Separate comment post for a separate top-level moral dilemma. (x2)
I have been aware of safety failures in a workplace. (several in the same workplace) Recently in this country the laws were changed to impose a duty of care to any person who visits a workplace and knows something is unsafe. Each worker has a duty of care to themselves; and to other workers as well as other visitors to the workplace. (this includes for example - if someone walks onto a building site without a hard hat, and an incident happens where they would have been protected if they had a hard hat - you as a worker are liable for not stopping them from being there unsafely)
Various equipment that has had safety features disabled and a culture of unsafe practices. whenever I mention to either the person doing something unsafe; or the supervisor - the response seems to be, "don't worry" or "the person does that at their own risk".
At some point I believe that an intervention should be made; but I feel like to try any harder would be to overstep my authority in the workplace. (there are systems in place to report a workplace that is unsafe but I don't feel like I can use them).
Another example is that the workplace is a very loud environment (well above safe levels); and people should be wearing ear protection for long exposure. Because there is a culture of unsafe behaviour; any new worker does not start wearing earplugs and just joins the rest of workers in being equally unprotected from loud noise. when I raised this with the highest boss - he replied that they don't wear ear protection when they are provided anyway so they don't bother to provide it any more.
I expect in 10+ years a worker will become deafened and will complain to the workplace; I don't know who will be to blame, but I also don't know what I can do to make a difference. (I wear ear protection always, and surprise myself if I take it off just as I leave)
Dilemma: Things are wrong, people are harming themselves | I can't seem to fix it by talking to them, the bosses or demonstrating the right things to do.
Do you think this dilemma is similar to the situation of having an acquaintance who smokes?
[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?
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