The Morality Project

[MysticWav]

I find that scenario rather abominable.

But you're right, in real life the math is seldom that easy which is how I suspect we all manage to get along. The edge cases are not impossible though where we would recoil and regard one another as monsters.

In your mind, is it "not your fault" if people die when you were the only one who could save them?

Indeed, it is not my fault. The cruel hand of fate struck down those five people, and though I'd have liked to help them, I could find no justified way to do so. Whereas taking the other route /I/ would be the one that struck down our unfortunate donor. I guess it's sort of a Hippocratic oath approach to morality? First do no evil. The ends do not justify the means. Then do whatever good you can.

[mouse]

So, at it's core, your belief is that the meaning of life is existing? You survive for the sake of survival?

Not exactly... it is not existing, it is because by existing no more one ceases to have the potential to continue existing. There is a larger difference than the subtlety of that statement would indicate. For one, I am profoundly against immortality, and would consider such a fate to be worse than nonexistence,

Also, you seem a bit torn on the value of society versus the value of being self-sufficient. If the society is necessary, why is self-sufficiency so important? One cannot maintain one's species without a social structure, so what good is working towards living without ties to the social structure, rather than working to better it from within to make survival a greater possibility? Also, how do you appropriate the use of technology into this behavior, given how many people keep your internet running, not to mention assembling at least the parts for the computer itself.

Not at all. While my belief is certainly not subjective (which individual it is that things happen to is unimportant), it is relative (predicting the most good action for any specific individual takes into account their surrounding family and society). And the object is to increase adaptability (another bit of jargon, close to simplicity) by minimising the number of things one is dependant on. It is also not individual survival that is the goal, the unit of ethics according to my system is the society.

C-sections are an excellent example, children born through c-section are more likely to require such procedure to have their own children. Its use is breeding generations of descendants dependant on this process for the continued survival of their linneages. Not that I think it will ever become a universal as a species, there is no selection pressures against those capable of normal birth. Just, without the selection pressures against cesarean births the traits nessessetating it will stabilise in the population. What is the general rate among the population of a neutral trait once it's stabilised? I think it's somewhere around 18%. That's why ressessive genetic illnesses rarely get bred entirely out of a population.

While sometimes I describe myself as anti-technology, really it is shorthand. For I am not against technology in-and-of-itself, and think it is a bit foolish to say a calculator is technology but an axe or a beaver's lodge are not. Nor am I against knowledge, for it can replicate indefinitely just as any species. I am against not being responsible for the things one depends on for their own survival, though, like heat. I'm not really against anything a computer does, and find sociability and the access to knowledge and debate a fine thing. I do intend on getting rid of my tablet here at some piint in the future anyways though, it's too much cost and hassle, but while I still am using it to sell things to pay off my land I have no problem using it for nonsurvival purposes.

You deliberately make it a goal to live apart from society, to not be dependent on society for help - although you didn't mention it, I presume this should include less-savoury practices such as using weapons to drive away thieves instead of relying on the police. And if there's one bad winter that kills your crops and exhausts your reserves, you risk starvation.

I would agree with such practices for defence. (Though around here that's very unlikely. The moose are far more of a danger than other people, exceot maybe flatlanders from away.)

I would accept my death in the case of such bad fortune.

Although, and perhaps this is just being pedantic against the spirit of what you're saying, but part of the point of limiting one is dependant on is to be more adaptable in such situations. Personally, I'm a professional wildcrafter, and in almost any month I can go into the woods and survive on what I can forage and am not reliant on my crops to get by. Though I don't know if I could support a whole family this way like the truly expert natives used to do here. Esoecially this time of year when we still have over a foot of mushy snow on the ground.

There's still a risk of death, but that is something I believe is important. And I'm willing to except should I arrive in that scenario.

You're using English words a little strangely. "Society" does means "a distinct self-perpetuating group of people", which implies families and friends within the society. Not a single person and the infrastructure to support them - that's a hermitage, which is the exact opposite of society. Similarly, describing your goal as "Survival" is strange when you'll turn down life-saving medicine out of principle. A survivor is someone who lives for longer than other people.

I have no better words to describe these concepts in English. When I say society, it very much refers to the former concept and not the latter. Explicitly not the latter, an individual cannot survive indefinitely. And in the same vein, survive refers to the entirety of this group, not to any one individual. There are fungi with very short lives, but wouldn't you say a sourdough culture that has continued since the century 19 to have survived for longer than any human?

It seems a little like you're living in a past century. You're not using the benefits that modern life gives you - and there's nothing wrong with turning down an opportunity, but if your goal is to not be culled by natural selection, shouldn't you take every advantage you can get?

My goal isn't to not be culled by natural selection. It's to live in such a responsible manner that it I am still culled should I arrive in such situation. In modern society the burden of mistakes has been spread across the entire population, and does not result in culling.

One could easily say that using medicine goes against 'natural selection'. If one believes the purpose of 'natural selection' to weed out weaker genetics, then being culled by disease is, technically, the way 'natural selection' is supposed to work.

At the very least, utilizing medicine can have clear negative impacts on the ability of the immune system to function without medicine, and as such, allow more individuals with weak immune systems to pass on their genetics.

Very much the latter, but I would strongly hesitate to agree with the former. There is much more going on in the process than just that alone.

Even assuming natural selection does work that way, if weak immune systems are not a disadvantage in modern society then there's no reason to artificially select against them. And conversely, if weak immune systems are a disadvantage in modern society (e.g. because medicine is expensive), then they'd be naturally eliminated and there's still no reason to artificially select against them.

At best, you'd end up perfectly adapted to live in a world that hasn't existed for millenia. Which is actually the general difficulty I have with mouse's worldview.

Neither is that the culture that exists around here present in my life, not is that the culture I would wish to live in or believe morale to live in. If I could be a beaver, harvest the cattails and live in a sod-house in the woods with modern humans paying just as little attention, I would do so. It is a different niche, very few people use their cattails or care about the miles upon miles of unused timberlands all privately owned. Yet somehow if other humans in there as opposed to a moose or bear even using completely different resources to them, they do care very much.

I think my girlfriend, who has a very weak immune system and thyroid problems would definitely argue that she would rather not have been born that way. It's awful and she is constantly in pain or sick. I don't think she should die, but we both agree she should never procreate.

That is extremely honourable and an example of what I would say is compatible with my beliefs. I wish her luck with her health. (That is not sarcastic or hypocritical. You clearly do not hold my own values, and I sincerely mean good will in accordance to your values, or atleast my presumptions based on this limited evidence.)


I am very sorry to make such long posts! Also, I feel I should state that while my friends and I try to apply our beliefs rigorously to ourselves, I have no qualms with other people practicing their own different beliefs as they see fit.

[snowyowl]

I guess it's sort of a Hippocratic oath approach to morality? First do no evil. The ends do not justify the means. Then do whatever good you can.

Well, this is mostly the same as my approach. The difference is, in my worldview,

By not making a decision, you are deciding to do nothing.

Sitting on your hands and saying "Welp, not my problem" doesn't shield you from the consequences of your actions. Nothing shields you from the consequences of your actions. You have to look at the options available to you, and see which one results in the best consequences. "Do nothing" is an option, and it has consequences like any other.

[RyukaTana]

That is extremely honourable and an example of what I would say is compatible with my beliefs. I wish her luck with her health. (That is not sarcastic or hypocritical. You clearly do not hold my own values, and I sincerely mean good will in accordance to your values, or atleast my presumptions based on this limited evidence.)

Hey dude, thanks, I don't hold your values but so far they're entirely compatible with what I perceive as ethical behavior. I appreciate very sincerely your good wishes, and I repsect your choices man. I wish you well in your future endeavors, and while I don't agree necessarily with how you've come to those conclusions, I admire the sense of self-governance that comes with them. That is one of my greatest virtues, the one on which almost all of my ideals apply.

I've had awesome conversations with people with whom I have notable disagreements with, and I hope to have such with you in the future, even if I feel our channels of communication don't fully connect. I feel pretty comfortable understanding the subtext, and you seem pretty willing to ask questions and clarify, which is so useful in debate.

Sitting on your hands and saying "Welp, not my problem" doesn't shield you from the consequences of your actions. Nothing shields you from the consequences of your actions. You have to look at the options available to you, and see which one results in the best consequences. "Do nothing" is an option, and it has consequences like any other.

Yeah, well, the opposed consequences of his actions (if he is said 'sixth person') is that he dies... At that point, you may as well be a mob with pitchforks and torches.

Situationally, I'd say that 'equal value' doesn't tell me enough. If we're talking serial killers and rapists, fuck 'em, let 'em rot. However, I don't really have an equal opposite view of good, because I support the individual and the society pretty strongly. At some point, I empathize with both, and I don't think I'd deem either morally good or evil options.

Of course, that hypothetical is riddled with a ton of other complexities. The point of the question is, if one must die to save five (fuck the other variables), and none can be deemed of notably greater social value, is killing one ethically viable? Yes. I would absolutely say so. However, I have never come to a meaningful ethical crossroads that was dramatically easier than deciding what I'd eat for breakfast, so I wouldn't bet on that happening.

[Inverse]

I don't think that utilitarianism (or negative utilitarianism) argues that "the ends justify the means." If the means creates some massive degree of suffering, then the ends aren't justified. In the five/one example you gave, killing one person creates suffering for them, their family, their friends, and so forth, and also creates suffering for five innocent people (and their family, friends, etc.) who have to live with the fact that someone was murdered so that they could continue to live. There's no decrease in suffering there; it in fact greatly increases the suffering in the world and is thus morally repugnant.

[Packbat]

Belatedly, my take on your hypothetical:

Suppose we have six people. Same age, same worth as human beings. Five begin to suffer from organ failure through no fault of their own. Suppose there is a healthy individual who is an incredibly well matched donor for all of them, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, etc. They'll be completely cured, suffer no relapses, one hundred percent success rate on the operation, and no ongoing health problems. Utilitarianism says that in the interest of maximum well-being/happiness we should chop the sixth indvidual up, thereby having five healthy happy productive lives and one regrettable pain-causing death, as opposed to one healthy happy productive life and five painful deaths.

Is there some aspect of utilitarianism I'm failing to take in that prevents that scenario?

Before I say anything else, I have to point this out: the word "utilitarianism" only denotes the idea that the moral goodness of different options in a situation is best measured by comparing the resultant values of a utility function (i.e. a formula that converts a description of the universe into a - usually notionally - numerical measure). The word "utilitarianism" does not describe what the utility function is. Someone whose utility function is based solely on calculating the well-being of Germanic Aryans - their health, wealth, and abundancy, onwards to the end of time - might behave very differently from how Hitler did, but they would be no less of a monster.

That said, for most non-evil utilitarians you meet - such as the classical utilitarians I alluded to earlier - snowyowl's answer is precisely correct (edit: as is Inverse's): in any real scenario, the ancillary harm outweighs the good. (For one thing, organ transplants aren't reliably permanent solutions to organ failure.)

My answer differs, because I am (approximately) a rules-utilitarian, rather than an act-utilitarian - I believe, as George Berkeley said, "The rule is framed with respect to the good of mankind; but our practice must be always shaped immediately by the rule." Considered in that form, answering the hypothetical is no longer a matter of calculating the relative value of one human being and five; it becomes a matter of considering whether a rule presents itself that would suggest the murder of the one for the sake of the five.

In the case in question? I don't see any such rule. In fact, any rule which suggested that we should do so in all cases wherein the hypothetical applies would lead directly to a society full of rampant, arbitrary violations of all individual rights - one in which no prudent person would allow anyone to find out their blood type (e.g. by donating blood) lest they be dissected to aid the injured, no fat man would dare cross a bridge over a trolley line lest they be shoved off, and no-one would want to risk being revealed to possess liquid assets (or possibly fungible assets of any kind) lest they be stolen to enrich lives in poverty-stricken countries. Such a society would be far worse than one in which five, or fifty, or fifty million people die every year for lack of organ transplants, because not only would the rule fail to open up any large supply of organ transplants, and not only would the extensions of lifespan from these organ transplants be terrifically constrained (after all, to get an organ transplant, you have to reveal your donor profile), but this society wouldn't even have the economic stability required to support the technological infrastructure of organ transplants. A society that destroys all sources of liquidity within itself is a society that will inevitably find itself in a catastrophic economic depression ... and unable to escape.

That is not to say that there are no scenarios under which I would allow a lesser evil for the greater good, of course. Mary Mallon was unwilling to alter her behavior so as to avoid spreading typhoid fever, or even consider the possibility that she was infected despite her lack of symptoms, so there existed no reasonable alternative to involuntary incarceration. But the very fact that I alluded to her intransigence (and the fact that I spoke in the past tense - these days, antibiotic treatments exist for typhoid) illustrate how the mostly-unarticulated rules that I employ are shaped by the need to avoid creating negative precedents: multiple attempts have to be made to find and create solutions short of violating someone's personal rights before we can say, "This is the only thing we can do to prevent this harm."

[sonofzeal]

Personally, I hold to a form of Virtue Ethics. I work from the premise that actions I take affect my environment, but also affect me - and I find that the latter is a good basis for determining the rightness and wrongness of acts. Repeated lies make lying more natural and easier to default to, while telling the truth even when it's hard makes it easier to make that choice again in the future. And by minding such changes to who we are, we can arrive at a better sense of ethics than following some set system of rules, or by running through Felicific calculus.

Perhaps an extended example.

Suppose I am in Nazi Germany, and a Jew comes knocking on my door asking to be hid. While I have some very pragmatic reasons to say no, a good neighbour wouldn't turn the person away if the hiding could be managed. I wish to be a good neighbour, so I accept them. An hour later, an SS Officer knocks on my door, asking if I know where any Jews are hidden. "Thou Shalt Not Lie" is a good rule of thumb, but in this situation it would be selfish to put my adherence to such a moral code above protecting a person's life from unjust persecution. I do not wish to be selfish, so I lie and send the officer on his way.

Another example.

Suppose I am working at a railway junction, and a runaway train is about to crush half a dozen people unless I pull a lever to divert it so that it crushes one other person. Both options are terrible, but one is worse for the community as a whole than the other. I wish to be a good citizen. Being a good citizen here would kill a fellow, and I wish to be someone who has compassion, but I should also be having compassion for the five others, and they outweigh, so I pull the lever (and cross my fingers in hope that the one person miraculously gets away, even though I know they probably won't - I can always hope).


There are some interesting corollaries of this perspective. For instance, physical traits have moral weight. Strength is a virtue for a Firefighter. A Firefighter should be strong. People are counting on their strength. If you are a Firefighter and are not strong, that has similar moral weight to being a Police Officer who is unjust, or a Childcare Worker who is unloving. This does not mean that people with physical disabilities are "less ethical" than their counterparts, but does condemn deliberately putting yourself in situations where that becomes a liability. And it means that for many of us there's moral worth in working towards physical improvement too.

Another interesting corollary is that different people may have different ethical constraints on them in the same situation, depending on who they are and their place in society. A Police Officer should wish to be a "good Police Officer", and that involves certain virtues that would be useless or even counterproductive in a kindergarten teacher, and vice versa. Their duties are different, and thus their duties may demand different sorts of decisions from them. This is not to say that the system is "Relativistic", merely that it's "Particular", in that it's sensitive to the particulars of the situation. Adding or changing factors may change how a person's duty calls them to act, or how the choice of an action might affect them. If pulling the lever in the second example would wrack you with guilt and render you unable to perform future good actions, that's a factor against. Or, alternatively, if you felt that making that cynical choice might jade you to future tragedy and deter you from acting with compassion there, that's also a factor. A person needs judgement to weigh these factors, certainly, but under Utilitarianism they need judgement to extrapolate from their possible actions to all possible outcomes of those, weigh the balance of probabilities, calculate the weight of human pleasure or suffering involved, and come to a decision. I'd argue that's far more complex than simply asking yourself who you want to be, how that hypothetical person would act, and perhaps how you think this action in question might affect you going forward.

[Inverse]

I've gone ahead and added links to everyone's first posts, along with a short phrase describing their philosophies. If you feel your descriptor is inaccurate, go ahead and post a preferred title.

[RyukaTana]

I wouldn't exactly declare the point of my philosophy 'fuck it all'. It's a matter of separation of the ideal versus the practical, and I practice the ideal with the people I love. I live for the people I love, my life revolves around making their lives better. The problem in describing my philosphy in a short phrase is because philosophies shouldn't be described in short phrases, but especially not mine.

So, if you must describe only the practical side of my philosophy, misanthropy is a simple and accurate term. If you want to describe my ideal, I guess 'communal anarchy' would work, but neither is a facet that can exist without the other. I wouldn't be as much of a misanthrope if I didn't have an ideal view of the world, but I don't live by my ideal because of my misanthropy.

[MaggiedesHiboux]

My own, personal morality is more theoretical than practical. Obviously, don't hurt other people, be kind, blah blah.
Religion is where it gets tricky.
I self-identify as Christian, but am more than willing to admit that I do not know for certain whether it is true. I do not know for certain that souls exist, that God exists, or that He works the way I think He does. I operate under the assumption, for day to day life, that God exists and souls exist, because the idea of my consciousness just ending is utterly horrific to me.
Assuming souls exist, what has a soul and what doesn't?
Some people believe that only humans have souls. Others believe that everything has a soul. Personally, I think it is likely that if something has a consciousness-if it has thoughts and emotions, even if not as complex as humans, it has a soul. But I don't know this for sure.
Here's where things get contentious.
If you take two alternate universes-one where only humans have souls, and one where, say, all vertebrates have souls, and you take a cow from each universe-I believe that it is more ethical to kill the cow that has a soul than the one that doesn't.
Think about it. A cow is inherently innocent. It doesn't have the moral complexity to be guilty of things. A cow soul is, in my opinion, going straight to Heaven. If you kill the cow with the soul, you send it to Heaven. If you kill the cow without the soul, then you terminated a consciousness.
This does not necessarily mean I would find it more ethical to kill a human with a soul than a cow without. Cows and humans aren't the same. Sorry if that makes me racist or speciesist or whatever. I'm also not saying it wouldn't be less ethical to kill the human than the cow. My basic premise of theoretical morality is, I do not know for certain. Besides, in the absence of a way of determining the existence of souls and if they do exist who has them, it's a bit moot.
(All other things being equal-if both have souls or neither does-kill the cow)