Immiment Death Question

[talisman]

Re: Immiment Death Question

no I just removed the inaction vs action "loophole" as it were.

the point of these kind of one vs many scenarios are to exist as a reference point for people's responses to other scenarios that involve different forms of decision making. The theory goes that it's relatively easy to choose one person to die rather than five, but relatively difficult to choose to become personally involved, say by pushing a really fat guy in the way of the train to stop it before it hit the five people.

[talisman]

Re: Immiment Death Question

kilroy, these scenarios aren't supposed to have any bearings on reality. They exist as little tests psychologists and researchers interested in forms of decision making give to participants.

[Kilroy_x]

Re: Immiment Death Question

I understand that, but people's responses in this type of scenario are driven by raw emotion rather than reason, and the questions themselves are phrased in a way that is very unreasonable. I would choose the "loophole", as you call it, because to attempt to act on the thought processes that these questions test would be absolutely and fundamentally incoherent.

[talisman]

Re: Immiment Death Question

Well less emotion in the kind we've been discussing and more reason. It's a pretty clear cut rational choice to see that 1 < 5. Emotion comes into play in variants where you have to sacrifice, say, yourself, your children, your mother, whatever.

[Kilroy_x]

Re: Immiment Death Question

Not at all, because 1 isn't neccessarily greater than 5 when these numbers reference non-identical units of a property or set of properties. You have no clue what you're measuring, you're just relying on emotion to tell you of its existence and then patching in fallacious reasoning to take over from there. Hidden beneath the straightforward arithmatic is the assumption that human beings have some set of properties which when present in this world are "good", and it is these in turn firstly that we cannot measure, and secondly that we cannot weigh in the type of calculations that are being discussed.

It's also worth noting that any action in these scenarios violates the categorical imperative.


Anyways, I'm off to class. I'll pick this up later.

[sherbtail]

Re: Immiment Death Question

I'm with Kilroy 100% on this one, I don't think I would do anything either, because...darn it its too late to think, I need my beauty sleep.

Basically I would take no action because it would be the only thing I could do that would not be morally wrong. If I push the lever, I am in effect, killing somebody, however if I do nothing, I am just letting the natural order of things occur

[monkeybomb45]

Re: Immiment Death Question

i wouldnt pull the lever and i would shoot the guy alone on the platform ^_^ so then they are all dead and it wouldnt matter anyway

[Izzi]

Re: Immiment Death Question

You can't just subtract one person from another as if it means anything. We aren't dealing with bars of gold or grains of rice, we're dealing with human beings, who are a good deal more complicated and who are entitled to individual sovereignty, and part of that implies not treating them as objects and not treating them all as just means to an end.

Havnt you ever learned about any past wars. Even the war in iraq. Men are always treated as objects. People are just tools in the tens of thousands. We lost so and so thousand in this war and thousands in that war. Were those men ever recognized individually? What about that one guy that got shot in the head instantly as he steped off the boat on D-day.
It might sound a little sadistic but its true.

[RandomPscho]

Re: Immiment Death Question

Deaths become simple statistics when the number killed cannot be either imagined or be personal to the person hearing about it. To a family who had a soldier killed, they care about all the deaths, but to the general population, it is just another death.

Hope that makes sense.

[Kilroy_x]

Re: Immiment Death Question

Havnt you ever learned about any past wars. Even the war in iraq. Men are always treated as objects. People are just tools in the tens of thousands. We lost so and so thousand in this war and thousands in that war. Were those men ever recognized individually? What about that one guy that got shot in the head instantly as he steped off the boat on D-day.
It might sound a little sadistic but its true.

What is done and what should be done, or even what is justifiably done or what makes sense to do, are all things very much dissassociated from one another. War is just one of many things that people do because they think in a perfunctory manner and trust their instincts to make up for their lack of understanding.

[Izzi]

Re: Immiment Death Question

I dont understand your point. Are you trying to argue that you shouldnt save the larger number of people? Honestly even the single person would agree to be killed if it saved more.

[Chrissi]

Re: Immiment Death Question

I don't know whether I'd agree to die to save more.

It would depend how I felt at the time. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

[Kilroy_x]

Re: Immiment Death Question

I dont understand your point. Are you trying to argue that you shouldnt save the larger number of people? Honestly even the single person would agree to be killed if it saved more.

If I was capable of getting permission before taking the action then I guess that would be fine, but under this scenario I am not. I can't reasonably be expected to make a decision that actively leads to a persons unwilling death, even when it prevents the death of others.

[Izzi]

Re: Immiment Death Question

But the point of the question is to choose either one. You dont have the decision not to do either. Your point is completley pointless. Even if you could decide to let the 5 people die. Why would you. When you can save more. This really isnt even something to question when the answer is so blatantly obvious.

[ledwix]

Re: Immiment Death Question

Honestly even the single person would agree to be killed if it saved more.

Although that may sound true logically, not many would actually die to save a few random strangers. Obviously, with an absence of emotion and bias, the person would agree to die. However, we are extremely biased when it comes to taking care of ourselves before even thinking about others, as you know. That is natural.

For example: There are two teams, A and B, coexisting in peace.
-Team A kills 2 people from Team B. Out of those 2 people, both of them hated Team A and would willingly kill every member of Team A under all circumstances.
-Team B then takes the offensive and kills 150 people from Team A. Out of those 150 people, only a handful would even consider cruelly murdering anyone from Team A. Most were peaceful.

Which team is the most justified?

For a person thinking logically, they might choose Team A. However, multiply all the numbers by 1,000, label Team A as Japan, and label Team B as the United States, set the time period and situation as World War II, and you might get all the bias of American pride in this country. The bias is to take care of ourselves first even if it means horrible treatment of others. We seem to dismiss this as meaningless and insignificant, which is really ignorant. I hate how many idiots think this way in my classes and such.