Check out the latest interactive activity at Philosophy Experiments.
A Million Dollar Puzzle: The Newcomb Paradox
If you can sort this one out, then you’re a genius. Mind you, most people think they know the right answer, it’s just they don’t tend to agree what that answer is.
There’s a new activity up at the philosophy experiments web site.
It examines our intuitions about a particular class of killings – namely, those which are also instances of “letting die”. Once again, it’s based on the work of Judith Jarvis Thomson, and in particular a section of her article, “The Trolley Problem”.
The activity hasn’t earned its stripes in the court of public reason yet, so it’s possible it has lacunae and glitches. If so, let me know here!
In my previous post, I talked about a little trick that is embedded within the Morality Play interactive activity.
Very quickly, one of the questions asks whether there is a moral obligation to help a person who is in severe need.
You see a charity advertisement in a newspaper about a person in severe need in India/Australia. There is no state welfare available to this person, but you can help them at little cost to yourself. You have good reason to believe that any help you offer will make a difference. Are you morally obliged to help the person?
Half the people undertaking the activity are told that the person lives in India; the other half that the person lives in Australia. They are then asked to state whether they think we are “Strongly Obliged”, “Weakly Obliged” or “Not Obliged” to help the person.
After nearly 1200 responses, this is what the results are showing us
The thing that has really caught my attention is the results for people who self-identify as Christians and atheists, respectively (more precisely, the atheist group self-identify as having “No Religion”, so they could be agnostics, or perhaps even deists of some sort, but for the sake of convenience, I’m going to call them atheists).
The headline news is that atheists are coming on towards twice as likely as Christians to think we’re “Not Obliged” to help the person in need in India (currently, 43% as opposed to 24%).
I actually find that quite shocking. But perhaps even more shocking is the fact the atheist group are much less likely to respond that way when asked about the person in Australia. Here (only) 36% think we’re not morally obliged to help. There are two further points here: (1) this gap is more than twice as large as the average gap across all respondents (and it’s easily statistically significant – I checked!); and (2) if you look at the Christian group, in complete contrast to the atheist group, you find that they are more likely to think we’re not obliged to help the person in Australia.
My first reaction to these figures was to think I had messed up the programming somewhere. But I have double and triple-checked, and I’m almost certain that I haven’t. Plus, I’ve checked the numbers manually (so to speak); and the figures in the charts correctly add up to 100, so I think this really is what the numbers are saying.
My second reaction, of course, was to think about confounding variables and systematic biases. (Note to any stray new atheists reading this: I am fully aware of the dangers of a non-randomised, self-selecting sample, and that it is not possible to generalize these results, but the fact remains that these results are curious, and rather shocking, in and of themselves – we’re not talking about tiny numbers of people here).
So what’s going on? I don’t really know, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s possible there is some correlation between youth and irreligiosity specific to these activities (because they tend to get picked up by European schools and colleges), and that it might be that young people are less likely to think in terms of moral obligation than older people; it also seems possible that various stripes of moral nihilism might result in non-religious people denying that one is morally obliged to help others (even if they would in fact help others).
But the difference between the atheist response to the India and Australia conditions is… well, harder to explain (and, as I said, it’s a little disturbing). Anybody got any ideas?
Here’s what I think is quite an interesting thing. There is a little trick in the Morality Play activity I’ve put together at Philosophy Experiments. One of the questions asks whether there is a moral obligation to help a person who is in severe need.
You see a charity advertisement in a newspaper about a person in severe need in India/Australia. There is no state welfare available to this person, but you can help them at little cost to yourself. You have good reason to believe that any help you offer will make a difference. Are you morally obliged to help the person?
Half the people undertaking the activity are told that the person lives in India; the other half that the person lives in Australia. They are then asked to state whether they think we are “Strongly Obliged”, “Weakly Obliged” or “Not Obliged” to help the person.
This is what the results are showing us so far.
There are a couple of things worth remarking upon. The first is that if you look at the overall results, you find that 4% more people respond there is no obligation to help the person in India than they do about the person in Australia (39% to 35%). However, although suggestive, these results are not yet statistically significant, so it’s not yet clear that this is a real pattern rather than just an artefact.
The second interesting thing is that if you exclude everybody who does not live in either the United States, United Kingdom or Canada from the result set, then this pattern disappears. In this instance, 37% of people think we’re not obliged to help the person in India compared to 36% who think the same thing about the person in Australia.
As yet, these results are merely suggestive, but it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Crosspost from JeremyStangroom.com
Okay, I have been terribly remiss in not keeping this blog up to date. I had to write a book (with James Garvey) – The Story of Philosophy (Quercus) – which was a bit of a monster undertaking.
Anyway, as some of you might already have seen, I’ve put together a new activity at the Philosophy Experiments web site.
Should you Kill the Backpacker?
It looks at some of the complications arising out of the Trolley Problem. More specifically, it largely relies on Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article, “The Trolley Problem”, which appeared in The Yale Law Journal.
It’s already been completed more than a 1000 times, and the average “tension quotient” across all these players is 23% (lower is better). See if you can beat this score.
Michael F., in a comment here, argues, in effect, that the shipwreck scenario and transplant scenario featured in In The Face Of Death are not strictly analogous because of the extremity of the situation faced by the shipwrecked sailors:
They were at sea for something like a week before the decision was even made, delirious from hunger, thirst, lack of shelter from the elements…it’s beyond comprehension how far removed from the day to day way we have of dealing with all of these situations. And they were the only ones who could deal with the situation. No appeal to anyone except those they were sharing the boat with.
All this is absolutely right: the situation with the transplant doctor doesn’t have these features. However, there are a couple of points to make here which undermine the argument that the two situations are not parallel in the required way.
The first is that the transplant scenario does have its own element of extremity (which was added in precisely to handle the point Michael makes here): one of the patients the transplant doctor is trying to save is her own child. It is true, of course, that this is a different sort of thing than being stranded in the middle of the ocean without food and water, but nevertheless one should not underestimate just how desperate people will become if the life of their child is under threat. Certainly, I’d warrant that many mothers would happily trade places with the shipwrecked sailors if it meant their own child had a chance to live.
The second point is that there is a difference between factors that justify a particular course of action and factors which mitigate against culpability given the immorality of a particular course of action. It is true that the extremity of the situation faced by the shipwrecked sailors could reasonably be seen to mitigate against their culpability (assuming that one thinks it was morally wrong to kill the cabin boy). It is a much harder argument to make that it justifies their actions. To put it simply, we don’t tend to think that the antecedent pressures and temptations that people are under are part of the story of the rightness or wrongness of the actions they take (albeit they are part of the story of how we judge their culpability).
There is an interesting datum here: in their judgement of the case brought against Thomas Dudley and Edward Stephens for the murder of the cabin boy, Richard Parker, the Queen’s Bench Division under Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, did not accept that the extremity of the situation was even a mitigating factor:
It must not be supposed that in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse for crime it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was; how awful the suffering; how hard in such trials to keep the judgment straight and the conduct pure. We are often compelled to set up standards we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy. But a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime. It is therefore our duty to declare that the prisoners’ act in this case was wilful murder, that the facts as stated in the verdict are no legal justification of the homicide; and to say that in our unanimous opinion the prisoners are upon this special verdict guilty of murder.
Of course, this is not to argue that the Queen’s Bench Division necessarily got this right (albeit one suspects they probably knew what they were talking about when it came to legal culpability). But nevertheless it does illustrate that it isn’t at all obvious one can argue straightforwardly from pressures and temptations to justification.
The trolley problem, which forms the basis of Should You Kill The Fat Man?, was originally introduced by the philosopher Philippa Foot. Foot died, aged 90, in October last year.
It has just been announced that a Symposium on Moral Philosophy in honour of her memory is taking place in March. Full details here.
TPM (The Philosophers’ Magazine) interviewed Philippa Foot back in 2003. You can read the interview here.
To recap, In The Face of Death (which you should complete before reading this) sometimes features a comparison between a shipwreck situation and a transplant situation. In the former, three shipwrecked sailors kill a barely conscious cabin boy, who was almost certainly going to die anyway, in order to increase their chances of survival (it allows them to eat his flesh and drink his blood). In the latter, you’re in hospital with an illness that will almost certainly kill you, when a transplant surgeon asks whether she can end your life immediately, and then use your organs to save the lives of three of her patients. You say no, but she kills you anyway, and transplants your organs.
The activity complains if you state that the shipwrecked sailors were morally justified in killing the cabin boy, but the transplant surgeon was not morally justified in ending your own life.
An objection that has come up a couple of times is that the transplant surgeon behaves badly not so much because she takes your life, but because she takes your life having undertaken, as a doctor, not to “play God” in this sort of situation. So, for example, here’s an extract from a modern version of the Hippocratic oath:
Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given to me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
There are a number of things to be said about this objection.
1. Although, all other things being equal, it is (probably) true we don’t behave well if we break our undertakings, it is hard to think this is true in all situations. This is easily demonstrated: if a doctor can save the lives of a million of her patients, by killing one patient, then it is a brave person who’d claim she’d be wrong to do so (the television series House featured an interesting examination of this issue).
2. It follows, then, that whether “playing God” is justified in any particular situation depends on the nature of the situation. But, in terms of the scenario we’re dealing with here, that just seems to put us back where we started: were the shipwrecked sailors justified in killing the cabin boy versus was the transplant surgeon justified in killing you (and thereby playing God)?
3. Given these two situations, it is hard to think that what is morally decisive is the fact the doctor’s behaviour violated her previous undertaking not to play God. In other words, it is hard to think that what turned a “right” action into a “wrong” action was the fact that she had previously made certain undertakings.
4. Part of the thought here has to do with the extremeness of the acts we’re talking about. Taking a life seems to be a big deal, morally speaking. In comparison, breaking an oath seems like a much smaller deal. Therefore, it is counterintuitive to suppose that the latter can be decisive when looking at the morality of the former.
5. Having said this, it is also true there is no knock down argument here. If somebody insists that as far as they’re concerned the fact the transplant surgeon violated the Hippocratic oath is morally decisive, then probably it isn’t possible to do much more than to show why the claim is counterintuitive. It is in the nature of moral arguments that sometimes all one can hope to do is to pump intuitions in a certain direction.
I have been arguing that there is a strange asymmetricality in the attitudes of some people towards abortion and miscarriage (they are against abortion, but are not particularly troubled by the phenomenon of miscarriage).
Christopher Carr has put forward the following argument which aims to show that given a particular sort of view there might actually be nothing odd about this asymmetricality:
if the value is a potential value, then miscarriage may not mean anything, or it may mean a literal fraction of what it would mean were the fetus further along in development or already born. For example, for a particular individual moral framework perhaps a human fetus is worth “one”, a human infant is worth “two”, a human baby is worth “three”, and thereafter all have reached full personhood of “four”. We would still consider miscarriage to be the destruction of valuable human entities, but we may be allowed to think that an eight-year-old child dying of leukemia represents a greater destruction of value. How we assign respective values depending on cause of death and degree of personhood could give us radically different results as to how we evaluate the medical seriousness of miscarriage in relation to other causes of death.
Okay, so the first thing to say is there is no doubt this is true: we can think the value attached to human life is incremental in this way (though I think Christopher inadvertently switched around baby and infant in his schema). However, the question is how does this view match up against people’s attitudes towards abortion.
There are a number of points to make here.
1. It’s worth starting off by saying that although it is a common view that the value of human life increases as the human entity develops from embryo through to full personhood, it is a very uncommon view amongst people who are opposed to all abortion (the overwhelming majority of whom think an embryo has equal intrinsic value to a human adult just by virtue of being biologically human); indeed, if you read the anti-abortion literature, you’ll find that many people deny that things such as sentience and personhood are the measure of value, precisely because this opens up the possibility that an embryo/foetus does not have the value of a human adult;
2. Setting this point aside, the question remains as to whether it makes sense to see the value of human lives as being incremental, and yet to be resolutely opposed to abortion. This is actually quite a difficult question to answer, since it means weighing up the value attached to the embryo/foetus against the right to self-determination. However, to put Christopher’s argument in its best light, let’s say there isn’t a problem here: that it is possible to think that even the relatively low value attached to the embryo/foetus in the early stages of pregnancy trumps our right to self-determination (this isn’t an incoherent view, by any means, it’s just it runs into difficulties when held up against the way that de facto we tend to treat the right to self-determination);
3. So how should this person view miscarriage? Well, it is true that they should not see any individual miscarriage as being as great a tragedy as the death of a human person (because embryos/foetuses don’t have the value of a fully developed human being). But equally, it is true that they can’t see any individual miscarriage as being morally neutral (even if we’re focussing only on the death of the embryo/foetus): they are required to think that miscarriage is a bad thing, in and of itself, because it means the ending of the life of something of value (albeit relatively low value);
4. More than that, though, given that the right to self-determination is not trivial, and given that they think the value attached to the embryo/foetus trumps our right to self-determination, then it follows that they can’t think the value attached to the embryo/foetus is merely trivial. We can’t quantify this value, obviously, but we know it’s enough to rule out abortion, even though this means denying the right we have to self-determination. (The counter-argument here that the right to self-determination is trivial or unimportant isn’t persuasive because de facto we don’t think it is trivial or unimportant.)
5. At this point, it becomes (partly) a numbers game. The sheer volume of miscarriages has to be factored into the argument. Okay, it’s true that one might think the numbers of people suffering cancer and heart disease means that these diseases/conditions are a more serious issue than miscarriage (given the fact that these conditions affect human persons to whom there is a higher value attached than to embryos/foetuses). But it is much less plausible if we’re talking about conditions such as kidney failure, Parkinson’s, ALS, etc., all of which we do consider to be serious medical issues. (There is a complication here to do with the possibility that one might attach arbitrary levels of value to the foetus, human person, etc., so that it turns out that just one human death is a greater tragedy than the deaths of say a million foetuses even though the value of a foetus is enough to rule out abortion. If this comes up in the comments, I might deal with it in another post.)
So if somebody is opposed to abortion (in all, or nearly all, circumstances), then it remains true that they should consider miscarriage to be a serious medical issue. Christopher’s argument here is relevant in that it does impact on how serious an issue some people should view miscarriage to be. But, of course, as we already noted, the number of people opposed to abortion who have this sort of incremental view of the value of human life is very small (precisely because it does allow the possibility that the value of an embryo/foetus might not be great enough to rule out abortion given that we think the right to self-determination is important).
If you’re curious about what sort of data the Whose Body Is It Anyway? activity is throwing up, then you can find out here.
Some of the results are entirely predictable. For example, by far the biggest predictor of whether a person is going to be opposed to abortion is religious belief. So, for instance, 83% of people with no religion support the right of a woman to have an abortion, compared to only 37% of Christians
However, there are some surprises. The comparison between Christians and Muslims, for example, is interesting. This shows that a bigger percentage of Muslims than Christians support the right of a woman to have abortion (42% to 37%), though it should be said that this figure is only statistically significant at p < 0.10.
I’ve discussed what is perhaps the most curious piece of data here. It seems that young women of no religion are much more likely to be opposed to abortion than young men of no religion (which I still think is bizarre).
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