The Rise of the Peninsula

Chapter 181 0144 – The Tram Problem{2}
You are standing on the bridge, and the tram is about to rush under the bridge. The only way to stop the tram is to push the fat man standing next to you off the bridge, let him get stuck in front of the tram, and stop the tram. The track workers would be saved, but of course the fat man died.

What would you do? Would you kill the fat man to save those five lives?
It's hard to know how we would actually react in such a situation, but that's not the point at all. The point is, what should we do in such a situation.

What is morally right?
What is better?
Whether or not this is almost never the case in reality is likewise entirely unimportant.

With these two and other similar cases, what philosophy wants to find out is: What makes an action morally right and what makes it morally wrong?
Why is it good to do this and bad to do that? These thought experiments show us how our sense of moral direction works, and where it needs to be revised.

The example of these trams is very famous, first proposed by the British philosopher Philippa Foot (1920-2010) in the 20s, and later by the American philosopher Judith Thomson (Judith Jarvis) Thomson, 60--) into many different versions.

Until now, there are still people studying these "trolley problems" (trolley problems), even the psychology camp is not absent.

Not long ago, a study pointed out that if the case is described in a foreign language, more people will feel that the fat man should be pushed off the bridge. This is probably because the use of a foreign language will create a certain sense of distance, and the thinking of rational calculation will also be activated. .However, this is only a preliminary hypothesis, let us forget about psychology here and return to these philosophical questions.

"Positive and Negative Moral Differences"

In the trolley problem, Thomson is particularly concerned with how there is a moral difference between positive action and negative inaction.Because we often feel that doing something bad is more reprehensible than not doing something good, even if the result is the same.Please imagine:
You're in a beauty pageant, you're waiting at the back of the stage with your competitors, and when the girl sitting next to you stands up and walks to the front of the stage, you see a big coffee stain on her dress.You could have called her back, but on second thought, you'd have one less competitor and a better chance of winning, so you didn't say anything.This behavior is not good enough, but imagine that this coffee stain is something that you sneakily poured on her clothes. Wouldn't it be much worse? If so, why?
Why is it worse to kill children by hand than to starve them to death? We will never do the former, but we let the latter happen every day, so there must be a moral difference between killing and letting people die difference.However, it is not enough to say that "there is no sin in what is not done", because if anyone does not give water to his cat, so that the cat dies of thirst, then he is still guilty even though he has done nothing.Some would even say that he caused the cat's death, even though he actually did nothing.The difference between positive action and negative inaction is difficult to define.And why one is worse than the other is not entirely clear.

Suppose you plan to drown your brother in a swimming pool so that you don't have to split the inheritance with him, and you drive to his house and see him doing his routine swim up and down in the pool.But all of a sudden he's yelling from a MI Q and you just watch brother moan in convulsions and drown in the pool.

Wouldn't the result be as bad as if you had drowned him by hand? Or would it have to be more morally reprehensible to do so?
In fact, that is the case in law.Not only our intuition, but also criminal law, in most cases, emphasizes the difference between killing and letting someone die.There may be a simple answer to this: the reason why killing is worse than allowing to die is because killing must also include allowing to die.

If I push a child into the water and let it drown, I make two mistakes at the same time: pushing the child into the water and standing by.But if I see someone push a toddler into the water and let him drown, I've only made one mistake - by standing idly by.While that's bad enough, it's not nearly as bad as being hands-on.

inner moral steering wheel
Let's put aside the thorny issue of distinguishing hands from hands and indifference, and return to the problem of the trolley.How would you decide now?
Would you switch the switch in the first instance, but not push the fat guy off the bridge in the second?
Most people think that switching the switches in the first example is correct even though doing so will result in someone's death - "one is better than five" is their reasoning.

Park Shangyuan looked at the man in the cheap shirt at the moment. He was staring at himself intently at this moment, and his expression was extremely distorted, as if he could see his heart, and he dropped his head in shame.

"In fact, it is fair and just. It is better to sacrifice one person than to die five. This should be the point of view of most of you, but what I want to tell you is that you are just unknown people, and there is no need to sacrifice for righteousness. Sacrifice your own righteousness."

"How do you say that?" The young man in cheap t-shirts felt his temperature quickly at this moment, and he seemed to want to know his reason quickly.

"Actually, isn't this the way the world is? It's obvious that I'm already living in dire straits, but if I have 10 yuan, I'll still help beggars, but we can't even take care of ourselves, so how can we take care of others?"

Park Sang Won looked at me and the others with a smile.

"It's like the current media to protect ourselves, but this is not a refined egoist, but we must always be clear about what we want, and just keep going. The so-called righteousness and fearlessness are applicable. For those heroes, but should we do it?"

"We are just unknown judicial workers. We want to learn from the municipal government. What is justice? It is wrong for us to change direction, because that person should not have suffered like this, and those 5 people are the fault of their own composition. They will die, and they will pay the price for their actions, of course, you can pay attention to what I say, as for whether it is cheap or not, it is your business."

After seeing everyone fell silent, it seemed that this question was too heavy, so Park Shangyuan planned to change the way of speaking, and everyone continued to talk about it.

Yet you feel that under no circumstances should you push the fat man off the bridge, even if that would save five lives.Why is it possible to "save five lives with one life" in the first example, but not "save five lives with one life" in the second example?
What's the difference? Both examples have positive actions: the first example is pulling the handle, the second example is pushing people off the bridge, and the result is the same—one person is killed and five are saved.

What's the difference? A common response is, "In the second instance, I killed directly and intentionally."Indeed, I seized the fat gentleman with my own hands, and deliberately pushed him to his death.We can also look at these two important points a little more closely.

Physical contact may be a psychological obstacle, but the question here is, does contact or not matter in moral judgment? Detonating a bomb and killing 10 people is more moral than killing 10 people one by one. Is there any better?
From a psychological point of view, it is easier to detonate a bomb than to kill someone manually, but the degree of moral condemnation is about the same

Applicable, because the moral sense requires that bad effects should not be used as tools to achieve good results.

"Trade-off between obligations and benefits"

Suppose a surgeon is so skilled at transplanting organs that the organs are always accepted by the donor's body.Right now there are exactly five patients on the waiting list: two are in desperate need of a lung, two are in need of a kidney, and one is in desperate need of a heart, all with the same rare blood type.

At this time, a healthy young man came to the hospital for a routine health check. He happened to have the same rare blood type as the five patients, so he was a potential organ donor.

So, can the surgeon kill him and use his organs to save five patients? Of course not! We remember the prohibition on instrumentalization—human beings must not be abused as tools.

But when it comes to the following example, how should we judge? A terrorist has hidden a bomb in Berlin. The bomb is powerful enough to blow up the entire city to the sky. There is not enough time to evacuate the city. Molecular torture to extract confessions, and find the place where the bomb was buried in time?
Assuming his young daughter knows the location and the only way to get a confession is to torture his young daughter, can we do that?
We all know the prohibition against torture, which is written in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights of the European Parliament. In addition, this is also clearly recorded in the German Basic Law, but in Switzerland, torture is not an element of crime.

This issue is much debated and ethically highly controversial because there are two far-reaching moral theories at odds with each other.

What I am talking about is the theory of utility and the theory of deontology.The difficulty is that we favor both theories, but in some instances only one can be correct.

The utility theory maintains that the moral value of an action is measured only by the outcome of the action.

Simply put, the rule is this: If you want to know whether an action is good or bad, look at its consequences.In practice, if an action can maximize the well-being and minimize suffering of the people involved, then do it.The greatest well-being of the greatest number of people - so "one death is better than five" is also a discussion of benefit theory.

Deontology is different: according to deontology, the moral value of an action is not only in its result, but also in the action itself; some actions are inherently bad, no matter how much good they can produce, murder, torture, and theft all fall into this category.These behaviors are unconditional mistakes, and their value cannot be enhanced through cost-benefit calculations. No matter what the situation is, there are some things that people just can't do.

These ethical prohibition boards protect our human dignity and prevent our interests or lives from being sacrificed for the common good.

The important representatives of benefit theory are two English philosophers, Bentham (Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832) and Mill (John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873), who continued this line of thinking and are still The most famous living supporter is the Australian philosopher Singer (Peter Singer, 1946a).Among the deontological philosophers at the other end, the most important is Kant (1724-1804), the enlightenment master from Konigsberg, Germany, and the notorious "categorical imperative"

Creator of (kategorischen Imperativs).

Since it is impossible to bypass Kant in the field of ethics, we should briefly discuss his theory.

According to Kant, an action is good if it results from a good intention, that is, if there is a good intention behind the action.

But what kind of intention is good? Kant's answer is unbelievably simple: If I want all people to act according to this intention, then this intention is good.Kant believed that our basic principles of behavior, which he called "creeds"

(Maximen), must be generalizable.I have a ground rule of conduct that is good if I can expect everyone else to act on it.Why shouldn't we dump rubbish in the street, shouldn't break promises we've made, shouldn't cheat our friends? Because we can't seriously expect everyone to do it, which is Kant's famous categorical imperative.In his own words, the categorical imperative is "please act only in accordance with those tenets that you wish to become the universal law".This requirement is categorical, without assumptions, without preconditions; it should be followed by everyone at all times and everywhere, regardless of his private interests and goals at the time.

According to Kant, a good test of the moral quality of the principles we act on is whether the principles can be generalized.Moreover, the notions of universalizability and injustice are embedded in our everyday understanding of moral rightness.Just think about what the elders of the family used to say: Whenever we did something bad again, they would say, "Just think about it, if everyone did this, the world would be in chaos!" That's it. Kant's fundamental idea of ​​ethics.

But beware: the categorical imperative is not the same thing as the famous golden rule "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," nor is it a positive version of the rule "Do unto you as you would like them to do to you." You treat people that way."Because the code requires different behaviors for people with different interests.Conversely, the categorical imperative makes the same demands on everyone—the masochist becomes sadistic according to the golden rule, but he does not change according to the categorical imperative.

(End of this chapter)