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botogol comments on Far & Near / Runaway Trolleys / The Proximity Of (Fat) Strangers - Less Wrong
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Are these sorts of ethical dilemmas ever posed to people serving in the Military?
I often wonder about this, because there seems to be no shortage, in times of real crisis, to find a soldier willing to fling himself under the trolley (without needing to hurl a fat man) if need be.
Of course, this is something that is ingrained in the soldier's behavior during training, and it, at times, doesn't take.
Then, there are times when the military becomes filled with people who are willing to throw anyone onto that railroad track, as long as the math turns out correctly (more people saved than killed). It is an officer's job to do just that (and then order a soldier to do the actual throwing).
I guess this just shows that people are capable of having their normal morality either amplified or nullified depending upon the context. In some cases, there may be no morality to speak of in some classes of soldiers.
However, you do bring up an excellent point. Immediacy of the situation/decision. It is relatively easy for people to make dispassionate and rational decisions when they are not in the heat of the moment or more removed from the actual situation. I have found that it is a rare individual who can actually make a rational decision in the heat of the moment without considerable training (and not just mental training. It takes real simulation of the act for most people to learn just how they will react in such situations).
A person in the audience suggested taking firefighters, who sometimes face dilemmas very like this (Do I try to save life-threatened person A or seriosly injured Baby B), and hooking them up to scans and seeing if their brains work differently - The hypothesis being that they would make decision in dilemmas more 'rationally' and less 'emotionally', as a result of their experience and training. Or the pre-disposition that led to them becoming fire-fighters in the first place.
Of course, just like with Military Training, the Firefighters may have biases about what they consider to be rational.
For instance, most would probably save the injured baby at the expense of an uninjured adult or child. Yet, the baby has less immediate worth than the adult or small child, as these latter two are conscious and self-aware in a way that the baby is not.
Yet, almost instinctively, humans tend to go for the baby. Of course, genetics has wired us to be that way.
That's true (that they have biases) although I understand the training is attend to the nature of the injury, and practicalities of the situation - eg danger to the firefighter - rather than the age of the victim.
However what one might expect to see in firefighters would be ethical dilemmas like the trolley problem to trigger the cerebral cortex more, and the amaglydia less than in other people.
Perhaps.
Unless of course the training works by manipulating the emotional response. So firefighters are just as emotional, but their emotions have been changed by their training.
This is the sort of problem Kahane was talking about when he said it is very difficult to interpret brain scans.
It worries me that we do not have more emphasis placed upon mustering out our Armed Forces members to undo some of the training that they receive, simply because their emotional biases have been so changed that it makes it difficult for many of them to re-integrate into society.
I think that we are developing a similar problem with Police, who are used to interacting primarily with the worst parts of society, and then developing a bias that the rest of society has similar behavioral trends as that lowest common denominator they are used to seeing.
I will have to re-read the Kahane comments about interpreting brain scans...