Would You Kill the Fat Man? [pdf]
utilitarianism.com
utilitarianism.com
The answer is this: morality is not a rational set of rules. It appears this way but that is an illusion. The illusion feels so real that many people believe morality is 100 percent learned and attempt to codify it into a logical framework. The existence of this moral dilemma of the fat man is proof that morality is not consistent nor is it learned and that all attempts at codification are in vain.
Morality at its essence is a set of random competing instincts making us feel certain things are "right" and other things are "wrong". Usually these instincts are aligned but certain edge case situations cause our moral instincts to become at odds. The moral dilemma of the fat man is one such edge case.
We have one instinct telling us that thou shalt not directly kill or push the man off the bridge. We have another instinct telling us there's a logical numbers game of saving more people if we push the fat man. When those two instincts are at odds it causes this moral dilemma. We will not push the fat man but we will pull the lever. The logical consequence is the same but our instincts lead us to prefer one over the other.
These instincts were not created to make sense. They were evolved via natural selection in the plains of prehistoric Africa. For survival humans never needed a logically consistent set of rules to survive... they dont even need to understand the rules. They just need a set of behaviors that will help them survive. And in the end that is all morality is. Just a set of random behaviors that exist because of natural selection.
Many people are actually vehemently against this reality. They wish to think of morality as a higher plane of thinking with internal logical consistency. They are wrong. Morality is an arbitrary set of inconsistent rules that directs human behavior for the sole purpose of survival. All else is illusion.
This question of the fat man exists because we misunderstood an aspect of reality. We misinterpreted the true nature of what morality is and we thus asked an irrelevant question thinking that it's some sort of deep philosophical mystery.
I agree, but the number and calibre of modern thinkers who have objective moralism leanings is interesting.
I suspect that it's because if you give up objective moralism you also risk giving up some amount of power/influence/purpose.
But morality and "me" feels to be one and the same so it's harder for people to believe that it's just something akin to your hunger instinct. Examining the moral conflict helps segregate the concept of morality as separate as we are able to then identify the logical inconsistencies within our own moral framework.
I think you've actually got close to the issue, but obscured it by referring to the action as "directly kill". The real issue, as I see it, isn't to it's the choice of killing to save, it's about being complicit in that person's death.
By choosing to do nothing, your conscience is clear because although you might have saved some people from dying by taking action, you haven't done anything to cause the death. I think most people would still feel morally guilty for not acting, however if you had chosen to kill someone, even if it saved others, you could be found legally guilty for murder if it went to court.
Part of the point of having so many different variations of this problem is that it allows you to probe the edges of your own value system. For instance, the variant with the plane that's lost power and is going to crash somewhere, the pilot choosing to go to somewhere less populated isn't choosing to kill anyone, they're trying to minimise risk by aiming for somewhere that's generally less populated. By going for a less populated area, there's more chance that they might be able to even avoid any ground deaths, and even better, more likely they could find somewhere where the landing might be gentler and minimise on-board deaths too. But in any case, even if this went to court, it'd be manslaughter rather than murder, because there weren't any individuals that he had identified and decided that their deaths were acceptable.
Personally, I'm not sure I'd even pull the lever knowing that it would take someone's life because for me the moral guilt of participating in one innocent person's death would be worse than the moral guilt of not saving a larger number of other innocent people's deaths. It'd be a different situation if it was a choice of e.g. one armed person and 5 potential victims, but even then I don't think I would be able to choose to kill the aggressor and would only take action if there was a non-lethal option for incapacitating them that didn't put me at great risk of also becoming a victim. Obviously, the real solution if there was sufficient time, is to summon the police and let them take the moral and legal decision and consequences for it.
No the point isn't to probe your value system in this way.
There are two points to this.
1. The first point is to show inconsistency and irrationality within morality itself. It's to show how random and arbitrary these moral instincts are.
2. Given how consistent the choice is across populations it shows that our moral system is biological. An irrational and inconsistent set of instincts that is biological and genetic as the situation has the same response across different cultures.
From these two points, the final point is ultimately that there is no point. Morality is an arbitrary set of biological instincts like hunger or pain. There is no overarching deeper philosophical meaning. Your wasting your time trying to probe the depths of morality just like if you tried to find the deeper philosophical meaning behind your hunger instinct. Pointless. It reduces morality to nothing. It is an instinct like hunger... Nothing more.
There are many examples where people from countries or even the same country but a different period of time have wildly different moral values - just consider slavery, war etiquette, polygamy, cannibalism, eating certain kinds of animals, the death penalty, abortion, socialism, welfare state, age of consent, etc... In all of these areas, there any many viewpoints that are seen as abhorrent and immoral by others, yet either were or still are held by others.
I wouldn't even say that it's an instinct not to kill other people, as I'd imagine an infant left in the wilderness to fend for itself probably wouldn't regard an encounter with a human any different to any other unfamiliar animal that may or may not want to kill it. If it seems to present a danger, they'd probably avoid them or kill them. If they killed them, that'd also be a source of food, possibly even an easier source of food than what they normally ate.
However, we're taught by those around us the societal norms, including not killing others, from a very early age. It's a desire that most people have for acceptance and wanting to fit into a society that leads to following these rules. Sure, if you grow up in the absence of any kind of societal influence, your moral code might just be an instinctual "I must survive", but that's radically different to most people who have ever lived. What about acts of self-sacrifice for a greater purpose? Maybe it's instinctive for mothers to protect their children, but not so much for self-sacrifice to help strangers. Sure, it happens, but only some times, and only by certain types of people.
But in any case, who are you to say that the point isn't to probe your value system? That's certainly one of the outcomes of thinking about these questions and questioning why you make certain choices in some situations that you wouldn't in other situations. There's also no way you can say with any certainty that not one single person who has ever posed this kind of question hasn't had the intention to make people think about their own value system.
The basis for morality is biological. We can build high level frameworks on top of that but the core tenets remain genetic. What you're describing is the high level interpretation of our core moral instincts. The attempt to codify morality the attempt to explain it. This like, culture, like religion is made up by the human imagination.
In some sense this is a look into the pre-internet style. Waffle about Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi's ornate, neogothic/baroque designs would be good material for the dinner table if someone with no other access to information. But if the point of this is to explore the trolley problem it is a distraction.
There is a certain sort of person who owns a large bookcase in which the most treasured book (indeed, the only one in the room to be thoroughly thumbed) is "100 Books to Read Before You Die". They'd probably get a lot out of the writing style here.
I guess that's one solution to the trolley problem: avoid it completely! Haha :) Tho as I learned just now from another comment here, that's call "moral indulgence", the desire to keep one's hands clean.
I'll show my cards then (otherwise it seems unfair, tut-tutting you for avoiding the problem while avoiding it myself! :)), if I imagine I'm facing this in real life right now, here's what I'd do:
I will save the many and sacrifice the few. I'd feel bad about it tho, and apologize to the family of the life I took, and try to contribute to their lives in an attempt to make it easier on them, knowing that nothing could make it up to them. Eventually, I'd probably move on with the understanding: I don't know if it was the right thing, but it was necessary, and I did it. I don't feel good about the life I took, but I'm happy about the ones that I saved. Mixed-feelings, that's life.
It is scary tho to say what you'd do, because you feel someone's about to judge you. Oh well...I suppose that's one of the points of this :)
22 pages before the book begins…no thanks. Maybe someone will TlDr it.
Logically it makes more sense to flip the switch. 5 lives vs. 1.
But when you change the situation. There's no more switch. Just a single track with 5 people tied to it. You're on the side of the track with a really fat man. You push the man onto the track you can save the lives of all the people because the really fat man stops the train. But the fat man will die.
Two situations with equivalent logical consequences but experiments show that people will consistently flip the switch but they will not push the fat man. Why do people act one way but not the other when both situations are logically identical?
This moral conflict is one of the greatest pieces of evidence that our morality is made up of biological instincts. First it shows morality is not logically consistent. Second the same moral hiccup is shown across all cultures and demographics consistently indicating that morality is genetic and biological and not learned.
That is the significance of this moral conflicts. It says something deep about humanity, biology and the true nature of what morality actually is.
It's not just some wierd moral game.
Change the 5 people to millions. Now it's one person vs. millions.
The choice is now even more obvious. And if you don't consider the numbers in this case people will call you a psychopath if you can't see the difference in moral weight between millions and one life.
Numbers are indeed part of the equation.
For example a researcher choosing to sacrifice a healthy individual to donate their immune cells to save a million terminal cancer patients is considered morally reprehensible because people can’t to see how the researcher could be considered responsible for the a healthy individuals life. If the individual goes from being healthy to being in a coma and researcher becomes family member the question then becomes morally ambiguous.
If morality was a universal concept there would be nothing ambiguous about it. It would be logically consistent. But what we observe is that we can trigger inconsistent moral situations.
This very example. This very topic is evidence to that fact. The moral conflict described as the topic of this HN article is consistent across populations across cultures. It is genetic. It is not learned.
In fact we can actually identify physical and structural difference in people who lack morals. Psychopaths, people who innately lack a moral sense. The differences can be literally seen as a physical manifestation of an actual 3D coordinate of the brain. A researcher who studies these things can actually tell you if you're a psychopath or not just by looking at a brain scan.
The switch scenario implies that the individual has responsibility for the entire system. The switch and the train have a strong cultural component that implies responsibility for the system as a whole (employee). Even if you state it explicitly people simply don’t believe that a train switch is going to be left unattended and put into the hands of a completely independent third party. If you state that the train switch operator dies while you are visiting the station leaving the switch in your hands there is an implication that you are stepping into the switch operators role.
Society expects that someone with responsibility for the entire system would make trade-off decisions that would be immoral in the second scenario. For example, a politician would be expected to make policy of when it is acceptable to harvest organs from a donor while a doctor making a decision unilaterally would be morally repugnant.
The questions are more interesting in getting insights into cultural expectations of responsibility than deep biological biases about morality. It turns out that we have very finely tuned expectations on what rises to the level of “responsible” that moves a decision from one category to another. A health minister making a decision about which medical treatments are medically necessary are seen as less morally ambiguous than an insurance executive even if the process to make the decision and the outcomes are exactly the same.
Anyway the point isn't to examine the details of the moral conflict. The point is to examine why the moral conflicts even exists. It points to the fact that morality is arbitrarily biological in origin. It's a set of random arbitrary behaviors that helped with our survival in the caveman days.
Thus given how arbitrary it is, it's sort of pointless to analyze morality too deeply as if there's some higher hidden meaning. There isn't, it's just random instincts with no logical cohesion. Pointless to explore philosophically.
That is in the end the point of this example.
The concept you're describing is known as moral indulgence or moral self-indulgence: When a person refuses to do the right thing because they want to keep their hands clean. When you're standing at the switch you have agency and should be prepared to own your action. "Five people were struck by a trolley because I lacked the moral fortitude to save them."
[0] https://cla.csulb.edu/departments/philosophy/wp-content/uplo...
> It's not wrong not to kill the one man because you can't be sure of the situation.
People don't make decisions with perfect information. We make decisions based on the best information we have available. Refusing to sacrifice one to save five because you don't know how they ended up there smacks of making excuses to get out of making hard choices.
That is exactly the reason why the trolley problem is bad. People don't make decisions with perfect information, but the trolley problem is such a perfect information problem.
The thing is, people follow some sort of behavioural pattern that simplifies reality. Shooting people with guns is bad, therefore killing people with switches is bad. Choosing to kill people with switches might make them more likely to kill people with guns and people with guns are more of a danger than people not flipping switches.
These heuristics aren't optimal in theoretical scenarios that test the limits, but they work in every day scenarios.
The problem is people don't stand at these switches. They have to go out of their way to stand at them. They probably aren't even aware that there is a switch. They probably don't know what the effect of the switch is. Yet somehow they have to pull it and get it correct, with no one to support them in making that decision?
This isn't some amateur aircraft landing scenario, where you get assistance by the control tower.
In other words, what I mean to say is that your response (and similar ones) are quite common.
Utilitarianism and its more recent avatars like "effective altruism" intends to replace moral questioning with math from elementary school. The world doesn't work that way. Never has, never will.
(It's also quite perverse, because there's this underlying assumption/insult that if you're not utilitarian, then it means you don't quite understand that 5>1, and therefore you're beyond stupid and shouldn't be part of the conversation.)
All the facts, while helpful, are not necessary for utilitarianism.
> "effective altruism"
I think you're attacking a straw man. You won't find Peter Singer attacking people for engaging in suboptimal charity.
> there's this underlying assumption/insult that if you're not utilitarian, then it means you don't quite understand that 5>1, and therefore you're beyond stupid and shouldn't be part of the conversation.
You can certainly say you'd sacrifice five to save one, but you need to back it up. The moral indulgence critique says, more or less, if you refuse to do it because you don't want to do something distasteful you're being a coward, not stupid.
Rule utilitarians can coherently refuse to pull the switch. I happen to disagree with their moral framework, but they can mount a vigorous defense of the position. Personally I come down hard on the side of rejecting the status quo bias. Commiting to symmetry in moral decision making is useful for avoiding contradictions. I also don't care much for act utilitarianism, since it's susceptible to non-utilitarians putting their fingers on the scale (ex. "buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog".)
It would seem the whole setup of the experiment is designed to rule out personal courage. The question isn't "would you fight a terrorist" to save five people, or would you climb a dangerous mountain, or swim a violent stream, or defeat some incel with a machine gun...
The question is "would you flip a switch", and the subtext is "with zero risk to yourself". How does flipping a switch become an act of courage and not flipping an act of cowardice.
Also, movies. I don't think there's one (successful) movie where the hero voluntarily and coldly sacrifices even one completely innocent and unrelated individual, in order to save any number of people. When the hero kills someone, every movie goes to great lengths to explain that person somehow deserved it or was an enemy.
In movies, it's the villains who are utilitarians. That should tell us something.
> The moral indulgence critique says, more or less, if you refuse to do it because you don't want to do something distasteful you're being a coward, not stupid.
Thinking more about it, in my case it's the number of people what would push me to take action. I feel 5 lives vs 1 is not worth enough for me to change destiny. If it was 100 lives vs 1, I would definitely take action (sorry fat man). I'm not still not sure about 10 vs 1. I guess in the moment I'd go with my intuition.
Just something to consider before you switch careers...
Good morality is messy, but solving for the dual that is maximizing evil is often far more intuitive.