3 ms·

Do you similarly advocate that we should, right now, today, in real life policy, set up a program where we check people for matches to multiple people needing o

Do you similarly advocate that we should, right now, today, in real life policy, set up a program where we check people for matches to multiple people needing organs, and if one healthy person's organs can save the lives of 2+ people, murder that healthy person and take his/her organs?

dalore 10y ago
No, because the risk of surgery and transplant, plus the initial health of the person needing the organ, means it's not 100% certain it will succeed. But leaving the organ in the original person will.
- aetherson 10y ago
  Obviously controllable for. Do you support the program if we kill only people that we believe are statistically likely to save more than 1 life?
- billforsternz 10y ago
  You should have stopped at No.
Strilanc 10y ago
Kinda. I think it would fail utterly in practice. The per-person incentives are all wrong. You're less likely to get picked if you ruin one of your kidneys, for example. "Donors" are going to be unwilling in general, and that will cause a lot of trouble and turmoil. Lots of protesting. Not to mention any abuse of the system would be kind of horrifying. But the general idea of substituting "bad luck you got a disease" with "bad luck you lose the lottery", when there's only half as many lottery losers as there were disease losers... maybe that's not so bad. When it comes to trolley problems, you also have to imagine yourself on the track. Do nothing and there's a 5/6 chance you die. Throw the switch, and there's a 1/6 chance you die.
SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
Are you implying that the correct response is to let the five people die in the Trolley Problem, then? To avoid getting your moral hands dirty? No, obviously I don't advocate that we go around arbitrarily murdering people to potentially improve the lives of others. But there's a huge difference between searching out and selecting specific people and killing them and simply changing the number and identity of people who will be killed by random events. It's the difference between premeditated murder and a no-fault accident. Policy/law decisions must necessarily make choices like this, flipping the switch from tracks that typically have five or five hundred people standing on them to tracks that typically have one, for the good of the five or five hundred. Like air bags that kill some people but save thousands more. Or vaccines that kill (a very small number) of kids (typically with allergies) but save millions.
- aetherson 10y ago
  What I'm implying is that the Trolley Car Dilemma is a toy example that is very divorced from actual life, which makes consequentialism seem more compelling than other examples closer to implementable policy do. The fundamental conceit that you can add and subtract lives, or happiness, or the like as though they were values in a formula is core to consequentialism, and I don't think that people are actually willing to follow through with the implications of that when it stops being at a safe remove. I don't understand the bright line you're drawing between "murder someone by pointing a runaway trolley that would otherwise absolutely miss them in their direction" and "murder someone by harvesting their organs." You can (and, I'd argue, should) believe that air bags are a good idea without believing that the reason that air bags are a good idea is that you can add and subtract lives. For example, you could say, "If YOU get into an accident, it is far more likely that an airbag will save you than it will kill you," which is a different thing than saying, "An air bag will kill YOU, but it will save two other people." And there are many other moral theories which would suggest that air bags are good for reasons other than that "I killed Bob but saved Alice and Charlie" is a generalizable rule for moral good.
  - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
    >I don't understand the bright line you're drawing between "murder someone by pointing a runaway trolley that would otherwise absolutely miss them in their direction" and "murder someone by harvesting their organs." The difference is key to understanding policy decisions like this. You absolutely use math with lives when you're making policy. Right down to calculating lives with dollars. If there is a fixed budget of $100M to apply to saving people's lives, you ideally will divvy the money around in such a way that the most people live. You don't extend one person's life by 1 month using extreme measures that cost $50M and let a hundred die who would could have had their lives extended by years for $50k each. To some degree the original question is a real-world policy example of the trolley problem: Do we allow companies like Tesla to save thousands of lives, possibly your own, in exchange for indemnifying them against the (ideally) few lives lost (also potentially your own) when the technology fails? That sounds identical to the air bag policy: In both cases the life saved could be yours. You might not even get into an accident if there were enough self-driving cars, so not only would you live where you might have died, you might even avoid an inconvenience. I'm not talking about seeking out people and killing them. That is committing murder for an alleged "greater good", and the ends don't justify the means. I'm talking about redirecting a trolley that is going to kill five random people and instead making it kill only one random person. And we can talk about focusing on further advances to make sure that one person doesn't die (statistically speaking) either, but I think that throwing the switch, in a policy sense, is always the right first step. I think the moral argument that flipping the trolley switch is wrong is bankrupt, and that it does map onto the real world and real world policy decisions like requiring mandatory air bags. Flipping the switch isn't murder. Not flipping the switch when you have the opportunity is murder.

dalore 10y ago

No, because the risk of surgery and transplant, plus the initial health of the person needing the organ, means it's not 100% certain it will succeed. But leaving the organ in the original person will.

aetherson 10y ago
Obviously controllable for. Do you support the program if we kill only people that we believe are statistically likely to save more than 1 life?
billforsternz 10y ago
You should have stopped at No.

Strilanc 10y ago

Kinda. I think it would fail utterly in practice. The per-person incentives are all wrong. You're less likely to get picked if you ruin one of your kidneys, for example. "Donors" are going to be unwilling in general, and that will cause a lot of trouble and turmoil. Lots of protesting. Not to mention any abuse of the system would be kind of horrifying. But the general idea of substituting "bad luck you got a disease" with "bad luck you lose the lottery", when there's only half as many lottery losers as there were disease losers... maybe that's not so bad. When it comes to trolley problems, you also have to imagine yourself on the track. Do nothing and there's a 5/6 chance you die. Throw the switch, and there's a 1/6 chance you die.

SomeCallMeTim 10y ago

Are you implying that the correct response is to let the five people die in the Trolley Problem, then? To avoid getting your moral hands dirty? No, obviously I don't advocate that we go around arbitrarily murdering people to potentially improve the lives of others. But there's a huge difference between searching out and selecting specific people and killing them and simply changing the number and identity of people who will be killed by random events. It's the difference between premeditated murder and a no-fault accident. Policy/law decisions must necessarily make choices like this, flipping the switch from tracks that typically have five or five hundred people standing on them to tracks that typically have one, for the good of the five or five hundred. Like air bags that kill some people but save thousands more. Or vaccines that kill (a very small number) of kids (typically with allergies) but save millions.

aetherson 10y ago
What I'm implying is that the Trolley Car Dilemma is a toy example that is very divorced from actual life, which makes consequentialism seem more compelling than other examples closer to implementable policy do. The fundamental conceit that you can add and subtract lives, or happiness, or the like as though they were values in a formula is core to consequentialism, and I don't think that people are actually willing to follow through with the implications of that when it stops being at a safe remove. I don't understand the bright line you're drawing between "murder someone by pointing a runaway trolley that would otherwise absolutely miss them in their direction" and "murder someone by harvesting their organs." You can (and, I'd argue, should) believe that air bags are a good idea without believing that the reason that air bags are a good idea is that you can add and subtract lives. For example, you could say, "If YOU get into an accident, it is far more likely that an airbag will save you than it will kill you," which is a different thing than saying, "An air bag will kill YOU, but it will save two other people." And there are many other moral theories which would suggest that air bags are good for reasons other than that "I killed Bob but saved Alice and Charlie" is a generalizable rule for moral good.
- SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
  >I don't understand the bright line you're drawing between "murder someone by pointing a runaway trolley that would otherwise absolutely miss them in their direction" and "murder someone by harvesting their organs." The difference is key to understanding policy decisions like this. You absolutely use math with lives when you're making policy. Right down to calculating lives with dollars. If there is a fixed budget of $100M to apply to saving people's lives, you ideally will divvy the money around in such a way that the most people live. You don't extend one person's life by 1 month using extreme measures that cost $50M and let a hundred die who would could have had their lives extended by years for $50k each. To some degree the original question is a real-world policy example of the trolley problem: Do we allow companies like Tesla to save thousands of lives, possibly your own, in exchange for indemnifying them against the (ideally) few lives lost (also potentially your own) when the technology fails? That sounds identical to the air bag policy: In both cases the life saved could be yours. You might not even get into an accident if there were enough self-driving cars, so not only would you live where you might have died, you might even avoid an inconvenience. I'm not talking about seeking out people and killing them. That is committing murder for an alleged "greater good", and the ends don't justify the means. I'm talking about redirecting a trolley that is going to kill five random people and instead making it kill only one random person. And we can talk about focusing on further advances to make sure that one person doesn't die (statistically speaking) either, but I think that throwing the switch, in a policy sense, is always the right first step. I think the moral argument that flipping the trolley switch is wrong is bankrupt, and that it does map onto the real world and real world policy decisions like requiring mandatory air bags. Flipping the switch isn't murder. Not flipping the switch when you have the opportunity is murder.