But we have plenty. Universally there are moral sentiments such as "Don't murder, don't steal," that transcend culture. Most people understand that laws are societal enforcements, but that laws themselves can be moral or immoral. It is used in vernacular and in culture. — Philosophim

My issue with this is that there is absolutely no requirement to postulate objective goodness to explain these things, and to my mind the ontology of "objective goodness" doesnt even make sense.

This leads to an infinite regress that, in reality, must terminate in arbitrariness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is exactly the sort of thing that leads someone to be an anti-realist so I don't see that as a criticism. An anti-realist is led to the position precisely because they don't see any foundation for objective moral value.

abolishing the target of practical reason ends up destroying all of reason. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think there is a good Moorean argument for this... simply that anti-realists don't have any problem with reasoning or having their own ethics. Anti-realists just aren't that different to realists wrt ethics.



You arr talking as if there are certain things that just ought to exists and I don't think this is how it works. You may postulate something exists, look for it and then find that you have no evidence that it exists. Completely reasonable to not believe it exists.

and the nature of the animal. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, so you have lots of animals engaging with the same world. This doesn't really count for animals though because they aren't using words.

The sheep distinguishing a "wolf" is not part of this conceptual thing because it doesn't have a word for it, it is just making distinctions in the world. It can make any number of distinctions in line with its capabilities that are completely degenerate and redundant, so there is in no sense a fixed set of bounded distinctions a sheep can make. You can get it to pay attention to some features or to others. It will react to the presence of a wolf. It will also react if it learns that certain features of a wolf imply different things. It doesn't need to put things into labelled boxes to do this.

why different peoples make largely the same sorts of distinctions despite having developed their languages and cultures largely in isolation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Because they are the same animal that behaves in the similar ways and interacts with the environment in similar ways.

But can you think of one culture that doesn't distinguish types of animal or doesn't use terms for colors but rather blends color and shape, color and size, etc.? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You miss my point. My point is that we are always capable of making these distinctions.

And in fact, itis actually relatively well documentes that there are some cultures that use very different colour categories (e.g. tribes that distinguish only about 3 color categories). Even relatively similar cultures can have different categories. But even if cultures have different categories, it is extremely likely we all have the same color distinction capabilities. So in fact, our ability to tell apart colors greatly transcends the kind of words we use. And it is this ability to make distinctions beyond categories shows that inherent boundaries don't exist. I am using actualities because it doesn't matter what cultures tend to use or not. No one uses bleen or grue. But they are coherent concepts. YOU perfectly understand what these concepts mean or any combination. You can use them if you want. I have decided to use them right now and I will be able to score high in a test of distinctions. My ability to use non-standard concepts is an actuality. They are perfectly coherent. The fact I can use them shows my abilities to engage in the world transcends fixed boundaries.

Everything is "could, "can," "is possible," or "if." But can you think of one culture that doesn't distinguish types of animal or doesn't use terms for colors but rather blends color and shape, color and size, etc.? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Its not hard to find words that are non-standard or don't have a direct one-to-one translation in another language. Some may be random, some may be conditioned by the way people live or interact that they have words for particular things that have unusual significance for them but no where else.

https://ourworldenglish.com/28-untranslatable-words-from-around-the-world/

Even though there is no one-to-one correspondence in many of these words, do I have any problems understanding them? Not really, at least superficially. Would be able to convey some unique words in english to a person not familiar? Probably. Why? Because concepts are redundant and degenerate. Our ability to engage with the world is not confined to fixed boundaries. There is always inherent overlap.

Again, my point is not that people use different schemes. The point is that peoples engagement with the world transcends fixed boundaries. People can make up new words, new concepts any way they want and other people can understand because we don't perceive the world in fixed discrete objects. What we perceive is much more high-dimensional than that.

The appeal to pragmatism isn't meant to say that people have different uses and so end up with different words.

What I mean by that is that our engagement with the world and our ability to perceive the world is not in words or fixed categories. We don't need them. Animals don't need them. Words come about through the need to communicate which is a pragmatic act. It doesn't matter if we end up using many words the same (which would be because we share similar lives and similar things are relevant to us).

The point is that the words are not the the thing, they are a tool that we fit to the world for our own use. But our actual engagement with the world perceptually and physically far outstrips that.

Once you remove words from the equation then the idea of fixed boundaries loses good definition (not that it had any in the first place since our use of words is totally fuzzy and degenerate). Once you remove words then ultimately what you have is the idea that we react to the world in a certain way and there is a continuum of similarity and differentiation. And even that imo is an idealization because I don't think the way we (I) hold attention to things is particularly tangible either. Its not apparent to me that I attend the world in discrete quanta. Personally there is something obscured about how I attend to the world in a way which allows me to act in a way indicative of someone paying attention. Obviously there is always some kins of example of something like "focus hard and see the shape of this like" which seems like it should be straightforward ( I am not sure, but will give benefit of doubt) but this is only an extremely simplistic example which is not representative of the fact that we are attending to things all the time at different breadths and intensities and different levels of vagueness.

Yes, exactly, but humans aren't many potential species, we are just one. What is "pragmatic," "useful," or "good" is always conditioned by the way the world is. This is what I mean by prioritizing potential over actuality.

Of course, if the world was so different as to rewrite all our conceptions of objects, there would be different objects. But the world would seem to have to be very different indeed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What is pragmatic depends on how a particular animal lives its life. We are perfectly capable of inventing a multitude of completely coherent concepts or words that refer to different things, different boundaries. We just choose to use vocabulary in a certain way as depends on how we live our lives and what we want to communicate. If i just made up a concept and fit it to the world... then what is the criteria for it not to be a proper concept or object if it fits? Or if lots and lots of people start using the concept coherently? I don't think the idea that we can "rewrite our conception of objects" is falsifiable in a similar sense to how some criticize the idea of different conceptual schemes. We engage with the world and we can draw boundaries anyway we want and apply labels in anyway we want with complete flexibility, maybe partly why all "objects" are fuzzy, also perhaps reflecting the fact that nothing we encounter in our daily lives is not in some sense decomposable in very complicated ways.

I think its about plurality. Endless plurality. We can point at any aspect of a scene we want. Maybe there's no fact of the matter. But surely the words we come out with, there is inherent plurality in the schemes we use. Huge degeneracy or even redundancy in the ways we can use words to engage with things in perception. And we can do it on the fly.

Trick is to do it without saying the word. Any word immediately invokes a convention.
There's no 'importance to survival' since the question is being asked in absence of anything which can meaningfully assign 'importance', salience, or which can meaningfully 'survive'. — noAxioms

Yes but the way your brain works at any moment isn't independent of your personal or evolutionary history.

No one uses grue and bleen and I don't imagine you could ever get them to, not least because: — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you could if you gave them a reason where they needed to use those concepts, where those concepts suddenly became useful and had statistical significance. People don't because there is no pragmatism in those concepts but they are completely intelligible otherwise we wouldn't be talking about them. And it follows that if we had to use the concepts in everyday conversation or had to look out for grue and bleen things... then we would.

A. It isn't obvious when objects were created by looking at them, smelling them, etc.
B. When an object is "created" is itself a dicey philosophical question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No average person realistically knows any of these things for objects.

But you might imagine something like splitting the visible spectrum in half and having words for size AND color for some colors and then shape AND color for others, such that "square + purple" and "yellow + small" are their own discrete words. And yet absolutely no society does this. They use colors and sizes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, because we have no reason to use these yet these concepts still exist or you wouldn't be able to talk about them. At the same time they depend on how your biology happens to be. If you had a different type of color vision then what decomposition of colors seems "natural" may not be the same as a regular person. At the same time, if you had a sense that was inherently able to detect "size + color" then you would have a completely different conception of what seemed "natural".

But in actuality they aren't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But they do exist. The fact that it is not useful to use a certain kind of concept doesn't preclude it.

And again, I think you confuse concepts and words with out ability to engage with the world. A cat doesn't need words to distinguish and interact with the world. You can train a cat to react to and behave in accordance to arbitrary "colour + size" combinations and neuroscientific experiments have precisely done this. We are fully capable of engaging with the world in a multitude of ways that far strips words and concepts we use. Words are just for communication, not things in themselves. Worda don't do any work. Complicated brains with huge numbers of degrees of freedom do the work with regard to incredibly complicated statistics that show up in our sensory organs with patterns at various scales. Obviously these statistics have root in some kind of physical connection via physical apparatus. Obviously how we interact with the world is arbitrary. But no visual scene is a fixed decomposition into discrete objects. We have access to a huge amount of information in the visual field that allows us to flexibly engage with it in ways much greater than a fixed decomposition of objects. We are engaging with statistical regularities at different scales and have some ability to attend to some over others.

Sometimes objects seem simpler than they really are because you can just implement a particular kind of control where you can ostensively point at things and say a word, completely ignoring the rest of the total complexity in which one makes distinctions at various scales, precluding well-defined boundaries. We choose to point at things based on the pragmatics and perspective of the kind of scale we exist on and evolved in the universe, based on the sensitivities to things we can pick out due to neural hardware, due to the affordances in which we can act in the environment. But could we point at other less obvious "objects"? Yes. If they become important to survival could they become bonafide "objects"? Yes. Ultimately, pointing and naming something is just the idealized, superficial surface of your ability to distinguish and manipulate things.

The thing is that sight and touch are coarse-grained depending on one's perspective and in any case, touch is about fundamental physical interactions or forces, not the actual touch of a thing. They tell you about affordances of an object in some context, not "contact" with an object.

What distinguishes "object" from "non-object"? Statistical salience.

To borrow a line from J.S. Mill, I think one would have had to make some significant advances in philosophy to believe that children experience statistics and not things (or have had some very strange childhood experience.) The things of experience are given. Questions about what underpins them is another matter. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Or perhaps simply these "things" are statistics, to completely deflate the idea of an object. This would simply be a matter of what brains do - infer and de-correlate latent regularities in statistical and learn transition statistics for the sake of control. An "idea" is just what is latent in ineffably complex transition and control statistics.

It's in there. Otherwise, when kids point at things and ask "what is this?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

But is this a child detecting objects or a child that is detecting statistics (which maybe has been honed over development too)? You then ask that doesn't detecting statistics depend on what kind of statistics you are sensitive too and where you find yourself in the world? A pumpkin looks very obviously like a single object to us but these statistical regularities that make up a pumpkin are decomposable because we know a pumpkin is made up of lots of different things inside which generally we are not aware of - many scales above and below. The child certainly isn't aware of atoms, forces etc. Is the child detecting an object? Or statistics.

You can train people to detect all sorts of statistics and things in the right context which they normally wouldn't consider significant in any other. I think another point is that I think our perception and language is sophisticated and flexible that it can detect any kind of objects it wants given the need. No one normally uses the concepts bleen or grue... but if we wanted to we obviously can. The indeterminacy is there all the time and we can use it but choose to restrict ourselves.

Here is one thing I am inclined to recently. Concepts aren't really a thing. Knowledge is not in words. We can have knowledge without words and use it very well. And once you take away the words its pretty vague the idea of drawing boundaries and labels around things because when we manipulate the world and predict things it transcends any fixed, coarse labels. My ability to use objects with my hands and maybe invent new ones, new uses has nothing to do with fixed boundaries I must respect. There is an extreme fluidity in how I enact my knowledge.

Words are just about communication. It is just something we use to help convey information. Words don't define the things in themselves and words don't even have rigid meanings beyond our ability to manipulate them.

There are no concepts just our interactions with the world through a neural space with incredible ability to distinguish through its many degrees of freedom. We can detect regularities. But that in itself is utilizing the same kind of space of degrees of freedom. There are an enormous numberways we can act, react, distinguish in ways which differ and overlap in regard to the things that show up in the cortical space.

Question is, it is anything more than a concept? Nobody is suggesting that as a concept, it is incoherent. Well, mostly nobody. — noAxioms

But then surely the concept of an object as an objective thing would be incoherent?

Strange. We seem to in principle put labels around things any way we want, nevertheless there seems to be directly apparent underlying distinctions that we experience regardless of those labels (Arguably - at least that is my strong inclination - but I think there can be intractable debate about this that I am not sure about: e.g. overflow of consciousness and phenomenal/access distinction which I think is probably somewhat illusory).

Those underlying distinctions also obviously depend on the way our brains happen to interact with the world - e.g. animals with different sense capabilities, the resolution we interact with world where solid objects are obviously constructed from something more fundamental - what seems like a "natural" object depends on the perspective. Even so, underneath we assume there are kinds of regularities in the world which, though we perceive and perhaps abstract through our limited perspectives, seem to capture objective distinctions out in the world beyond labels... distinctions we could never access mind-independently... what does a distinction even mean? How do you cash out the term "objective"? There is almost a paradox that clearly in principle there is some objective world, events, "things" not the same as other "things", changes in one place different from another place. But any labelling brings the arbitrarineas back.

Is object just not a coherent concept? One must just accept the limit that the mind constructs things in an arbitrary way about something which is "objective". Inherent contextual paradox. We can refer to an objective world but not without subjective machinery... but then how is that objective. Cannot be reconciled ever. No matter how you construe it, a reference, a label is an arbitrary label. This like an inherent glitch of epistemic perspectives. Maybe you can justify a label if it could not have been otherwise though. But we don't know enough. And even then you cannot say that other labels are invalid. The difference then is parsimony.

Fundamental object? But are there any in the universe? Is the universe a constant arrangement of little fundamental objects? Virtual particles emerge from the "aether". Elementary particles decay. Matter can be turned to energy and vice versa. Particles can change properties but I don't know how that works... once there was three weak bosons and hypercharge.. symmetry breaking, now there are two W, one Z boson and a photon. I also find it interesting that the discretization of fields into individual particle quanta seems in these models almost a side effect. It comes from boundary conditions which are the same reason anything else is quantized in quamtum mechanics. Only, a lot of things happen not to be quantized because they happen to not have those conditions. But do we really know what a field is? Seems quite abstract. Particles are then just due to energy levels of the field. What is energy even? Not even really a thing is it. Very abstract way of describing constraints on behavior. Literally everything in physics is about behavior, spatio-temporal transformations. Forces are about behavior involving symmetries. Particles representations of poincare symmetry groups. When you get down to it energy is the indicative of symmetry too... just perhaps the most fundamental one. There are no objects in physics in some sense... abstract functional behaviors... what even is mass but a resistence to force in some sense?

Do we need intrinsic fundamental objects in physics. What role would intrinsicness play? Would be almost epiphenomenal, homogenously indistinct... either that or inaccessible. Then when you try to imagine what the inaccessible would be like, you must still use labels, which ofcourse I have been using all along. Paradox I say. Because how can the world have no intrinsic nature... but again, "intrinsic nature" is an abstract concept we invent. Maybe just no possoble coherent access and so the paradox remains.

Maybe then you can identify distinct particles but they ephemeral and perhaps not fully well-defined scientifically (e.g. spatially). But again, label issue still there and deeper inaccessibility being beyond scientific model of observable behavior. Paradox. Can you define object in some other way? In terms of causal interactions and modal counterfactuals? Then again, causality is a construct and modality suffers same anti-realist arguments as any other scientific concept imo.

If you think I have not understood something, then explain why rather than pointless, contentless quips.

I agree they aren’t the same; but I brought it up to counter your view that: “It seems very straightforward to me that in a scenario where either everyone was going to die or only two people, it is better to choose two.”. — Bob Ross

Its not a counter because it is a completely different scenario with new constraints that change the issue. It's totally reasonable to have a completely different answer to these different scenarios and still be coherent or consistent but the things that make this scenario more difficult are not in the other one at all.

Are you saying that it is bad to kill a person in self-defense, to some degree, while still being morally permissible to do so (in appropriate self-defense scenarios)? — Bob Ross

Well yes, killing anyone is bad. A death is bad. Its preferable that no one dies during an altercation. If someone does die then that is still a negative thing even if it was due to justifiable self-defence.

Hmmm. Ok. Imagine a serial killer has 12 people in their basement and are torturing them. Imagine the serial killer tells you that they will let 11 people go if you personally go kill 1 of them: would you do it?

If so, then you do not think it is immoral to, per se, to kill an innocent person; which is incredible to me. — Bob Ross

This is a completely different scenario though witli different connotations where you are introducing another malevolent agent who you are bargaining with. This makes the scenario a lot less straightforward. You have also completely complicated the choice because here it is not about an arithmetic of deaths but also torture.

This is a totally vastly different scenario to one where you're driving in a car and for whatever reason, lets say just a horrible accident, there are 4 people in the road and you can make a choice to save 0 lives or 2 lives. The scenario you have brought up just now cannot be compared and the car one is much more straightforward.

An easy example is self-defense: a person is morally permitted to kill another person if that person is an aggressor and their response is proportional. This only works with this kind of “counter-intuitive” thinking your profess here — Bob Ross

My point is that just because its we can mitigate much if not all of the blame for killing someone in self-defence doesn't mean that killing anyone still isn't bad. To my mind, the idea of this forfeit you talk about implies that this badness is completely removed. Thats why I dont like this language. It works better in a kind of legal context, not a moral one imo.

That’s fine. I just think this indicates that your ethical view isn’t fully fleshed out; and you will have to hierarchically adjust your moral principles to fix this paradox/antinomy. I have my solution, which you already have heard, but if you don’t like it then you will have to come up with your own. — Bob Ross

I disagree. I don't see the need to come up with a fixed solution to this problem if there is no fully satisfactory choice. No ethical view will do that and imo, choosing a strongly well-defined ethical framework may even lead to more unintuitive consequences elsewhere, as I find with your ethical framework from my perspective. Not only am I unsure about the ethics of killing the disobedient man on the tracks in the trolley problem, but this view you have stated below I find explicitly very unintuitive:

"Secondly, I would say that one must continue to go straight, assuming they cannot try to veer away to avoid all 4 altogether (and have to choose between intending to kill the two to save the other two and letting all 4 die), because, otherwise, they would be intending to kill two people as a means toward the good end of saving two people."

It seems very straightforward to me that in a scenario where either everyone was going to die or only two people, it is better to choose two.

In general, I feel like people can have a reasonable sense of right and wrong without an explicit moral framework. I would say maybe people are picking preferred moral frameworks after the fact based on their intuitions of right and wrong - they are clarifying their own prior beliefs rather than choosing some framework which will reveal to them beliefs that they probably did not already hold.

What do my intuitions say? That flexibility and vagueness (rather than restrictiveness) in terms of a moral framework is more likely to resonate with my moral intuitions as opposed to picking a single more rigid or rigorously defined moral framework which occasionally gives outcomes that I don't morally resonate with at all. And this is the thing with moral frameworks - they all do this from what I can tell. Imo, that is because they all attempt to simplify moral thought into clear, tangible latent principles. I feel like different moral frameworks will then emphasize different intuitions about the underlying regularities of morality, but usually in order to articulate this clearly, they exclude other intuitions. For instance, deontology and consequentialism I think both capture and isolate different aspects about people's moral intuitions in daily life.

I would say obligation is a duty towards something; and duty arises out of commitment to what is (actually) good (viz., commitment to being moral). — Bob Ross

To be honest, I can almost give the same reply as before:

I don't even know what it really means to have a duty to do something unless this duty is being enforced by some kind of legislative body or something like that.

Well, I don’t mean forever. — Bob Ross

I didn't either! By black-and-white I mean it seems implied that once someone gives up their right to something like life then it removes the badness of killing them, which isn't intuitive to me. But again, possibly this is better in some kind of legal or other legislative context.

You think that the five innocent people should die because the one person was being extremely negligent? — Bob Ross

There is no scenario that has been discussed in this thread I think where the five people should die or deserve to die or that it is morally good that they die. It's not clear to me either that one person deserves to die for being extremely negligent; and so this dilemma doesn't seem a great deal less problematic than the regular trolley problem to me.

Edit: lots of cleaning up

If so, then I would say that one has to trump the other; or some other principle has to supersede them both. This is a half-baked ethical system (otherwise). — Bob Ross

I haven't proposed an ethical system but I haven't seen any that successfully resolve this issue in a fully satisfactory way... which I guess is why it is being talked about in the first place.

You are saying that one is obligated to save humanity and not to sacrifice a person to do it. Without further elaboration, you just have a moral antinomy in your view. — Bob Ross

Yes, this is the point I was conveying. Sometimes these kinds of paradoxes just exist. But I don't like the word obligated. I find that term a bit loaded. I don't even know what it really means to be obligated to do something unless this obligation is being enforced by some kind of legislative body or something like that.

It helps avoid morally counter-intuitive (and immoral) conclusions; like in the axeman example where someone may say “it is wrong to lie, so I must tell the axeman the truth even though it will help them find and kill an innocent person”. — Bob Ross

Well I think people can avoid this kind of issue in other ways. I think I am probably more comfortable with it as maybe more along the lines of legal concepts but morally it seems a bit too dispassionate for me and sometimes a bit too absolute in how you can suddenly just lose a "right". Maybe my thinking is along the lines of : just as how many of these antinomies don't feel satisfactory when I apply a black-and-white wrong/right label to their outcomes, I don't think that the idea of losing or gaining "rights" should be so black and white either. Again, I think in a setting more explicitly about law or formal rules, I might think differently.

I was agreeing with you: I would not pull the lever because he is presumed innocent. I would have to know, without a reasonable doubt, that he is on the tracks due to some sort of severe negligence or stupidity to find it permissible to sacrifice him to save the innocent five people. — Bob Ross

I think some of our wires must have been crossed in this particular conversation, perhaps when I was talking about the "a man on a regular rail" where I meant (maybe unclearly) just a man on a single pair of tracks walking about, no other people involved. My thought then was that even if the man had refused to obey the rules of being on the track we wouldn't normally think he deserved to be killed by the train or that it would br acceptable for the train driver to acknowledge that there was a man on the tracks and plow him down anyway without any intent in trying to stop.

Its not clear to me either, that if we have a variation of the regular trolley problem where the 1 person on the tracks could have got off but didn't or knew they shouldn't be there but chose to, that it would be vastly more acceptable to pull the lever and run him over than in the regular scenario. I am not entirely sure.

Interesting analysis, better example of the plane scenario.

Those aren’t general principles — Bob Ross

I wasn't suggesting general in that sense. My point is that killing an innocent person could be wrong. But saving the human race could be right. At the same time. Irreconcilably.

Saving humanity is morally permissible but not obligatory: it is not wrong, per se, to not save humanity. You are forgetting about moral omissibility. — Bob Ross

I haven't been assuming anything about obligations but I struggle to see how someone who refusing to save the world wouldn't have any moral significance.

I happen to think that only beings of rational kinds have the right to not be killed if they are innocent. — Bob Ross

Fair enough!

I was keeping it generic on purpose: one doesn’t need to know what exactly counts as a morally relevant factor or reason to understand that what obviously isn’t is stubbornly sitting on a track just for the fun of it (or whatever).

...

How is that no fault of their own? You just said they are standing on the tracks because they desired it. Are we not held accountable for our actions, even if they spring from our desires? — Bob Ross

I guess I am just not as sold on this forfeiting right to life thing, at least, how it was framed in your paragraph. That's obviously not to say I don't understand why the driver might think it morally better to run over the person (afterall I putforward the killing innocent vs. saving the world thing). I am just not necessarily sold on this conceptualization or language in terms of forfeiting life. But maybe I am reading that idea too strongly. Obviously someone can have a strong impulsion to go on the tracks when they have been told not too. I am not entirely that makes it right to kill them. I am not sure I agree with this kind of retributive aspect of it where surely their life would not be forfeit if they were just an idiot on the tracks in a normal situation. But because of these 5 victims, you say now its okay for someone to pull the lever and and change tracks on them. I would have to think that scenario over.

It means that the person, in the event which is being analyzed, has not done anything which would cause them to forfeit certain rights. — Bob Ross

Alright, sure.

No, because he is innocent until proven or reasonably demonstrated to be guilty. — Bob Ross

Oh, so what he is guilty of in this scenario is not saving lives ans thats why he deserves to die? Yup, its a tough one for me.

Hmm, thinking about it, I thought the baseball example was more ambiguous but thinking about it more I'm just thinking that I don't think this would be allowed to happen in a real life scenario. There would be rules that a flight could not land like this in some kind of populated area regardless. Maybe not as ambiguous at all in this particular case at least. Albeit I do wonder what the fallout or public opinion on this would be if some pilot landed a plane and saved 800 people but inadvertantly killed a baseball team.

Whether you pull or do not pull the lever, you aren’t responsible for any of the deaths. — Fire Ologist

I feel like there is a funny kind of "paradox" in itself here in the sense that in that if I had the mindset that I was not morally responsible for the outcome, it would be extremely easy for me to just pick saving more people in the trolley example. If I did not pick the 5, then I would still feel guilty and feel like I did something wrong by saving less people than I could have. But then if I felt bad about not saving 5, I would probably also feel bad about killing the 1 and then its back to feeling that moral responsibility (I guess the net example doesn't have this particular point though). I think it would be impossible for me not to feel some even under the circumstances you lay out.

The only way to reduce the destruction and death is to quick land on that baseball field with kids playing. It’s either two teams and some fans die, or probably fifty or one hundred or more people everywhere else. — Fire Ologist

This is very interesting. Much more ambiguous as to whether this is a "kill 5 kids to save 1000" or "To save 1000 you must do a certain move which itself has risk of almost certainly killing kids."

If killing an innocent person is wrong, then you can’t do: period. You can’t turnaround and permit yourself to do it in instances where you could avoid a bad outcome or create a better outcome—that would be akin to saying that some immoral acts are morally permissible, which is a manifest contradiction. — Bob Ross

I think a question is whether someone can be justified in doing something they think is generally morally impermissible because there is a benefit which is morally right.

Maybe one factor is that we tend to talk about moral claims in terms of absolutes which are context-independent - "killing is wrong" - but realistically, everything happens in a context and some contexts really test the limits of those principles. I'm inclined to the view that maybe we create these rules as a way of simplifying the moral process even though realistically, things aren't so simple in some contexts.

By emphasizing the absoluteness of these things we get some weird contradictions like in these examples. On one hand you say "If Killing an innocent person is wrong you can't do it". But then on the otherhand, can you not easily make a claim something like "Saving the human race is right and you should do it.". And there we have a weird contradiction. Both I think are strong valid moral claims that when you ignore context would say are almost imperative. In general, I would say most people would think saving the world is a hugely important imperative - so compelling that so many stories and films are based on this concept, and perhaps it is a large part of the basis for the climate-crisis fixation. Is there a single absolute way of valuating these claims and comparing them? I really doubt it. Its not obvious.

I think the scenario of killing one life vs. saving humanity is not really representative of the intention of either of these absolute claims which come head to head in direct contradiction. We can wonder whether the fact these claims seem incompatible is because the contexts they tend to occur in don't overlap. In our typical world, it seems pretty reasonable, unproblematic, imperative to put the preservation of innocent life at the top of the list with nothing to push it away or threaten that position. Similarly, saving the world usually implies either accidents or "evil" agents that arguably could justifiably be killed if there were no other way. Thinking about that, that isn't even so clear though; for instance, one might say if Hitler was going to destroy the world, we must stop him! If killing him was the only way, then maybe that would be justified. But arguably the table can be turned in the sense that to stop Hitler you probably would never need to actually kill him unless he was a very powerful entity that needed to be brought down personally. But he is a normal man. Once you had him in captivity, he can't do anything and arguably many would say you shouldn't kill him but try him in court and put him in prison (others may say death penalty though). On the other hand, it is almost necessary to kill lots and lots of men in battle to save the world in this case even though they are arguably much more innocent than Hitler. They fight because they are forced to, to feed families, because they are brainwashed by propaganda.

But I digressed a bit. Maybe it is still fair to say that generally these concepts regarding saving humanity and the preservation of an individual human life have primacy in different contexts which don'ttend to conflict. But a question is whether if it was more normal for these contexts to overlap, we would find it more permissible to kill an innocent life to save humanity. Do we not already do this with regard to animals? Other innocent living things we kill to survive? And these sentiments have been changing in the western world as it seems people are becoming more and more considerate of animal welfare, and in a world where harming animals on a daily basis is something people generally do not need to do. At the same time, even most vegans probably don't look upon meat eating people in the same way they would look on a murderer or someone who enabled murder. Realistically, we have caveats and context-dependencies in how we treat these moral absolutes. Either that or they are not as absolute as we think. Realistically there are some scenarios where avoiding contradiction is not possible.

I don’t. I will not permit anyone to kill an innocent human being for any end; because it is wrong. — Bob Ross

But killing is wrong, period! You are permitting a bad thing! Your moral position is more lax than someone who believes it is wrong to kill at all! For instance, what you say here from another posy just above:

"I think we can blame people for obvious negligence; so if you are stipulating that a person was informed clearly that they should not be on the tracks, that they have the freedom to easily move off of the tracks, they refuse with no good reason to be on the tracks, and the other five people (on the other tracks) do not have the freedom to move nor are they being negligent; then, yes, I would pull the lever because I am no longer killing an innocent person."

Actually seems pretty brutal. Now obviously I completely get this reasoning and it is very pragmatic, but it seems that this pragmatic pull [b[does[/b] seem to be something that was already in place in the scenario. What does no good reason even mean here? If they believe the track is a sacred religious site is that a good reason? What if they just feel extremely passionate that they have to sit on this track for no good reason through no fault of their own, is that any different? What does innocent mean here? Surely, if this was just a man on a regular rail track you would not run him over and you would say he had not necessarily forfeits his life... or would you? Clearly there is no clear delineation of the context for forfeiting someone's life here. The forfeiting doesn't precisely depend on what that person has done but on the presence or absence of 5 victims. If the person doesn't forfeit their life when there are no victims then what makes them forfeit their life just because victims are present? Its not clear from your paragraph whether the forfeit is because the victims are there period or they shpuldn't be on the track, period. Maybe you can just stipulate that but then I guess this brings up the idea that it is not entirely clear what innocent means, how arbitrary that might be or what degrees of non-innocence mean the forfeit of life or not. From the perspective of someone woth a stricter view of the permisibility of killing, this may seem very lax and context-dependent.

that would be akin to saying that some immoral acts are morally permissible, which is a manifest contradiction. — Bob Ross

No more or less an absurdity than allowing the world to die to avoid culpability - leading to a world where no people existed and morality was meaningless. I said before maybe someone who believes in God or an afterlife would have a different view but I do not believe in an objective fact of the matter about moral truths. Morality arises in social interaction out of biology. So when society is gone and everyone is dead, then morality is pointless and doesn't exist. I think there is also an interesting question of whether someone letting the world burn to uphold their moral integrity could be seen as selfish and immoral in some sense. You refuse to killin ocent people but at the same time you find it reasonable to not get involved or attempt to intervene in a world where other people kill people. You could try to prevent other deaths but generally people think it is fine to not so this. So when someone allows the world to be destroyed, it is because they want to avoid a bad thing happening or is it because they want to avoid their own culpability? Some see it as admirable to sacrifice their own life for the good of others. Would someone sacrifice themselves in terms or moral culpability in the same way? Is the need not to be blamed greater than other's wellbeing? I'm not necessarily entertaining these things very seriously and the last thought seems to de-emphasize the innocent life at stake in order to look at the motives of the agent. But it is interesting how seemingly you can be very flexible with how you frame moral issues to emphasize one thing or the other. And perhaps that is the very reason why deontological positions are attractive, even useful.

but I disagree. — Bob Ross

Yes, ultimately in some respects its all turtles going round and round. Sometimes people disagree just on intuition though I think all moral discussion depends on at least some shared values through which we can persuade. But then again, if there are situations when consensus simply does not exist, then its even more difficult. Some moral situations are by their nature insoluble in any way that is totally satisfying. I doubt anyone is totally satisfied with the trolley problem even when they commit to one correct choice.

Edit: In bold, doesn't changed to does

I think I forgot to read these bits:

So “not blameworthy”, but worthy of a judgment of “worse ethically.” Hmm. — Fire Ologist

Well I don't think its necessarily a black and white issue.

If you are forced to either kill one or five people, with seconds to choose, and you had no interest in killing anyone at any point, and you can’t be held blameworthy for the outcome, how is the decision you do make better or worse ethically? I would say the decision (should you decide to risk participation in this death trap) is a practical one, not an ethical one. Less death is practically speaking a better outcome. Why ethically? — Fire Ologist

I think the only reason less death is a better outcome here is because we are speaking ethically. There is no practical benefit in the scenario from less death. We want less death because we think that not killing people or perhaps saving lives is some kind of moral goal. I still think you can have ethical scenarios about killing regardless of whether you put the label of murder on it. Death is bad and reducing it is an ethical issue because we think that is the right thing to do.

morally counter-intuitive to the untrained mind — Bob Ross

I'm not sure this is about training but preferences. Some people think saving the human race is pretty reasonable thing to do and I am sure many would-be survivors would agree. That said, killing an innocent person isn't really right. Then again, saving humanity is a right thing to do on its own, and benefits people (at least under some opinions, because I think that the belief that humanity is bad and a creator of suffering is also kind of a reasonable view in some ways) so surely its fair to say there is both good and bad in the choice? I would say it seems to be a similar case in your morality too where people can forfeit their right to life and its okay to kill them in self-defence or if they are not innocent. You permit bad things for an end. Sure, you would say they are justified in a special way, but then there are probably some people who are even stricter than you are on when it is permissible to kill.

Well we are using absurd in different senses I feel. You're using absurd in a sense to express your moral disagreement while I am using it in the more existential sense. As I said, regardless of the moral view on the issue I think its kind of an incredible thought letting the entirety of human existence die at what is comparatively such a tiny cost. Then with the human race gone, morality has gone with it - what was the point of upholding that moral decision then! I guess you might view that outcome differently if you believed in the afterlife and God. I guess justifying the killing of an innocent by saving the human race could be absurd for you in this existential way also if you were inclined to believe the justification was justified in this scenario - saving the world being a choice you would make even though you thought it was wrong because of the killing of an innocent.

If you stick to the raw, initial facts first, before moving this into more layered situations and questions - what do you see as the moral issues? — Fire Ologist

Its about killing innocents to save more people. If just sticking to the initial facts, I feel like the only reason to not make a choice is that you object to the idea of not killing innocent people, and that is indistinguishable from having msde a choice - to not pull the lever.

You don't think there is an absurdity in letting the whole human race die because you don't want to kill an innocent person?

I think regardless of what you think of the morality of that behaviour, it is most definitely absurd.

If we are going to start changing the hypo and adding intentions and cheeseburgers, we would have to conduct a new analysis of responsibility and intent and actions in furtherance of these. — Fire Ologist

I think this is a strawman because clearly what is not interesting about the trolley problem is not the trolley problem on its own, but the underlying reasons that people make decisions on it. Changing the scenario is relevant because by exploring counterfactual scenarios we are testing and probing the underlying reasons why people make these choices and how they would react in different scenarios.

Changing the context to cheeseburgers is relevant - not in the sense of wanting to analyse a new scenario with cheeseburgers - but in the sense of analyzing whether your use of the notion of intent is really consistent here. If the answer to the question of culpability for murder changes when we replace the goal of saving innocent people with eating cheeseburgers, then clearly lack of intent in the sense that has been described in this scenario is not sufficient to remove culpability.

I think the question the hypo poses is: should the person who either pulls the lever or sits still be held responsible for anyone’s death? And the answer is no, under the existing facts. — Fire Ologist

I think there are layers. Someone may not be blameworthy in some sense that they can't help being forced into a situation where someone had to die. But does that mean there was not a better or worse decision ethically? Not necessarily.

The key difference is that they aren't experiments, they are theoretical in nature only. You cannot really do these experiments practically and the ethical requirements today are so high that they can't ever be done. — Christoffer

They are experiments. What is being measured is not what someone would do practically but their judgement or opinion. You don't need actual experiments to assess someone's opinion.

An actual moral experiment where people are acting arguably might bring in many more factors than simply someone's belief or opinion on a moral scenario.

So imo your criticisms that these may not be representative of real scenarios is misplaced because the goal I have in mind here isn't to talk about what people actually do, its to yalk about the beliefs they have.

People don't necessarily behave consistently; however, it is usually difficult for people to maintain inconsistent beliefs. People carrying inconsistent beliefs tend to try and explain away the inconsistency with reasoning which is more internally consistent (e.g. you think its bad to hurt living things but okay to kill animals... you need to find an additional reason to explain away this inconsistency).

Asking about people's opinions or judgements as opposed to their actual behaviour is invaluable in understanding what people hold to be a consistent moral framework and why they hold it.

When it goes into the real world then things change... people are perhaps more likely to miscalculate the correct option... people get scared... peoples judgements are clouded... peope turn out to not care or not value morality over other motivations for their own behaviour.

Yes, they work as introduction courses to philosophy, but since there's no validation past the theoretical, and real world examples of similar events show much more complexity in their situational circumstances that they become unquantifiable as statistical data, they end up being just introduction material, nothing more. — Christoffer

So are you suggesting that people change their morality when it comes to complex vs. simple scenarios? Do you personally change your whole moral thinking when it comes to a complex scenario vs. a thought experiment? Or do you believe you are using the same moral framework to tackle different problems? If you agree on the latter then I don't see the obstacle in using simplified scenarios as ways to tap into and clairfy people's reasons on moral scenarios.

I'm not sure what you're disagreeing — Christoffer

Well your comment looks like its saying these experiments only pinpoint flaws in people's thinking but I don't see how that can be the case when there is no consensus on a correct answer. I don't really understand how strength and depth in moral reasoning would bring about an optimal, uncontroversial solution to the trolley problem.

sometimes just a question of their current state of mind and mood. — Christoffer

This regularly happens in real life. People often behave in the wrong way and then only realize they were shouldn't have afterwards.

But still, the problem is that people's justifications rarely correlate to how they actually behave in real moral situations. — Christoffer

Again, it depends what you are interested in - the psychology of moral behaviour or moral beliefs, reasoning and frameworks - and no doubt there is overlap.

Just reading the audience discussion around the moral actions in The Last of Us part 2 and how people had problems with everything that happened in that story is more fascinating and revealing as a case study in morality than how people justify their choices in the trolley problem. — Christoffer

Well I can only take your word on that because I don't know anything about that.

the more trivial I've found these thought experiments to be. — Christoffer

Trivial in what way? To me, the lack of consensus
makes the trolley problem non-trivial.

But if the person on the trolley said “I need to save the most innocent people I can” and pulled the lever he wouldn’t be culpable for murder because that was not his intent. — Fire Ologist

What if it was about their own life and not innocent people? What if it was about tge reward of a tasty cheeseburger: " I didn't intend to kill anyone, I just wanted that cheeseburger so bad".

Yes, thinking about it I see what you mean. When I made this comment I was still stuck on the question of whether this had to be some evil agent concocting the whole scenario. One could then look at it in the sense of someone refusing to participate in their game. At the same time, you could argue that in this context, if there is abetter or worse outcome then one should still make it. One could go even further and argue that if the whole scenario waa concocted by an evil genius then some of the moral responsibility is alleviated from making utilitarian-type choices.

If the scenario was totally accidental then one could say that there is no reason to refuse to participate. But then again maybe this applies most to non-trolley scenarios: e.g. a basic rescue mission where you could choose to save 5 or 1 or 0... then the choice is pretty obvious. I see though that the trolley-problem complicates this in the sense of the fact that 5 people were always going to die. I guess then one could refuse to participate in the sense of refusing to make such a choice if it meant killing someone. Then again though, the trolley scenario is constructed in such a way that refusing to participate is indistinguishable from making a choice... did you really refuse to participate or did you make the choice based on the idea that killing someone and encroaching on that person's freedom is worse than allowing 5 people to die who were going to die anyway.



Very interesting. Even if it was the whole human race (including your self?)?

There then comes the irony and absurdity of committing to your moral standards so strongly that you would allow the human race to die and, arguably in doing so, render your value system meaningless.

One could also plausibly argue almost a kind of immoral dimension in the sense of someone would sacrifice the rest of the world just so they personally didn't have to bear any moral culpability (though maybe from someone elses perspective they may still be morally culpable for ending the human race).

I think a case could be made for a policy of non-interference, but that case falls apart when the numbers get extreme. — RogueAI

It also falls apart when the scenario is accidental / incidental and hasn't been engineered by some evil agent.

But the messiness of reality strips the simplicity out of the scenarios adding so many moving parts that the scenario in itself has changed so much that the parameters of measurement becomes skewed. — Christoffer

I don't see this much different to how scientific experiments are always much simpler than everyday reality. A dice roll is presumably describable via Newtonian / classical forces but no one creates a direct Newtonian / classical model of a dice roll and then conducts an experiment to validate it.

But it's not very good at higher level thinking about morality as it's already clear how complex morality can really be. — Christoffer

For me, the point of it isn't to produce moral thinking and correct moral answers but to uncover the underlying reasons and intuitions of moral thought.

Most of us would assume those reasons are consistent across many different scenarios regardless of complexity or if "the experiment [has] already been conducted".

Yes, but in that case I much rather look at the scientific experiments that have already been conducted. Since experiments that cannot be actually conducted only becomes theoretical and at best very surface level. The fact that people regularly over-estimate their ability to act morally in every single situation makes it hard to actually get a good "scientific" result. — Christoffer

The thought experiment itself is the conduction of it. I just want to see what the opinion or judgement is of it. The fact that people may over-estimate their ability to act morally would apply to any thought experiment regardless of complexity or realistic-ness.

Most moral analogies usually only pinpoints the banalities in people's confidence in their own morality, but those people were usually not very involved in critical thinking about morality to begin with. — Christoffer

I disagree. As far as I'm aware there is no consensus on the correct solution to the trolley problem. The fact that people disagree brings up the question of why they disagree and what this says about their moral thinking and what kind of variables make them change their moral choices, which imo is an interesting thing in its own right. The question of how people act and actually behave morally in real life (and whether they actually do what is in agreement with the beliefs, judgements, moral frameworks they have) is also another interesting question in its own right.

I think my disagreement with people in regard to these things maybe stems from me finding these questions interesting in their own right as opposed to just a vehicle for prescribing practical morality.

I think there are layers to agency in the sense that one could be forced to make a harmful choice by someone, in which we might reduce responsibility for the action; but then, within that choice context, if there is room to choose a better or worse option, then I think that is still up to you unless that specific choice was forced on you by someone else. So there is a nuance in the sense that you were partly forced but also had some choice.

Some might even layer it up even further in the sense that some people might argue that in a deterministic world no one has actual responsibillity. But then again I don't think many people strongly commit to that idea, at least in practical ethics.

Nonetheless, that last point brings up the fact that sometimes we just have to make choices. No one may have forced us to make the choice but it seems that a choice had to be made just as a matter of how events unfolded. You keep talking about the trolley problem as if a choice had been forced (commanded participation by another agent); but I don't think there is anything explicit in the trolley experiment saying this. The trolley problen could have a natural cause - a freak train incident due to no ones fault. Maybe this could be forcing in some sense of diminish responsibility... but it is unremarkable and does not especially stand out. Almost all other difficult moral choices are like this and not participating in a scenario like that would be immoral I think most would agree. The way that the trolley problem is set up, 5 people are going to die anyway so refusing to participate is practically the same as making a choice. But even so, refusing to participate in a rescue mission where either one or 5 people must die would not be deemed to the moral thing to do in that context by most people.

Again, if there is still wiggle room to make a better or worse choice then I think that one still has moral responsibility for that I think, though obviously people may attribute less responsibility if the choice was unusually extreme or difficult people didn't have the correct information (but trolley problem gives us the correct information). But then that doesn't mean there are not better or worse choices. You may be forced to kill 1 or kill 5 but if you knew you were doing fully in the moment then surely you have to justify the choice. Contrary to what you say, I think morality emerges precisely because "consent" is broken. There is no need for morality if it is just about getting what we want and agreeing to play the game. Morality comes from the fact that we are forced to play games we might disagree with. We wouldn't have all these moral rules if people didn't have conflicting wants.

Edit: some tidying up.

Yes, I think most moral analogies automatically fail in that they are too simple for being actually valuable in moral philosophy — Christoffer

I'm not sure I agree that scenarios like the trolley problem never happen - I think they probably do a lot in a messier way and in some ways the fact that the trolley problem has no perfect outcome reminds of the messiness of reality sometimes.

Nonetheless, I think the value in these analogies is not necessarily in trying to find out what the right thing to do is, but why we have the moral preferences we do and how they differ. Its like an experiment. Scientific experiments need controlled and independent variables to figure out whats going on. If you have a simplified scenario and you change certain aspects of it and see what people think then it may give more clarity as to why we make certain choices or what our preferences are. If you just present a scenario with lots of different factors then its not always clear what is actually guiding peoples decisions.

I don't think I can agree on your view that the other things are distractions. These "distractions" are part of what make it interesting, and the fact you can vary these different factors and change how the situation seems I think is very informative about morality.

I also don't think the statement: "if you were forced to kill either 1 person or 5 people with no other options, which would you do?” is an absolute description of the trolley problem. I think stating it like this changes the scenario a bit - from what I can gather, the most common views of it have it that 5 people were going to die anyway. As I said in another post, I'm inclined to think that framing it this way makes the situation different to a simple choice of 1 vs. 5. Viewed this way you could also argue that there is not so much a forcing element here. 5 people are going to die; you can choose to save them if you so wish at the cost of 1 person's life.

Edit: Thinking about it, maybe someone could view the last description / sentence as forcing if they wish; but at the very least, I think its not absolutely clear there is a single way to interpretate. Depends what you mean by forcing I guess. If you were to view that last description as forcing then perhaps it is not so different from many other scenarios in life someone could choose to engage in or abstain from (in similar way to what has been saying I suppose). On the other hand, does forcing really exempt you from moral responsibility?

But you can have a kind of incidental, naturalistic reason for why the event occurred. It could be just to do with trains carrying people like they normally would day-to-day and some unforseeable circumstance happens which requires this choice.

Aha, I respect that you have doubled down on this. Yes, I think my view on this can change a lot depending on how I picture the scenario or the details like you say. Many times I am inclined to think maybe there are scenarios which just do not have a best answer. I am not entirely sure on this 999 scenario though my first instinct was to not kill them. The less I think of the deed as like an intentional, culpable act as opposed to like a preference, the more I feel inclined to kill the 999. But as a culpable act, the more comes into it the thoughts of it being immoral to impose yourself on someone else's freedom of agency and being alive which seems competitively important, morally. But then again, even just changing how I conceptualize the act itself can make this part seem less salient. You can imagine some kind of rescue scenario where a decision must be made and no one would blame you for having made the decision; but the fact that there is like an initial default set of people who are going to die, then the choice seems less like a necessary thing either-or and more of a culpable act being imposed on people.

How can you talk about that without talking about how it works in the real world? — T Clark

When I say regardless, I am not implying exclusion of practical application, not to say that a trolley-type problem can never arise or that people's reactions to a trolley problem won't tell you about how people think about ethics more generally.

It’s an unreal scenario and doesn’t factor in intent, which is essential to defining an ethical act between people. — Fire Ologist

Surely you can incorporate intent into your consideration of it though?

then its a different question — Philosophim

Well, what's your answer to the different question?

What if you had to execute the 999 people yourself?

Most philosophical thought experiments are silly. To have any value, a thought experiment should take into account the issues we see in the real world. It can still be simple, but it has to be real. — T Clark

Some people are just interested in morality just because they are interested in morality, regardless of practical application. For them there is no reason to cast away such thought experiments. They are just as informative about morality as anything else. Why people have differing opinions on these experiments tells you about how people think and their view of morality or what motivates moral action.

There's an interesting question. Is there lack of evidence of other intelligent life because it is so rare for it to get started?

Or because once it starts, it never lasts long.

Or why not both.

Aha, that actually made me laugh out loud for several minutes.

I like reading about these ideas, something both very poetic and powerful about them.

What is the Buddhist view about creating life? If they see life as just suffering and the ultimate goal is ending the cycle of suffering, death, birth - "extinction" - (as far as I understand), then wouldn't they be anti-natalist?

Wow, very interesting, thanks! Will definitely have a look.