What are your answers to the baby dilemma and the trolley dilemmas posed in this Time poll? My answers were "couldn't" all down the line although I admit I came very close to pulling the switch on 3a:
An out of control trolley is heading down a track toward five unsuspecting people and will surely kill them all. You could throw a switch diverting it to a siding, but an equally unsuspecting man is standing there and the train will kill him instead. Could you throw the switch, killing one to save five?
Maybe if there were fifteen or fifty instead of five, it would have made a difference as far as voting goes, but in fact I have no idea what I'd really do in such a situation.
Here's a previous ST post on the trolley dilemmas.
More of a casuistry test than a morality test per se, isn't it?
Posted by: HA HA HA | November 24, 2007 at 11:23 AM
Well, yeah, there's that. How many angels would you push off the head of a pin, kinda thing.
Posted by: gail | November 24, 2007 at 11:24 AM
...or a "sentimentality test", though that implies as much of a judgment about what the "right" answers are as "morality test" does.
Posted by: HA HA HA | November 24, 2007 at 11:25 AM
...if an angel could chuck wood!
Posted by: HA HA HA | November 24, 2007 at 11:25 AM
All it really tests is what choice you would make in the test.
Posted by: gail | November 24, 2007 at 11:26 AM
As spiritual entities, angels probably can't chuck wood because they wouldn't be able to exert force.
Posted by: gail | November 24, 2007 at 11:28 AM
Of course, without casuistry, ethicists would be out of work. Would you want to be responsible for putting innocent college professors on the dole? Or making them go to work as Wal Mart greeters?
Posted by: gail | November 24, 2007 at 11:51 AM
Innocent college professors, no.
But then I think about my advisor...
If by making my advisor a Wal-Mart greeter, I could save five other professors in the department from working cash registers at Best Buy... But I can think of only three I'd want to save. And the Dean or Whatever of Academic Something, who used to teach a seminar class in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. I'd save her. But wait, Google says she's in the department full time now.
Welcome to Wal-Mart, Prof. B----w!
Posted by: HA HA HA | November 24, 2007 at 06:38 PM
I found it very interesting that they said they wanted to gauge morality without defining what that morality was. From a Machiovellian or Nietzschean sense, perhaps my decisions were moral. I will point out that they don't really give you enough information to judge if your decision was moral or not. Perhaps that sick, dying man in the life raft was the only innocent there and it would have been more moral to throw the ex-cons overboard and allow the one man to die a peaceful death.
Posted by: prairie biker | November 25, 2007 at 07:54 AM
My other issue is they wanted to know if you "could" make that decision, not if you "would". I don't think their implication was enough to infer action on your behalf. If actually confronted with such a decision, I think most people would not be able to take action.
Posted by: prairie biker | November 25, 2007 at 08:01 AM