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MrMind comments on Open thread, Oct. 10 - Oct. 16, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Read it already. Let's be clear: you think the mother should push her baby in front of a trolley to save five random strangers? If so, why? If not, why not? I don't consider this a loaded question -- it falls directly out of the utilitarian calculus and assumed values that leads to "donate 100% to charities."
[Let's assume the strangers are also same-age babies, so there's no weasel ways out ("baby has more life ahead of it", etc.)]
There are a lot of conflicting aspects to consider here outside of a vacuum. Discounting the unknown unknowns, which could factor heavily here since it's an emotionally biasing topic, you've got the fact that the baby is going to be raised by an assumably attentive mother, as opposed to the 5 who wound up in that situation once, showing at least some increased risk of falling victim to such a situation again. Then you have the psychological damage to the mother, which is going to be even greater because she had to do the act herself. Then you've got the fact that a child raised by a mother who is willing to do it has a greater chance of being raised in such a way as to have a net positive impact on society. Then you have the greater potential for preventing the situation in the future, caused by the increased visibility of the higher death toll. I'm certain there are more aspects I'm failing to note.
But, if we cut to what I believe is the heart of your point, then yes, she absolutely should. Let's scale the problem up for a moment. Say instead of 5 it's 500. Or 5 million. Or the entire rest of humanity aside from the mother and her baby. At what point does sacrificing her child become the right decision? Really, this boils down to the idea of shut up and multiply.
Never, in my opinion. Put every other human being on the tracks (excluding other close family members to keep this from being a Sophie's choice "would you rather..." game). The mother should still act to protect her child. I'm not joking.
You can post-facto rationalize this by valuing the kind of societies where mothers are ready to sacrifice their kids, and indeed encouraged to save another life, vs. the world where mothers simply always protect their kids no matter what.
But I don't think this is necessary -- you don't need to validate it on utilitarian grounds. Rather it is perfectly okay for one person to value some lives more than others. We shouldn't want to change this, IMHO. And I think the OP's question about donating 100% to charity, at the detriment of themselves, is symptomatic of the problems that arise from utilitarian thinking. After all if OP was not having internal conflict between internal morals and supposedly rational utilitarian thinking, he wouldn't have asked the question...
Ah, as it happens, I have none of those conflicts. I asked because I'm preparing an article on utilitarianism, and I happened to bounce on the question I posted as a good proxy of the hard problems in adopting it as a moral theory.
But I can understand that someone who believes this might have a lot of internal struggles.
Full disclosure: I'm a Duster, not a Torturer. But I'm trying to steelman Torture.
Ah, then I look forward to reading your article :)