My guess is that it is a question about responsibility. In the trolley problem it is my responsibility to pull the lever or not. If I don't lose my money people will die. In real life it is the responsibility of everybody. Maybe still very egocentric not to donate but at least your conscience can let you sleep at night.

An interesting take on it is that if, for example you have 90.000 in savings you could choose not to pull the lever and use your savings to save 20 people in Guinea, but also this would not be a popular choice I guess.

There's also a matter of proximity. In many of the other problems, people chose to sacrifice more people that they didn't know well over sacrificing someone (best friend, cousin, yourself) that you do know well. The charity problem isn't quite the same as the trolley problem, because it's saving someone outside of your tribe in a faraway land, vs. saving someone who is presumably local to you and about to die in front of your eyes. Also note that people frequently do give up their life savings (in medical bills, or GoFundMe) to save people close to them.

The charity problem is also unimaginably complex. What if I donate my entire (literal) life savings...then lose my job, go homeless, and consequently die? I've thus saved a handful of lives, lost one (myself), and doomed maybe dozens or hundreds of other lives I could've later saved! Uh, whoops. :|

Every moment, every (in)decision you make comes at the opportunity cost of many other choices, and their exponentially multiplying secondary/tertiary/etc consequences.

These thought experiments feels like (#0) solving an optimization math problem where you're:

1. Stumbling through an unimaginably large solution space and

2. Latching onto local minima (heuristics like "choose the fewest trolley deaths"), which are probably bad answers, only to realize

3. We don't even precisely know the objective function we're optimizing. So the problem has gone "up" one level. We first need to solve that optimization problem. GOTO #0.

The whole thing feels farcically hopeless and is maybe even a recursive or self referential minefield. Yikes. So the idea of avoiding it entirely by just winging it through life using your gut, or checking out entirely, doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Hell, it might be the only way to keep your sanity. It's an unsatisfying heuristic, but...oh look, we're back at step #2... :))))))

You are discounting the simple possibility that 70% of respondents do not have any significant "life savings" to speak of.

Not to mention a lot of people measure account their wealth in more than just money.

Reminds me of Richard Posner, former Chief Justice of the Seventh Appelate court. His essay on how poor people have no wealth so you need the threat of prison to keep them in line. And how middle class people you only need the threat of impoverishment to keep them in line. So you can just fine them. And wealthy people only need the threat of loss of reputation to keep them in line.

Which is to say Posner is an idiot that knows nothing of poor people. Because all an honest poor person owns is his reputation. Where Musk... when you are that wealthy someones always going to overlook your transgressions.

Evidently he also didn't know anything about rich people. If they manage to damage their reputations then they figure a good PR firm and some contributions to the right places will take care of that for them.

I think it used to be true. The Musks and Trumps have, like Neo in the Matrix, decided they have total control over their actions with no regard for mere perception any longer. Some people think the old framework is still valid, and others think it no longer applies.

People operating on different sets of facts!

100%. I have no savings so it was an easy pull

Risky play, if I’m lucky and inflation goes up 1000% I’ll seem downright smart for counting on the breakdown of society!

I have the ability to re-earn my wealth. I can't undo death.

But perhaps your wealth would put you in a better situation to save additional lives in the future. It's a tough moral question.

Exactly what I thought!

This is all assuming that the money actually goes towards them, and not to everyone else inbetween you and that person you are trying to help.

And while yes, some good charities do exist apparently; I can't name any.

Edit: and no one better try to say 'WE' is a good charity.

GiveWell is a research platform for finding good charities. I referenced them in my original comment.

Edit: Okay, I might be a bit tired. Sorry... I should have read that twice...

Comment redacted to help hide idiocy... sorry.

He just named one: GiveWell.

Sorry, but wasn't taking it at face value just cause it was used as a data point only at the time.

And not to be that person; but proof please.

I really do want a comprehensive list if possible of which charities are actually worthy of even being allowed to keep existing on this planet.

> I really do want a comprehensive list if possible of which charities are actually worthy of even being allowed to keep existing on this planet.

You're in luck! That's exactly the problem that the Effective Altruism movement aspires to solve (namely, how to do altruism effectively.) And Givewell, in particular, is a great site for that - you can either donate to them and have them spread your donation over their "top charities", or donate to the charities yourself.

They do a lot of research, very transparently, to figure out which charities are actually achieving good outcomes. You can read their research, their thought processes around it, etc.

Note that this doesn't necessarily mean those charities have "zero overhead", as you alluded to in another comment - that's not a good way to judge a charity, in general, the same way it isn't a good way to judge a company; we don't really care how much money it takes to run a company or how that money is used, we care about their profit. Similarly, if a charity uses a lot of money on things like staff, but this makes them more effective at actually (say) saving lives, then it's a net better charity to donate to than other charities.

They have extensive research on their website that doesn’t need to be copy pasted here.

If five people in my immediate presence experienced such peril then watched me sacrifice my life savings to save their lives, I would expect their testimonies of admiration and relationships backed by a life-debt would end up being an asset of equal or greater value than a tremendous lot of liquid cash. I won't lie; I want to be whole-heartedly adored by them, even more than I want the rich man's $500,000 bribe.

It's a false comparison in my opinion, but I do get your idea.

With your scenario, there are two elements to consider:

1. Bystander Effect, i.e., someone else can help in this situation so I don't have to

2. People likely reason that Guineans still have some agency to try to subsist, so the threat is not as immediate

Compared to the Trolley problem proposed, there is a decision to be made _now_ that only you have control over and there will be an immediate effect in that people's lives will be saved in a situation where they have no option to help themselves or even get by at a bare minimum.

Ignoring the "I'm absolutely broke so who cares?" people (which while a fair point I think isn't quite the spirit of the scenario, which is will you sacrifice items of significance to you for the lives of others), I think that your scenario has too much distance and layers of abstraction as to how the money helps. Fundamentally, if we can't actually understand specifically what the charities do to save a life in Guinea, so it's harder for people to accept that the decision has any significant impact.

So I don't see any real inconsistency between your scenario and the trolley one. People aren't as accepting of the premise that the charitable donation immediately saves a life and count on the help of others whereas pulling the lever immediately has an observable effect.

But you don’t have perfect information / certainty in this case. This is more akin to a mystery box trolly case, or a fuzzy one.

I think a lot of people would pay money in the situation. You sending money to someone whose suffering you never even saw in Guinea and never hearing whether it helped is indeed a different thing than this trolly problem.

People want to feel like good people.

A rather hilarious example is asking if they are against bestiality. Pretty much everyone is.

Asking why in more liberal circles gets you an answer along the lines of "it hurts the animals" a lot of the time.

Then asking if it hurts animals more than eating them usually results in a ban.

It hurts the animals more than eating them.

It hurts the liberal ego more than anything.

For me, the difference is that one is an emergency and the other is a long-term sytematic issue.

The cost of the lives of 5 first-world people in terms of economic productivity is like an order of magnitude greater than my savings.

What did you answer for problem 6, where a rich man offers you money to pull the lever and kill someone else? Presumably, a rich man is likely to have more economic productivity than a random person.

A life is a life, in that situation. But one of them is giving me money. So without further information, I'll take the money and save theirs.

I take the money.

Like most people, you probably drive a car from time to time. Collectively, cars kills 30-40k americans every year. By choosing to drive you are a fractional murderer - statistically responsible for some slice of a death. Not many people will decide not to drive on learning this…

Or we can say (for example) that drivers kill 30-40k Americans every year. By being a bad driver and choosing to drive you are a fractional murderer.

But that's fine because and and I bad drivers are not.

How do you know if you’re a bad driver or a good driver? It seems like a pretty blatant tautology to say that only bad drivers kill. Willing to bet almost every one of those fatal car crashes were caused by people who would have said they were a good driver…

I think many people would agree in the abstract that donating some amount of their savings to developing countries is the right thing to do -- many more people than actually do this in practice.

Saying something ought to be done is not the same as doing it, basically.

And of course, while donating to poor countries is fundamentally similar to Question 3, in practice it's obviously not the same; people do seem have a 'moral discount' for things that occur farther away (geographically, temporally, or otherwise).

Silly random thoughts that went through my head at this question

1) Many people's life savings is 0. A bargain!

2) If _I_ were one of the five people, I'd try and make it up to the lever puller. Lever-guy might even come out ahead.

3) If I pull this lever right away in question 3, if there are later questions about giving up my life savings, they'll be free. This might be the value lever pull! I might be kicking myself later for missing this deal.

Other people have worked a long, long time for their life savings, and it's very likely that, as appreciative as these people might be, it's just as likely that this person gets a sincere thank you but no financial compensation. In the right situation, I could see it leading to severe depression as the puller feels they gave up everything and nobody cares.

I still think you need to pull the lever.

I mean, I hope they'd at least vouch for you in a GoFundMe

Perhaps there are some other factors involved such as immediacy, distance, agency, surety and that the question is hypothetical?

You can always *pass the hat" amongst the survivors

This. Though I might try to get them to agree first before pulling the lever.

Watching people get run over the trolley will harm me more, than the deaths of unknown people somewhere on the other side of the world will.

I took the Giving What We Can Pledge[1] and donate 10% of my income to effective charities for this reason. It barely makes a difference to me and it saves more than 1 life a year. They also have a really cool How Rich Am I calculator[2] to put it in context.

I still chose to pull the lever though because I don't have $18000 in my life savings yet.

[1]: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge

[2]: https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i

I think a lot of people would also be fully willing to pay not to have to witness five people get hit by a train

It's much easier to click the button that says "I'm a good, altruistic person!" than to actually donate away your life savings.

well if only I could pull a lever to relieve me of my debts (and save lives at the same time!)

By that logic, somebody defrauding a charity out of $4500 should be punished roughly the same as a homicide.

(Not saying that's necessarily wrong, just to give some perspective on the "fun" corners you get into when putting a monetary value on human life, and it's so much different from the value you get where you live).

Only if they defrauded one of the most effective charities (as opposed to $4500 raised to buy some new musical instruments for a school) and only if punishments should be determined by total harm caused.

Harm caused is usually one of several factors we use to determine punishments, which is why attempted murder is punishable even if the perpetrator failed to cause any harm.

(Not saying our current system for punishment is necessarily right.)

It depends on how much people's life saving is.. It can be even negative... not everyone is in your situation.

There are pragmatic reasons as well. For me, people spend a lot to be happy like buying luxurious stuff or go to the movies/good restaurant. Saving people makes me happy. I am willing to pay for my own happiness.

I answered with the majority because I followed John Rawls' condition of the "veil of ignorance", which means that the only information I have to start with is:

1) an average person's life savings is less than 1 million

2) an average person's life is worth ~10 million

I have to take issue with 2) - for ethical and rational reasons I refuse to but a monetary value on people.

Contrary to popular belief, there's nothing unethical about attaching a price to a human life: it's a very uncomfortable question, and I think there ought to be some disagreement on what the number should be...

But money is fundamentally just a unit of value. We use it to compare the value of different things. We can use it to convert between labour (someone's time, which is a fraction of one's life) and goods and services. We can also use it to measure lives: 5 statistical lives lost is worse than 1 statistical life lost, all else being equal. We can also use it to weigh years lost to disability, etc.

Note that this doesn't mean things always have a fair price, and it says nothing about whether money is fairly allocated in society. And it certainly doesn't mean that people can be replaced with money. None of this is the point.

As a thought experiment, ask yourself the following questions:

- Is a human life worth more than nothing, or zero dollars? (I hope you will say yes)

- Is a human life worth more than 20$? (I hope you will say yes)

- Does a human life have infinite value? I hope you will agree that this is not the case: if it was, then we would be justified in sacrificing all of the world's resources combined, in order to save a single life. The paradox is that this would come at the cost of all other lives, which is clearly nonsensical. Even a pharaoh's life, or a king's life, is not normally considered to be worth the combined lives of all of his subjects, from the perspective of modern society. Lives have some non-zero, but finite, economic/social "value".

- Is there a fair price, in dollars, for an hour of labour or work? If there is, then you accept that there is some conversion factor between a fraction of a human life, and some amount of dollars.

Putting a price tag on a human life is something that is so important, that we ought to discuss it more often. Whether we put the price too high, or too low, is often what explains political disagreements on the provision of public goods and services. We do ourselves a great disservice by not forcing ourselves to come up with a concrete number, or by not being honest about what our numbers are. We should challenge each other's assumptions and ensure we put a fair price on it, and ensure that this price is based on the things that matter to us as a society.

Judges, actuarial scientists, and economists, all do it explicitly. Nobody agrees on a specific number, but they all pick a number. The rest of us? We do it implicitly, whether or not we're aware of it, every day of our lives. The problem is that our value judgments and our choices, especially if they are not conscious, are often not self-consistent.

---

See also:

- https://fee.org/articles/marginalism-and-the-morality-of-pri...

- https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agen...

- https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230963-100-put-a-pr...

- https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/get-honest-about-the-price-of-...

- http://justiceharvard.org/lecture-3-putting-a-price-tag-on-l...

- https://www.porchlightbooks.com/blog/changethis/2020/all-liv...

- https://muse.jhu.edu/article/18688/pdf

Thanks for the thoughtful comment. A lot of this thinking does line up for me, but it seems like there's something missing. Why do we all feel a little bit sick when we hear about car executives doing calculations to determine whether to perform a recall or not? Isn't it because we're putting a financial price on life? Or is it just that the price we're hearing is too low?

The most infamous recall was the Ford Pinto, and it was particularly bad because they knew about the problem before the car ever shipped, and once the problem was known didn't fix it for years even though the cost would have been $11/car.

Less directly, there's the fact that new safety features often come to luxury vehicles first, and might eventually trickle down to cheaper cars due to competition and regulation (backup cameras, automatic emergency braking).

I think mostly we don't like to think about it. This comes up particularly in the health care industry. There was the (manufactured) furor over "death panels" but there's also the very real challenge of deciding whether it's worth paying possibly millions of dollars on a drug that might have a marginal-at-best improvement in someone's survival odds. And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.

Indeed!

> And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.

Not only that, but even in first world countries (ie.: countries that have a good universal/public healthcare system), the dollar value of a statistical human life matters as well. There are waiting lists where you have to decide a priority rank of who gets the organ first, or who gets scheduled in on Monday for their surgery vs who has to wait, etc. Nobody likes that it has to be this way, and nobody wants to be the person that decides (in reality, it's often an ethics committee and there are rules and guidelines to follow), but that's how it has to be.

The money used to save and extend lives has to be taken from somewhere, and it's taken from the money that represents a fraction of the population's labour one way or another (it's a bit more complicated than that, especially when you consider monetary policy, and non-labour sources of income, but the general idea stands).

If you don't put a dollar value on it, then you're going to be making a lot of subjective decisions based on how you feel resources should be allocated: you're going to be taking from some people and giving to others, based on a gut feeling rather than a system. Your gut feeling might be the right one from time to time, but chances are it won't be self-consistent, and will be very biased.

I think even if we all agree that there is a price, it’s hard not to feel discomfort about that.

Depending where in the world you are, you may have grown up to believe that humans are more worthy than animals because we have “souls” or whatever that means. A lot of our culture and religion deeply reinforces the “humans are special holy magic” feelings. I won’t develop this thought to great detail unless someone wants me to.

But in addition to that, you’re absolutely correct in saying that oftentimes the price we put on life is too low.

In addition to that, even if the price is correct, it may be difficult for us to have a good perspective on that, simply because we are talking about large numbers (we’re really bad at large numbers), and because pricing stuff is hard. Even stocks are hard to price, and people argue with each other about wildly different price targets.

Well, once the event hits the news and it comes out that you sacrificed your saving to save some people, then it should be easy to set up a gofundme and recoup the costs, at least if you're like me and your life savings are paltry. You may even profit!

I picked that option. Based on the knowledge that it would take me around 6 years to regain my life savings at the moment and it would take me over 6 years to get over the decision of picking the savings.

If I very publicly save 5 people from a violent death I can easily play that off into much more than my life saving are worth with a couple of book deals and maybe a movie

If you are early in life your life savings may be negligible. If you interpret it as net-worth it may even be a benefit if you have student loans.

A little different when you are out to splat them under your feet. That’s pretty traumatic.

out of sight out of mind.

If I don't pull the lever, then I ain't donating my entire life savings.

Maybe I don't want to watch a bunch of people die

One of these trolleys made it to Guinea???