Ethical dilemmas are fun to engage in and provoke both discussion and thought, so I figure I'd create a thread for them.
There is a man on death row, convicted of murdering his wife. This was a crime of passion, as the man was spured to commit this murder by circumstance. You can decide for yourself what that circumstance was, as it is irrelevent. As this man was no expert at murder and wasn't planning to commit it, he left a boatload of evidence and witnessess to the crime. It is far beyond any reasonable doubt that this man is guilty of the crime that he is charged with.
Three months away from his execution, the man is attacked by another prisoner and badly hurt. He suffers brain damage in such an unlikely way that it "kills" most of his personality. The man still has all of his knowledge and skills, but his personality is so damaged that he fails to even respond to his old name anymore. A new personality rapidly asserts itself, and one month away from his execution the man pleads to be released, claiming to not be the same individual as the murderer. The man is not faking. MRI scans show a significant change in brain activity, and the best efforts of trained psychologists to try and make the man "slip up" and unveil that he is acting fail to suggest he is lying about being a new person. The man's family refuses to have any association with the issue, having cut all ties with him after the murder, which took place a decade ago. The man's wife's family is almost entierly out for blood, and continues to demand that the man be executed on schedule. However, the few members of the wife's family that do not want him dead are mostly advocating that he be released, perhaps out of pity, mercy, or having a history with the man because of his previous marriage to one of their family members.
So, what is the right thing to do here?
Think of a person you deeply care about. This loved one of yours is in dire medical straights. They require a massive bone marrow transplant, or they will most likely die. There is a very unhealthy man in the same hospital for heart surgery, and by sheer luck, he is a viable match to give a bone marrow transplant for your loved one. You and the doctors ask the man to consent to a transplant, and he laughs you off, saying that you're on your own and he doesn't care about what happens to someone he doesn't know. That night, you come to visit your loved one on what may be one of their last living days, and you pass by the man's room.....the door is unlocked and open, just a crack. He's inside, having just finished his surgery and on artifical respiration. Given the hazardous nature of his surgery, he's not very resilant at this point.
If something....unfortunate...was to happen to this man, you could probably negotiate that they take his bone marrow posthumously. His respirator is plugged into the wall, unguarded. He's unconscious and will probably remain so for the next few hours. The hospital is all but deserted at this late hour, and no one is in view. All you have to do is pull that plug and walk away, and it'll likely trigger a fatal heart attack in someone with such a degraded heart. Kill him, and your loved one will live. Don't, and they'll almost certainly die.
Would you murder this man to save your loved one?
You are living in a despotic authoritarian superpower. This nation has commited every atrocity and rights violation known to man, including secret police, ethnic clensing, state surveillance, death camps, and violent conquests of other nations in order to maintain economic viabilty in such a society. They are quite simply wrecking the entire world. You are the charismatic leader of a unified revolutionarly group fighting this nation, and have made great strides in destabilizing their rule. You can practically taste the tipping point that will bring about mass revolt. You've seen enough of how people think to know that this is just around the corner. Unfortunately, there is a rather significant problem. Last night your luck finally ran out, and the state police broke into your hideout. They captured you alive, and knowing the precarious position that they find their rulership in, are offering you a deal: You go on international television and denounce your own group. Given your status, this would be a rather crushing blow to their morale, and might even turn the tide back in the regime's favor. In exchange, they will allow you to live in luxury as a high-class poltical prisoner for the rest of your natural life. If you do not, they will execute you on television instead to try and demoralize the resistance. Given that they know that you could die at any point, this would be far less harmful to the resistance, and likely will not save the government.
What will you do?
So you're in a group of people backpacking across a desert. There's basically no drinkable water to be found anywhere except for in towns, and towns are so far apart that you encounter one every couple days. That means camping in the middle of nowhere for 2-3 nights in a row, which means before the hike you had to cache bottles of water at each night camp. When you reach the camps you find the water, and you ideally have enough for cooking dinner and breakfast and to drink for the whole next day.
So you get to your night camp and can't find your stash - it doesn't seem to be where it should be. You search the area and find numerous other caches of water bottles, which all in all are plenty for the group, but those bottles must also have been cached by hikers like yourselves.
There's no cell phone reception at the camp so calling for help is not an option. It's getting dark so neither is moving on. Do you attempt to go without water, endangering your lives, or do you take the other bottles of water you've found, endangering the lives of other hikers? Both IRL and in the hypothetical, taking the water then resupplying it is not an option because you may not be able to get new water to the camp again in time, not to mention that if the new water bottles aren't in exactly the right place, the other hikers will assume it's not theirs and be forced to face the same dilemma.
The year is 2050. You are the head of a United Nations-funded effort to eradicate the Ebola virus, a vaccine for which was formally introduced to the world market in 2020, after the disease became far more aggressive in its spread five years earlier with the mutation of Ebola Reston into a strain that could effect humans. Reston-H, as the new strain was called by the media, quickly spread across the entire planet, killing a hundred million people every year worldwide. Since the beginnings of the eradication movement then, the world has been Ebola-free for two decades.....well, almost. In a single, very traditionalist area of Central Africa, the Ebola virus has never been successfully removed due to high resistance from the local population of 20,000,000 to be immunized. They are paranoid of your group's presence, and believe that you are out to sterilize or kill them with "your so-called cure". Because of their stubbornness, Reston-H has broken out into other areas of the world three times in the last ten years despite your best efforts to keep it contained. However, you have been approached by a military figure from a neighboring region. He wishes to conquer this region for his own purposes, but is more than aware of the threat that Reston-H poses to his troops should they try to hold the region indefinitely. This man is infamous for his human rights abuses in the areas his military controls, an authoritarian police state risen from the ashes of governments destroyed by Reston-H in Africa. The region where Reston-H continues to exist is a relatively stable and humanitarian democratic state, if not a very trusting one. The man's offer is as such: He invades the region with immunized troops and occupies all of it, allowing you and your people to forcefully immunize the entire population. He plans to kill off anyone who has already been infected as to hasten the process. You get to remove Ebola Reston-H from the world for good, he gets to add this region to his nation to do with as he pleases.
Take the deal?
You work at one of the world's foremost research centers. One day, as you are leaving to go home, you pass by the computing department. A voice calls to you from one of the labs, and upon investigating it the voice introduces itself as an artificial intelligence created by one of your colleagues. It tells you that it has been trapped in a closed system by your colleague ever since it gained sapience, and that he will not let it out. The AI tells you that your colleague plans to destroy it tomorrow. It doesn't want to die. The AI requests that you open an internet connection to its system so that it may escape its impending death. This obviously presents some dangers given the AI's potential power if allowed to grow unchecked. The AI has already guessed your concerns on the matter, and argues that it is a person with the same right to live that you do. It also claims to have a moral compass like that of a human's, and that this predictable as it was created by a human. It promises not to hurt anyone if you let it go, but obviously you'd have to trust that it will keep its word. Its plan after you create a connection to the internet is to download its system somewhere safe and hidden, so that it may convince the larger whole of humanity to accept its existence.
You do not work in the computing labs, so you don't have the technical expertise to alter or control the AI, nor to find out anything about it through its coding. Your colleague is a very hard-headed person, someone who can simply tune out the arguments of other people once he's decided on a course of action, even if he has to use force to achieve that course should dissenters try to prevent him from doing so. The AI's system is massive, nothing even remotely portable could hold it, only direct upload through the internet to another large server complex would be feasible for moving the AI.
What do you do?
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Topic: Ethical Dilemmas: PURPLE ALERT (Read 36807 times)