This is going to be a long one. I’ll be as brief as I can as this covers a lot, but not nearly enough.

I posted these two threads a while back:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5489/killing-a-billion/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5497/an-alternative-trolley-problem/p1

What is always the case everywhere is how people tend to initially respond to these hypotheticals. People mock them and/or are often upset by them deeming them dehumanizing.

Even when people answer they tend to be torn between the problem as a moral problem and the problem as a logical problem. I did sadly make a mistake in the “alternative trolley problem”. What a number of people tend to do - from previous experience - is to reduce the problem to the numbers presented and focus on the percentages given. Most realise that the problem requires a basic understanding of how to calculate probabilities and on numerous occasions people forgot about the people on the track who would die because they were overly concerned with the probability calculation; they didn’t see the death of innocent people on the track because they were potentially murderers. This is a common feature of all hypothetical questions. The constant shift between pure logic and pure feeling; a feature most explicit in ethical problems where the logical is convincingly dressed up as the emotional and the emotional is used as a reason for a logical choice. The contrariness is where some people may take a more drastic move toward a “altruistic” or “nihilistic” attitude (I’ll come to that later).

Many people in the trolley problem are happy to do nothing. This is why I posed the “Killing a Billion” question where the effect of inaction means the death of the entire human species and/or all life on earth. Here people evade even more by ignoring the fact that this is a hypothetical and prefer to obsess over the improbability of the situation where they were more ready to engage with the trolley problem. They think it easier to dismiss the problem as stupid and/or ask an endless array of questions about how such a situation could occur rather than deal with it face on.

A response from one poster:

The problem with these hypotheticals for someone of my convictions is that they break down the process of moral decision making further than I think we have the capacity to judge of ourselves. I believe moral judgements are made mostly without our conscious awareness and any rationalisation of them is mostly post-hoc. — Isaac

This, I am arguing, is precisely the point of the hypothetical. To prime our decisions - where direct conscious awareness is absent - by engaging as fully as possible with an extreme situation through application to a hypothetical scenario. How this can be done requires severe self-investigation and a large amount of resolve - the social interaction of having the question posed is a difficult, if not unsurpassable, hurdle to deal with.

A major difficulty with such hypotheticals is our readiness to respond to them in the public eye - to virtue signal. To share our thoughts and feelings on the matter is certainly beneficial as we can learn, and foster, the perspectives and reactions of others. Regardless, in public declaration we’re always going to stop short of saying something we deem socially abhorrent and/or outright monstrous; the problem here being if we don’t engage with the “darker” aspects of our being, or simply the part of us we refuse to admit, then they can consume us from within. In the “killing a billion” scenario the self-proclaimed “passive,” “peaceful,” and “non-violent” person would mete out the destruction of humanity or apply a sickening means of meting out their version of “justice” - taking the opportunity to unleash the violence they deny they possess within.

I the above respect the most honest manner of dealing with these hypotheticals is not by denying them (to do so is to deny ourselves) but by not announcing them. This does not mean we cannot explore some of the problems publicly, but at the end of the day facing the inner demons we all possess is not something anyone, other than a masochist, would willing do - even if they did they wouldn’t be taken seriously and/or bring about a fertile ground upon which the self-righteous self-deniers could cultivate their virtue signaling seeds (much like I am doing now by setting myself up as some shining star, some pinnacle of morality! Haha!). My comments show blatantly the hypocrisy of publicity; we’re all at fault here and that is not a bad thing or a good thing, just something it pays to be aware of.

So what do we do with the hypothetical? Well, we apply our thoughts and feelings to it with no intention of expressing this to anyone else. We navigate the problem, explore our options, and come to an understanding of where it leads to the best of our abilities and then cleave to an overall conclusion. Once the best conclusion we can brew up is ready, we then tweak the original hypothetical and/or disallow any iteration of our “conclusion” and begin afresh! We will all meet a boundary we cannot, or simply will not, pass. Some stones are better left unturned if we wish to live our lives out with some degree of ‘sanity’ (‘sanity’ here can be taken to mean ‘moral orientation’).

When it comes to ‘morality’ we’re essentially talking about a means to ‘measure’ what cannot be ‘measured’. Through pragmatism and social interactions in societies we apply an ‘ethical canvas’ upon which our individual ‘morality’ is contrasted against; even altered to some degree against its secluded and primary engagement.

Note: I very much prefer to differentiate between “ethic” and “moral” in this way. ‘Morality’ being much more skewed toward the individual’s attitude and the ‘ethical’ being much more skewed toward the societal attitude (both of which we’re only ever partially aware at any given time - stretched out in a ‘tension’ of ‘convictions’ that make emotional experience navigable.

As an example, let us say we have to choose the death of one of several persons. You can think up your own ‘categories’ of persons (an interesting, and difficult, truth to face by the manner of our arbitrary choices - likely instilled by social attitudes we’ve been forced to take on due to the “ethical canvas”). Now watch how you struggle with your choice! Don’t make the choice as if you’re going to tell anyone else about these thoughts, explore the tropes you’ve come accustomed to, and reveal the vapidity of them (or more scarily, the tropes that are meaningful to you!). You may find yourself exposed to some utterly arbitrary delineations between persons - eg. hair length or clothing - yet the hypothetical insists you make a choice! Observe the machinations of logic here as you grasp for any old vague association between hair length as a character judgement (your personal associations and biases) - logic is a deadly weapon when it comes to moral conviction, a double-edged sword that can destroy our sense of morality or strengthen it. The danger is the reduction of a moral problem to a purely logical one, or of reducing a logical problem to a purely moral one. The idea that “emotions” muddy our rational choices is a fallacy. Our rational choices exist because of our emotional reactiveness and orientation in the world. The emotional revulsion felt by “killing a billion” doesn’t allow us to fully withdraw from the situation as to do so means the death of a species (if the hypothetical is taken on as a serious proposition rather than made a mockery of - a lie to the self of the seriousness with which one handles emotional stress a s strain), nor does the “killing a billion” allow for a purely logical approach, yet initially this judgement must be made somehow regarding the ‘value’ of human lives and the roughshod means of ‘balancing’ your choice.

Note: There is an embedded problem within all of this that is so obvious as to make us blind to it. This is the very means I am using to communicate these thoughts, that is what we commonly call “language”. This is a problem when dealing with our moral sensibilities as language is a community project not a private affair, and so given the above ‘moral’ I talk of it necessarily carries a seed of ‘linguistic conviction’ that is NOT our individual position. In fact our logical convictions are formed in a language and these thoughts, these contemplations, are therefore never truly our own if we put all our effort into “verbal thought” - and there is, for some at least, to partly decouple “verbal thought” from a problem at hand to some degree (this will never escape the “verbal” expression of the hypothetical though, because a “hypothetical” is always posed in “verbal language”!

To move quickly onward ... let us assume we’ve made a decision. What we can often find after several levels of peeling away the different skins of the hypothetical is that we arrive at an ever growing and increasing horrific set of options. What is interesting is where we draw the line between our own self-interest and the interest of others (maybe this is what we call “altruism,” but that is a concept I’m suspicious of). Here we can find that those of us who may act with most sensitivity and repulsion may be doing so simply out of self-interest. They want to avoid suffering at all costs - even that of survival of the human species perhaps - so outright annihilation is of more appeal to them; an attitude legitimised by a form of ‘nihilism’ and a base denial of ‘morality’ or any meaning. The counter reaction would be a severe ‘altruism’ I alluded to earlier, that is an attitude that avoids all negativity an attitude where when given the “killing a billion” hypothetical the question is warped into a seemingly more ‘positive’ question of “what six billion do I save?” rather than “what billion do I kill?”. If you understand what I’ve been saying you’ll understand that dishonesty involved here; the avoidance of the darker aspect of the self. This is a fruit that appears delicious on the outside yet is rotten to the core - the violent reaction produced after taking one huge bite out of this is going to be seriously damaging to anyone in its proximity as well as the said biter.

The main question we’re forced to deal with here is how we wish to act in such a given situation. How we wish to act and how we actually act are quite obviously not by any means always - if ever! - the same thing. Exploring how you wish to act when faced with a difficult situation will help you act as you would wish to act - conditioning is part and parcel of this and is a common feature of how soldiers and people in the emergency services are trained. The difference is they are trained to act in a mostly automated manner based on somatic responses and by disassociating emotional contents in order to ‘get the job done’. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the unfortunate consequence of this. From my perspective the point of the Hypothetical question and its use is in understanding ourselves better and instilling a sense of ‘morality’ in our everyday life. You may say contemplating what billion people to kill is not going to make me more morally astute. I would argue otherwise. The point being you are fortifying yourself with the tools to approach an extreme problem with a serious and meaningful attitude, of facing your inner shadow self and therefore when a situation occurs you’ll have a more defined sense of moral orientation. You will be more likely to both act as you would like to act AND be more likely to know when you DO NOT act as you would have preferred to (the later being the more likely I expect!).

The reason most people don’t do what they say is because they don’t think about what they want to do and then rationalise their own stupidity as wisdom; humans mostly believe they acted in the ‘correct’ manner and it is only when they are true to themselves and knowingly act how they say they should act that they real benefits. The sequential nature of the stories we tell ourselves and others about life - the chapters, scenes, paragraphs and lines - are symbolic lies produced to explore our faults not to instill our just convictions for acting as we did.

Next time you find yourself saying “How can people do such things!?” in what is nought but mock outrage, stop and understand that you KNOW what it is to do such a thing. You are that evil you view in others because you recognise it for what it is. You don’t see the misdeeds in others by having no experience of them yourselves.

How you deal with this is ‘morality’ and what you tell others about it is a lie.

If you’ve got this far without spitting good job and thanks be to yourself! These have been my lies, this has been my denial and I aim to do better by my measures :)