The Moral Sense Test
moral.wjh.harvard.edu
moral.wjh.harvard.edu
Several situations present you with the option of causing one immediate and fairly certain death to prevent several more distant, much more speculative deaths. You can't predict the path of a boulder down a mountain. A boulder that would be stopped by one person would be unlikely to kill five. The man driving the injured people to the hospital actually has little idea how quickly he needs to get them there to save their lives. The certainty presented in the problems is so unreal that they might as well have been posed in an entirely abstract way in the first place.
Studies have been run on this in the past and to my dismay most people would, in the initial scenario, flick the switch to save five but kill one - immediately becoming murderers rather than bystanders. I suspect this test is trying to weed out what could make people flip-flop from one point of view to the other, as when replaced with "pushing a fat man off a bridge to block the trolley" the stats have tended to swing the other way.
Link was posted here recently, if anyone missed it.
The thing that stuck out most to me about this project was that some of the questions made a point of including superfluous numerical details (e.g. "thirty-three infantry divisions" or "Forty-second Street"). Maybe they're seeing whether priming a subject with these numerical details modifies how we weigh moral alternatives.
In your case you value maintaining an unsullied self-image over assisting 5 people in mortal peril, and would prefer if other people saw your choice the same way.
But you're right (I've met people who were familiar with the people involved here): the intuition is that the stronger the perceived interpersonal relationship between you and the unlucky bloke the less likely you are to flick the switch, but teasing out exactly how much relationship is needed to make the moral intuition flip is tricky business.
"Maintaining an unsullied self-image" is largely what personal moral codes are about. If I actively killed someone, I would find being a murderer harder to cope with than being a witness to the death of a larger number of people.
I think this is a purely moral standpoint, whereas "killing one to save the five" is the result of people playing a "numbers game." I think this is demonstrated by the opposing results of the "push the fat man off the bridge" dilemma - once you change the mechanism from a lever/switch to actually pushing a dude off a bridge, people's sense of morality comes rushing back.
I'll skip the lengthy description of all the views, but the short version is that there do exist very compelling arguments that if you choose inaction, you are just as responsible for that outcome as you would be if you chose action.
As applied to the trolly problem, the point is that the "take action" vs "do not take action" is a false dilemma. Choosing not to act does not absolve you of responsibility or remove you from the problem. You may have feelings otherwise, but it is a rational argument.
I would say moral codes are about trying to use your agency to do good, not bad; there's no obvious reason why "doing good" would always and everywhere equate with "easy to cope with".
You claim you're not doing a #s game but I think I can prove that you are, even if you're not yet aware of it.
Consider this alternative scenario: the trolley is hurtling towards the 5 men as before and you've got the option of throwing a switch; what's new is that this time the switch moves the train into an empty railyard, saving the five lives at no one's expense.
The #s game is removed and it's just a case of: do you think yourself morally obligated to throw the switch and save the lives, or not?
Careful here.
Then again, I think much more harm results from people not living up to either sort of moral standard than from people having suboptimal moral principles (whatever that actually means).
As a math problem, sure - but lives do not all have equivalent value. I view this as a moral problem, not one of statistics or utilitarianism.
I would prefer to live in a world where people tend to do what produces most net benefit rather than one where people tend to safeguard their moral purity, so I remain undismayed.
In most situations it is hard (or even impossible) to calculate the benefits or costs of different actions. This is why people argue strongly for and against things like the abortion debate. Unless you treat people like countable objects it is hard to establish if killing one person is better than letting five others perish.
With this sort of thinking, of course, there are no definite answers - so I take an objectivist standpoint that people should use their personal moral codes and self-interest to make decisions - rather than "running the numbers."
You don't consider the number of people involved to be significant? What if instead of saving five people it was some other number 5 > n > 1,000,000,000. Do the numbers still not matter?
The problem here is that you cannot know the value of this one individual vs the five. People aren't a set of bricks, all manufactured to be the same size and from the same material. Saving five people vs one is a guess -- you can be wrong and save a group of people who contribute nothing and kill the man who does. But the numbers still apply because one man cannot be worth more than thousands for example -- and I think part of this experiment was to find out what your threshold for this was.
Pushing fat guys in front of trains seems a bit cartoony and far less certain to save anyone in reality.
I think that the confusion around whether it would even work is enough to muddy the results in that case.
1) False dichotomy. (There are exactly two actions you can take, no more.)
2) Unrealistic foreknowledge. (These are exactly what the results of these actions will be.)
3) Unrealistic scenarios. (How many of us are ever going to be standing with our foot stuck in the tracks of the sideline right near the switch when five other people are...blah blah blah.)
This kind of test is exactly what gives philosophers a bad reputation. They are studying important issues; could they /please/ take the time to build a test that respects the intelligence of the testee?
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