[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
The Username/password anonymous account is, as always, available.
I had to decide whether I would send my sister to prison for a year or let her keep using IV drugs. I chose to send her to prison, but this was not the intuitive choice. I very much performed a utilitarian calculation. This leads me to remark on socioeconomic class: My station has certainly improved since childhood, but I would still say that I'm very much working class, and I dare say that the reliability of one's moral and memetic heuristics and inputs are very dependent on class.
In my personal experience, though I take a risk in fully generalizing, the working class is permeated with toxic memes. The most common and general is probably anti-intellectualism, but there are other more specific ones that are better communicated in phrase: "It is better to be thrilled than it is to be safe"; "It is more important to conform to working-class social norms than to obey the law"; "Physical, verbal, and emotional abuse are tolerable so long as the abuser loves me"; "Physical exercise and healthy diet merely confer bonus points"; "Regrettable actions committed on emotional impulse are entirely excusable, even with this maxim in mind"; and perhaps most ironically, "One should follow one's heart," without the caveat that one should not follow it over the edge of a suspension bridge.
This is not to say that the other classes are entirely nontoxic, but I would say that they are less toxic. You can see in the other classes, being safety-conscious, physically exercising and eating healthy food, not tolerating abuse, and at the very least making the appearance of deliberation, are acts that actually confer social status. When I spend time around people in a higher socioeconomic class it seems that they on average have healthier thoughts than me, if we're talking about gut reactions and intuitions, as we are, even if they have not deliberately sought out and acquired their memes. In one sense, we would expect them to seem healthier, and in another more objective sense, we would also expect them to seem healthier, because socioeconomic class, mental and physical health, and all of those other enumerable things correlate with one another; it is social and so it is a causal shooting gallery, but the correlation is there.
And likewise, LessWrong is skewed heavily towards white, male, very well-educated first-worlders. We might expect that an average LW user simply relying on the memes that they've acquired and not applying a moral calculus at all would not be a terribly worse alternative to applying the calculus, or perhaps an even better alternative, if they would apply the calculus selectively and in the pursuit of justification.
And so in my everyday life I find that I am surrounded by people with unhealthy memes and that I myself have some curled up in the various corners of my mind, and it is, more often than one might think, safer and very useful to consciously deliberate as opposed to following intuition. Virtue ethicists who consider virtuous danger, thrill-seeking, impulse and anti-intellectualism, do not live very long on average.
And furthermore, though I am technically twisting your words to my own end, I do not think that it is such a crazy hypothesis to say that higher classes lead more 'morally inert' lives, because many healthier memes allow you to 'skip' the moral dilemmas altogether; e.g. contraceptive use, abiding the law, taking care of your health, surrounding yourself with people who do all of these things and have all of these healthy memes, etc.
But of course, neither am I a human utility calculator.
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