Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Tack]

So, I was recently having a riveting and thoroughly complicated discussion with my roomates currently about Ethics.

The two major questions which started it (If anyone is interested) were:
1. Are the titans from 'Attack on Titan' evil? (They lack free will, but actively seek and kill people).
2. There is a train hurtling towards 40 people on tracks. You and you alone are within arms reach of a lever you can flip which will divert the train onto a different track, where one person is. Do you flip it?


Those two questions are both awesome starting points to talk about in order to start a big discussion about it, but apart from that I'll throw in a bit more blarg just to get people who for some reason find ethics Crazy Interesting wanna know about it.

So far through my perusings I've found different a bunch of different schools of ethics.


1. Utilitarian (Greatest + to most people, Least - to least people).
2. Hedonism (Greatest pleasure to me, Least pain to me)

3. Consequentialist ("The end justifies the means")
4. Deontology (The act which you believe is right, is good.)

5. Social Pragmatism ("Good" and "Right" evolves over time as society evolves, and to be 'good' is to change with it.)
6. Role Ethics ("Good" and "Right" is based on the specific community you belong to, and to be 'good' is to follow it.)
7. "Divine Law" Ethics [TRY NOT TO DISCUSS THIS ONE TOO HEAVILY] ("Good" and "Right" are immutable as written down by X Y Z.)
8. Semi-Nihilist ethics (If it doesn't overly defy the immutable laws of the universe, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Everything will die.)


Which are you? Would you throw the lever?

[Solymr]

Ptw because sometimes I get too bored with myself.

I live in some pragmatism-relativism-nihilism state, I don't think any action can be defined as only good or bad, but as good for who and bad for who.

Also I would totally flip lever because without more data the choice seems obvious.

Edit: oh right I forgot the titans thing. No free will therefore not evil, just extremely dangerous as too warrant a complete removal.

[SirQuiamus]

1. Exactly as evil as your average serial killer.

2. I would flip the switch and accept whatever penalty is imposed for manslaughter. Utilitarianism is never a good idea in reality, but it always wins out in contrived examples such as this.

[Il Palazzo]

2. There is a train hurtling towards 40 people on tracks. You and you alone are within arms reach of a lever you can flip which will divert the train onto a different track, where one person is. Do you flip it?

Which are you? Would you throw the lever?

There's more to it than just philosophy. For example, while most people will tend to say they'd flip the lever, all you need is to alter the situation slightly - by making the person not throw the lever but instead be required to push a person on tracks (so that the train stops before hitting the larger group) - and the weight of a more personal involvement will make some of the people who would throw the lever change their minds.
You can go even further - what if you're a doctor, and there's a person in the waiting room for a routine check-up, whom you could put to sleep and harvest their organs to save 40 people that will otherwise die. Still the same ethical conundrum, but even more personal, end even less people would do it.
So while it sounds simply like a question of ethics, utilitarianism and so on, it seems more about taking responsibility, getting your hands dirty, distancing yourself from the deed and other issues closer to psychology than philosophy.

There's a great series of lectures by Michael Sandel ('Justice: What's the right thing to do?') available from Harvard uni's website, in which this and many other philosophical issues are discussed in an enlightening fashion.

[Sergarr]

1. They're evil to the society of humans. Because the society of humans provides the world with much more variety than the titans, that means it's also objectively evil (at least according to my definition of evil, which is any action that bring the world closer to a state where there are either no thinking entities or no variety in everything)
2. Depends on the additional information. For this kind of scenario, every little detail counts.

[BFEL]

BFEL has many different shades of the listed ones. Most prevalent are Nihilist, Deontologist, and Utilitarian.
Basically, it doesn't matter at all, so might as well be as awesome as you possibly can.

[Reelya]

For the train one, I hold that action or inaction are interchangeable, so you should act to minimze the deaths. You're able to push the button or not push the button, the difference is semantic. If you do nothing, you're still choosing. And since the choice is yours, the responsibility for the outcome is yours. Having a brain fart and refusing to choose is still a choice, but it's attempting to absolve onself by blaming "fate".

Some might contend that it's not your place to "choose" who dies, so you're not liable for the 40 people dying, and should let the train hit them so that you didn't actively murder the one person. But I don't think this is convincing. Consider the scenario where the train is hurtling towards 40 people and there is no-one on the other line. If you let the train hit them and go "it wasn't my fault" nobody is buying that. You alone had the power to save them, it is your responsibility that they died no matter how you throw your hands up and claim that you "didn't do anything". Not pulling the lever is ethically no different than pulling the lever when the train was aimed the other way.

I think that regardless of how you measure the worth of human life, it's clear that 40 individuals are worth "more" than one individual, and that them being hit by the train is worse in every way.

To make stakes a bit higher, you can ask, what if the one person on the tracks is your husband/wife, son/daughter or similar.

[Tack]

There's more to it than just philosophy. For example, while most people will tend to say they'd flip the lever, all you need is to alter the situation slightly - by making the person not throw the lever but instead be required to push a person on tracks (so that the train stops before hitting the larger group) - and the weight of a more personal involvement will make some of the people who would throw the lever change their minds.
You can go even further - what if you're a doctor, and there's a person in the waiting room for a routine check-up, whom you could put to sleep and harvest their organs to save 40 people that will otherwise die. Still the same ethical conundrum, but even more personal, end even less people would do it.
So while it sounds simply like a question of ethics, utilitarianism and so on, it seems more about taking responsibility, getting your hands dirty, distancing yourself from the deed and other issues closer to psychology than philosophy.

Other examples I've seen of that were 'Child', and 'Child playing'.

People were leery of killing a child, and when people heard 'playing' they suddenly made the assumption that the 40 adults who were on the other track Knew the risks that were involved with being there, whilst the child wasn't aware of what danger they were in, which was another thing.

I personally would usually always flip the switch. I'm very utilitarian and kinda cold in my personal ethics.


Here's another one- Someone must live, someone must die.
Your choice is between a child and a person who is of definite value and use to society (A doctor, or the scientist who cured ovarian cancer.)
Which do you kill?

[Reelya]

For the Titans one. We can ask "are lions evil?" when they attack humans. We tend to say they are ethically neutral even though they attack and kill humans.

Titans are human-shaped animals basically. It's possible that their IQ is lower than an animal too.

 Does being a human-shaped predator automatically exclude them from the moral rules of animals?

[Urist Arrhenius]

We'd need to define evil, and then we could get into all sorts of crazy problems ala good/evil vs good/bad.

I'd say you have to flip the lever. What I can't stand about most deontological thinkers is that they pretend not acting isn't a choice. Like, if there was nobody on the other track and you didn't flip the lever, you'd be responsible for all of those deaths. But if there is one person on the other track suddenly standing by is acceptable. It's not.

I'm not necessarily a strict utilitarian, but I don't feel the need to be a strict anything. I'm a big fan of Nietzsche. Which, before anybody tries to argue it is, is not nihilism.

[LordBucket]

a bunch of different schools of ethics

Which are you?

Morality is purely subjective. If you're a spider, catching a fly in your web and eating it probably seems like a good thing to you. If you're a fly, it probably doesn't. This is not to say that it fundamentally "is good" if you're a spider. Nor does"belief" that something is good make it actually good.  "Somebody thought X was good" does not mean that X was good. It simply means that somebody thought X was good.

It might be "good for the spider" to eat the fly or "good for the community" to catch the criminal. But there is no "X is good" without the 'for whom' part of it.

Morality by its nature is subjective.

[Tack]

8. Semi-Nihilist ethics (If it doesn't overly defy the immutable laws of the universe, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Everything will die.)

Congratulations, you belong to the school of Lovecraft.
It's still a school.


However I personally would argue that morality Isn't subjective, but objective, unless it's specifically deontological.
Utilitarianism is all about cold calculation in order to produce the logically best possible way, for instance.
Most of these are in the sense of furthering the human race, but there's many different moralities which aim towards the preservation of the world, or the galaxy.
You could always argue that it's subjective in the sense of 'Our world', but that's not what subjective means.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

To address the two question in the OP:

If you've read Attack on Titan, you'll know that titans are actually just

Spoiler: spoiler alert folks (click to show/hide)

transformed humans, and that it is implied they are actually bound to some greater entity's will. In one scene, a titan actively resists harming a child because she was a princess in it's old village/kingdom/something.

So titans are not evil. Even the titan hybrids who have free will explain that they do what they do because they were coerced in to it. No, they are more like the zombies from The Walking Dead. At first glance they seem evil, because they are killing everything, but they are just a force of nature in the end.

To the second one. I probably wouldn't flip the lever. I would yell out and if the damned fools didn't get off the tracks they'd be paste. Why wouldn't I flip the lever? Because regardless of my actions someone is going to die, so what's the point? In a world of 7 billion is there a difference between 1 and 40? Besides, while I could forget about 40 men whom I had never personally met, I would remember the one who I condemned to death to save the other 40.

If I had to choose a school, which I really don't prefer, I guess I would say "social pragmatism".

[Frumple]

Eh. The thing that trips people up is that ethics isn't subjective, but how it manifests is. Ethics at its core is a very simple thing: It's how to achieve desired ends. That's literally it. And that's not going to change based on actor, nor is the extent that desired end is achieved (which is measured by effectiveness and efficiency, how well the end is achieved and how easily it can be repeated, more or less) -- neither the method nor the measurement changes.

What changes is the desired end... but the trick is that that's not an issue of ethics or morality, it's an issue of aesthetics. Which is pretty subjective, by most considerations of the subject, or at the least very fluid based on the situation.

So people get kinda' confused, from what I've seen. They see ethics as a variable rather than a static formula that contains a variable. Which is a fairly different thing.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Human behavior, and thus human ethics can hardly be quantified, quantized, or otherwise be described on an individual level formulaically. Metacognitive thinking is a great window in to human thought and action, but don't think you're looking in to a gearbox or circuit bank.