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mattnewport comments on Open Thread: May 2009 - Less Wrong
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My use of the phrase 'morally weak' was to describe how I think many/most people would view the choice, not my own personal judgement. I agree with MrHen that the 11th man's choice is not morally wrong. I was contrasting that with what I think would be the mainstream view that the choice is morally wrong but understandable and not deserving of punishment.
To me this is similar to the trolley problems where you are supposed to choose between taking action and killing one person to save 10 or taking no action and allowing the 10 to die. The one person to be sacrificed is yourself however. I wouldn't kill the one to save the 10 either (although I view that as more morally wrong than sacrificing yourself). I also generally place much lower moral weight on harm caused by inaction than harm caused by action and the forced choice scenario here presents the 11th man with a situation that I think is similar to one of causing harm by inaction.
Sorry, my bad. Thanks for clearing that up.
As to the act-omission distinction, it would be simple enough to stipulate that the default option is that you die unless you tell the king to kill the other ten. Does this change your willingness to die?
No, that wouldn't change my decision. It's the not-sacrificing-your-life that I'm comparing with causing harm by inaction (the inaction being the not-sacrificing) rather than anything specific about the way the question is phrased.
The agency of the king does make a relevant difference in this scenario in my view. It is not exactly equivalent to a scenario where you could sacrifice your life to save 10 people from a fire or car crash. Although I don't think there is a moral obligation in that case either I do consider the difference morally relevant.
Suppose the king has 10 people prepared to be hung. They are in the gallows with nooses around their neck, standing on a trap door. The king shows you a lever that will open the trap door, and kill the 10 victims. The king informs you that if you do not pull the lever within one hour, the 10 people will be freed and you will be executed.
Here the king has set up the situation, but you will be the last sentient being capable of moral reasoning in the causal chain that kills 10 people. Is your conclusion different in this scenario?
The king here is more diabolical and the scenario you describe is more traumatic. I believe it does change the intuitive moral response to the scenario. I don't believe it changes my conclusion of the morality of the act. I feel that I'd still direct my moral outrage at the king and absolve the 11th man of moral responsibility.
This is where these kinds of artificial moral thought experiments start to break down though. In real situations analogous to this I believe the uncertainty in the outcomes of various actions (together with other unspecified details of the situation) would overwhelm the 'pure' decision made on the basis of the thought experiment. I'm unconvinced of the value of such intuition pumps in enhancing understanding of a problem.
Why is this where the thought experiments suddenly start to break down? Sure, it's a less convenient world for you, but I don't see why it's any more artificial than the original problem, and you didn't seem to take issue with that.
I have taken issue with the use of thought experiments generally in previous comments, partly because it seems to me that they start to break down rapidly when pushed further into 'least convenient world' territory. I'm skeptical in general of the value of thought experiments in revealing philosophical truths of any kind, ethical or otherwise. They are often designed by construction to trigger intuitive judgements based on scenarios so far from actual experience that those judgements are rendered highly untrustworthy.
I answered the original question to say that yes, I did agree that the 11th man was not acting immorally here. I suspect this particular thought experiment is constructed as an intuition pump to generate the opposite conclusion and to the extent that the first commenter is correct that the view that the 11th man has done nothing immoral is a minority position it would seem it serves its purpose.
I've attempted to explain why I think the intuition that this is morally questionable is generated and why I think it's not to be fully trusted. I don't intend to endorse the use of such thought experiments as a good method for examining moral questions though.
Fair enough. It was mainly the appearance of motivated stopping that I was concerned with.
While I share some general concerns about the reliability of thought experiments, in the absence of a better alternative, the question doesn't seem to be whether we use them or not, but how we can make best use of them despite their potential flaws.
In order to answer that question, it seems like we might need a better theory of when they're especially likely to be poor guides than we currently have. It's not obvious, for example, that their information content increases monotonically in realism. Many real-world issues seem too complicated for simple intuitions to be much of a guide to anything.*
As well as trying to frame scenarios in ways that reduce noise/bias in our intuitions, we can also try to correct for the effect of known biases. A good example would be adjusting for scope insensitivty. But we need to be careful about coming up with just-so stories to explain away intuitions we disagree with. E.g. you claim that the altruist intuition is merely a low cost-signal; I claim that the converse is merely self-serving rationalization. Both of these seem like potentially good examples of confirmation bias at work.
Finally, it's worth bearing in mind that, to the extent that our main concern is that thought experiments provide noisy (rather than biased) data, this could suggest that the solution is more thought experiments rather than fewer (for standard statistical reasons).
* And even if information content did increase with realism, realism doesn't seem to correspond in any simple way to convenience (as your comments seem to imply). Not least because convenience is a function of one's favourite theory as much as it is a function of the postulated scenario.
I would be interested in hearing more on this subject. It sounds similar to Hardend Problems Make Brittle Models. Do you have any good jumping points for further reading?
I don't, but I'd second the call for any good suggestions.
I don't consider moral intuitions simple at all though. In fact, in the case of morality I have a suspicion that trying to apply principles derived from simple thought experiments to making moral decisions is likely to produce results roughly as good as trying to catch a baseball by doing differential equations with a pencil. It seems fairly clear to me that our moral intuitions have been carefully honed by evolution to be effective at achieving a purpose (which has nothing much to do with an abstract concept of 'good') and when a simplified line of reasoning leads to a conflict with moral intuitions I tend to trust the intuitions more than the reasoning.
There seem to be cases where moral intuitions are maladapted to the modern world and result in decisions that appear sub-optimal, either because they directly conflict with other moral intuitions or because they tend to lead to outcomes that are worse for all parties. I place the evidentiary bar quite high in these cases though - there needs to be a compelling case made for why the moral intuition is to be considered suspect. A thought experiment is unlikely to reach that bar. Carefully collected data and a supporting theory are in with a chance.
I am also wary of bias in what people suggest should be thrown out when such conflicts arise. If our intuitions seem to conflict with a simple conception of altruism, maybe what we need to throw out is the simple conception of altruism as a foundational 'good', rather than the intuitions that produce the conflict.
I confess to being somewhat confused now. Your previous comment questioned the relevance of moral intuitions generated by particular types of thought experiments, and argued (on what seem to me pretty thin grounds) against accepting what seemed to be the standard intuition that the 11th man's not-sacrificing is morally questionable.
In contrast, this comment extols the virtues of moral intuitions, and argues that we need a compelling case to abandon them. I'm sure you have a good explanation for the different standards you seem to be applying to intuitive judgments in each case, but I hope you'll understand if I say this appears a little contradictory at the moment.
P.S. Is anyone else sick to death of the baseball/differential equations example? I doubt I'll actually follow through on this, but I'm seriously tempted to automatically vote down anyone who uses it from now on, just because it's becoming so overused around here.
P.P.S. On re-reading, the word "simple" in the sentence you quoted was utterly redundant. It shouldn't have been there. Apologies for any confusion that may have caused.
Agreed; however it's important to distinguish between this sort of appeal-to-intuition and the more rigorous sort of thought experiment that appeals to reasoning (e.g. Einstein's famous Gedankenexperimente).
Given that your defense of the morality was based on the inaction of not self sacrificing, and that in this scenario inaction means self sacrifice and you have to actively kill the other 10 people to avoid it, what reasoning supports keeping the same conclusion?
I'm comparing the inaction to the not-self-sacrificing, not to the lack of action. I attempted to clarify the distinction when I said the similarity was not 'anything specific about the way the question is phrased'.
The similarity is not about the causality but about the cost paid. In many 'morality of inaction' problems the cost to self is usually so low as to be neglected but in fact all actions carry a cost. I see the problem not as primarily one of determining causality but more as a cost-benefit analysis. Inaction is usually the 'zero-cost' option, action carries a cost (which may be very small, like pressing a button, or extremely large, like jumping in front of a moving trolley). The benefit is conferred directly on other parties and indirectly on yourself according to what value you place on the welfare of others (and possibly according to other criteria).
I think our moral intuition is primed to distinguish between freely chosen actions taken to benefit ourselves that ignore fairly direct negative consequences on others (which we generally view as morally wrong) and refraining from taking actions that would harm ourselves but would fairly directly benefit others (which may or may not be viewed as morally wrong but are generally seen as 'less wrong' than the former). We also seem primed to associate direct action with agency and free choice (since that is usually what it represents) and so directly taken actions tend to lead to events being viewed as the former rather than the latter.
I believe the moral 'dilemma' represented by carefully constructed thought experiments like this represents a conflict between our 'agency recognizing' intuition that attempts to distinguish directly taken action from inaction and our judgement of sins of commission vs. omission. Given that the unusual part of the dilemma is the forced choice imposed by a third party (the evil king) it seems likely that the moral intuition that is primed to react to agency is more likely to be making flawed judgements.
This makes sense to me, but it seems to run counter to the nature of MrHen's original claim that the issue is lack of responsibility. For example, if it's all about CBA, then you would presumably be more uneasy about MrHen's hostage example ($100 vs. 10 lives) than he seems to be. Presumably also you would become even more uneasy were it $10, or $1, whereas MrHen's argument seems to suggest that all of this is irrelevant because you're not responsible either way.
Am I understanding you correctly?
In this example I wouldn't hold someone morally responsible for the murders if they failed to pay $100 ransom - that responsibility still lies firmly with the person taking the hostages. Depending on the circumstances I would probably consider it morally questionable to fail to pay such a low cost for such a high benefit to others though. That's a little different to the question of moral responsibility for the deaths however.
Note that I also don't consider an example like this morally equivalent to not donating $100 to a charity that is expected to save 10 lives as a utilitarian/consequentialist view of morality would tend to hold.
Well, you are certainly understanding me correctly.
OK, I think I'm sort of with you now, but I'm just want to be clear about the nature of the similarity claim you're making. Is it that:
I originally assumed you were claiming something along the lines of 1. but I'm struggling to see how such a link is supposed to work, so maybe I've misinterpreted you're intention.
Yes. I'd generally hold that it is not morally wrong to allow harm-by-inaction: there is not a general moral obligation to act to prevent harm. In real moral dilemmas there is a continuum of cost to the harm-preventing action and when that cost is low relative to the harm prevented it would be morally good to perform that action but not morally required. At extremely low cost relative to harm things become a little fuzzy and inaction borders on an immoral choice. When the cost of the action is extremely high (likely or certain self-sacrifice) then there is no fuzziness and inaction is clearly morally allowed (not-sacrificing by jumping in front of a trolley cart to save 10 is not immoral).
Given inaction being morally permitted in the trolley case, I have difficulty imagining a coherent moral system that would then say that it was not permissible for the 11th man to save himself. The evil king does change the problem but I can only see it making not-sacrificing more rather than less morally acceptable. I can conceive of coherent moral systems that would allow the 11th man to save himself but would require the trolley jumper to sacrifice himself. I have difficulty conceiving of the reverse. That's not to say that one doesn't exist, it's just sufficiently removed from my own moral sense that it doesn't present itself to me.
This thought experiment among other things convinces me that omission vs. commission is a sliding scale.
That would fall in the territory I describe as fuzzy above. At a sufficiently low cost inaction begins to seem morally questionable. That is largely driven by intuition though and I'm skeptical of attempts to scale it up and draw moral conclusions. I believe there are reasons the intuition exists that do not scale up simply. In other words, scaling up from this to conclude that if a very small cost is obligatory to save a single person then a very large cost is obligatory to save a million people is faulty reasoning in my opinion.