Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?

[Fall Caesar]

Taken from Michael Sandel's Harvard class called Justice: (See Video Here)

If you had to choose between (1) killing one person to save the lives of five others and (2) doing nothing, even though you knew that five people would die right before your eyes if you did nothing—what would you do? What would be the right thing to do?

In general, is it permissible to harm a smaller number of innocent people to prevent greater harm to a larger number of people?

 

[cosmictraveler]

Which ever you choose it will be the correct thing for you to decide because you have to live with your decision not anyone else.

I would have to know more about the circumstances before I would kill someone like are they threatning others with a gun or are they shooting already at others and someone has already died.

 

[quadraphonics]

Taken from Michael Sandel's Harvard class called Justice: (See Video Here)

If you had to choose between (1) killing one person to save the lives of five others and (2) doing nothing, even though you knew that five people would die right before your eyes if you did nothing—what would you do? What would be the right thing to do?

In general, is it permissible to harm a smaller number of innocent people to prevent greater harm to a larger number of people?

Interestingly, psychologists have discovered that peoples' answers to such scenarios depend heavily on the details. Specifically, the question of whether the hypothetical decider has to physically kill anyone himself.

I.e., given an abstract choice between the death of 1 person and the deaths of 10 people, almost everyone will choose the 1 person. But given a more specific scenario in which you have to literally, physically kill the 1 person in order to save the other 10, most people will switch preferences. I.e., they'd rather be "indirectly" responsible for 10 deaths, than "directly" responsible for 1. Neuroscientists suggest that there are two separate, competing structures in the brain that cause the phenomenon: one unemotional "accountant" structure that weighs moral outcomes in concrete terms (1 death or 10), and another emotional structure that is simply averse to doing any direct harm to anyone. In abstract scenarios, the latter structure does not get activated, and so people make accountant choices (whichever option saves more lives). But in scenarios requiring the decider to personally kill, the emotional structure activates and most people will allow 10 to die rather than kill 1 person.

 

[Fall Caesar]

@cosmictraveler, I'll summarize the Harvard class scenarios:
1) An empty train goes haywire and if it stays on its same track, it will kill 10 innocent workers on the other side, however, if you pull the lever, the train will change to the other track and only kill one worker.

2) a fat guy is sitting on a bridge which crosses over a train track. A train with 10 innocent travelers goes haywire and will crash off a cliff. You see the fat guy and know that if you push him onto the track he will stop the train but will die.

The two scenarios differ just as quadraphonics stated, he is consistent with what the Harvard class showed as well.

However, what does a right choice entail? What is the value of an individual life, relative to another? Does the quality of the life of the person matter (is a fat guy's life worth less than ten innocent people)? Who judges that quality and why/how? There's a million questions still left unanswered, and these are the ones I wish to discuss.

 

[cosmictraveler]

@cosmictraveler, I'll summarize the Harvard class scenarios:
1) An empty train goes haywire and if it stays on its same track, it will kill 10 innocent workers on the other side, however, if you pull the lever, the train will change to the other track and only kill one worker.
.

What if there's two levers that if both were pulled they would stop the train completly? Or if a helicoptor could be used to stop the train by putting it down in front of the train thereby causing it to stop. There are many ways to stop a train so that it won't hurt anyone, why not find another way to prevent any injury ?

 

[jmpet]

I went through these scenarios in college with my philosophy classes and I denied the flat answer- I am not a puppet jumping through hoops to satisfy your ego because they're all loaded questions and every answer can be construed as wrong.

Perhaps it's an exercise in "degrees of wrongness" but I refuse to be a part of it. I invoke the Kirk Philosophy- alter the conditions to where you end up winning in the face of impossibility.

But bottom line- if it were my life or another's, I would happily give up my life knowing another's was saved and I believe this is the only correct answer.

 

[Fall Caesar]

@cosmictraveler, the situations are fixed and no third party or anything not described cannot take place.

But bottom line- if it were my life or another's, I would happily give up my life knowing another's was saved and I believe this is the only correct answer.

I agree these are very loaded questions. And I respect your choice to not answer them; however, I do take question with your 'bottom line' statement. Why is it that you value another person's life over your own?

 

[jmpet]

I value everyone's life more than mine because my life is in the hands of God.

 

[Rav]

What is the value of an individual life

I can't consider these scenarios without getting stuck on that very question. Do we measure it based on the contributions that a person makes or might make to society as a whole or by how many people would be adversely affected by their death? Sure, why not? It seems as good a way to measure individual worth as anything else I've heard. But in the scenarios given we don't have enough information to make such a determination. In spite of an implication of significance the fact that the guy on the bridge is fat can't be a deciding factor in and of itself either. So if we are limiting ourselves to discussion related to the scenarios at hand, then for our purposes the value of a human life should simply be 1. It then follows that if we are forced to make a choice then we should always choose to save 5 people at the expense of 1 in both scenarios.

The tricky one of course is whether or not you should push a man off a bridge to save 5 people below. It's tricky simply because the part you play in this scenario is much more direct, significant and "hands on". It seems more personal. The end result may be exactly the same (1 dies so that five may live) but I think the real issues here are the emotional and psychological consequences that you'll have to live with for the rest of your life. I mean, imagine how much it could potentially torment you, especially if new information came to light after the fact that may have played a part in your initial reasoning had you known of it then.

In reality there are 7 lives to consider in each scenario rather than 6. You have to include your own. If you choose not to push a man off the bridge to save 5 lives below, in addition to not killing someone else, you're also saving yourself. Not from death of course, but from something pretty damned terrible nonetheless. In a very real sense you've decided that your life is more important than the lives of 5 other people.

There's also another aspect of this that I'd like to explore. What if, instead of pushing the man off the bridge, you climbed over the railing and pulled him over with you. In this scenario you're demonstrating your willingness to sacrifice yourself for the sake of others and it gives you something of a moral high ground from which to demand that others do the same. After all, 5 is still greater than 2. Somehow it seems less morally reprehensible to force someone to die with you for a greater cause than to force someone to die while you stand there and watch for the same greater cause. Even so it has to be said that sacrificing 2 lives to save 5 when you only had to sacrifice one is not a good outcome.

Interesting stuff anyway