A strong moral case for strip mining.
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The hypothetical fails to address, in point a: one key aspect, which is, âcan you communicate with the people who are trapped?â If you can then the obvious answer is to inquire as to which option they as a whole tend towards, and do that. In the end, the best ethical approach is one that is genuinely empathetic.
In the even that you canât communicate with them, itâs unfair to assume that anyone wants to die to save another, even if you support that ideal yourself, so again, ethically, itâs important to assess all possible viewpoints. The end result, combining pragmatism with ethics will always be to attempt to save everyone.
The baby part is actually kind of insulting. I mean, I know that there are some people who will change their answer based on that; there are also people who will change their answer if you say that the people had blonde hair. Itâs a cheap appeal to a fringe emotion, and the people crafting the question knew that.
Pragmatically, babies are extremely easy to produce, whereas developed, trained adults are not. So a trained adult is a more valuable resource than a baby. However, there is an emotional backlash to hurting babies, which is strong enough in society that no pragmatic or ethical response could possibly ignore it. However, realizing this, no one would ever stuff dozens of babies down a fucking mine. In short, the latter hypothetical at once relies on and yet defies the condition itâs appealing to. Itâs a failed hypothetical, because the ideas it stresses preclude the environment it demands. People donât put babies in mines for precisely the reason this query thinks it can get a special answer via asking about babies in peril.
So part b: was cheap and stupid.
Now thatâs what I call a dilemma!
As many commenters have observed, the original problem is dead easy. The expected value is 50% either way, so swing for the fences (and avoid survivorâs guilt) by choosing option two.
But if option one had something to offer in return for the horror of our having to sacrifice half of the min{e/o}rs, things would start to get tricky.
If we arenât sweating at 45%, the screws could be tightened some more.
option 2 seems the obvious choice, option 1 requires you to make some decision on which lives and dies, some criteria of choice (or flip a coin, in which case any given miner or baby or baby miner has the same probability of living) option 2 is simpler. baby or miner makes no difference. i think just about everyone would rather you take the measure that saves the most but has the greatest risk than the one which saves the least but is certain, if you fail the family of the deceased may take issue with your choice but just point them to the family of the deceased that would have been abandoned if if saved that person and i think they see that the best thing for everyone is the riskier maneuver.
Thatâs dodging the dilemma. The rescuersâ emotions and preferences are not at issue. If one rescuerâs life is sacrificed for the benefit of Baby Hitler Junior, is the ensuing Holocaust Part II (The Search For Curlyâs Gold, because the âElectric Boogalooâ joke is hell of played out, people.) ethically justified because some rando saved a babby from dying to death?
well played.
I wonder about these when we start to tweak the equivalency.
What if itâs a certain 60% saved or a 50% chance of saving everyone?
70%?
80%?
We struggle with making such hard decisions. The socially acceptable, incorrect, choice is to try to be an hero.
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Compared to what, meaningless gestures?
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Back when I used to white water kayak, the question was how much assistance did dumb-ass and probably drunk tourists deserve. The general rule of thumb was kids under 12 deserve help, as well as people that were in imminent danger of death. Seriously, there are some popular drowning spots where several drunks on inner tubes drown each year, but nobody felt it was worth sacrificing their weekends just to stake out those locations and save a couple people a year. Sometimes weâd throw rescue to ropes for people just for practice.
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Option 3: Cry âWho the hell did put me in charge of those baby miners?! That´s insane!!!â then run away as fast as I can never to be seen again.
Iâve learned 2 things from all of this:
#1 Baby Miners are SOL
#2 We Have To Live With Our Decision
It is a lot easier to live with the fact that you tried as best you could to save everyone but it just wasnât possible, then it is to live with yourself having consciously chosen to let any number of people die. It is difficult to devalue any number of humans to put them on the losing side of a risk equation. The first scenario you tried your best but the tragic situation prevailed, the second you calculatingly decided to end the life of a certain number of people via rationalizing odds. I think the dilemma is that logic is butting heads with a moral prime directive. It isnât just about maximizing lives saved, it is also about living with the decision and the reasoning behind the decision. It is trickyâŚ
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The point of the dilemma isnât to assess any particular personâs morality to assign a passing or failing grade; itâs to break down the heuristic processes people use to make decisions, under laboratory conditions, so to speak.
Some will answer A, some B, to the miner dilemma. Some will change their answer when itâs babies involved; some wonât. There is no right or wrong answer from the researcherâs point of view, just data. Changing the victims from miners to babies is not a cheap trick to get you to answer wrongly, itâs a tool to discover if some people will change their minds based on the cuteness of the victims, and so illuminate (hopefully) the human decision-making process.
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I also bet that many would change their minds confronted with the real decision versus a conceptual question. Or if they know the miners, or have seen the babies, etc. Actual people humanize the question and take it out of the realm of the abstract.
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Go for certainty, save a half. In case of the miners, having the witnesses of the mishap cause are worth a lot of bias off 50%.
âŚand then spend the rest of your life fighting off the lawyers of the other halfâs familiesâŚ
With babies, the answer doesnât matter, they have no sunk cost in schooling/training and can be made anew on a whim by an untrained workforce.
Thanks! I came here to say roughly the same thing.
For example: the runaway train trolley where youâre supposed to push the fat man onto the tracks to save other lives. Well, what if youâre used to working with the laws of physics, and you begin to wonder: âHmm, thatâll kill him, but wonât really stop the trolley because he might derail it, but itâll then hit that power cable, which will electrify the platform and then kill that classroom of children on their way to the museumâŚâ
I agree completely with âmu.â Contrived situations are BS. And in that light, Iâll propose the official VietNam solution: 'Letâs bomb them all and let God sort it out."
I am selfish and have a negativity bias.
Therefore I want to avoid the possibility of saving fewer than 50% more than want to save more.
I choose one.
If you had stopped after your first sentence, I would have totally agreed with you. I hate questions like this. First of all, you canât answer them honestly, because the only honest answer would be: âI donât know. Iâve never been in that situation.â Secondly, itâs just not a realistic scenario.A more realistic scenario would be one where option 1 has a 90-100% chance of saving 40-60%, and option 2 has a 40-60% chance of saving 90-100%.
Two things: First, morality operates in the real world, not the hypothetical. In the real world, there are never clear binary decision trees, whether it is miners and babies, torturing terrorists, or trains and broken bridges. Morality is non euclidean, and never operates in a closed system.
Second, probability, at least outside a subatomic level, is not factual. It is a measurement of the size and shape of an unknown, not an actual fact. What we are presented with is a choice between a certainty and an unknown; they are not equivalent. Human beings are inherently bad at understanding probability, which makes both Las Vegas and space exploration possible. I am glad I live in a world where in both cases, most human beings would almost certainly always go for option b, whether it was babies or non-white miners. (The whole miner vs baby things is a rather juvenile distraction; mind you, I used to be a miner.)
I think Nasrudin has the best answer to probability based dilemmas:
Nasrudin was caught in the act and sentenced to die. Hauled up before the king, he was asked by the Royal Presence: âIs there any reason at all why I shouldnât have your head off right now?â To which he replied: âOh, King, live forever! Know that I, the mullah Nasrudin, am the greatest teacher in your kingdom, and it would surely be a waste to kill such a great teacher. So skilled am I that I could even teach your favorite horse to sing, given a year to work on it.â The king was amused, and said: âVery well then, you move into the stable immediately, and if the horse isnât singing a year from now, weâll think of something interesting to do with you.â
As he was returning to his cell to pick up his spare rags, his cellmate remonstrated with him: âNow that was really stupid. You know you canât teach that horse to sing, no matter how long you try.â Nasrudinâs response: "Not at all. I have a year now that I didnât have before. And a lot of things can happen in a year. The king might die. The horse might die. I might die.
âAnd, who knows? Maybe the horse will sing.â
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