Trolley cars
May. 2nd, 2013 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
foliumnondefluetI was watching a lecture on morality by prof. Sandel when some questions occurred to me (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY&feature=share&list=PL597DA5F21A55365E)
Most students chose the option to divert the trolley on a track with only one person, thereby avoiding five. But most students didn't want to save the five by pushing a fat man in front of the trolley car.
Sandel is a Kantian, so he theorizes that pushing the fat man in front of the trolley is "using a conscious entity as a means" and we instinctively shy away from that. But what intrigued me was the (all to brief) explanation from one of the very few students who didn't want to divert the trolley in the first scenario - in my opinion it was basically a similarly Kantian argument; the student said that by diverting the trolley you are sacrificing the one to save the five, and that is something one should categorically never do. Sandel asks, almost sarcastically "even if it means five people are killed instead?" yet doesn't ask this from people who don't want to push the fat man.
Personally I think Kant's maxim is flawed because it's totally fuzzy what "treating a person only as an end in itself" even means. I think you can *always* find a perspective that says you're using someone "as a means". So I was probably not going to be convinced by that anyway, but I think the student's position shows how subjective and arbitrary Kant-like arguments are applied.
An interesting idea then occurred to me: look at what the choices *avoid* rather than what they select. In the first scenario people don't actually choose to kill the one person; they choose to avoid running over the five others. What of the second scenario? You avoid either (1) pushing the fat man in front of the trolley, killing him; or (2) standing by and doing nothing while five people die.
I think we can explain the reaction to the second scenario by stating that people would vastly prefer to stand by and do nothing rather than get involved, deciding who lives or dies, and run the risk of criticism for it. The difference with the first scenario is I think that there, we are said to be at the steering wheel of the trolley, and one could argue that steering one way or the other is anyway our choice so we can't really escape blame either way. But if we DID push the fat man, the trolley would stop, the fat man would be dead, the five would never know they were in danger, and it'd be left to us to explain why pushing someone onto the tracks seemed like a good idea.
It seems to me that the student who objected to diverting the car in the first scenario basically declined responsibility for steering, he wanted to let the car run as it would rather than bear the moral consequences of making a choice. He preferred to be a bystander, it seems.
So I don't think this shows that we somehow instinctively obey Kant's moral maxims. Rather I think it may show our penchant for what is called the "bystander effect".
But knowing that humans have a proven tendency to shirk responsibility in emergencies, what are we to make of our instinctive reluctance to push the fat man in front of the train, thereby saving five lives? Can we trust it as a "moral intuition" telling us what's right? Or are we merely finding justifications for our unwillingness to do the right thing and take responsibility for it?
Most students chose the option to divert the trolley on a track with only one person, thereby avoiding five. But most students didn't want to save the five by pushing a fat man in front of the trolley car.
Sandel is a Kantian, so he theorizes that pushing the fat man in front of the trolley is "using a conscious entity as a means" and we instinctively shy away from that. But what intrigued me was the (all to brief) explanation from one of the very few students who didn't want to divert the trolley in the first scenario - in my opinion it was basically a similarly Kantian argument; the student said that by diverting the trolley you are sacrificing the one to save the five, and that is something one should categorically never do. Sandel asks, almost sarcastically "even if it means five people are killed instead?" yet doesn't ask this from people who don't want to push the fat man.
Personally I think Kant's maxim is flawed because it's totally fuzzy what "treating a person only as an end in itself" even means. I think you can *always* find a perspective that says you're using someone "as a means". So I was probably not going to be convinced by that anyway, but I think the student's position shows how subjective and arbitrary Kant-like arguments are applied.
An interesting idea then occurred to me: look at what the choices *avoid* rather than what they select. In the first scenario people don't actually choose to kill the one person; they choose to avoid running over the five others. What of the second scenario? You avoid either (1) pushing the fat man in front of the trolley, killing him; or (2) standing by and doing nothing while five people die.
I think we can explain the reaction to the second scenario by stating that people would vastly prefer to stand by and do nothing rather than get involved, deciding who lives or dies, and run the risk of criticism for it. The difference with the first scenario is I think that there, we are said to be at the steering wheel of the trolley, and one could argue that steering one way or the other is anyway our choice so we can't really escape blame either way. But if we DID push the fat man, the trolley would stop, the fat man would be dead, the five would never know they were in danger, and it'd be left to us to explain why pushing someone onto the tracks seemed like a good idea.
It seems to me that the student who objected to diverting the car in the first scenario basically declined responsibility for steering, he wanted to let the car run as it would rather than bear the moral consequences of making a choice. He preferred to be a bystander, it seems.
So I don't think this shows that we somehow instinctively obey Kant's moral maxims. Rather I think it may show our penchant for what is called the "bystander effect".
But knowing that humans have a proven tendency to shirk responsibility in emergencies, what are we to make of our instinctive reluctance to push the fat man in front of the train, thereby saving five lives? Can we trust it as a "moral intuition" telling us what's right? Or are we merely finding justifications for our unwillingness to do the right thing and take responsibility for it?
Also, in real life trolley malfunctions almost always lead to less forward motion, not more.
Date: 2013-05-03 12:13 am (UTC)I think this might be more clear in the related thought experiment wherein the town elders have the opportunity to frame a connectionless drifter for a series of grisly murders, even though they know that the real serial killer was a respected and beloved pillar of the community who recently passed away, because they also know that the truth would tear the community apart. This is closer to things that actually happen in real smoky room decision making, and the consequences of the coverup are not just the death of the drifter but establishing that this is how things are done 'round these parts, that the consequence-related calculations of the human beings in power are absolutely the most important factor in decision making, and if they're sure that, say, truth-based riots will be worse than the death of an innocent and the well-known complications that arise from webs of lies, than by gum that's how things should be done.
And even though people who hear these thought experiments might not immediately think of it in these terms, I'll bet that their resistance to the allegedly consequentialist right answer would go away if the scenario didn't reek of these longer-term societal consequences. To see if this is the case you'd have interview people without relying on the usual philosophy strategy of just announcing "assume that [normal consequence] doesn't apply, because [shaky reason]" (e.g., how the prisoner's dilemma setup always claims that there will be no future interaction or consequences beyond those of the game, exactly the opposite of how it would really work with people who commit crimes together), as intuition is about as good with those disclaimers as your imagination is with not thinking about bananas. But you can certainly construct weirder scenarios that encourage people to think differently - for instance, maybe the actor is a minor god or a restless spirit or something.
Re: Also, in real life trolley malfunctions almost always lead to less forward motion, not more.
Date: 2013-05-03 05:21 am (UTC)I agree that the hypothetical stories are very unrealistic, particularly in the way they assume perfect knowledge of consequences is possible - you somehow know for certain that the 5 people won't be able to get away, that the fat man will stop the trolley, that a meteor won't impact two seconds later, that the 5 people aren't actually terrorists preparing a bombing, etc.
I also agree that many supposed examples of the bad consequences of consequentialismare poorly thought out, usually by assuming a very narrow view on the consequences and then rejecting it because of longer-term bad consequences, like you said. My own main objection to consequentialism is that it's insufficient by itself - you must rely on other values to judge which outcome is "better" or you end up in infinite regress, and I think it may often be used to disguise which of these other values are being applied. A secondary objection is that it only really works in hindsight, and perhaps not even then; people argue that going back in time to kill Hitler may actually make things worse...