On the question of moral culpability for eg attempted murder I always give the example of running over a child while momentarily distracted in reaching for some sweets. Are we really to punish everyone the same regardless of the consequences? I think we are and I’d not punish any of the drivers. Intention is everything.
On the trolley problem I’d not want to throw the leaver. My strong intuition is that in some sense society does not want me to make these kind of choices. The default is ‘mind your own business’. But if they gave me a hat with ‘Safety Officer’ written on it and a salary with instructions to save lives as best I could I dare say I’d be throwing the leaver if not happily then at least more readily.
If we live in a purely materialistic world than our moral intuitions are driven by evolution. What we deserve or entitled to doesn’t really matter. We are basically doing what will get the best outcomes in the long-run. The drunk person who runs over a child has the genes or whatever to hurt the tribe while the drunk person who manages to not hit the child has better genes and thus the tribe should allow his genes to pass to the next generation and snuff out the line of the first.
If the father was good at managing money and made a lot of it than there’s a good chance that the son will also be good at it so should be given the money to manage when his dad dies. The person that makes more money should be able to use it how he wants and before monogamy he would have used it on more wives. He is better at being productive so he gets more kids to improve the gene pool of the tribe. And it has to seem just to us because our moral intuitions evolved.
I see the difference in moral weight to be a question not of what we've been given (by accident of birth or circumstance) but by what we do with it.
Hitler is an easy example, because there were lots of people with his background that did not do what he did (in fact, many people from his own country risked their lives to save Jews, for instance). For a Nazi prison guard, moral culpability would depend on this person's other options and knowledge of the evil. You can look at factors like knowledge of the wrongdoing (which guards could be considered far more aware of the atrocities than the civilian population, even if both were in favor of the Nazis). You can also look at what alternatives the guard had. If the guard had no choice but to be a guard (conscripted, perhaps) and would be killed for not being a guard, that's very different from a person who knew what being a guard entailed and did it anyway voluntarily.
You can observe individuals in any situation who turned out differently than others in very similar situations. I already mentioned the Nazi scenario where some people in the country turned out to be moral monsters (Nazi leadership) and some who we think of as moral heroes (Schindler, as an example). I don't think that there's any way for us to determine, a-priori, that Schindler would turn out to be a hero while Goebbels would be a monster. I would bet that their upbringings were similar, in addition to the fact that they were of similar ages, both joined the Nazi party, etc. That difference is what being a moral person *is*, at least to me.
In the reverse, you can look at someone from the 1950s being mildly racist in 2010 and judge them differently than someone born in 1990 being mildly racist in 2010. People growing up in the 1950s lived in a very different world, in terms of racial discussions than someone born in 1990. (You can adjust for location, upbringing, whatever relevant criteria as well). We can judge both of them for saying or doing racist things in 2010, but the moral weight of their actions can be higher or lower depending on circumstances beyond their control.
The argument is that, even if we don't know what made the difference between Schindler and Goebbels, it must be some difference in their genes or environment for which they were not responsible. That part of the argument comes down to whether you believe in free will, an issue I plan to post on at some point.
Obviously I believe in free will, so that one is easy for me. I'll look forward to your post on it, as you often have excellent insight into topics you write about.
This does not seem like a remotely productive comment. If someone made a mistake - in reasoning or in conclusion, point it out. This is just anti-intellectual whining.
“ A tort case is a dispute between equals. A criminal case is a dispute between the defendant and the state. States are not gods but are often viewed as having a moral status rather like one.”
You have written a book on a variant of anarchism. You are not saying that there are no criminal cases under anarchy, are you?
Would it be another case of a dispute between equals, or is the community necessarily also a party in a criminal case? Those who were not directly threatened still have a weak interest in having others restrain themselves according to custom. Is this sufficient to say they must be allowed to participate?
The community has an interest in preventing the escalation of disputes to violence. In effect, they must stand behind any arbitration, participating in or at least tolerating any enforcement violence required when the loser of an arbitrated dispute refuses to abide by the arbitrator's decision. If they remain indifferent, or take the side of the loser, and the loser has the means to resist enforcement, then the effect is as if they have overthrown the decision. In that weak sense, they are the ultimate arbiters: if they take a side, that side has won, and a precedent has been set.
I don't know whether a market legal system would retain some form or tort/crime distinction or not. In my book _Law's Order_, which is not about anarchy, I spend a chapter on whether that distinction makes sense, whether the different legal rules associated with the two categories make sense, and how one might modify tort law to make it cover what are now crimes.
I don't see any fundamental reason why criminal cases cannot be treated as disputes between equals in the same sense as tort cases. My interest in not having someone kill you is no different from my interest in not having someone dent your car or break a contract with you. For the mechanisms that make enforcement possible in a stateless society, see my first book. A free pdf is webbed.
Under criminal law I can never, legally speaking, be the victim of a crime. If someone steals from me it is treated as a crime against the state of California, not against me. The state decides whether to prosecute, whether to settle, on what terms. If there is a fine it goes to the state.
The mechanisms to prevent a dispute from escalating to violence have little to do with the tort/crime distinction.
I do not see the attempted murderer as less tainted. They had the good fortune to fail in an effort which would create tragedy. If they repent, they can perhaps forgive themselves more easily than if they had succeeded. Why should other persons distinguish between the attempt and the success?
My question is why do other people distinguish between the attempt and the success, because in fact they do, both in the law and in individual moral judgements. I offered a possible answer.
The first bit is a fascinating question, one discussed in interesting detail by both Ezra Klein and Sam Harris. The latter realizes that we have no free will -- everything is just chemical reactions (physics at the core) -- and thus we are left to try to be just while creating incentives to protect the general welfare.
"Realizing" assumes your conclusion. The reason I am not willing to do that is that the perception (or illusion) of free will is associated with consciousness. I don't understand consciousness, how there can be a ghost in the machine, a me looking out through my eyes.
I have no trouble imagining a p-zombie, a being that appeared to be conscious but wasn't (arguably GPT4 comes close), entirely explainable in the framework of the current understanding of science. I have no idea what you add to that to get me. Yet the fact that I, my consciousness not just my body, exists, is the most basic fact I am aware of, since everything else I know funnels through it. Cogito ergo sum.
I doubt that Sam Harris knows either.
As a little reinforcement for that point, consciousness also plays a special role in at least some interpretations of quantum mechanics. Before a person looks in the box, Schrödinger's cat is in a mixed state. After a person looks, the cat is either alive or dead. Presumably after a p-zombie looks, the p-zombie is in a mixed state.
I don’t get the no free will thing. Even assuming we don’t we still have to act as if we do otherwise we’d never get out of bed. A world with or without free will wouldn’t look any different would it? (Sam Harris is much smarter than me so I expect there is a good answer to this!)
I don’t think so. People argue about it as if huge matters were at stake, but really there are none. The only vague suggestion I’ve ever heard is that without free will, punishment seems unjust. Okay. But we have no free will, so how do we change it? And if we stop thinking of consequences as punishments, nothing changes. People learn, and people react to incentives, whether they have free will or not. If the response to crime has the effect of reducing crime, we don’t need to know whether people have free will. We just need to know the effects of different causes. Lacking free will apparently does not prevent us from learning more about this and adjusting our behavior accordingly, since people have done so in the past. Even if the does not demonstrate free will, it demonstrates that nothing depends on free will, nothing is at stake.
Does our understanding of justice determine our institutions, or the reverse, or does influence go both ways? Most people don’t question what they have become accustomed to, and tend to moralize it to boot. It took a surprisingly long time for people to begin to question slavery, and then a surprisingly short time for it to be nearly eliminated. If we didn’t need free will for that, what do we need it for?
"One person is sitting on the left branch. Should you pull the switch to divert the trolley to the left branch?"
This is done all the time. Big accident scene where not enough medical personnel arrive to treat everybody. What to do? Triage! Some are condemned to death. Why? Maximize number of lives saved.
We acquiesce to this rule and method for we don't know whether we're on which side of the track. The rule gives each of us best chance for survival if we don't know what state we will be in after the accident.
We triage but we don't kill a healthy person in order to use his organs to save three people in need of different organs, which looks like the same logic. As I argued in the post, we feel responsible for consequences of action in a way in which are not responsible for consequences of inaction.
I think the difference arises from not knowing or knowing what position one will be in. With triage, it's clear: We don't know what shape we'll be in after the accident.
If we could transfer this way of looking at things to the trolley problem, the triage solution would work: Suppose we don't know whether we will be among the four on Track I or alone on Track II. Would we acquiesce in the rule that it's best to maximize the number of lives saved? I think yes.
We don't know if we will be in need of an organ transplant. In the trolley case, we don't know which branch we would be on, but the odds are four to one on the branch the trolley is initially headed for. You would throw the switch but a lot of other people wouldn't — why?
In the second version, would you push the overweight stranger off the balcony?
Well, we wouldn't know the odds. Let's say equi-probability of the unknown. Then we'd be hesitant between saving a few people and letting the same number of other people die.
Why others hesitate in a situation where they know they will save more lives is beyond me.
Let me try the same approach to the overweight stranger. Do we know whether we will be the overweight stranger or not? If we did, and were overweight, we'd be against sacrifice. If we didn't, we might be for it. But again, equi-probability of the unknown, together with some risk aversion, says do not sacrifice the overweight stranger.
I expect we don't think about such decisions. We don't have time in a real world trolley case. Must be ingrained somehow.
We don't know whether we will be the overweight stranger or one of the four people at risk of being run over. The odds are four to one for the latter, assuming no additional information.
You said you would throw the switch without hesitating. The odds are four to one there too. Would you push the stranger without hesitating? If not, why not?
No, no: I wouldn't hesitate throwing the switch only if I knew for sure that I was saving four and killing one.
Your post is asking what we would do about such and such. I'm guessing we are led to our decisions behind the veil of ignorance.
If I followed equal probabilities of the unknown, which we probably do before learning about risks, and I were a tad risk averse, I would get clogged doing nothing about pushing somebody off the balcony. Like in real life.
I could be completely wrong, of course, in the sense that that is not consistent with how we act.
"Strip off everything a person is not himself responsible for — genes, wealth, upbringing, both nature and nurture — and it is hard to see what is left on which differences in desert could be based."
But assuming so much implies we have no agency. Our actions would all be pre-determined. People do make choices, even asylum inmates do. This is important for understanding the really bad guys, the concentration and death camp guards, the gulag operators and enforcers, the collectivization promulgators in the Soviet Union and China. These were volunteers! They had it better than they otherwise would have.
No. This is one of those absurd supposedly moral questions that people like to pose but are absolutely meaningless. Akin to the Trolly Car one mentioned below. If a trolly car is going to run over five people but you can switch it to another line and have it run into a fat person would you do it? oohhh deep question.
No it's not.
If you lived on the planet Vulcan you would because the needs of the few outway the needs of the one and the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. To quote Spock. On planet Earth in the real universe. The answer is no. The very simple reason is if you change the path of the trolly you've committed a homicide. And not only that but a deliberate Murder One Homicide. Doesn't matter about the safety hat or the instructions, or the salary. You have committed a murder. Legally. Though your actions you killed that guy. Let's say all the people tied to the tracks were convicted murders and the fat guy was the sole support of his 9 children, his widowed mother and his mistress. Or the other way around. He's a convicted murderer escaped from prison and the other people are the sole support of their 45 children, their widowed mothers and their mistresses. Make you happier? Sorry you still have committed a murder with malice of forethought.
In days of yore the FBI was shooting up a house because some gangsters were in it. All was quiet for a while and they thought the people inside might be dead, but weren't sure. So they grabbed the groundskeeper, gave him a bullet proof vest and told him to go inside and look. Lucky for him they were.
There use to be a law in CA that said you had to assist a policeman if requested too. That was recently overturned. You are under no legal or moral obligation to risk your own life to help another. Or to follow orders that might get you killed or badly injured. There are two exceptions that I know of: If you are on a ship and the Captain tells you go down in the hold and fight a fire, you have to go, even if you are just a passenger and might get burned to death or die in another way. If you enlist in the one of the armed services and the sergeant tells you to go up the hill, you have to go up the hill, even if it means you get shot. Other then that you don't have to help anyone or do anything to prevent their demise or anyone else. If you do, fine. You are a nice person. People might think you are awful if you don't. What if the risk entails your demise and you have 9 children depending on you? Risk your death or severe injury to help someone else? Is you obligation to them, your kids, your widowed mother?
Witness the cops lack of actions in the school shooting in Texas. who stood by and did nothing. You can say they should have or must have. But they had no legal obligation to do so.
If X thinks about shooting someone, buys a gun. Puts the gun in the drawer and doesn't do it is he guilty because he thought about it? Well, no, but in this day in age he might be. If a drunk kills someone that is not just a moral crime but an actual crime. If a drunk doesn't, he's committed the crime of driving drunk but not of killing anyone. It might be luck, chance, fate, kismet, the will of the gods or whatever. Doesn't matter. If you hate your neighbor and try to send telepathic deep thought waves to him to cause him to die are you guilty of bad thoughts? Well maybe. Guilty of murder? No.
Trying to do something and failing means you have failed. You should not be judged or punished as if you succeeded.
I get that people are not responsible for the cards they are dealt. But I strongly suspect that a society that buys into this belief in a radical way will be overwhelmed by freeloaders. I just can’t see a way out of treating people as if they are responsible for their actions (while nodding to how they got there).
That's certainly one argument for the pattern of legal and social sanctions one observes. But I would like to believe that my moral judgements are correct as well as useful, so want to think about whether allocating outcomes, including everything from criminal punishment to income, on other than a strictly egalitarian basis, is an injustice we have to put up with for practical reasons or not. It doesn't feel to me like an injustice, and I am trying to make sense of my (and other people's) moral intuitions.
I know a person who grew up in an abusive household and then foster care, and ended up aging out of foster care. Typical results for someone with that background are...not good. Instead, she became both a wonderful person, but also got into the foster care business (ran a local agency) to help kids who were going through the same experience she did.
If she had turned out to follow the more normal track for someone in her situation, most people would assign less moral blame to her for that outcome. They would cut her some slack, so to speak. Not all the slack in the world, though. Nobody would have given her slack if she became a serial killer, no matter how bad her upbringing. In reality, that she turned out to be a thoughtful and loving person who reinvested in the community is worthy of praise. The difficulties of her upbringing didn't force her reality in adulthood.
That difference in moral valence between expected and actual outcomes is what's relevant to moral blame or praise. I think our legal and social sanctions try to track the difference between expected and actual outcomes, recognizing that it's quite difficult to accurately predict such things. We also have to have some significant firmness in the legal sanctions for crimes - not too much harshness or leniency for exculpatory factors.
Your "expected outcomes" are the result of our limited knowledge. One possible response to your story is that there must have been other factors we are unaware of that would make the expected outcomes, given full knowledge, exactly what happened. That's the determinist position.
One response to that, which I expect to suggest in another post, is that determinism is wrong, there really is free will and she had a consciousness which made choices, in her case choices that led to the outcome you describe. The other response, the one I was offering in this post, is that even if becoming the person she is was ultimately due to factors she was not responsible for, still that person is admirable and deserves our respect and approval.
On the question of moral culpability for eg attempted murder I always give the example of running over a child while momentarily distracted in reaching for some sweets. Are we really to punish everyone the same regardless of the consequences? I think we are and I’d not punish any of the drivers. Intention is everything.
On the trolley problem I’d not want to throw the leaver. My strong intuition is that in some sense society does not want me to make these kind of choices. The default is ‘mind your own business’. But if they gave me a hat with ‘Safety Officer’ written on it and a salary with instructions to save lives as best I could I dare say I’d be throwing the leaver if not happily then at least more readily.
If we live in a purely materialistic world than our moral intuitions are driven by evolution. What we deserve or entitled to doesn’t really matter. We are basically doing what will get the best outcomes in the long-run. The drunk person who runs over a child has the genes or whatever to hurt the tribe while the drunk person who manages to not hit the child has better genes and thus the tribe should allow his genes to pass to the next generation and snuff out the line of the first.
If the father was good at managing money and made a lot of it than there’s a good chance that the son will also be good at it so should be given the money to manage when his dad dies. The person that makes more money should be able to use it how he wants and before monogamy he would have used it on more wives. He is better at being productive so he gets more kids to improve the gene pool of the tribe. And it has to seem just to us because our moral intuitions evolved.
I see the difference in moral weight to be a question not of what we've been given (by accident of birth or circumstance) but by what we do with it.
Hitler is an easy example, because there were lots of people with his background that did not do what he did (in fact, many people from his own country risked their lives to save Jews, for instance). For a Nazi prison guard, moral culpability would depend on this person's other options and knowledge of the evil. You can look at factors like knowledge of the wrongdoing (which guards could be considered far more aware of the atrocities than the civilian population, even if both were in favor of the Nazis). You can also look at what alternatives the guard had. If the guard had no choice but to be a guard (conscripted, perhaps) and would be killed for not being a guard, that's very different from a person who knew what being a guard entailed and did it anyway voluntarily.
You can observe individuals in any situation who turned out differently than others in very similar situations. I already mentioned the Nazi scenario where some people in the country turned out to be moral monsters (Nazi leadership) and some who we think of as moral heroes (Schindler, as an example). I don't think that there's any way for us to determine, a-priori, that Schindler would turn out to be a hero while Goebbels would be a monster. I would bet that their upbringings were similar, in addition to the fact that they were of similar ages, both joined the Nazi party, etc. That difference is what being a moral person *is*, at least to me.
In the reverse, you can look at someone from the 1950s being mildly racist in 2010 and judge them differently than someone born in 1990 being mildly racist in 2010. People growing up in the 1950s lived in a very different world, in terms of racial discussions than someone born in 1990. (You can adjust for location, upbringing, whatever relevant criteria as well). We can judge both of them for saying or doing racist things in 2010, but the moral weight of their actions can be higher or lower depending on circumstances beyond their control.
The argument is that, even if we don't know what made the difference between Schindler and Goebbels, it must be some difference in their genes or environment for which they were not responsible. That part of the argument comes down to whether you believe in free will, an issue I plan to post on at some point.
Obviously I believe in free will, so that one is easy for me. I'll look forward to your post on it, as you often have excellent insight into topics you write about.
About you, Ecclesiastes says, אל תתחכם יותר
This does not seem like a remotely productive comment. If someone made a mistake - in reasoning or in conclusion, point it out. This is just anti-intellectual whining.
You know what, you are right. I am sorry. I will try to be more constructive in my posting in the future.
“ A tort case is a dispute between equals. A criminal case is a dispute between the defendant and the state. States are not gods but are often viewed as having a moral status rather like one.”
You have written a book on a variant of anarchism. You are not saying that there are no criminal cases under anarchy, are you?
Would it be another case of a dispute between equals, or is the community necessarily also a party in a criminal case? Those who were not directly threatened still have a weak interest in having others restrain themselves according to custom. Is this sufficient to say they must be allowed to participate?
The community has an interest in preventing the escalation of disputes to violence. In effect, they must stand behind any arbitration, participating in or at least tolerating any enforcement violence required when the loser of an arbitrated dispute refuses to abide by the arbitrator's decision. If they remain indifferent, or take the side of the loser, and the loser has the means to resist enforcement, then the effect is as if they have overthrown the decision. In that weak sense, they are the ultimate arbiters: if they take a side, that side has won, and a precedent has been set.
I don't know whether a market legal system would retain some form or tort/crime distinction or not. In my book _Law's Order_, which is not about anarchy, I spend a chapter on whether that distinction makes sense, whether the different legal rules associated with the two categories make sense, and how one might modify tort law to make it cover what are now crimes.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Laws_Order_draft/laws_order_ch_18.htm
One of the talks I like to give is "Should We Abolish the Criminal Law?" You can find recordings of several versions at:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/MyTalks/MyRecentTalks.html
I don't see any fundamental reason why criminal cases cannot be treated as disputes between equals in the same sense as tort cases. My interest in not having someone kill you is no different from my interest in not having someone dent your car or break a contract with you. For the mechanisms that make enforcement possible in a stateless society, see my first book. A free pdf is webbed.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery%203rd%20Edn.pdf
Under criminal law I can never, legally speaking, be the victim of a crime. If someone steals from me it is treated as a crime against the state of California, not against me. The state decides whether to prosecute, whether to settle, on what terms. If there is a fine it goes to the state.
The mechanisms to prevent a dispute from escalating to violence have little to do with the tort/crime distinction.
I do not see the attempted murderer as less tainted. They had the good fortune to fail in an effort which would create tragedy. If they repent, they can perhaps forgive themselves more easily than if they had succeeded. Why should other persons distinguish between the attempt and the success?
My question is why do other people distinguish between the attempt and the success, because in fact they do, both in the law and in individual moral judgements. I offered a possible answer.
The first bit is a fascinating question, one discussed in interesting detail by both Ezra Klein and Sam Harris. The latter realizes that we have no free will -- everything is just chemical reactions (physics at the core) -- and thus we are left to try to be just while creating incentives to protect the general welfare.
Realizing we have no free will is key, but really difficult. https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
"Realizing" assumes your conclusion. The reason I am not willing to do that is that the perception (or illusion) of free will is associated with consciousness. I don't understand consciousness, how there can be a ghost in the machine, a me looking out through my eyes.
I have no trouble imagining a p-zombie, a being that appeared to be conscious but wasn't (arguably GPT4 comes close), entirely explainable in the framework of the current understanding of science. I have no idea what you add to that to get me. Yet the fact that I, my consciousness not just my body, exists, is the most basic fact I am aware of, since everything else I know funnels through it. Cogito ergo sum.
I doubt that Sam Harris knows either.
As a little reinforcement for that point, consciousness also plays a special role in at least some interpretations of quantum mechanics. Before a person looks in the box, Schrödinger's cat is in a mixed state. After a person looks, the cat is either alive or dead. Presumably after a p-zombie looks, the p-zombie is in a mixed state.
I don’t get the no free will thing. Even assuming we don’t we still have to act as if we do otherwise we’d never get out of bed. A world with or without free will wouldn’t look any different would it? (Sam Harris is much smarter than me so I expect there is a good answer to this!)
I don’t think so. People argue about it as if huge matters were at stake, but really there are none. The only vague suggestion I’ve ever heard is that without free will, punishment seems unjust. Okay. But we have no free will, so how do we change it? And if we stop thinking of consequences as punishments, nothing changes. People learn, and people react to incentives, whether they have free will or not. If the response to crime has the effect of reducing crime, we don’t need to know whether people have free will. We just need to know the effects of different causes. Lacking free will apparently does not prevent us from learning more about this and adjusting our behavior accordingly, since people have done so in the past. Even if the does not demonstrate free will, it demonstrates that nothing depends on free will, nothing is at stake.
Does our understanding of justice determine our institutions, or the reverse, or does influence go both ways? Most people don’t question what they have become accustomed to, and tend to moralize it to boot. It took a surprisingly long time for people to begin to question slavery, and then a surprisingly short time for it to be nearly eliminated. If we didn’t need free will for that, what do we need it for?
"One person is sitting on the left branch. Should you pull the switch to divert the trolley to the left branch?"
This is done all the time. Big accident scene where not enough medical personnel arrive to treat everybody. What to do? Triage! Some are condemned to death. Why? Maximize number of lives saved.
We acquiesce to this rule and method for we don't know whether we're on which side of the track. The rule gives each of us best chance for survival if we don't know what state we will be in after the accident.
We triage but we don't kill a healthy person in order to use his organs to save three people in need of different organs, which looks like the same logic. As I argued in the post, we feel responsible for consequences of action in a way in which are not responsible for consequences of inaction.
I think the difference arises from not knowing or knowing what position one will be in. With triage, it's clear: We don't know what shape we'll be in after the accident.
If we could transfer this way of looking at things to the trolley problem, the triage solution would work: Suppose we don't know whether we will be among the four on Track I or alone on Track II. Would we acquiesce in the rule that it's best to maximize the number of lives saved? I think yes.
Me, I'd throw the switch without hesitating. :-)
We don't know if we will be in need of an organ transplant. In the trolley case, we don't know which branch we would be on, but the odds are four to one on the branch the trolley is initially headed for. You would throw the switch but a lot of other people wouldn't — why?
In the second version, would you push the overweight stranger off the balcony?
Well, we wouldn't know the odds. Let's say equi-probability of the unknown. Then we'd be hesitant between saving a few people and letting the same number of other people die.
Why others hesitate in a situation where they know they will save more lives is beyond me.
Let me try the same approach to the overweight stranger. Do we know whether we will be the overweight stranger or not? If we did, and were overweight, we'd be against sacrifice. If we didn't, we might be for it. But again, equi-probability of the unknown, together with some risk aversion, says do not sacrifice the overweight stranger.
I expect we don't think about such decisions. We don't have time in a real world trolley case. Must be ingrained somehow.
We don't know whether we will be the overweight stranger or one of the four people at risk of being run over. The odds are four to one for the latter, assuming no additional information.
You said you would throw the switch without hesitating. The odds are four to one there too. Would you push the stranger without hesitating? If not, why not?
No, no: I wouldn't hesitate throwing the switch only if I knew for sure that I was saving four and killing one.
Your post is asking what we would do about such and such. I'm guessing we are led to our decisions behind the veil of ignorance.
If I followed equal probabilities of the unknown, which we probably do before learning about risks, and I were a tad risk averse, I would get clogged doing nothing about pushing somebody off the balcony. Like in real life.
I could be completely wrong, of course, in the sense that that is not consistent with how we act.
"Strip off everything a person is not himself responsible for — genes, wealth, upbringing, both nature and nurture — and it is hard to see what is left on which differences in desert could be based."
But assuming so much implies we have no agency. Our actions would all be pre-determined. People do make choices, even asylum inmates do. This is important for understanding the really bad guys, the concentration and death camp guards, the gulag operators and enforcers, the collectivization promulgators in the Soviet Union and China. These were volunteers! They had it better than they otherwise would have.
No. This is one of those absurd supposedly moral questions that people like to pose but are absolutely meaningless. Akin to the Trolly Car one mentioned below. If a trolly car is going to run over five people but you can switch it to another line and have it run into a fat person would you do it? oohhh deep question.
No it's not.
If you lived on the planet Vulcan you would because the needs of the few outway the needs of the one and the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. To quote Spock. On planet Earth in the real universe. The answer is no. The very simple reason is if you change the path of the trolly you've committed a homicide. And not only that but a deliberate Murder One Homicide. Doesn't matter about the safety hat or the instructions, or the salary. You have committed a murder. Legally. Though your actions you killed that guy. Let's say all the people tied to the tracks were convicted murders and the fat guy was the sole support of his 9 children, his widowed mother and his mistress. Or the other way around. He's a convicted murderer escaped from prison and the other people are the sole support of their 45 children, their widowed mothers and their mistresses. Make you happier? Sorry you still have committed a murder with malice of forethought.
In days of yore the FBI was shooting up a house because some gangsters were in it. All was quiet for a while and they thought the people inside might be dead, but weren't sure. So they grabbed the groundskeeper, gave him a bullet proof vest and told him to go inside and look. Lucky for him they were.
There use to be a law in CA that said you had to assist a policeman if requested too. That was recently overturned. You are under no legal or moral obligation to risk your own life to help another. Or to follow orders that might get you killed or badly injured. There are two exceptions that I know of: If you are on a ship and the Captain tells you go down in the hold and fight a fire, you have to go, even if you are just a passenger and might get burned to death or die in another way. If you enlist in the one of the armed services and the sergeant tells you to go up the hill, you have to go up the hill, even if it means you get shot. Other then that you don't have to help anyone or do anything to prevent their demise or anyone else. If you do, fine. You are a nice person. People might think you are awful if you don't. What if the risk entails your demise and you have 9 children depending on you? Risk your death or severe injury to help someone else? Is you obligation to them, your kids, your widowed mother?
Witness the cops lack of actions in the school shooting in Texas. who stood by and did nothing. You can say they should have or must have. But they had no legal obligation to do so.
If X thinks about shooting someone, buys a gun. Puts the gun in the drawer and doesn't do it is he guilty because he thought about it? Well, no, but in this day in age he might be. If a drunk kills someone that is not just a moral crime but an actual crime. If a drunk doesn't, he's committed the crime of driving drunk but not of killing anyone. It might be luck, chance, fate, kismet, the will of the gods or whatever. Doesn't matter. If you hate your neighbor and try to send telepathic deep thought waves to him to cause him to die are you guilty of bad thoughts? Well maybe. Guilty of murder? No.
Trying to do something and failing means you have failed. You should not be judged or punished as if you succeeded.
I get that people are not responsible for the cards they are dealt. But I strongly suspect that a society that buys into this belief in a radical way will be overwhelmed by freeloaders. I just can’t see a way out of treating people as if they are responsible for their actions (while nodding to how they got there).
That's certainly one argument for the pattern of legal and social sanctions one observes. But I would like to believe that my moral judgements are correct as well as useful, so want to think about whether allocating outcomes, including everything from criminal punishment to income, on other than a strictly egalitarian basis, is an injustice we have to put up with for practical reasons or not. It doesn't feel to me like an injustice, and I am trying to make sense of my (and other people's) moral intuitions.
I know a person who grew up in an abusive household and then foster care, and ended up aging out of foster care. Typical results for someone with that background are...not good. Instead, she became both a wonderful person, but also got into the foster care business (ran a local agency) to help kids who were going through the same experience she did.
If she had turned out to follow the more normal track for someone in her situation, most people would assign less moral blame to her for that outcome. They would cut her some slack, so to speak. Not all the slack in the world, though. Nobody would have given her slack if she became a serial killer, no matter how bad her upbringing. In reality, that she turned out to be a thoughtful and loving person who reinvested in the community is worthy of praise. The difficulties of her upbringing didn't force her reality in adulthood.
That difference in moral valence between expected and actual outcomes is what's relevant to moral blame or praise. I think our legal and social sanctions try to track the difference between expected and actual outcomes, recognizing that it's quite difficult to accurately predict such things. We also have to have some significant firmness in the legal sanctions for crimes - not too much harshness or leniency for exculpatory factors.
Your "expected outcomes" are the result of our limited knowledge. One possible response to your story is that there must have been other factors we are unaware of that would make the expected outcomes, given full knowledge, exactly what happened. That's the determinist position.
One response to that, which I expect to suggest in another post, is that determinism is wrong, there really is free will and she had a consciousness which made choices, in her case choices that led to the outcome you describe. The other response, the one I was offering in this post, is that even if becoming the person she is was ultimately due to factors she was not responsible for, still that person is admirable and deserves our respect and approval.