If the miners get into a fight over it and half of them are killed, do you get to count them as the 50 you save or are you now trying to figure out whether to save all/half of them. Does anything change now that you know a bunch of them are murderers?
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Good point. I clearly need to think a bit more about this.
Only if you are a consequentialist, i.e. if you believe that the morality of your choice is determined by its outcome.
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How fucked up is it about our species that thatâs a legitimate concern?
I have to agree with posters suggesting that the babies have no understanding of some living and some dying. They have no sense of being let down or prioritized. I also am of the thought that with one life you inflict many, for example of the babies die yes the parents will grieve and suffer, however if the adult minors die they will likely be leaving behind a family. If that is the case then that entire family may suffer not only loss and grief but financial hardship and the entire family dynamic changing. For this reason I would go with the second option on both. If you donât have success in saving them all then at least you tried, if you fail then you have not sat there and actively condemned 50 of the hundred to certain death.
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But wait, where are the miners? What is the condition of the mine? Who is calculating the strategy of success? Do they know what they are talking about? Have they done these kind or rescues before? How is this the same or different based on this mine and these conditions?
I bring these kind of questions up because I know that they are designed to pose a moral quandary for people. We are suppose to ignore all the âfrictionâ and other details to solve like a simple math problem.
The attempt to abstract out someoneâs morals also forces people to fill in the blanks with crap and other assumptions.
It reminds me of the âticking time bombâ scenerio that is used by people who want to justify torture. They want you to work from and agree to the situation even if it is total BS. And if you demand that they answer other questions, they complain that you âarenât playing fairâ
How do I value life? How do I trust statistics of success? Are babies more valuable than adult miners? Maybe it depend on if it is YOUR baby or your husband.
I was just watching an episode of Stargate Atlantis and the people from other planets got the same kind of 'moral dilemma and they started asking questions. âWhy are they on the train tracks?â
Just to mess with the simple sort of answer the person was asking.
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O(f course you take option 1 in your setup. The utility (i.e. expected number of lives saved is much higher):
Option 1: 1.0 * 99 = 99
Option 2: 0.01 * 100 = 1
Itâs a no brainer mathematically, and itâs a no brainer morally.
In the original problem, the utility is equal, thus the moral dilemma.
Option 1: 1.0 * 50 = 50
Option 2: 0.5 * 100 = 50
Mathematically the options are equivalent. This is (supposed to be) a morality choice, but the problem seems flawed. Itâs structured like the old âkill 1 to save 5 by switching a trolley from one track to the otherâ, vs âsave 5 by throwing a man into the path of the trolley.â That problem causes a more visceral reaction, than this. This seems much more abstract.
For what itâs worth, I vote try to save them all.
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We do that all the time. This is how road safety is determined, healthcare costs calculated, vehicle safety devices designed, earthquake safety, etc. There is nothing monstrous about it. A human life does not have an infinite value. The real question you need to be asking is what is the moral value between any given change. For example, you could take the $50 million you would use to save the miners (and let them die horribly) and use it to save thousands of people from malaria. Would you do that? Or you can use the money to pay for healthcare. There does come a point where the general use of money is more beneficial than throwing money away to save people in a crisis. And there does need to be a balance. You could design your entire economy to try to pay for healthcare and safety devices only to see it collapse because nobody works in other fields. You could cancel all non-medical scientific research to devote funds to saving lives only to see that your economy has stagnated and that the lack of GDP growth has cost more to healthcare and safety than if you did a more economically sustainable action. In a world with infinite resources, simple choices likes yours are possible. We donât live in that world.
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âI was just watching an episode of Stargate Atlantis.â
Wrong.
It doesnât really work to propose a purely abstract moral choice with no context whatsoever, does it. It becomes more like a logic puzzle or a numbers game than anything resembling the conscious and subconscious processes in real decision making.
âBut officers, I was 100% certain killing that one guy was the only way to save the other five.â
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I think it does - if itâs 50% chance for each baby (in option 2) that means 50 will still likely (in terms of probability) live, instead of all 100 dying if it goes bad. It gives each baby an equal chance of being rescued, as opposed to option 1 where 50% of babies have 100% chance of living and 50% 100 chance of dying.
I donât know about the babies, but for me personally the miners answer is 100% obvious:
- If I were one of the miners the most ethical thing for me to do would be to risk my own life for the chance that everyone else would live.
- Since I assume I am rational, and I assume that everyone else is rational, I have to assume that all us miners will share the same belief.
- So we would all opt for option 2, the risk of death for the chance that we all live.
- So as the person tasked with the decision, I should respect that and go for option 2
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If it was truly, measurably a 50% success rate vs an even chance of all or nothing, I will take the guaranteed route. But it is never like that, the unguaranteed route is always north or south of the 50% line. There will always be a factor either in your favor or against.
Tl;Dr save lives donât gamble.
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I get the impression that weâre in a situation of white and blue morality. Because I think the point of morality is to help people, and it matters what does or doesnât help people. I guess weâre on orthagonal axes.
Then think of non-monetary costs. How many rescuersâ lives are you willing to risk for the miners? For the babies? For a box of kittens?
What if youâre presented with the choice to save only one of the three? Your irrational âbasic human empathyâ might well lead you to value the fluffy kittens over the stinky noisy babies or sweaty grizzled miners, when the kittens arguably have the least utility.
EDIT: Oh, and no one has yet mentioned the possibility that one of the babies is destined to be the next Hitler.
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Just to note about the experiment in general, the concept of expectation value would be helpful. In both of these cases, that value is 50. From a statistical point of view, there is no difference.
Is it even mathematically identical, though? Iâm having a hard time processing the logical consequences of one of the choices dealing with 50 lives in peril and the other with 100. Does it change anything, numerically speaking? Not sure.
Morally it feels different because âsaving some vs. all doomed soulsâ is not the same as âchoosing to add previously undoomed souls to the mixâ.
Presumably anyone who is a rescuer wants to be a rescuer. They choose to risk their own lives, not anyone else.
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But thatâs not the same situation. The crucial difference is that in the original setup, the decision to send in rescuers is already made. The question is about allocation. In thus setup, the choice is:A: Attempt a risky rescue.B: Make an affirmative choice to not to utilize the resources you have immediately available thus condemning 50 people to certain death.
This isnât about trying to save as many people as possible vs saving only what you know you can. This is about trying to save people, or condemning them to a gruesome death.
