It didn't say anything about jerking off rats. Is that Part II?
I saw that, and was going to write an interesting and well-informed post on the subject. But no, you and your brain-damage jokes.
I bet those brain-damaged people are all libertarians, too.
I'm sure ogged won't mind if you steal his link and write an interesting and well-informed post about it.
Doesn't he need to pay royalties? Or are we suggesting that FL should remain in the Mencia-like position of battening of other people's intellectual property?
Retelling jokes, linking to already linked articles... at long last, FL, have you no decency?
Decency? In purple butterfly brocade? Darling, please.
An interesting study showing those of us without that evolutionarily anachronistic region functioning can make difficult decisions instead of being paralyzed. One day y'all will catch up.
Yeah, my hauteur would have worked better if I could have gotten through the comment without a typo. (And it's one of the ones where I'm not sure what I wanted to type -- either 'battening on' or 'battening off' would have worked).
I've got to admit, LB, I had no idea what you were talking about. I'm not sure I've ever seen either of those usages for "battening".
I thought one could only batten hatches, down.
And sorry, FL. I would like to see your more thoughtful post, because I like the ethics posts. But if you embroider your theory with butterflies, I will laugh.
I'd like to see a test of whether this is really a difference in moral judgment, or a difference in ability to ignore extraneous information -- like, do people with this sort of brain damage do better on the "Which is more likely -- Lisa is a bank teller, or Lisa is a bank teller and a feminist" question?
Because the difference between the two types of moral dilemmas has always struck me as an unwillingness to take the second type (fat man pushing, baby smothering) according to the terms of the question -- you get the sense that there's some doubt as to whether the fat man would stop the trolley, or whether the baby would cry loud enough to attract attention, and that doubt is what changes people's minds.
I'm sure it's just damage to the emotional reaction. After all, going by pure logic, it *does* make sense to smother a baby in order to save yourself and others. The reason we don't like that conclusion is that we have an emotional reaction to babies, and to the idea of directly killing people. I, personally, think this is a fine and moral thing, but the biohazards of the world (who are all inhuman monsters) obviously don't agree.
Actually the interesting part of the study is that the results of damaged & undamaged groups are the same for two sorts of cases: regular trolley cases with non-immediate relationship to the 1 & 5, and the porn-or-poverty and poor-with-child cases. The two groups give different results for cases like Fat Man Used to Stop Trolley. These last cases are structurally a lot like the generic trolley 1 vs 5 case, but they involve more visceral connection to the 1. It's tempting to take Greene's explanation that there's some empathic capacity that's in conflict with more abstract CBA in these cases.
Hypothesis: Chop Chuck is just the same as Trolley, with a causal spur mistaken for an intended outcome. Sadly I didn't think of this.
On the other hand, maybe it's not emotional/empathic capacity so much as an admirably consistent dumping of the for-thee-but-not-for-me, NIMBYish aspect of our minds.
(I don't really mean this.)
This finding delights me. Also, it indirectly supports euthanizing Peter Singer.
baa, seriously, it's not an anti-consequentialist finding at all...I know, I know, we're kidding, but this is like the Kohlberg thing. "Haha, you're stuck at stage four!"
I suspect, from the limited sketch of the study in the article, what's missing is the emotional or pathetic component that's so hard to get freshman philosophy students to set aside. And maybe that's what's been damaged; the ability to see the baby you smother to save five lives as a cute little baby that probably giggles at you and tries to catch your fingers before you kill it. If all you can process are the numbers, then it's more logical to kill the baby.
I have some questions about the conclusions the author seems to be drawing. Because the assumption that the brain-damaged patients are morally wrong on some of these questions is a huge one; I can talk perfectly normal, un-brain-damaged people into thinking it's okay to throw the fat man onto the track, or to throw the switch, or to kill baby Hitler. Quite a lot of otherwise normal people have those beliefs anyway. (Let me change up the story: now it's clear-eyed Jack Bauer who sacrifices his daughter Kim, thus saving the building of innocent Americans and thrilling fans that she's finally off the show..... a sociopath? Or having the Balls and the Will to Do What Must Be Done.) Is it a sign of brain damage?
Labs, you're inching perilously close to humorlessness. Are you going to come in? Shall I pour you a drink?
21, me, including the appalling "more logical." Gah. I should just shoot myself now and save my committee the trouble.
B, I know it. It's funny that what gets my righteous indignation going is bad criticism of Jeremy Bentham.
I would happily push quite a few annoying, non-innocent, attitude-rich middle-school kids in front of a trolley in order to save an innocent fat man. (How many? There's a limit to my physical strength, so I'd say high single figures -- low double figures.)
Also Libertarians. fewer of them per unit of weight, of course.
the emotional or pathetic component that's so hard to get freshman philosophy students to set aside
Really?? Because my usual experience of kids that age is that they're ruthlessly rationalist and refuse to acknowledge that, you know, things might be *just* a little more complicated than thinking that drug addicts should just quit, or that poor people should just work harder, etc.
We're just funnin' labs.
"Haha, you're stuck at stage four!"
I used to hear this a lot at the arcade.
If we're going to be serious (for a moment), it's a diagnostic finding, right? What seems to keep people from wanting to be directly involved in killing is a deep-seated emotional aversion...
24: We all have our issues. It's kind of admirable, actually. Intellectual honesty uber alles!
25: If I were to help you, John, I bet we could make the pile bigger.
26: It's usually pretty split on the ethics problems. Especially with the Fat Man or Chop Up Chuck version of the trolley problem. (Same numbers of people killed or spared in each one, just the method of death is different.)
What's chop up chuck, just for the hell of it?
How fat is the Fat Man? Like unattractively big?
duuuuuuuude, I want to play kung fu master now!
Chop Chuck is: you can kill 1 person to save 5 by taking the 1's organs. Generally the intuition is that it's wrong to kill 1, but killing 1, saving 5 produces more valuable states of affairs.
31: Six people of equal moral standing. Five are dying, each of a different kind of organ failure. The sixth is Chuck. Chuck has healthy organs. If we chop up Chuck, we can give his healthy organs to the other five, who through the magic of philosophy will then go on to live healthy, productive lives. If we don't chop up Chuck, he will go on to live a healthy, productive life, but the other five will die.
The paradox is that it's structurally similar to the trolley problem. Most people think it's fine to divert the switch onto the track with one person to spare the five; most people think it's abhorrent to chop up Chuck to save five lives.
look you bastards, drop everything and watch "Newsnight" on the BBC website. There has just been a Jeremy Paxman interview with John Bolton that was an absolute peach. Bolton was just slit open from groin to throat.
Did anyone use his organs to save five dying people? Because that would be cool.
My own opinion is that if people in general set aside the emotional and pathetic component and thought completely rationally, behavior would get worse. With its rationalistic bias, academic ethics tends to zero in on rare (often fictional or ludicrous) cases where outcome would be better if people were more rational and not at all emotional. To me this is "hard cases make bad law" territory.
History does not tell us that a universal reluctance to kill others for good reasons is one of the world's most pressing problems.
Late to the game...
You can batten sails. Well, we use battens in sails.
I figured LB was using a legal term.
If they didn't use his organs for transplants it was immoral, peachy though it may be.
If you google it, 'battening' (on or off) as meaning parasitic on is an actual idiom, although I admit I have no idea what it has to do with battens in the nautical sense. But it's not a legal term.
39: But, but . . . what would happen to the no relationship policy?
The difference with the trolley case is that the trolley case is forced.
As far as I know, in real-world situations where trolley dilemmas really occasionally happen, such as warfare, police work, or dangerous industries such as mining, people are trained to choose the lesser evil. But afterwards they almost always feel awful; some people never get over it.
A problem with the organ donor case is that once you've got the five dying patients, if you're free to force the situation, you can kill anyone whatsoever. And that's the kind of argument that ruthless people in government use all the time when they stage little unforced utilitarian dlilemmas.
36: You realize, you bastard, it would be a lot easier if you'd just slap in a link. Lazy fucker.
39: Yeah, I wonder if a tendency to fixate on extreme moral dilemma isn't what gives rise to stuff like the much-discussed false choices on 24--you must be willing to rip out a dude's fingernails one by one if you want to save America! What choice will you make?!
34,35
I think there is a problem of people thinking that seemingly non-consequential moral reasonings, have no consequentialism to them at all. People on trolley tracks is a pretty unusual situation, and is unlikely to have large negative external effects. But allowing doctors to chop people up for organs, is pretty clearly not going to be the best way to structure organized medicine.
In that sense some of these questions are like "ye-old ticking time-bomb", your always suspicious that people setting up dubious and implausible conditions while ignoring all externalities, might be up to something.
Or maybe I'm trying to say that our moral precepts arn't just giant marble blocks that fell out of the sky onto our cultural landscape. One or the other, or both.
Wait, why don't you just let Chuck live, and chop up one of the people who's going to die anyway, and use his healthy organs to save the other four? If you're nice you might even be able to talk him into signing an organ donor card and bypass the problem altogether. But even if not, why drag poor Chuck into this mess?
Brock is close, but the real-world solution is to get organs from foreigners, who don't count for the purposes of morality.
Is there a way of pushing fat men in front of trolleys such that their organs will still be usable?
Bolton was on the Daily Show last night, and I thought he did pretty well, actually - for John Bolton.
And why is he doing the talk show circuit now? His tell-all autobiography isn't coming out until Christmas...
51: Poor foreigners. Who even if they did count, are doomed anyway, so it really is the most practical thing.
54: "I am not in the least pain upon that matter, because it is very well known that they are every day dying and rotting by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can be reasonably expected."
Exactly. If they weren't so dirty, we could even eat them.
42: If you google it, 'battening' (on or off) as meaning parasitic on is an actual idiom, although I admit I have no idea what it has to do with battens in the nautical sense
If I'm reading my OED correctly, we're dealing with two words. One, from the french baton, means stick or something like a stick (nautical, carpentry). The other, from the olde norse batna, meaning to improve or gain advantage (feed off).
Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Ask Mr. Pedant. Be sure to join us again for tomorrow's episode: "Bar: lower, pass, or meetup at?"
Hah. That makes sense -- the connection with nautical battens really wasn't working for me.
35 44 49
I agree with 44. The trolley situation is more realistic and plausibly binary. The organ case is less realistic and more open to alternative actions as suggested in 49, or even better get the 5 sick people to all agree that one will be selected at random and killed to save the other four.
Dsquared was right - Bolton does fare poorly. Go here and go to 31:45 in the show (although the parliamentary debates at the beginning show how much better orators than we the Brits are).
59: Thanks. That will help when I go to Sweden.
I'll add, Bar: crossing.
The interesting thing with Bolton on the Daily Show last night was that the dynamic looked something like this:
Stewart: So, what do you think about [bad thing the Bush administration did]?
Bolton: [Reasonable, but rebuttable explanation of why it wasn't a bad idea.]
Stewart: But, [other, not related, bad characteristic of the Bush administration.]
He just kept changing the topic rather than engaging in winnable debates.
My wife watched the Bolton interview on the Daily Show, and thought that Bolton came across as an incredible moron.
Let me defend (again) strict consequentialism in a way that doesn't sound sociopathic:
For most real world circumstances, the moral emotions are a better guide to consequences than discursive, verbal & mathematical reasoning. This is true because the relevant causal connections and future consequences are far too numerous and unknown to aggregate. The moral emotions evolved to maximize benefit for a limited number of people immediately impacted by your action, who by good fortune are likely to carry copies of your genes. Given the limitations of our ability to explicitly calculate, this will be the best we can hope to rely on almost all the time. Exceptions are likely to be artificial or hypothetical.
So a good consequentialist will cultivate the moral emotions as a reliable guide to consequences, even though it leads to bad results in a few made up cases.
Everyone should go watch the Bolton interview (in the right margin of the linked page). He gets treated exactly like he deserves.
I would like to watch the Bolton interview, but it crashed my browser (FF) and is not yet up on YouTube.
Bolton gets treated far better than he deserves in that clip. He should be a pariah, jeered and mocked wherever he goes. In fact, based on that repulsive performance, he's one of the few people who deserves to be afraid for his physical safety everywhere he goes.
"Well, you'd rather live in a dictatorship than a failed state. That's not the decision I'd make."
Well luckily for you, you don't have to choose either one, you amoral prick. He's the perfect representative of this administration. If this country had a smidgen of decency and responsibility left, their only choices would be prison or asylum in some third-world shithole.
God, I hate these people.
I like the interviewer's look of disgust, but Bolton never gets the tongue-lashing he had coming for those lines about the federalist papers, the failed state, and Saddam's brain trust as a weapon of mass destruction.
Yeah, we should just give them all those great plans we had that made our Revolution so easy and bloodless! And not build up to a horrible civil war within eighty years! And were not based on our ability to defraud foreign governments of money and resources! And that we all lived through and remember vividly and without romanticization!
Why the hell don't we have press people who will actually ask thinking questions rather than just inviting the Boltons and so forth to deliver their sound bites and then thanking them?
Bolton may not get the tongue-lashing he deserves, but that's still the best interview of a Bush administration official I've seen in a long time. Just dripping with contempt. Beautiful.
Yeah, that's true. Jon Stewart just waxed him again tonight.
He just kept changing the topic rather than engaging in winnable debates.
It's not really a winnable debate, since the whole interview is maybe 10 minutes long. The best Stewart can do (and, in fact, did) is to express disagreement or skepticism about specific points, perhaps follow up with a question or two, and move on. He's going for polite disagreement, which is difficult to do in a limited time frame. I was impressed by the interview.
It's my experience that Jon Stewart is not a particularly aggressive interviewer and consistently goes for the milder laugh than the real bloodletting.
Which is not me trying to badmouth Stewart. I think it's mostly a consequence of him honestly trying to find the middle ground between being a political humorist and having an actual agenda, while keeping some actual teeth in his funny.
My take is that Stewart is a friendly interviewer with politicians and fairly aggressive with journalists, who are the show's real target.
66: well said. A finding from neuropsych case studies that's always fascinated me is how patients with various sorts of frontal damage that produce loss of affect, or affective flattening are always impaired at decision making, not just of the moral type. They either can scarcely do it at all, or their decisions tend to produce worse outcomes.
A finding from arguing with conservatives similarly convinces me that you can approach issues with the honest intent to be thoroughly rational, and still convince yourself of crazy things.
As for Stewart-on-Bolton, I thought Stewart did as well as you could ask for, given the role he has taken for himself. Despite the show's very good critical dimension, Stewart is very open about being a comedian first.