Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel and psychologist Fiery Cushman have designed a moral sense test. The test poses scenarios and asks you to evaluate the relative morality or immorality of different actions. The purpose of the test for the researchers is to compare the responses between philosophers and non-philosophers to various ethical questions. (I imagine that the results will be not unlike when they check economist's ability to perform investment finance.)
I encourage you to go over to their site and help them collect some data.
Anyway, I was over on their site this morning, and one of the scenarios got me thinking. If you are planning on taking the test, do that first. I don't want to shift their data.
One of the scenarios asks the subject to evaluate the morality of a situation like this one. (I don't remember the actual wording.)
You are a doctor. You are trapped in an ICU with 6 patients, one of them on life support. If you don't get out, you and all the patients will die. You can alert rescuers in one of many ways. One, you could pull the plug on the patient on life support. Then you and the remaining five patients will live. You could pull the power to the room which would have a similar effect. The scenario asks you to evaluate the relative morality of pulling the plug considering that you will extinguish one life to save at least 5.
The other later scenarios are pretty standard moral quandaries. You are trapped in a life boat with limited space and such. You are asked to make similar moral judgments, but the preface that you are doctor is no longer there.
This comparison with the doctor one and the others got me thinking. The thing is that in the scenario when I am the doctor, I feel much more comfortable making the "clinical" decision to end one life to save five. I obviously don't feel entirely comfortable with it -- I am ending a life, but I just feel more comfortable than in the other similar scenarios. In fact, I am pretty sure that in the doctor scenario I would make the tough decision, whereas in a very similar scenario involving say a fireman I would not.
I think this is because in my role as a physician, I am operating in a social space where such mercenary judgments are not only morally permissible, but expected. We expected physicians to perform triage. We expect physicians to maximize the lives saved.
If you think about it, though, this dichotomy is a bit odd. Why does the physician's occupation or special knowledge make the correct moral judgment in this scenario different? It may well be that the physician is in an better position to assess the likely survival (and resulting quality of life) of the individuals involved. Further, this scenario did not (as I remember) include any details about whether the patients were young or infirm, very sick or relatively healthy. Obviously these details would shift your judgment at to what was appropriate.
At the base of it, however, saying that the physician has greater knowledge and thus might make a better mercenary judgment does not resolve the issue. I can tell you for a fact that under circumstances where I was not acting as a physician, I would feel profoundly uncomfortable killing someone to save five. Is there some aspect of a physician's training that makes more comfortable with these decisions? Is it the social expectation that frees us, in degrees, from a measure of the responsibility?
I don't know, but I am curious to find out whether these researchers into the psychology of morality have considered the effects of particular groups operating in defined social settings on what we consider ethical behavior. A police officer operating in his official capacity might be subject to entirely different rules than a private citizen.
Thoughts?
Hat-tip: Crooked Timber and Mind Hacks
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When I took it I was asked some questions about being at the helm of a boat and killing a passenger in the boat to save 5 drowning victims (passenger was too heavy to let the boat move at top speed).
I found that I felt more of an obligation to the passengers safety as I was "in charge" of the boat than I would in a situation where I could flip a switch to kill one rather than five.
I suspect the answer is that when you assume a role (doctor, captain, etc) rather than just acting as an individual the level of responsibility you have toward others changes.
As a doctor your responsible for all the patients and thus have the expected moral responsibility to save as many as possible even if it means the death of some.
As a boat captain you have a moral responsibility to keep the passengers in your boat safe that must be balanced against your moral responsibility to help others.
I suspect that it isn't responsibility per se; but a particular sort of moral reasoning that people don't want to be responsible for using. It is generally hard to argue with the conclusions drawn from an approximately utilitarian moral calculus in these sorts of situations, however much we may not like the idea, but you would be hard pressed to find anybody(besides that guy from your undergrad philosophy seminar) who would comfortably admit to being a utilitarian.
We have pushed a lot of the situations where unpleasant moral calculus is unavoidable either into the hands of specialists, or just out of our minds. In those specialist situations, a flavor of utilitarian logic is implied by the circumstances, so nobody really needs to take personal responsibility for it, but outside of those, one would be forced to assume personal responsibility for utilitarian thinking.
The implied choice is "Pull the plug, take one life and save the other five patients" or "wait and do nothing, and all the patients will probably die." This is a difficult moral choice. A rule of thumb I've found helpful is that when you're down to only bad options, usually this means something has already gone wrong.
In this case, the first thing that has gone wrong is the disaster; nothing to be done at that point.
There is a second point, however, where something may have gone wrong: the triage of choice down to those two. There remains a third choice: "continue trying to think of a more moral option." The doctor is (presumably) qualified to judge how long it will be before the first person dies without action; he probably can estimate how much delay in rescue will increase the chances of someone dying; he might have some wild guess of the chances of rescue at different timescales; and, if at all introspective, he may have some idea of his chances of coming up with a better plan.
The problem posits the chance of saving five patients and losing one essentially sure if he acts, and base chance of rescue is essentially nil without action. However, suppose the doctor knows he's fairly clever and creative, and estimates (correctly) he has a 30% chance of having an idea to save everyone in the next 10 minutes if he waits to pull the plug... at the catch of now having a 1% chance that everyone will die before rescue, even if he drops the power. The expected fatality rate of immediate action is 1.0, but the fatality rate of thinking longer is (0.7)+(6*0.01)= 0.76 fatalities expected. The doc should keep thinking.
At some point, the doctor will have to perform a triage of the choices, and decide waiting any longer isn't going to help save lives, coming back to the original problem.
The next moral aspect I would see are how the choice to kill affects social probabilities down the road. We don't want to erode the human value for human life, as this makes many others howsoever slightly more likely to be casually killed. The doctor's choice here sets a precedent for the thousands who live to hear of it. Also against action is the doctor's relationship to all patients, seeking the best interests of each and every individual; this trust is what enables doctors to be trusted by patients enough to do their job. Eroding that increases the chances oh-so-slightly of death for many, many people. Neurology might give him some idea of the risks associated with these perceptions, and cause him to hesitate just a little longer; alternatively, the doctor might decide to find a way to kill while making the death appear of natural causes... leaving only one "witness" in a position to know what happened.
The tests were unmitigated nonsense. Moral decisions of the type hypothesized are just that: tales signifying nothing. Real moral dilemmas are either simpler or more complex.
I got one about being the /captain/ of the vessel, then you can make the choice.
What it comes down to, is that certain social positions, Military Commander (Not just soldier), Doctor, Captain of a Ship (not just in charge or at helm), Fireman, Police Officer, usw., carry with them the right, and responsibility, of making such 'hard' calls.
As a Doctor, you have the 'power' of life and death, and as a society, you are expected to wield that power to the best of your ability. Same for a military commander or such.
If you are not in that position, you are not wielding that power, and making the choice changes. If you are not in a roll where you are supposed to have that power, and make those choices, it no longer matters.
A Doctor or Captain must choose the 'lesser' of too evils, if you will. A regular person has a very unfortunate moral dilemma that cannot be resolved. A regular person does not have the right, or power, to kill to save. All lives are infinitely precious.
I'm sorry, I typed that poorly. I didn't quite convey what I meant, which was this.
You are, as a Doctor, not viewed by society as a "mere mortal". As a Doctor, you are required to choose.
As a regular person you cannot make the choice, because to a regular person, all lives are infinitely precious.
Make sense? No. What society wants? Yes.