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.
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.