Logically it makes more sense to flip the switch. 5 lives vs. 1.
But when you change the situation. There's no more switch. Just a single track with 5 people tied to it. You're on the side of the track with a really fat man. You push the man onto the track you can save the lives of all the people because the really fat man stops the train. But the fat man will die.
Two situations with equivalent logical consequences but experiments show that people will consistently flip the switch but they will not push the fat man. Why do people act one way but not the other when both situations are logically identical?
This moral conflict is one of the greatest pieces of evidence that our morality is made up of biological instincts. First it shows morality is not logically consistent. Second the same moral hiccup is shown across all cultures and demographics consistently indicating that morality is genetic and biological and not learned.
That is the significance of this moral conflicts. It says something deep about humanity, biology and the true nature of what morality actually is.
The switch scenario implies that the individual has responsibility for the entire system. The switch and the train have a strong cultural component that implies responsibility for the system as a whole (employee). Even if you state it explicitly people simply don’t believe that a train switch is going to be left unattended and put into the hands of a completely independent third party. If you state that the train switch operator dies while you are visiting the station leaving the switch in your hands there is an implication that you are stepping into the switch operators role.
Society expects that someone with responsibility for the entire system would make trade-off decisions that would be immoral in the second scenario. For example, a politician would be expected to make policy of when it is acceptable to harvest organs from a donor while a doctor making a decision unilaterally would be morally repugnant.
The questions are more interesting in getting insights into cultural expectations of responsibility than deep biological biases about morality. It turns out that we have very finely tuned expectations on what rises to the level of “responsible” that moves a decision from one category to another. A health minister making a decision about which medical treatments are medically necessary are seen as less morally ambiguous than an insurance executive even if the process to make the decision and the outcomes are exactly the same.
So morality depends less on the choice and more about the role of responsibility? One would think that the focus is purely on the choice.
Anyway the point isn't to examine the details of the moral conflict. The point is to examine why the moral conflicts even exists. It points to the fact that morality is arbitrarily biological in origin. It's a set of random arbitrary behaviors that helped with our survival in the caveman days.
Thus given how arbitrary it is, it's sort of pointless to analyze morality too deeply as if there's some higher hidden meaning. There isn't, it's just random instincts with no logical cohesion. Pointless to explore philosophically.
How does it make logical sense? People are not numbers. What right do you, or anyone else, have to decide who shall live and who shall die?
Reducing people to numbers is a logical fallacy in itself.
Increase the numbers then it will become more logical.
Change the 5 people to millions. Now it's one person vs. millions.
The choice is now even more obvious. And if you don't consider the numbers in this case people will call you a psychopath if you can't see the difference in moral weight between millions and one life.
It is difficult to create scenarios that trade-off one life for millions without implying responsibility of the person being asked to make the decision. People are grappling less with moral trade-offs in these decisions than they are with the dual axis questions or morality and responsibility. Create a scenario that trades off one life for a million but doesn’t imply the person choosing is in a position of responsibility and it becomes morally unambiguous.
For example a researcher choosing to sacrifice a healthy individual to donate their immune cells to save a million terminal cancer patients is considered morally reprehensible because people can’t to see how the researcher could be considered responsible for the a healthy individuals life. If the individual goes from being healthy to being in a coma and researcher becomes family member the question then becomes morally ambiguous.
That's my point. Moral ambiguity is evidence for the fact that morality is an arbitrary biological concept. It stems from evolution. It's a set of competing instincts.
If morality was a universal concept there would be nothing ambiguous about it. It would be logically consistent. But what we observe is that we can trigger inconsistent moral situations.
The core formulation of law and our interpretation of morality is formed off of cultural cues. But our core moral instinct is biological and genetic.
This very example. This very topic is evidence to that fact. The moral conflict described as the topic of this HN article is consistent across populations across cultures. It is genetic. It is not learned.
In fact we can actually identify physical and structural difference in people who lack morals. Psychopaths, people who innately lack a moral sense. The differences can be literally seen as a physical manifestation of an actual 3D coordinate of the brain. A researcher who studies these things can actually tell you if you're a psychopath or not just by looking at a brain scan.
Logically it makes more sense to flip the switch. 5 lives vs. 1.
But when you change the situation. There's no more switch. Just a single track with 5 people tied to it. You're on the side of the track with a really fat man. You push the man onto the track you can save the lives of all the people because the really fat man stops the train. But the fat man will die.
Two situations with equivalent logical consequences but experiments show that people will consistently flip the switch but they will not push the fat man. Why do people act one way but not the other when both situations are logically identical?
This moral conflict is one of the greatest pieces of evidence that our morality is made up of biological instincts. First it shows morality is not logically consistent. Second the same moral hiccup is shown across all cultures and demographics consistently indicating that morality is genetic and biological and not learned.
That is the significance of this moral conflicts. It says something deep about humanity, biology and the true nature of what morality actually is.
It's not just some wierd moral game.