Daniel Bartels of Columbia University found that individual reactions to trolley problems is context sensitive and that around 90% would refuse the act of deliberately killing one individual to save five lives. Further study by Daniel Bartels and David Pizarro focused on those 10% who made utilitarian choice. The study asked participants to series of value statement. The experiment found that those who had stronger utilitarian leaning had stronger tendency to psychopathy, Machiavellianism or tended to view life as meaningless.
While I agree with most of what you said about the dangers of attempting to assign a value to life, have a read:
http://advocatusatheist.blogspot.com/20 ... ought.html
Interesting conclusion:
It seems to me that the implication here is the statistical data of which dictates the proper action seemingly outweighs the moral intuition. Whether this is good or bad, I cannot pretend to know the answer to. Perhaps, we should use statistical computations to help model morality with prospective logic to aid us in moral decision making. I don't know. I just thought by positing a logical sociopath, instead of a morally righteous bystander, the test shows that righteous morality may in fact pose a greater threat to society than sociopathy. A strange moral realization if there ever was one.
Ah, but what if the fat man was your father and the other five were strangers of a different ethnic and social group? I wouldn't be able to kill my dad, but I think I would be morally justified in not taking action. I would also think that given the conclusion above, someone else who didn't know my father would be justified in pushing me out of the way and diverting the trolley.MrC wrote:I would probably divert the trolley to hit the fat man instead of the 5 people.
I was trying to link it to the gun ban issue. As mentioned before, less people have been killed by airguns than have been killed by wasps in the UK - where is the government push to eradicate wasps?MrC wrote:I couldn't really gauge what sort of thing you were suggesting (hence the above clarification) so, if you have any thoughts that don't fall under the arguments of my extreme interpretation of human-value, feel free to ignore the above.
Someone has clearly decided "It's not worth the effort of killing all wasps for the sake of keeping the 2 or 3 most sting-susceptible Britons alive" - and this has not created a public outcry, so clearly the vast majority of the population agrees with this notion whether tacitly or not.
