking through the ideas.

I think a lot of folks were compelled to solve it via practical solutions instead of "laying themselves before the problem." It's really how most people approach problems by default. I'm delighted to see that you picked up on the heart of the issue though.

  However for a very real world situation.... terrorist have hijacked an airplane, and are redirecting the airplane towards a large city/population group.  

Plenty of real-world parallels.

[SteveII]

The thought experiments are not equivalent. In the trolley scenario , you have control and responsibility over the thing that is causing the death(s). In the organ scenario, you don't have control and responsibility over the thing that is causing the deaths. What you have is control over one solution to the problem that may or may not be better than the problem. Nowhere in the organ scenario is there any responsibility to decide. 

To whomever chooses "consistent", that is disturbing, but in line with the morality one can glean from a totally naturalistic/deterministic worldview--which is to say an entirely subjective morality.

I personally would pull the lever to save the lives, but I would NOT conduct the organ transplants.

I agree that the thought experiments are not equivalent, but I disagree as to why. In both scenarios, there is a force which threatens the lives of five people. In both scenarios you can either NOT ACT which will result in the death of five people-- or you can ACT which will save five people but BECAUSE YOU ACTED one person will die. Why do you think you have "control and responsibility" in one situation and not the other? I would say in BOTH situations you have responsibility and (limited) control.

If you are going to argue that you don't have responsibility in the organ scenario, what is it  essentially that makes it different from the runaway trolley?

When I used the word 'responsibility', I meant an immediate, personal decision to throw the lever or not, and therefore responsible for what outcome happens. There is no escape from this responsibility because either way, you were the indirect cause of someone's death. 

In the organ scenario, there are no circumstance that make it your responsibility to decide something because inaction will not make you an indirect cause of someone's death. If you feel you have a responsibility to find a solution, then those feelings are a result of reasoning from a very specific moral system, not of the circumstances.

[Athene]

Wow.... this is about the best version of the problem, that I have seen.  I think someone mentioned, that in a common form of the dilemma, one is pushing some fat guy onto the tracks.  And at this point, I was fairly confident in my answer... No you can't do that.   Changing it to a switch somehow makes it different.  But why?  

To my mind, there's no essential difference between pushing the fat man onto the tracks and flipping the switch. The presence of the switch in the dilemma simply serves to allow for physical (and emotional) distance in completing the same action.

The idea that it makes the action more ethical/moral is little more than a comforting trick of the mind, IMO; An illusion.

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I'm not even sure New York state's depraved indifference law would require anyone to pull the switch or do the surgery.

I'm confident that depraved indifference laws don't require citizens to "intervene" by way of human sacrifice.

[The Grand Nudger]

It modifies desert...as a person who happens upon an unfortunate scenario is not held accountable for the specifics of the situation that they did not engineer.  Only their response to it.

So, for example, grabbing a fat man and tossing him on the tracks is to put an additional person in danger..and if you were going to -throw- a body on the tracks, and that would work...again one wonders why it wouldn't be one's own. People get confused by similarities of numbers, which is how this whole dilemma of comparison was manufactured in the first place. It's 1 or 5 regardless, and that makes it the same. right? No, and no. At least not according to c-ethics (or..really, any credible ethical schema).

Another way to explain this is that..yes, in both cases you may be in whatever sense you choose to take it, responsible for the death of a person..but moral considerations are not a dry accounting of whether or not someone dies. That;s not the question being asked, and so it doesn't serve as a cogent answer, nor will two people dying, 1/1 make every situation in which a person dies equivalent in a moral sense.

[paulpablo]

Wow.... this is about the best version of the problem, that I have seen.  I think someone mentioned, that in a common form of the dilemma, one is pushing some fat guy onto the tracks.  And at this point, I was fairly confident in my answer... No you can't do that.   Changing it to a switch somehow makes it different.  But why?  

To my mind, there's no essential difference between pushing the fat man onto the tracks and flipping the switch. The presence of the switch in the dilemma simply serves to allow for physical (and emotional) distance in completing the same action.

The idea that it makes the action more ethical/moral is little more than a comforting trick of the mind, IMO; An illusion.

I think it's a case of the fat man hypothetical question not making much sense in the real world.  The switch question makes more sense in the real world and it would be the least evil of the two things to do.

If you're just thinking of it like a computer game/programmed hypothetical scenario, as you are asked to do, then it really makes no difference.  It's just a numbers game.  But I think people would have a natural tendency to think of it in real world terms.

[The Grand Nudger]

Even as a pure numbers game one option is quantitatively better than the others.  I think that difficulties with c-ethics as people often express them -are- difficulties with whether or not it's "just a numbers game" - which isn't actually the position of c-ethics anyway...though if we wanted to approach it that way it becomes easier, not more difficult, at least on it's own grounds.

Simple math can hardly be said to be inconsistent, whatever else it may be, lol.

@Vulcan, what are your opinions on ethical pluralism? Perhaps c-ethics isn't the best way to approach either dilemma..but if so, which do you think might make more informative comments in either (or both) of those two hypotheticals?

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Side bar, assuming that some hypotheticals can;t be consistently approached with a singular ethics, could it be that having different people approach the same situation with seperate ethics gives us a more complete picture of all possible ethical ramifications of any given hypothetical?  Could this be qualitatively advantageous to us?  

For example, where c-ethics (or c-ethicists) fail to produce the desired outcome or cannot be applied..perhaps d-ethics (or d-ethicists) pick up the slack and get us the rest of the way.  Or VV, ofc? Not so much superceeding each other, as collaborating.

[bennyboy]

Why are you guys completely ignoring the implied third option? You let the 5 people die, you harvest the organs anyway, you buy a beautiful home for your retirement. All 6 of those fuckers are sheeple, and because you are superior, you will naturally find a way to benefit from this situation.

/reading Ayn Rand

[vulcanlogician]

@Vulcan, what are your opinions on ethical pluralism?  Perhaps c-ethics isn't the best way to approach either dilemma..but if so, which do you think might make more informative comments in either (or both) of those two hypotheticals?

I mentioned my stance on it to you when I first became a member: I am a pluralist because I find each of the monistic theories very compelling. The problem is they are all incomplete; they all miss something basic about ethics. That bothers me. Pluralism seems to offer a way to create some overlap between all the theories--where one fails, another can pick up. I find two theories to be head-and-shoulders above the rest: virtue ethics and hedonistic utilitarianism. These two might form a complete ethics if it were not for the fact that other theories (desire satisfaction, egoism, even natural law) didn't have something important to add--something that the "best" two theories utterly lack. There are also theories I reject (*cough* divine command) but on the whole, most of the theories discussed in my introduction to ethics course presented an indispensible facet of moral reality.

I find myself considering a heuristic of monistic theories, but that seems like a task that might run into problems once I start developing that line of thinking. Right off the bat: how the fuck do you prioritize them?

Side bar, assuming that some hypotheticals can;t be consistently approached with a singular ethics, could it be that having different people approach the same situation with seperate ethics gives us a more complete picture of all possible ethical ramifications of any given hypothetical?  Could this be qualitatively advantageous to us?

For example, where c-ethics (or c-ethicists) fail to produce the desired outcome or cannot be applied..perhaps d-ethics (or d-ethicists) pick up the slack and get us the rest of the way.  Or VV, ofc?  Not so much superseding each other, as collaborating.

That presents some advantages over my heuristic idea. A "collaboration" of monistic theories. But like many philosophers (Plato, Thoreau) I think individuals tend to be more worthy moral agents than groups tend to be (groups never seem to hold themselves accountable, and if they do, it's often because one or two people within spoke up-- not by consensus). But maybe I misunderstand your proposal. You may have not been referring to an actual group of people so much as a "group of deliberative bodies within one's own psyche." Regardless of what you actually meant, I find the idea of collaboration between monistic theories to be more compelling than a heuristic in numerous ways.

I would bring in deontological ethics in more, but its a bit of a weak spot as far as philosophical knowledge of it on my part. It has SOOOOOO many problems, I push it to the back of my study que. Compelling though. And I do have a rudimentary knowledge of it.

I have more to say on the matter, but let me end here so you can respond to what I've said so far.

PS: VV ethics? Don't think I'm familiar....

[The Grand Nudger]

I was remiss in not including a-ethicists...obviously we need them as well to identify lucrative retirement opportunities and novel organ thieving based business models.