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Finally (3/3)

(This is the third and final installment of my series of posts comparing two ethics thought experiments. If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 and Part 2.)

 

In these thought experiments we don’t know anything about the victims, which forces us to consider whether the victims’ identities matter. Ethical subjectivists would say that it is impossible to make a judgment in these cases without additional information, such as identities or identifying information, but this has a significant implication: if the ethical decision changes based on the victims’ identities, then we are accepting that some individuals’ lives are more valuable than others.

This is of course not a completely invalid assumption. While equality seems like a positive virtue, there are a lot of senses in which it is negative. First, to say simply that two people are “equal” is to accept that they are, morally, interchangeable. If what you mean is that they are equal in certain respects, such as entitlement to respect or inherent dignity, then they are interchangeable in questions concerning these aspects (ostensibly like our trolley problem and surgeon experiment). In summary, if people are truly equal (either in all respects or only in those respects that relate to human dignity), then you should save five people at the cost of one life (whether through surgery or pulling the trolley lever). I do not want to devote any more time to the drawbacks of equality here, but Henry Frankfurt’s On Inequality offers an interesting perspective on the subject.

Whether we accept the subjectivist critique or not, it is the same in either experiment: If we need identities for one, then we need identities for the other. If the potential victims are the same in each, my argument from this post is unchanged. If the victims are different, then the cases (as per the argument from last week) are reversible; if its ethical to sacrifice a given person to save one set of 5 victims by pulling the lever, it would be ethical to make the exchange between these same people via surgery.

In conclusion the fundamental value at stake is whether or not people are essentially equal in the respects that determine the value of individuals’ lives and the respect they ought to be afforded by others. If you believe this to be true, then it is fair to kill the one person, but you have to make this decision in every case. If you do not believe that this is true, then it is ok to decide whether or not to make the trade-off based on the circumstances and identities (though you would still have to make the same decision in either thought experiment).

As a final thought, people often present a version of this experiment in which the one person is your son/daughter. In this case, the outcome is the same to neutral observer (who is not the parent of the person) as in the original experiment. As a result, those who embrace consequentialism/utilitarianism cannot give preferential treatment to their child. To those who believe in virtue ethics or duty ethics, saving the child can be considered either the virtue of loyalty/friendship or the duty of a parent to protect his/her child. If you are inclined towards assuming that saving five lives is worth killing one person in the trolley problem simply because of the numbers, bear in mind that the extension of this logic requires making the same trade-off both in the surgery case and if you have an emotional attachment to the one person.

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Treat Like Cases Alike (2/3)

(this is a continuation of last week’s post, which can be found here)

Now that you are familiar with the experiments themselves, I want to compare and contrast them to draw out some of the underlying ethical considerations. As Mitch pointed out in a comment last week, the numbers in each experiment are clearly the same, yet the surgeon harvesting the organs of one patient to save five “feels” more wrong than pulling the lever in the trolley problem. The first question I want to answer is whether this gut instinct is rational.

In each case, some amount of death is inevitable: five people will die if you do not act, one person will die if you do. In neither case are you responsible for the circumstances, as you neither infected the five patients with their respective diseases nor caused the trolley to lose control. Both cases have innocent victims who are not responsible for their circumstances, and in both cases the one victim is in no danger unless you act. As far as I am concerned, these cases are equivalent in all relevant respects and impartiality dictates that the same logic must be applied in each. In other words, unless you can think of a compelling difference that I have missed, it is irrational to choose to pull the lever but not perform the surgery.

One possible reason some have offered for deciding differently in the two cases is that the surgery is more likely to set a precedent for future surgeons, meaning that future surgeons may repeatedly kill healthy patients to give their organs to ill ones. While on the surface this may seem like a valid critique (life-saving organ transplants are, in fact, more common than runaway trolleys barreling towards physically restrained workmen), this should not be a problem. One of the fundamental tenets of impartiality is treating like cases alike. If we are o.k. with the surgeon doing this once, we should be o.k. with all surgeons doing it always. The circumstances of each individual surgery are the same (barring additional information), so we should not fear that the action we deem moral is repeated.

I have made a point in this argument of emphasizing impartiality, but it should not be accepted at face value that impartiality is important. I have embraced it here because I am attempting to take a rational approach to these experiments (to contrast the gut feeling that leads people to treat them differently). Rationality requires beliefs (and actions that follow from them) to be grounded in reason and facts. By definition, there is no factual reason for treating cases differently based on attributes that are irrelevant to the situation at hand. Consequently, to treat identical cases, or cases that differ only in irrelevant respects, differently is irrational. Some philosophers have argued that rationality itself is not important, and that being guided by emotion is preferable. I do not wish to engage in this debate here (nor do I have the requisite expertise in the field), but if you are interested there are a lot of books on the subject.

Up to this point, I have argued only that we must decide the same way in either case: I have not argued for deciding one way or the other. For that, you will need to read again next week. In the meantime, if anyone believe that there is a difference I have missed that makes treating these cases differently acceptable, please let me know in the comments.

 

— Yes, I have changed this from a two-part to a three-part post. I am trying to be thorough so you guys can get a sense of how the process of evaluating thought experiments generally works. I promise that next week I will finish this and move on to something else (unless you guys want me to keep going with this, in which case you can leave me a comment next week). —

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Experiments in Ethics (1/3)

For this week’s post, I want to delve into a set of thought experiments that offer compelling lenses through which to view one of the most essential fields in the entire discipline of philosophy: ethics. For as long as people have interacted with one another, their behavior has implicated questions of right and wrong. These questions have formed the basis of the vast majority of legal codes, social norms, and religions.

The first thought experiment that I want to explore is called the trolley problem. There are many versions of the trolley problem that have been used to explore different dimensions of ethics, but I will explain the original as it was proposed by Philippa Foot in 1967. In Foot’s though experiment, there is a runaway trolley careening down a track towards a junction. You are placed near the junction holding a lever. If you do not pull the lever, the trolley will remain on the current track and hit five workmen working on that section of the track. If you do pull the lever, the trolley will be diverted to another section of track on which there is only one workman. It is assumed that all the people working on whichever portion of the track the reader chooses (either 5 workmen or 1 workman) will be killed. For reference, there is a sketch below that shows this visually (although in the sketch the people are tied to the track).

trolley-problem pic

The question Foot poses is whether the reader should pull the lever and divert the train toward the track with fewer people. Essentially, it is a question of whether human lives are fundamentally interchangeable (and therefore 5 is greater than 1) or each should be treated as an individual moral agent deserving the respect of others. Some philosophers have attempted to tease out a middle ground; usually by changing the numbers on each side, assigning specific attributes to the people involved (for example, the one person is your daughter or the President of the United States, or the five people are prisoners or terrorists), or changing the role the individual plays (pushing a man onto the tracks to stop the trolley rather than pulling a lever). At its core, the question is about determining the worth of people and deciding if it is morally acceptable to make decisions about how to act based on one’s perception of a person’s worth.

Since most people tend to read Foot’s experiment and instinctively accept that the person should divert the trolley to kill the individual person, one philosopher offered a particularly powerful counter-experiment that often elicits the opposite response. In this experiment, proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson in a 1985 paper, you are a brilliant surgeon with five patients of the same blood type in need of five different vital organs. This surgeon also has a sixth patient who is perfectly healthy but who’s organs are compatible with the other five patients. Thompson asks whether the surgeon would be morally justified in taking the five vital organs from the healthy person in order to save the five other people who need the organs.

Like with the first experiment, this one lends itself to a number of variations. A few notable ones include different numbers of patients in need of organs, the possibility that some of the organ transplants will not be successful, and assigning roles the the characters in play (the five people are children or the one person is the president, etc.) Because there are a number of ethical issues at play in each of these variations and this post is already fairly long, I will use the next two weeks’ posts to explore these issues in great detail.

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