Do you expect an actual consequentialist human to do better?
Another interesting question is how all these consequentialitsts who insist that pushing the fat man is the right thing to do would react if they met someone who has actually followed their injunctions in practice. It seems to me that as soon as they’re out of the armchair, people’s inner virtue ethicist takes over, no matter how much their philosophy attempts to deny the relevance of his voice!
A real-world example would be a mountain climber who cut the rope that his partner was attached to, because if he didn’t, both people would have fallen and died. If I met a mountain climber who did that, I wouldn’t react negatively, any more than I would to someone who killed in self-defense.
That’s not a very good analogy. One could argue that by engaging in a mountain-climbing expedition, you voluntarily accept certain extraordinary risks, and the partner merely got unlucky with his own share of that risk. Whereas one of the essential premises in the fat man/trolley problem is that the fat man is a neutral passerby, completely innocent of the whole mess.
So, the real question is if you’d be so favorably inclined towards a mountain climber who, in order to save multiple lives, killed a completely unrelated random individual who was not at all entangled with their trouble.
That’s a good point. What about the following scenario: some crazy philosopher holds A and B at gunpoint and forces them to go mountain climbing. They do, and A starts to slip. B realizes he has to cut the rope or he’ll fall also. In this case, A didn’t voluntarily accept any risk. I’d still be favorably inclined to B.
Hm… according to my intuitions, this example features another important premise that is lacking in the original fat man/trolley problem—namely, a culprit who willingly and maliciously brought about the problematic situation. Going by my intuitive feeling, it turns out that in such scenarios, I’m much more inclined to look favorably at hard-headed consequentialist decisions by people caught in the mess against their will, apparently because I tend to place all the blame on the main culprit.
Note that this is just an impromptu report of my introspection, not an attempt at a coherent discussion of the issue. I’ll definitely need to think about this a bit more.
This is reminding me of some long discussions of “The Cold Equations”, a short story which is an effort to set up a situation where an ideally sympathetic person (pretty young woman with pleasant personality) has to be killed for utilitarian reasons.
The consensus (after decades of poking at the story) is that it may not be possible to rig the story to get the emotional effect and have it make rational sense.
I’m not absolutely certain about this—what if the girl had been the first stowaway rather than the nth, so that there wasn’t as good a reason to know that it shouldn’t be so easy for stowaways to get on ships?
If I remember correctly, she still would have died even if she hadn’t been jettisoned—the ship would have crashed and she would hardly walk away from that. That makes her unsalvageable. In standard trolley problems I don’t switch tracks, but if there were a way to switch the track so the train killed only one of the same five people it would already have killed, that person is unsalvageable and can be singled out to save the salvageable.
The SciFi Channel usually does a pretty poor job at making original movies, but their adaptation of “The Cold Equations” was pretty good, covering most of the problems with the original story. The pilot and the girl frantically look around for excess mass to jettison, and find some, but it’s not enough. The issue of what measures were taken to stop people from stowing away simply weren’t discussed; she’s there, and they have to deal with it. And at the last minute, the pilot does offer to sacrifice himself to save the girl, but she refuses to let him.
thomblake:
Another interesting question is how all these consequentialitsts who insist that pushing the fat man is the right thing to do would react if they met someone who has actually followed their injunctions in practice. It seems to me that as soon as they’re out of the armchair, people’s inner virtue ethicist takes over, no matter how much their philosophy attempts to deny the relevance of his voice!
A real-world example would be a mountain climber who cut the rope that his partner was attached to, because if he didn’t, both people would have fallen and died. If I met a mountain climber who did that, I wouldn’t react negatively, any more than I would to someone who killed in self-defense.
That’s not a very good analogy. One could argue that by engaging in a mountain-climbing expedition, you voluntarily accept certain extraordinary risks, and the partner merely got unlucky with his own share of that risk. Whereas one of the essential premises in the fat man/trolley problem is that the fat man is a neutral passerby, completely innocent of the whole mess.
So, the real question is if you’d be so favorably inclined towards a mountain climber who, in order to save multiple lives, killed a completely unrelated random individual who was not at all entangled with their trouble.
That’s a good point. What about the following scenario: some crazy philosopher holds A and B at gunpoint and forces them to go mountain climbing. They do, and A starts to slip. B realizes he has to cut the rope or he’ll fall also. In this case, A didn’t voluntarily accept any risk. I’d still be favorably inclined to B.
Hm… according to my intuitions, this example features another important premise that is lacking in the original fat man/trolley problem—namely, a culprit who willingly and maliciously brought about the problematic situation. Going by my intuitive feeling, it turns out that in such scenarios, I’m much more inclined to look favorably at hard-headed consequentialist decisions by people caught in the mess against their will, apparently because I tend to place all the blame on the main culprit.
Note that this is just an impromptu report of my introspection, not an attempt at a coherent discussion of the issue. I’ll definitely need to think about this a bit more.
This is reminding me of some long discussions of “The Cold Equations”, a short story which is an effort to set up a situation where an ideally sympathetic person (pretty young woman with pleasant personality) has to be killed for utilitarian reasons.
The consensus (after decades of poking at the story) is that it may not be possible to rig the story to get the emotional effect and have it make rational sense.
I’m not absolutely certain about this—what if the girl had been the first stowaway rather than the nth, so that there wasn’t as good a reason to know that it shouldn’t be so easy for stowaways to get on ships?
If I remember correctly, she still would have died even if she hadn’t been jettisoned—the ship would have crashed and she would hardly walk away from that. That makes her unsalvageable. In standard trolley problems I don’t switch tracks, but if there were a way to switch the track so the train killed only one of the same five people it would already have killed, that person is unsalvageable and can be singled out to save the salvageable.
You’re right.
The SciFi Channel usually does a pretty poor job at making original movies, but their adaptation of “The Cold Equations” was pretty good, covering most of the problems with the original story. The pilot and the girl frantically look around for excess mass to jettison, and find some, but it’s not enough. The issue of what measures were taken to stop people from stowing away simply weren’t discussed; she’s there, and they have to deal with it. And at the last minute, the pilot does offer to sacrifice himself to save the girl, but she refuses to let him.