No amount of money would get me to kill a random person.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:No amount of money would get me to kill a random person.
In the OP, you were pricing the dropping of a moral belief. Here, instead, you are putting a price on some "random person" and the person who refuses to take money for killing him. IOW, now there are three prices proposed.If instead it is suggested, as Phyllo does, that one might prefer to die than to kill an innocent, it only entails that that person values their own continued existence less than they value the life of the other (or rather, the moral belief that they shouldn't kill).
Dan~ wrote:Life is right now about money.
Some people will price anything but others do not think in that way. It's not a universal attitude.You can put a price on all kinds of things, Phyllo. Price just mediates value. Anything you can value you can price.
You have brought up the trolley problem a few times now.Suppose you are faced with two possible worlds:
World A: a random person is killed and an orphanage gets an X dollar donation;
World B: neither of those things happened.
Is there some X where you choose world A? Shouldn't there be?
Do you say don't pull the switch in the trolley problem?
The fat man
As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?
Resistance to this course of action seems strong; when asked, a majority of people will approve of pulling the switch to save a net of four lives, but will disapprove of pushing the fat man to save a net of four lives.[11] This has led to attempts to find a relevant moral distinction between the two cases.
One clear distinction is that in the first case, one does not intend harm towards anyone – harming the one is just a side effect of switching the trolley away from the five. However, in the second case, harming the one is an integral part of the plan to save the five. This is an argument which Shelly Kagan considers (and ultimately rejects) in The Limits of Morality.[12]
A claim can be made that the difference between the two cases is that in the second, you intend someone's death to save the five, and this is wrong, whereas, in the first, you have no such intention. This solution is essentially an application of the doctrine of double effect, which says that you may take action which has bad side effects, but deliberately intending harm (even for good causes) is wrong.
Another distinction is that the first case is similar to a pilot in an airplane that has lost power and is about to crash into a heavily populated area. Even if the pilot knows for sure that innocent people will die if he redirects the plane to a less populated area—people who are "uninvolved"—he will actively turn the plane without hesitation. It may well be considered noble to sacrifice your own life to protect others, but morally or legally allowing murder of one innocent person to save five people may be insufficient justification.
Suppose you are faced with two possible worlds:
World A: a random person is killed and an orphanage gets an X dollar donation;
World B: neither of those things happened.
Is there some X where you choose world A? Shouldn't there be?
My position is that X exists. It's less than a trillion. And furthermore, that X is the price at which you should prefer a world where you are paid to kill a random person. Whatever value X is, you can just take X as payment and give it to the orphanage, and create what, by hypothesis, is the better world. In the event we choose between a better or worse world, it is moral to choose the better world.
phyllo wrote:Some people will price anything but others do not think in that way. It's not a universal attitude.
phyllo wrote:The "fat man" version of the trolley problem shows the general aversion to these ideas.
phyllo wrote:The difference between World A and World B is not just one dead person plus well-off orphans versus one live person plus suffering orphans.
Why on earth would you doubt it? People have refused to kill people trying to kill them. IOW despite losing everything possible. How much money would it take for you to rape a child, Carleas? I mean, you could use that money to help other children.Carleas wrote:Karpel Tunnel wrote:No amount of money would get me to kill a random person.
It may be true that you value not killing a random person more than literally more liquid value than all of humanity can produce, but I doubt it.
Sure. People will kill over a couple of bucks or who drank the last beer. Does this mean the price of a beer is the value of killing someone? Your proposal rests on some kind of at least vague consensus, not only on money as the measure, but what the measures tend to be.In any case, we know from observation that plenty of people do in fact kill random people for substantially less than everything.
Well, if we are accepting it, as you do here, we are accepting that money is not the correct measure.If instead it is suggested, as Phyllo does, that one might prefer to die than to kill an innocent, it only entails that that person values their own continued existence less than they value the life of the other (or rather, the moral belief that they shouldn't kill).
Let's put it differently: Take Singer's parable of the drowning child. How much do you sacrifice to save the drowning child? Put differently, how much do you currently contribute to charitable causes that demonstrably save the lives on innocents for around a thousand dollars? If the amount you currently donate to those causes is zero, you probably aren't as committed to not killing people as you claim. Moreover, if you currently choose to buy yourself food instead of contributing every cent you earn to saving those lives until you die from hunger and exhaustion, you probably aren't so strongly committed to dying rather than killing.
Wow, look at the assumptions hereIt may be that you just aren't a consequentialist, and you base your morality in the opinion of some all loving god who could care less about what happens to anyone around you so long as you don't participate directly in the causal chain that leads to their death. That morality is nonsense for a number of reasons, but that is a different discussion and my argument here doesn't address it.
Ah, there you go, one possible consequentialist argument AND NOTE: IT IS VERY VERY HARD TO TRACK THE CONSEQUENCES of such things. I say this, because most consequentialists tend to treat only those effects that can be tracked as the set of effects and/or show to me a kind of hubris in the ability to track consequences.On the other hand, it may just be that the idea of accepting money in exchange for committing moral wrongs is seen as taboo. That's understandable, because signaling a commitment to moral positions that is strong enough to overcome any personal gain is important for social cohesion and alliance building.
I've made it so far without having to make such decisions. And what are the consequences of having these kinds of scenarios BEING A REGULAR PART OF HUMAN INTERACTIONS? Oh, we don't have to think of that. Indirect effects, those that deal with how we think and the way it affects how we views others, oh those are hard to track, so we don't have to consider them.Here is one test: if you think that it's right to pull the lever in the trolley problem, to save five lives by killing one, then why would it be the case that you can't accept $10,000 to kill a random person and then donate that money to a charitable initiative that reliably saves a life for each $1,000 it receives? You would on net save 9 lives, 5 lives better than in the trolley problem. What gives? We're just replacing the trolley switch with a check for killing the one person followed by an alms collection to save the five.
And again what are the side effects of making this kind of thinking the main guideline in a society? How does that monetary evaluation, when taught to children, when it becomes the common way of evaluating actions in adult society..........how does that affect how we view and then treat each other? Ah, that's hard to figure out, we don't have to think of that.Here's another way to approach the problem, which is probably where we should have started: I think lying is always wrong, but surely you would tell a white lie for $1 million, right? Think of all the orphans you could save! Murder is an extreme case, and when we start there it's easy to take our gut rejection as an indication that there's nothing to this price-of-morality argument. But start with tiny moral wrongs, and (I hope) it's clear that we would take money for small moral wrongs. If nothing else, we can differentiate moral wrongs for which it's not taboo to discuss accepting money to violate, and ones for which it is.[
Karpel Tunnel wrote:Why on earth would you doubt it? People have refused to kill people trying to kill them. IOW despite losing everything possible. How much money would it take for you to rape a child, Carleas? I mean, you could use that money to help other children.Carleas wrote:Karpel Tunnel wrote:No amount of money would get me to kill a random person.
It may be true that you value not killing a random person more than literally more liquid value than all of humanity can produce, but I doubt it.Sure. People will kill over a couple of bucks or who drank the last beer. Does this mean the price of a beer is the value of killing someone? Your proposal rests on some kind of at least vague consensus, not only on money as the measure, but what the measures tend to be.In any case, we know from observation that plenty of people do in fact kill random people for substantially less than everything.Well, if we are accepting it, as you do here, we are accepting that money is not the correct measure.If instead it is suggested, as Phyllo does, that one might prefer to die than to kill an innocent, it only entails that that person values their own continued existence less than they value the life of the other (or rather, the moral belief that they shouldn't kill).Let's put it differently: Take Singer's parable of the drowning child. How much do you sacrifice to save the drowning child? Put differently, how much do you currently contribute to charitable causes that demonstrably save the lives on innocents for around a thousand dollars? If the amount you currently donate to those causes is zero, you probably aren't as committed to not killing people as you claim. Moreover, if you currently choose to buy yourself food instead of contributing every cent you earn to saving those lives until you die from hunger and exhaustion, you probably aren't so strongly committed to dying rather than killing.
So for you not saving someone is the same as not killing someone.
Here's a thought experiment. You need a babysitter or a coworker. You can have a person who does not donate to charities or you can have someone who does donate to charities but who will kill a random person for 1000 dollars. Which category of person would you consider hiring?
Me, there is not a chance in hell I would hire a hit man.Wow, look at the assumptions hereIt may be that you just aren't a consequentialist, and you base your morality in the opinion of some all loving god who could care less about what happens to anyone around you so long as you don't participate directly in the causal chain that leads to their death. That morality is nonsense for a number of reasons, but that is a different discussion and my argument here doesn't address it.
1) there are no consequentialist arguments against your position
2) all deontologists are theistsAh, there you go, one possible consequentialist argument AND NOTE: IT IS VERY VERY HARD TO TRACK THE CONSEQUENCES of such things. I say this, because most consequentialists tend to treat only those effects that can be tracked as the set of effects and/or show to me a kind of hubris in the ability to track consequences.On the other hand, it may just be that the idea of accepting money in exchange for committing moral wrongs is seen as taboo. That's understandable, because signaling a commitment to moral positions that is strong enough to overcome any personal gain is important for social cohesion and alliance building.I've made it so far without having to make such decisions. And what are the consequences of having these kinds of scenarios BEING A REGULAR PART OF HUMAN INTERACTIONS? Oh, we don't have to think of that. Indirect effects, those that deal with how we think and the way it affects how we views others, oh those are hard to track, so we don't have to consider them.Here is one test: if you think that it's right to pull the lever in the trolley problem, to save five lives by killing one, then why would it be the case that you can't accept $10,000 to kill a random person and then donate that money to a charitable initiative that reliably saves a life for each $1,000 it receives? You would on net save 9 lives, 5 lives better than in the trolley problem. What gives? We're just replacing the trolley switch with a check for killing the one person followed by an alms collection to save the five.
The idea that decisions and effects can be narrowed down this way, expecially when we are talking about a new system of evaluation behavior, is pathological and confused.And again what are the side effects of making this kind of thinking the main guideline in a society? How does that monetary evaluation, when taught to children, when it becomes the common way of evaluating actions in adult society..........how does that affect how we view and then treat each other? Ah, that's hard to figure out, we don't have to think of that.Here's another way to approach the problem, which is probably where we should have started: I think lying is always wrong, but surely you would tell a white lie for $1 million, right? Think of all the orphans you could save! Murder is an extreme case, and when we start there it's easy to take our gut rejection as an indication that there's nothing to this price-of-morality argument. But start with tiny moral wrongs, and (I hope) it's clear that we would take money for small moral wrongs. If nothing else, we can differentiate moral wrongs for which it's not taboo to discuss accepting money to violate, and ones for which it is.[
Morality is like a chess puzzle. Causes and effects can be easily broken down and tracked.
I tell white lies for free.
So, Carleas, in the time you wrote these posts, you could have worked for enough money to help a starving child somewhere. It's nice you never tell white lies
but you just contributed to the starvation of an African child.
Seriously, there is something extremely unpleasant here. Not because of what such thinking is and does.
I mean that from the bottom of both my consequentialist and deontological hearts.
You appear to think in terms of numbers, so this all seems reasonable to you.Willingness to do something is not the same as ability to do something. In theory, there exists a break-even price for anything one values. It may fail in practice for any number of reasons (e.g. transaction costs are too high; the good is not excludable; that price is more than the total value produced by all humans ever; people find this kind of thinking icky; etc.).
So you are saying that "ordinary people" really don't understand it ... only philosophers are able to understand and reason it out correctly.But is that general aversion consistent? We know that people's beliefs are often inconsistent depending on how a choice is framed, so it is not a given that people have a general aversion that turns out to be irrational upon examination. Particularly where the general aversion is among non-philosophers in a non-reflective mode, it isn't clear that we should put much weight in the moral consensus.
You mean if I accept your beliefs that these things can be reduced to numbers and simple math operations of addition and subtraction, then would I agree that X must exist?So, maybe put this a different way: if we take as a given that the correct morality is consequentialist and that that entails that we should push the fat man, in that case do you agree that X must exist?
But other consequences are hidden in the original presentation of the options. World A is a place where people will be routinely killed for the benefit of others. That will be the norm and it will be called good. And that's not all, because theft and sales of humans can clearly be justified on the same basis as the killings - for a net benefit. Anything is acceptable as long as you demonstrate the net benefit.One response to this line is to point out that, whatever other consequences you want to load into World A, there should still be an X that outweighs those consequences. Count up all the children in the world who will die of malnutrition in the next ten years, figure out how much they need to not die of malnutrition, plus the cost of distributing that much to each one. Is the life of every child who would die of malnutrition in the next ten years really not worth another source of existential dread and a little blood on your cuffs?
The hypothetical has been stripped of most of the consequences. It's a sanitized world.But I prefer another approach: to quote my torts professor, "don't buck the hypo" (not sure if that's original to her). You can make the math not work by adding additional terms, but those aren't the hypothetical being considered. If what you're saying is, "yes, in the case you presented, it's morally permissible to kill for money, but that case could never happen in the real world for [reasons]", then fine, say that. But if you don't agree that the hypo as presented justifies killing for money, then lets keep discussing the hypo as presented before we embellish it.
phyllo wrote:Not everyone thinks in terms of numbers.
phyllo wrote:So you are saying that "ordinary people" really don't understand it ... only philosophers are able to understand and reason it out correctly.
It seems perfectly reasonable that someone is repelled by having to physically kill the fat man.
phyllo wrote:It's also perfectly reasonable that someone believes that mathematics do not enter into life and death decisions.
phyllo wrote:But other consequences are hidden in the original presentation of the options...The hypothetical has been stripped of most of the consequences. It's a sanitized world.
Again, some people can't think it.Again, this isn't about how people do think, it's about they can think.
But you brought up the trolley problem in the first place.I'm saying surveys aren't a great way to get at a consistent moral framework.
They have valid reasons. They see the two problems as fundamentally different in an important sense. You deny the existence of that difference.I would also say it seems understandable that people are repelled by the fat man hypo, but not reasonable. See my comments to Meno_ above; people's intuitions are derived from cognitive mechanisms that evolved to solve very different problems from the trolley problem and the fat man variation. They don't tend to think about it, or be bothered by the possibility that it's inconsistent upon analysis. That doesn't mean that it is not inconsistent upon analysis.
I was thinking of those who refuse to participate in pulling the switch or pushing the fat man.Not if they've already happily answered the original trolley problem in favor of pulling the switch, in which case it's special pleading to complain about using mathematics in hypothetical life and death decisions only when we get to a life and death decision that feels icky.
Person A: What is the value of that person in US dollars?These statements conflict, and I agree with the latter. This is a hypothetical limited to its terms, the hidden consequences are removed by hypothesis, we're talking about an artificially pure scenario that gets only at a specific question of morality. The only difference between world A and world B, by hypothesis is that in world A someone is dead and an orphanage has X dollars.
Right. The merit/value of the people involved is only superficially known by the person at the switch or beside the fat man. How can he assign value to them?for example, if the "fat man" were an Einstein.... would we toss
Einstein into the path to save 4 rather ordinary people?
who becomes more important, the number of people or
the "relative" value of each person and once again, we run
into the problem of how do we judge or create
a criteria to decide which one is the answer?
Peter Kropotkin wrote:who becomes more important, the number of people or the "relative" value of each person and once again, we run into the problem of how do we judge or create a criteria to decide which one is the answer?
phyllo wrote:Again, some people can't think it.
Carleas wrote:[S]urveys aren't a great way to get at a consistent moral framework.
phyllo wrote:But you brought up the trolley problem in the first place.
phyllo wrote:They see the two problems as fundamentally different in an important sense. You deny the existence of that difference.
phyllo wrote:Person A: What is the value of that person in US dollars?
Person B: People can't be valued in terms of dollars.
Person A: That's not answering the question.
Person B: Obviously.
Or/and 'would prefer not to'.phyllo wrote:Again, some people can't think it.Again, this isn't about how people do think, it's about they can think.
Ecmandu wrote:My post just above this one was incoherent... I edited it
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