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Comment by jdrock | Hacker News Reader

I call BS on the test.

Interesting. You state that Casey Jones should divert the train, yet this will cause the death of the person trapped on the railway siding. This seems to be inconsistent with your belief that it is always wrong to cause another person's death. It is somewhat perplexing that you responded this way, since you do not believe that this course of action is necessiated by any general moral requirement to maximise the happiness of the greatest number of people. More of this later. For now, let's see what you make of the scenario below.

Choosing to let 1 person die so that 5 can live does not mean I find that action moral. It's simply the better of two options.

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That is a moral code. The whole point of the question is whether your code is absolute: can you kill someone if the alternative is worse, or can you absolutely not kill someone regardless of the alternative?

Sometimes the thing that has to die, is my moral code. Of course we must save the most people; of course it is immoral, and my immortal sould will suffer, but I am only one person and its worth it.

That's a pretty simplistic view, no? You don't believe causing a death is different than not preventing other deaths? Or perhaps it is different, but there is a certain moral penalty for letting a person die, and this is less than the moral penalty for letting 5 die? What if instead of 5, it was just a pregnant woman (1.5?)

Admittedly, that question isn't my favorite, as both options are relatively passive. How do you feel about the situations where a more active role is required? Would you push the man over the railing to save 5?

>> It's simply the better of two options.

What if it's pushing a philanthropist onto the rails to save 5 serial killers?

I'm not entirely sure what's the goal of this exercise. I'd imagine that in real life, regardless of who's getting killed, most people would simply let things run their courses since inaction is generally less risky than action.

Then, if confronted, I'd guess most people would probably come up with a justification that was favorable to them (i.e. thay would get them out of trouble's way), not follow some strict ethic model.

Most people will claim to have absolutist morals. They will say that it is wrong to kill someone and that ends do just justify means. What becomes interesting is that almost anyone will display circumstantial morals if confronted with a trade-off like this. The interesting question is at what point do their morals change and why.

My theory is that "killing = bad" is a default canned answer that society says is "correct" and people don't really think about what-if-I-am-faced-with-a-tricky-life-or-death-situation scenarios since these scenarios are not realistic to begin with.

I'm not very convinced that the assumption that people have a fixed moral system is correct. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense (evolutionarily speaking) to optimize for some abstract ideal consistency rather than fitting into a group. As far as living in a society goes, telling your social circle that you shun all forms of human killing is one thing, actually making a life-or-death decision when there are tricky caveats is completely different.

It's simply the better of two options.

You feel this way, but many people will avoid switching the train.

The point of the experiments is to see if (statistically) more or fewer people are willing to switch the train based on the race of the people involved.

You may think its simply of the better of the two options, but other people think that being the person to cause any deaths is simply the better of the two options and its good and useful that we have words like "utilitarianism" and such that let us talk about these differences.

> It's simply the better of two options

And that's why we call it utilitarianism.

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