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Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

to my dismay: You are (in some woolly sense) five times more likely to end up as one of the five in a situation like this, than as the one. It is therefore better for you on the whole -- and, symmetrically, better for everyone -- for people in general to choose to switch the switch and kill one person rather than five. It's nice that you value their moral purity ("murderers rather than bystanders"), but 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. (I'd be dismayed if I thought that "most people" aren't at all troubled by the prospect of being put in such a situation, but that's a separate issue from what they'd do once in it.)

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).

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It is therefore better for you on the whole -- and, symmetrically, better for everyone -- for people in general to choose to switch the switch and kill one person rather than five.

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."

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 numbers matter. The issue here is this: everybody isn't equal, we're all unique. Some people work hard, are more intelligent, and contribute more to society. Some people are of higher value, depending on your metrics. So a murderer (who takes from society) has less worth than a scientist whose research creates new technologies that aid society. Everyone should have equal 'rights', but everyone is not equal however.

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.

Relying on 'personal moral codes' without the help of math is a good way to form completely incoherent judgements. I wonder what sort of personal moral code you have that favors the death of five over the death of one. Saying its a 'moral' problem rather than a 'math' problem doesn't explain anything.

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