A general response to the responses to this fable.
The story ends where it ends. It is fiction, so there is no more to it than the story itself. It does not say what the man did. Anyone continuing it or adding further details, whether convenient or inconvenient, is writing their own fanfiction of the story to express their own response to the hypothetical.
There are two obvious continuations: “The decision was clear, he told himself, and walked on”, and “The decision was clear, he told himself, and waded into the pond.”[1] All further elaboration would be adding detail to make the story come out the way one would like.
For a lower stakes version of this story, consider the highly-paid lawyer who donates some time to working at a soup kitchen. This is a standard example in EA of Ineffective Altruism. The lawyer should instead (it is said) work those hours at lawyer rates and donate the money to do more good, or accept that he is working in the soup kitchen for the warm fuzzies, not to do all the good that he might. Is this different from the high-flying charity fund-raiser who can be more effective if he passes by the drowning girl? If he saves her, should he take care to be mindful that he is only doing it for the fuzzies, a concession to his imperfection, a necessary evil undertaken only to preserve his effectiveness?
I find myself somewhat disappointed that the scenario and the response don’t seem to have much to say. I actually thought the original scenario was meant as a thinly-veiled scathing critique of naive utilitarianism. For any non-psychopath who is actually in the scenario, saving the drowning girl doesn’t require any moral argumentation, and I wouldn’t feel safe being in community with anyone who sincerely preferred the other ending.
I think when people first discover rationalism and effective altruism, they often descend into a valley of learning to “shut up and multiply” and casting their intuitions aside. It’s very dangerous to remain in that valley without gaining humility about the limits of those tools. To be one of the good guys, you do have to rejoin human society and continue to love people in normal ways, and that isn’t only about one’s own personal warm fuzzies.
The neutrality of your follow-up reveals the original scenario as something like a scaffold upon which to hang one’s perspective and observe other perspectives being hung. The original example leaves me with a lingering itch, though, because the alternate perspective is not something that anyone should be encouraged to entertain.
I gave no resolution of the problem raised by this fable, because I do not have one.
Besides the decision the man is faced with, the story raises a deeper problem about morality. As far as I have seen in the literature, philosophical or theological, no-one has a solution. I shall call it the Problem of Totalisation.
Peter Singer preaches totalising morality. “The Most Good You Can Do”, to quote the title of one of his books, is the good that you must do. That good (he argues) must weigh everyone everywhere equally. The little girl in danger of drowning before your eyes is worth exactly the same as every child everywhere in danger of death. “The Life You Can Save” (another of his books) is the life you must save. To fail to do all you can to save all the people you can is morally equivalent to passing by the drowning girl. (Bought a new car? How many dead children did it cost?) You should not value your own children any more highly than a starving child on the other side of the world that you will never see and whose fate you will never know. He who would be Good must think of nothing else, do nothing else.
This conflicts with almost everyone’s intuitions. It conflicts with yours. It conflicts with mine. But who will argue against altruism? Who will argue, as inspirationally as Singer, that duty is bounded, that I do not have to do all the good that I can, that I will not sacrifice everything to the egregore Tutulma, and not merely as a grudging concession to my frailty? That no-one can live up to the demand is, for Singer, no refutation. “Yes,” he says (imagine the Chad YES meme here), “it is demanding.” Failing to live up to the standard is just that, a failure.
So there is the problem. Meanwhile, I don’t let myself get hijacked by clever words just because I don’t have cleverer words to set against them.
The little girl in danger of drowning before your eyes is worth exactly the same as every child everywhere in danger of death. To fail to do all you can to save all the people you can is morally equivalent to passing by the drowning girl.
The former does not imply the latter. That’s my point here, is that despite their lives having equal worth, the situations are not equivalent. Likewise, the “large man” variation of the trolley problem is not an equivalent scenario to the original. If the situations were equivalent, they would have equivalent effects. But they do not have equivalent effects. The alternative choices are not felt the same way, and they are not perceived the same way. They do not affect the actors or onlookers the same way, therefore the effect is not the same. The effects are not equivalent, meaning the outcome is not equivalent, so the choices can’t be equivalent.
For a taste of this:
Wouldn’t walking past the drowning girl harden your heart against all manner of clear and present suffering, and cause distant onlookers to condemn you, perhaps permanently ruining your reputation? Wouldn’t pushing a man off a bridge land you in prison and give you nightmares for the rest of your life, or make you more willing to take a life in the future for lesser reasons?
Any argument that these scenarios should be equivalent is analogous to a physics student proclaiming that cows “ought to be” spherical. When we do physics, we strip out a tremendous amount of detail to simplify our calculations. We turn it into math. If our assumptions are correct, the loss of detail won’t significantly change the final result, and we can turn the math back into a prediction about physics.
From the standpoint of consequentialism, any moral philosophy that creates these equivalencies is incorrect, in an objective, predictive sense. Humans are not spherical cows in a moral vacuum. When a scenario is presented that adds the atmosphere back in, we do not get to continue with our simplified assumptions without consequence. Human psychology is a very important part of human morality, and ignoring its role doesn’t just produce counter-intuitive results, it produces bad predictions, which if acted upon can have devastating consequences.
In the scenario presented, anyone choosing not to save the drowning girl in a real life version of this situation would be a deeply rotten person who I would not feel safe being around, and that feeling would correspond to a calibrated prediction about the type of behavior I should expect them to engage in in the future.
The scenario is not necessary to argue that it is good to do good in the world that you cannot see. But it can be used to justify doing evil.
A general response to the responses to this fable.
The story ends where it ends. It is fiction, so there is no more to it than the story itself. It does not say what the man did. Anyone continuing it or adding further details, whether convenient or inconvenient, is writing their own fanfiction of the story to express their own response to the hypothetical.
There are two obvious continuations: “The decision was clear, he told himself, and walked on”, and “The decision was clear, he told himself, and waded into the pond.”[1] All further elaboration would be adding detail to make the story come out the way one would like.
For a lower stakes version of this story, consider the highly-paid lawyer who donates some time to working at a soup kitchen. This is a standard example in EA of Ineffective Altruism. The lawyer should instead (it is said) work those hours at lawyer rates and donate the money to do more good, or accept that he is working in the soup kitchen for the warm fuzzies, not to do all the good that he might. Is this different from the high-flying charity fund-raiser who can be more effective if he passes by the drowning girl? If he saves her, should he take care to be mindful that he is only doing it for the fuzzies, a concession to his imperfection, a necessary evil undertaken only to preserve his effectiveness?
Regarding types of response to hypotheticals:
“Don’t fight the hypothetical!”
The Least Convenient Possible World.
“Do fight the hypothetical!”
“Question the hypothetical!”
Steelmanning.
“Against Devil’s Advocacy.”
Tagging those who commented: @Haiku, @Roman Malov, @localdeity, @Szeth, @Sting.
The latter continuation has something in common with Huckleberry Finn’s decision whether to betray an escaped slave. ↩︎
I find myself somewhat disappointed that the scenario and the response don’t seem to have much to say. I actually thought the original scenario was meant as a thinly-veiled scathing critique of naive utilitarianism. For any non-psychopath who is actually in the scenario, saving the drowning girl doesn’t require any moral argumentation, and I wouldn’t feel safe being in community with anyone who sincerely preferred the other ending.
I think when people first discover rationalism and effective altruism, they often descend into a valley of learning to “shut up and multiply” and casting their intuitions aside. It’s very dangerous to remain in that valley without gaining humility about the limits of those tools. To be one of the good guys, you do have to rejoin human society and continue to love people in normal ways, and that isn’t only about one’s own personal warm fuzzies.
The neutrality of your follow-up reveals the original scenario as something like a scaffold upon which to hang one’s perspective and observe other perspectives being hung. The original example leaves me with a lingering itch, though, because the alternate perspective is not something that anyone should be encouraged to entertain.
I gave no resolution of the problem raised by this fable, because I do not have one.
Besides the decision the man is faced with, the story raises a deeper problem about morality. As far as I have seen in the literature, philosophical or theological, no-one has a solution. I shall call it the Problem of Totalisation.
Peter Singer preaches totalising morality. “The Most Good You Can Do”, to quote the title of one of his books, is the good that you must do. That good (he argues) must weigh everyone everywhere equally. The little girl in danger of drowning before your eyes is worth exactly the same as every child everywhere in danger of death. “The Life You Can Save” (another of his books) is the life you must save. To fail to do all you can to save all the people you can is morally equivalent to passing by the drowning girl. (Bought a new car? How many dead children did it cost?) You should not value your own children any more highly than a starving child on the other side of the world that you will never see and whose fate you will never know. He who would be Good must think of nothing else, do nothing else.
This conflicts with almost everyone’s intuitions. It conflicts with yours. It conflicts with mine. But who will argue against altruism? Who will argue, as inspirationally as Singer, that duty is bounded, that I do not have to do all the good that I can, that I will not sacrifice everything to the egregore Tutulma, and not merely as a grudging concession to my frailty? That no-one can live up to the demand is, for Singer, no refutation. “Yes,” he says (imagine the Chad YES meme here), “it is demanding.” Failing to live up to the standard is just that, a failure.
So there is the problem. Meanwhile, I don’t let myself get hijacked by clever words just because I don’t have cleverer words to set against them.
The former does not imply the latter. That’s my point here, is that despite their lives having equal worth, the situations are not equivalent. Likewise, the “large man” variation of the trolley problem is not an equivalent scenario to the original. If the situations were equivalent, they would have equivalent effects. But they do not have equivalent effects. The alternative choices are not felt the same way, and they are not perceived the same way. They do not affect the actors or onlookers the same way, therefore the effect is not the same. The effects are not equivalent, meaning the outcome is not equivalent, so the choices can’t be equivalent.
For a taste of this: Wouldn’t walking past the drowning girl harden your heart against all manner of clear and present suffering, and cause distant onlookers to condemn you, perhaps permanently ruining your reputation? Wouldn’t pushing a man off a bridge land you in prison and give you nightmares for the rest of your life, or make you more willing to take a life in the future for lesser reasons?
Any argument that these scenarios should be equivalent is analogous to a physics student proclaiming that cows “ought to be” spherical. When we do physics, we strip out a tremendous amount of detail to simplify our calculations. We turn it into math. If our assumptions are correct, the loss of detail won’t significantly change the final result, and we can turn the math back into a prediction about physics.
From the standpoint of consequentialism, any moral philosophy that creates these equivalencies is incorrect, in an objective, predictive sense. Humans are not spherical cows in a moral vacuum. When a scenario is presented that adds the atmosphere back in, we do not get to continue with our simplified assumptions without consequence. Human psychology is a very important part of human morality, and ignoring its role doesn’t just produce counter-intuitive results, it produces bad predictions, which if acted upon can have devastating consequences.
In the scenario presented, anyone choosing not to save the drowning girl in a real life version of this situation would be a deeply rotten person who I would not feel safe being around, and that feeling would correspond to a calibrated prediction about the type of behavior I should expect them to engage in in the future.
The scenario is not necessary to argue that it is good to do good in the world that you cannot see. But it can be used to justify doing evil.