Quote:
A runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks toward five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. You can save these five people by diverting the trolley onto a different set of tracks, one that has only one person on it, but if you do this that person will be killed. Is it morally permissible to turn the trolley and thus prevent five deaths at the cost of one?
I happened to see this on Facebook today actually.
Laurence wrote:
Lol I wanna meet the Shorter and Fatter me! Oh yes, the trolley problem. Remember it from First year. I dislike Thought experiments because of their lack of analogy to real-life moral/ethical dilemmas. For example a real life Ethical dilemma may be to steal or not to steal from a cash register at work, or to cheat or not cheat on your girlfriend. Etc. But as far as this experiment goes I think it is designed to appeal to the Utilitarian strain of thinking. ( ie maximization of happiness to greatest number of people) The response here is to obviously save the 5 people fitting in with the Utilitarian idea. However interestingly when one says the child is the person flipping the switche's mother or lover this changes the story. The Utilitarian will no doubt hesitate and most likely admit he will save the lover (unless he is a very unique person who can rebel against himself for higher principles). This is why I think consequentialism is a failed Ethical theory. Because of two main reasons 1) one cannot know the future of our decisions so the decision maker has no true understanding of his actions. 2) Utilitarianism can quite easily allow for us to do things we (being our conscience or whatever you want to call it) would not do. For this reason such a morale theory cannot be lived. And if it cannot be lived I see no reason why it should be bothered with. Virtue Ethics on the other hand is much more sensible. It emphasizes the virtues, or moral character of a person. All this being said I'm a Virtue Ethicist, however given the basic outline of the thought experiment I think my character would decide to save the lives of the 5. Notice that this does not mean I "killed" the child. I think intention is important here. Intention is willing something to happen and the corresponding action fulfilling it. The flip-switcher does not intend for the child to be killed, it is an unfortunate effect of his action. This often comes up in debates about abortion. Called the Double effect. Interesting Morale Dilemma.
Statistics: Posted by Magicana Drofulcus — June 11th, 2012, 3:33 am
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Anyway, it's part of something called the Trolley Problem. Depending on how you phrase that question, 90% of people will answer one way or the other, regardless of if the outcome is different.
Statistics: Posted by bluecoat — June 9th, 2012, 8:41 pm
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A runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks toward five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. You can save these five people by diverting the trolley onto a different set of tracks, one that has only one person on it, but if you do this that person will be killed. Is it morally permissible to turn the trolley and thus prevent five deaths at the cost of one?
Statistics: Posted by bluecoat — June 8th, 2012, 2:57 pm
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Your studies deal with reactions. If I place a button marked "Do not push" against a candy machine, it's an educated guess that people will wonder "Wait, why not?", see the candy as harmless (or even a good reward), and very likely push the button after a probably consistent amount of time spent thinking over their decision. Suddenly my little test may have results that match your lever experiment. Lack of free will? No, it's just knowing how people think.
If you want to prove free will is a hoax, your tests have to overcome two things. Sentience and Conscience. If you can get a test that forces people into a logic puzzle with multiple solutions, all equally obvious, yet all subjects take one single solution? You're onto something. If you can put people in the middle of a crisis that weighs on their conscience--the "if two people were hanging from a bridge that's collapsing" idea, for example--and get everyone to pick the same course of action to take? You're onto something.
Statistics: Posted by Kikori — June 8th, 2012, 9:44 am
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philosophy-based, religion-aggravating, possibly-scientific topic
Also, scientific is the only angle I've approached it from. This is obviously a topic that philosophy is very interested in, as well as religion, and probably a few others. There's a lot of legal (bringing in poli-sci), social (sociology), and personal (opinon) implications on top of that.
Statistics: Posted by bluecoat — June 6th, 2012, 7:39 pm
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Statistics: Posted by Eadwulf — June 6th, 2012, 7:15 pm
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Fundamental question: Do we have "free will" and to what extent, or do we have something else?
In the last year or so I've slightly deviated from my psychology major into cognitive neuroscience, and this is a big question that comes up a lot. On a broader level, it's an old argument that goes back quite a ways to "dualism" vs "monism". Dualism is that old traditional idea that we have a soul, that we have spirit, that we have thetans, that we have a mind, or just that we have something beyond the physical. Monism is the opposite, and has been gaining a lot of ground in recent times; we are a product of biological processes. Consciousness is an illusion, it is an "epiphenomenon", simply something that occurs when you have many complex processes occurring simultaneously in the brain. Whether it occurs as a result of electrical activity, neurotransmitters, a combination of brain structures activating, or quantum mechanics is as-yet unseen.
Free will is obviously a very important concept to a lot of people. Neuroscientific evidence is a bit on the fence as to whether it exists though; in one study, researchers could predict when a participant would decide to pull a lever six seconds before the participant realized they were making the decision. This doesn't necessarily account for impulse or gut reactions, but those could just be chalked up to various kinds of conditioning. Even at the microscopic levels, classical conditioning (avoiding a taser that you have been shocked by) has been shown in amoebas, which don't even have brains. In humans, brain activation is in general reduced if someone has been "primed" with prior information when considering new information that is related.
There is a flip-side to these findings, however. While medical professionals used to think that the brain couldn't recover or change itself to any meaningful degree, the brain has an astounding ability to alter itself for something supposedly static in decision making. This is called neuroplasticity, and it's one of the great findings of the last 20-ish years. It's possible for multiple-stroke victims to become artists, for children who have had half of their brains removed to function at completely normal levels, and for people to be born without entire brain structures without ever knowing. Buddhism has latched onto this concept as proof that humans, given the right "nudge", can change themselves for the better. And again, these brain studies are all well and good, but people don't always have 10 seconds to ramp up their brain activity to make decisions.
On the weird part of the coin seemingly stuck on with a piece of gum, we find some strange theories with a bit more basis than you would expect. Remember the lever study a few paragraphs up? Well, participants still had this weird capability to tell their brain activity "no", completely throwing off the bets made be researchers. Is this evidence of "free won't"? Going stranger, like anything else in the world, brains have atoms, and at a quantum level there's some randomness. Maybe consciousness starts at this seemingly random level, and simply scales upward into observable brain activity and behaviors?
These are just some of the arguments I've come across in my classes, with no particular citations unfortunately
. There's a lot to find out there though, and I'm sure as hell not an expert. Hell, I only understand things from one perspective; I have no clue the philosophical arguments out there. Here's an article I just came across that comes from the "no free will" camp, written by a physicist: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victor-st ... lp00000009 This article does an excellent job of discussing the legal ramifications for these sorts of allegations. Can we punish criminals? How should we, when they are slaves to their own electrical activity? And more importantly, IS FREE WILL CRAP?
Statistics: Posted by bluecoat — June 5th, 2012, 1:59 am
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