I used to be a baby.
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I used to be a baby miner.
Not to sound selfish, but to avoid a lifetime of guilt and second-guessing, Iâd probably flip a coin.
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In the case of the miners, itâs actually a no brainer for me to choose option 1 and accept the certainty.
Two main reasons: the miners can probably decide who needs to live and who needs to die. Some of these guys might be old or sick, for example, and would accept death to give their friends a certain chance of life. Some of them might have families dependent on them and so their deaths would be hugely worse in the wider community. One brother might well willingly die so that the other would definitely live. Etc.
Secondly, having a large number of adult wage earners die simultaneously is much worse than having half of them die. A community could be totally wrecked if all the wage earners die. But if half dies, then the remainder can adapt, can take on extra jobs, can figure out what went wrong, etc etc. There can be a rebuilding process.
Thereâs actually a real world example here. In WWI, the UK started the war by drafting people from classes and schools together to serve as one unit. That means that if something happened to that unit, everyone in it died simultaneously. It turned out that this was deeply destructive with entire communities wiped out overnight. What they chose to do instead was to split apart recruitment groups as much as possible. Hence each community would see a few casualties, instead of either none or a ton. Following that logic, it has to be option 1.
Movies have trained up to think that option 2 is the âheroicâ option, because in movies option 2 always succeeds.
With babies, meh.
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Itâs been 18 hours. If we argue long enough then we wonât have to rescue anyone!
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Then you would go with whatever option enhances the bottom line. 
A big factor is how close are you to the decision and those involved. For instance, many people would easily say itâs ok to kill half the miners in order to save the other half. However, if youâre the one making the call with everyone watching, the decision will much harder to make and most will choose the path which causes the least amount of personal grief, even if itâs not the most logical or practical. Thatâs why so many folks support the death penalty but would never be able to personally carry out the act.
Assuming the rescue involves lining up to use a rescue harness or something, use option #2 and the free market to make the families pay to get their kin on the good part of the survival curve. This is the free market and social Darwinism ( a misnomer, but you get the point).
Internally, Iâm an option 2 guy - 50% for everyone.
Looking at the real world experts - say, medics in a crisis situation - I see triage. Put on the spot, I would lean to awful practicality, looking for some way to increase the 50% survival rate. Iâd base that on triage practice. I feel awful even looking at that sentence.
Were it my decision, whether Iâd be hunted to extinction in the aftermath would come into play. Weâd exit abstract classroom morality discussion and enter practical, real life.
What if we lower the stakes dramatically? Say instead of human lives the thing at risk is arbitrary âpointsâ to win a game you donât particularly care about? Does that change the strategy?
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Yep, this is an example classic thought experiment. The babies are just there to show how people react to the âcuteâ.
There really isnât a ârightâ answer. Hereâs a page with 25 examples (including a variation on the miners). The point is to see how you react when asked to deal with the grey areas of morality. Typically, asking these questions starts by leading in with âsimplerâ ones - for example:
Youâre in a mine, and thereâs been a cave-in. One of your 20 person crew is badly injured, heâs unconscious and canât climb out. You need to leave, the oxygen is fading. People left behind will run out of oxygen and die. What do you do?
(People would normally leave the one man behind. This seems like an âeasyâ question because one life is being lost, but nineteen are being saved.)
Youâre in a mine, and thereâs been an explosion. 5 of your 20 person crew are injured - some badly, and the climb to the surface looks unsteady. The oxygen has gone down, and you need to leave. What do you do?
(This is harder - itâs more than one person. Typically people will leave the injured to take care of the injured. That means one group can reach the surface to get help, and the limited air is used by the fewest people possible. It gives everyone the best chance for survival.)
Youâre in a mine, and thereâs been a cave-in. 10 of your 20 person crew are trapped, and the walls are now unsteady. You have explosives and tools to dig. What do you do?
(You may have lost half your crew, but trying to blast them out is ridiculously unsafe. Everyone would probably die. You need help. You can either get half the crew to the surface, and get volunteers to help rescue - or send a couple people to the surface while the rest start propping the walls around the area you need to break through. Time is of the essence. Even if you send your crew to the surface and get help, half your crew may still die (digging is slow), but itâs still the safest solution provided.)
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You might be right about the identity issue. Personally, my problem is that itâs a choice between inaction and action, versus two different actions.
The baby question is only interesting when posed to pro-life people in the form of âsave 1 newborn versus save 1000 frozen embryosâ.
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There arenât many things that really strike me as âhorrorâ or give me nightmares, itâs trying to do the right thing and have it go horribly wrong. There was a white water incident where a kayakerâs boat was pinned against a rock or log. The rescuer (a physician IIRC) was able to cut him out of the boat, but severed the guys femoral artery and he bled to death. Thatâs horror.
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Like Hitler.
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Is the value of lives saved linear? Is the the cost of a total loss more than twice as bad as a fifty percent loss?
For instance. Suppose you own the mine. Do you save 50 miners and keep production going? Do you attempt to maintain full production and risk closing the mine?
Or with more respect for human life. Every able bodied male in the village is trapped. Do you save half of them and guarrantee that the community survives, or do you attempt to save them all and risk everything?
I think it would depend on why the chances were like this. If there were two chambers with 50 miners in each and you had to arbitrarily pick one and only one chamber to rescue, this would be different from providing a short term escape route to the one big chamber where all of the miners were trapped. In the second case, you are providing an escape route that will only last long enough to save 50 people, but you donât pick who is rescued and who dies. At the end of the day though, I canât really imagine an event where you would have knowledge of that accuracy - Iâd have thought a real dilemma would probably be more along the lines of âthere are 20 miners trapped underground in an unstable section. Do you send your emergency rescuers in knowing that everyone (including the rescuers) could die in a collapse, or do you go slower and more carefully, making it more likely that the miners themselves will die, but avoiding risk to your crew (who are fewer, but are more directly your responsibility and have the potential to save many more people if they donât die now)?â
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This makes no sense. All babies are, by definition, minors.
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What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft? B flat miner.
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[quote=âpeter_atjet, post:100, topic:40156â]
For instance. Suppose you own the mine. Do you save 50 miners and keep production going? Do you attempt to maintain full production and risk closing the mine?[/quote]
Except that in any competent jurisdiction there is no way that a mine in which 50 people just died is going back into production before a very long inquiry is completed.
The âdilemmaâ is absurd, so the only answers which makes sense are the absurd ones.
