Uncategorized

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). —

Standard

2 thoughts on “Treat Like Cases Alike (2/3)

  1. Brendan Bernicker says:

    Kyle, that is a really good point. This feeds in to what I was going to discuss next week, but I want to give you something to think about between now and then.

    In the thought experiments, we don’t know anything about the victims. While you are correct that “there will never be the same set of 6 potential victims,” the new question becomes, “do the identities of the victims matter?” Ethical subjectivists would say that it is impossible to make a judgement in these cases without additional information, but this has a significant implication: if the circumstances change based on identities, then we are accepting that some individuals lives are more valuable than others.

    Whether we accept the subjectivist critique or not, it is the same in either experiment: If we need identities for one, than 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, than the cases (as per the argument above) 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.

  2. kmm6978 says:

    Another really interesting post, and I am really appreciating the fact that you are running with the same original thought experiment.

    It sounds like you are referencing almost a Kantian-like approach with this week’s installment when you say that as the situations are essentially the same, then we can create a general solution that would be acceptable at all times. Honestly though, I am going to have to challenge you a bit on this point, because I think the approach of “treat like things alike” to be almost an entirely theoretical approach to answering questions.

    Even if we keep the train track constant, and the lever-puller constant, there never will be the same set of 6 potential victims (one at least of each is expired every time.) Yes the cases are alike, however there is always the need of subjectivity so that we do not turn into a mindless legion of carbon copied individuals.

Leave a Reply