I’ve seen plenty of opinions that Israel’s strikes in Gaza have been excessive in terms of civilian casualties. This leads to a very natural question: how many civilian casualties would be ok? This isn’t to give an opinion on the current war, but if public debate touches on civilian casualties it’s a question we need to answer. It might seem cold to give some sort of precise figure: we’re loathe to quantify human life. But perhaps such ideals have caused more harm than good.
The EPA has a cost-benefit value of a human life. It’s now $6.9M (down almost $1M from the last estimate — a fact mocked by Stephen Colbert). It does seem very arbitrary to give a precise boundary — does this mean the government shouldn’t spend $6,950,000 on a safety ad campaign that’s likely to save one life? I don’t think so. But having at least some boundary is a very sensible idea. It looks nice & noble to say that human life is priceless. But if I had a disease where treatment would cost $20M, I hope most people would be in favour of using this cash to save a thousands of lives in my stead. Being just “noble” is another case of the concept of dignity leading to harm.
Moral intuition is often an play between utilitarianism (save as many lives as possible) and a set of maxims (eg. don’t harm an innocent). The two often conflict, as in the famous trolley problem. If everyone agreed to pure utilitarianism, then as long as I’m saving more people in the long run, I can do anything even if it results in huge civilian casualties. (Note: obviously all examples that follow are very artificial.) A man is surrounded by 10 children, I by 9. We both have rocket launchers. He has definite knowledge I’m about to fire. Using pure utilitarianism it’s ok for him to fire killing me and 9 children.
At some point though, we leave our comfort zone. What if he’s surrounded by 10,000 children and I by 9,999? There might be something off about killing 9,999 children. (Though I’d say there’s a lot more off about letting 10,000 die.) Things get even hairier in the real world, where uncertainty means we only have estimates. Let’s take things up a notch. I’m amidst 8 children, the other man is among 10. The man knows I’m a bit unstable — there’s only a 50% chance that I’ll fire. Does killing-8-with-certainty outweigh killing-10-with-50%-probability? I’d say even here, naive maths (weighing 8 victimes against 5 and not firing) gives a rule that works out better in the long run than killing the 8 “just to be safe”.
Maybe there is no solution to these dilemmas because our brain evolved to have a contradictory view of morality. But if we aim for any further moral progress, we must learn to count. And even identify some acceptable level for civilian casualties in conflict. Soundbytes like “you can’t put a price on human life” and “the concept of human dignity is essential” cannot be our masters — they’ll cause us to do bad things in the long-run. The noblest-sounding soundbytes have been used to justify horribly immoral things. Kant thinks you shouldn’t lie even to save someone’s life. If I were a Cambodian in the Pol Pot regime I’d certainly hope someone stops being noble and saves me through a “colder” arithmetic that puts a price on lives.
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[...] Michael Fridman argues that contrary to popular belief human life is not priceless, but rather that morality [...]
Being a former economist I am very used to having to assign values to human life and suffering.
I was intrigued by the “fat man” scenario (should you push a fat man off a bridge into the path of a trolley that is about to kill 5 people tied to the track?)
I would say not. Firstly, you’d have to be 100% certain there was no other way to stop the trolley. Secondly, you’d also have to be sure the trolley was definitely going to kill the people (might the trolley not have a remote stopping mechanism as the criminal was simply threatening rather than killing?) And would the fat man stop the trolley anyway?
There should be a huge moral difference between definitely (intentionally) killing and incidentally killing.
Killing someone as a by-product of a good act is unfortunate, killing someone to prevent a bad act is more morally ambiguous (e.g. shooting through a hostage to kill the criminal.)
I agree we need to use numbers to decide on the greater good, but we cannot simplify it by saying a>b therefore it is justifiable to cause b to stop a. We must also place a value on our own conscience/soul/respect (as a nation rather than an individual). Otherwise I would suggest it would save suffering in the long run if we simply turned the middle east into glass. However most people, I hope!, would see this as an evil that we should not do. Better to try and negotiate and reason with people even if the maths is not in your favour.
it seems you are rationalising away the concept of the trolley problem a bit. you’re saying that maybe the fat man won’t stop the train etc — however the hypothetical is only for the situation where you KNOW that they will stop the train and that it’s the only way to prevent the deaths of 5 people.
what would you do in this (unrealistic) scenario where everything is clearcut and we cannot hide behind the uncertainty?
in terms of the middle east i think the fact that we shouldn’t turn it to glass can be derived from simple utility in terms of the value lost if everyone in the region perishes (even painlessly) which is likely to be a lot greater than the value lost from current death and suffering in the region.
Okay, I was rationalising it away, and now I’m going to hide behind self interest
I would not push the fat man to save the five, but I would flip the switch. Why? Because I would go to jail in the first instance but be called a hero (not by the sixth person’s family) in the second.
Morally I think the active killing of a human is more damaging to me personally than the incidental or accidental killing of a person.
Actually, since fear runs my morality then I think that the fact that I may be that fat man is the problem. If I crash another trolley into it then I have a fighting chance of it missing me and hitting someone else, whereas if I was on the other track then I would understand and *want* the person to flick the switch to save the other 5. I am not explaining myself very well, and doubt I really can without a great deal of introspection. I may get back to you…
i realise it’s a very thorny problem — i haven’t got a coherent answer myself!
i guess the natural utilitarian counterargument to your self-interest defence is that by not pushing the man across the tracks you are sacrificing 4 lives unnecessarily just to stop yourself from feeling bad.
nurds
People are worthless in most of the world…only a handful of percentage are people like us who even have the opportunaty of using the internet all the others starv every day or have to walk long hours to get a drop of water that might be contaminated
Thought experiment:
A car is driving along and the brakes fail, a group of schoolkids are crossing the road. Would you want the driver to avoid the kids and swerve onto the pavement, even thought you are standing there? Probably.
A car is driving along towards some kids but the driver isn’t paying attention. Would you want a stranger to push you in front of the car to make the driver stop?
The way to think about this is to put yourself in every single one of the positions, driver, kids, bystander (who pushes) and person being pushed. Once you do this you can get a feel for all positions and decide based on that.
I think that the intentional killing of an innocent person to save a greater number is wrong. Occasionally necessary, but still fundamentally wrong. So the police marksman who shoots through a hostage to stop the hostage taker blowing up the remaining hostages is NOT a hero. He is also not a criminal. In fact, he is a victim too.
So is throwing the fat man in the way of the trolley a necessary evil? Not for me, I wouldn’t do it. I criminalise myself by trying to save the five people on the track. I, too, become a victim. Some people may have their moral sensibilities set up differently and would be willing to do it.
As to whether the person throwing the fat man into the trolley should be a criminal… That is up to society. We have to have a moral concensus, or majority, to decide that.
I wonder what side the Christians would take on this, after all, life is sacred and thou shall not kill. This should blow their minds much more than it does ours.
hihihi — what?!
keddaw — the utilitarian counterargument would be that you sacrifice 5 people for the sake of not feeling bad about yourself and not getting your hands dirty (by pushing the man in front of the trolley). and i have to say that whilst it doesn’t seem to be a welcome counterargument i can’t think of anything wrong with it.
and part of the utilitarian argument is that right shouldn’t just boil down to gut feelings (just like other forms of knowledge or opinion shouldn’t boil down to gut feelings).
as for the hostage negotiator, would you say he didn’t do the right thing whether he shoots the hostage or whether he doesn’t and then lets the others die? in that case you seem to believe that some people are “morally unlucky”
Hi Michael,
the utilitarian argument fails, for me, because my feeling bad is more important (to me) than 5 lives. Would I kill 5 people to feel good? Of course not.
Unfortunately, for the utilitarian argument, morality does come down to ‘gut feelings’ as I believe all morality is subjective. While it should be a reasoned and rational opinion it will differ between people.
The hostage negotiator is a different situation. If the hostage in front of him is going to die if he doesn’t shoot then he has to do it, there is no change of outcome for the poor hostage anyway.
Hmmm… I am rethinking the fat man situation! Comparing it to flipping the switch on the track. A person was perfectly safe and by my hand they now die. I should probably post when I have formulated my thoughts, not as I am doubting myself
I just can’t bring myself to the utilitarian viewpoint though.
Okay, new idea – sh!t happens. If you are an innocent bystander and you get hit by the derailed trolley, sh!t happens. If you are tied to the other branch of the track and someone flips the switch then sh!t happens. If you are near the trolley but fat then getting shoved in front of the trolley is not sh!t happens. Does that count as a new morality?
my feeling bad is more important (to me) than 5 lives
I understand you’re probably being a bit tongue in cheek (based on your previous comments) but a sentence like that seems like a very good argument for utilitarianism to me!
It is good to capture your thoughts in a raw form before you’ve had time to formulate them, just as an illustration of the process of moral reasoning. Personally I can “feel” both sides of the issue in pushing someone in front of the trolley — which is why it might make sense to let some form of reasoning decide between the two conflicting emotions.
Because our emotional “gut feelings” are VERY fickle and contradictory (actually I posted on the trolley problem ages ago in case you didn’t see it), which addresses exactly what you were saying:
http://anadder.com/is-our-moral-sense-lopsided
I was looking for these posts to see what I thought a while back (to see if I had changed opinion at all) after I saw this:
http://justiceharvard.org
I highly recommend it.
I haven’t changed my mind.
The worker/person who is hit by the train is killed by accident at best, incidentally at worst.
The fat man is killed intentionally.
I guess one way to put it is:
It is okay to kill while avoiding a tragedy;
It is not okay to kill to avoid a tragedy.
That is not utilitarian. But I am not a utilitarian, as I have worked out from this. And also some other much more interesting things such as:
There is a price to pay for living in a free and open society that follows its own rules. If the price is an occassional 9/11 then so be it. It is cheap by any standards.
Looks good but are there just 12 episodes of the show? If it’s ongoing I’ll be hardpressed to add another show to my watching list otherwise sounds interesting.
Which episode examines the trolley problem?
I agree that 9/11 is not a huge price to pay for living free in that comparatively there are 100s of 9/11s every day from malaria, cancer and car accidents in terms of death toll. The worst thing is that we don’t even have to pay the price of 9/11 since such things can probably be prevented without surveilling everyone.
There are 24 lectures, each episode has two lectures bundled together.
The trolley problem is dealt with in the first episode, along with eating a cabin boy…
The libertarian view is dealt with in the third episode which is the one I am most interested in.
I am actually conflicted, I intellectually agree with the minimal state and redistribution of wealth by taxation is theft, but I am emotionally pushed towards the idea that a collective fund should exist to help the least fortunate… But that is not in the scope of this post…
You should throw the fat man in the way of the trolley! (Finally got my head round this.)
It is morally identical to flipping the switch.
The reason we are less tuned to doing this that to flip the switch is because of the unrealistic premise of perfect knowledge. We can never know, in the real world, if the fat man will stop the trolley, if the trolley was 100% definitely not stopping and all the other assumed knowledge.
In the real world it is more likely that we can know (to a reasonable degree) that the trolley would carreer into the 5 people killing them. We can know that flipping the switch will save the 5. We then use this knowledge to make a decision.
The discomfort over the fat man scenario is simply one of lack of knowledge. It is right that we are morally disturbed over a situation that we do not know enough about to make such a momentous decision. It keeps us from making life-altering, snap decisions with insufficient knowledge.
IF we knew all the factors then I would easily push the fat man, but as we don’t then it isn’t right to do so.
From a utilitarian viewpoint (which I don’t think I have) can you answer me this (again assuming perfect knowledge):
If you have a 20% of killing six people or you can switch tracks and have a 100% chance of killing one person, what would you do?
This situation reminds me of a hostage situation more than anything, but it is quite interesting. I would take the view that I would select the (statistically) greater harm of going towards the 6. Hence why I’m not a utilitarian. Why is a better question, but it resembles the reason why I wouldn’t kill a healthy individual to harvest their organs to save 5 dying people. However, there is a soft limit that I could not pass, e.g. I would not risk 100 people with a 20% of death to avoid killing one person. How I get to the number that is my limit requires a longer post than a comment here.
Also, would it matter if the chance of death was per person or for the entire group, e.g. the difference between a dangerous cable car (all die or no-one) and an infectious disease (everyone has an equal chance of dying)?
I don’t think the scenarios have to do anything with imperfect knowledge, we still have the same intuitions if the scenarios are rephrased adding “and there’s a 99.999999999% chance that throwing a person across the tracks will stop the train”
On the numbers you gave, there are many utilitarian answers — I think a rule utilitarian would say something a lot different to an act utilitarian. I think the intuition we have about the risk being “spread” amongst the 6 represents the fact that our intuitions don’t handle probability well. In theory I would follow Eliezer Yudkowsky and shut up and multiply (see this post on the intuitions of utilitarianism). But in a real situation I don’t think I have any idea what I’d do.
Awesome. Just found out that the trolley problem was posed to people in an fMRI machine.
We find out that different parts of the brain function in the two situations and the proximity of the fat man that you harm is from an older part of your brain that doesn’t want to harm others. The switching scenario is simply from the cost benefit part of your brain.
http://richarddawkins.net/article,4459,n,n
Would you kill a perfectly healthy individual to provide organs to 5 people desperately in need of them?
This is morally and logically identical to the fat man issue.
Which is also morally identical to flipping the switch.
Therefore you should not flip the switch.
I actually came at this from a libertarian viewpoint which was at odds with what I’d actually do (flip the switch) but using logic I have come to the conclusion that I shouldn’t flip the switch. Never said I wasn’t a hypocrite…
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