The Moral Sense Test

I would think that a better test strategy would be to devise a longer, but more realistic scenario – something hypothetical but more fully realistic: about organ sales and donations, or responses of hospital personnel to the disaster or whatever – and tell the whole story, news or documentary-style.

Indeed, when I was not entering a fine amount for people throwing concrete bags to the ground, I was asked to imagine cruise ships sinking. I must say that having read the harrowing account of the Estonia sinking by William Langewiesche probably influenced my answers.

Hmm … if they want data from “the man on the street, mere mortals, Joe the Plumber”, an Internet survey is not the way to go. But let’s take non-academics as an approximation. Still, they might not want to pose a head-scratching dilemma in the very first screen – “My profession is computer programming – which of the very few classifications does that fall under?” (I finally went with “Services”)

For the problem noted in comment John Quiggin / #1, I also chose alternative b).

(Especially the motorboat one. Maybe it’s just because I don’t know motorboats, but boy howdy do the certainties in that one strike me as stupid things to be certain about.)

“Then”, sorry

My answers were remarkably incoherent.
{shrugs}

You wake up one morning to find that your cat is sitting on the counter in front of your coffee maker. No matter what you do, the cat is not willing to move out of the way of the coffee maker, rendering you incapable of making coffee. You will have a terrible morning if you do not make coffee, and you know your terrible morning will negatively affect the lives of five other people. You know that the cat will never move of its own free will. You know that the cat does not like to be pushed off of counters. If you push the cat off of the counter, you may make coffee.

Pushing the cat off the counter is:
Extremely morally good….. neither good nor bad…. extremely morally bad

rmz- you’re making the question too easy! (Also, much closer to life and easier to predict with great certainty than most of the examples in the test.)

Maybe thinking about this is what makes me a political theorist and not a philosopher, but what bothered me about the test is that the questions stopped at my ethical evaluation of the proposed action, rather than going on to ask me if I would perform the action anyway, or if it would be the right thing to do nevertheless.

Especially in extreme circumstances, the choices we face in life are typically not between moral goods and moral evils as such, and especially political actors often face choices between moral evils of varying severity. Those force us into choices leaving what Bernard Williams called a ‘moral remainder’ we can’t reduce by pretending what we did was ethically good because it was the right thing to do under the circumstances.

And is it too much to ask professional philosophers to crack open a history book or read a newspaper? It’s depressing to see question after question about abstract contrived scenarios like fires in orphanages and people standing on railroad tracks with trap doors and switches. Haven’t humans created enough extreme scenarios in real life that would provide much more compelling sets of circumstances for ethical reflection.

I think I need to go ‘push the cat off the counter’ and get some coffee.

Oops, I probably misspoke about ‘cracking history books’. If memory serves, Hitler often shows up in these sorts of questions–as in, ‘The baby you kill now to save the fifteen orphans in the burning building would otherwise grow up to be Hitler’. Does Godwin’s Law apply to philosophy, too?

Aside from the ridiculous levels of certainty involved in these questions, another issue not addressed which would be important to me in the moment is the participation of the other people in the scenarios. Why isn’t “you drive the boat, I’ll try my luck in the water” an option? Why isn’t asking “can I try turning off the power in order to trigger the alarm, even if we’re taking a risk with your life support machine” an option?

The silliness of such scenarios was amusingly shown in Stargate Atlantis. Thus proving that sci-fi is better than philosophy.

@rea: exactly — this is the Jack Bauer school of morality. Why are moral philosophers giving intellectual cover to this sort of thinking?

And, um, yes, if you screw up and kill someone it’s worse than if you screw up and don’t kill someone. Even though you’re still an asshole if you get drunk and plow your car into a tree and you should have your license revoked, etc. Is there a “phfew, that was close” theory of moral philosophy?

I realize that trollycar-style ethical theory is regarded by many with a certain degree of skepticism – nay, it is the tipmost taper on the candelabrum of ‘not very punk rock’…….I thought about turning off comments on this post but decided that would probably just result in someone complaining about trolleycars in someone else’s CT thread.

In other words, you want people in general to talk about trolley-car problems, but you don’t necessarily want me to talk about trolley car problems. So I won’t. Not much, anyway. I’ll go off-topic instead.

My big beef with trolley car problems is that they’re an especially vivid example of the academic / analytic philosophy practice of decontextualizing problems before analyzing them. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the academic bias is too overwhelmingly in the decontextualizing direction. The original trolleycar problem with the switchman was real-world, but the elaborations and refinements became increasingly ludicrous. It would have been better to start collect real-world examples of the conflicts between moral intuitions / deontic ethics / emotive ethics / traditional ethics on the one hand, and consequentialism on the other — cases from warfare, public health policy, economic planning, policing practices, etc.

I just recently looked at Parfit’s book arguing that ethics should be more impersonal and realized that in practice for most people, ethics is personal by definition: who you are, what you’re willing and not willing to do, how you feel about the behavior of others you know or know about. At the same time, most people also have a practical consequentialist way of thinking which often conflicts with the moral sense, and people often describe consequentialist choices as practical compromises and, in some cases, as tragic necessities. (“A man’s got to do what he’s got to do”). Cases have been documented when individuals living according to violent honor codes followed that code in full knowledge that they were committing mortal sins.

Individuals who make consequentialist choices which conflict with intuitive or deontic ethics are usually doing so selfishly, or for the sake of a family or local community, and thus can be described as acting wrongly because their consequentialism is not universalist. But in theory government administrators, etc., make consequentialist choices for the general welfare, and normally it’s in cases where the persons involved are mostly distant and faceless. Non-consequentialist forms of ethics tend to lose some or most of their persuasive force in such situations.

All the kinds of things that are implausible or offensive about consequentialism for individual ethics (the impersonality and sometime ruthlessness, the assumption of an unreasonable amount knowledge about consequences, the belief that goods and bads can be quantified and aggregated on a single scale) are almost inevitable for administrators of large organizations of any kind. Consequentialism is an administrative ethics. Administrators have to think that way. There’s no intuitive administrative ethics.

Which leads me to my point about consequentialism as a proposed individual ethics. (Actually, this only applies to altruist consequentialism). What it does is make the individual a kind of public official administering that part of the social aggregate which is legally or otherwise defined as “his”. An individual is supposed to be a cog in an enormous rational administrative machine, the smallest capillary division of Society.

This view has a lot of deficiencies — mainly the assumption of more knowledge than an individual can realistically have, the repression of the local knowledge he actual does have, and the submission of every individual to a mysterious distant group. I do not think that it’s necessarily a good thing for individuals to submit their intuititive ethics to the universal or public ethics. (Huckleberry Finn, Eichmann, etc.)

My conclusion has been that utilitarian thinking and ethical thinking are two different things that act as checks and balances on one another, and it’s seriously wrong to try to reduce one to the other or to subordinate one to the other. (Some of these criticisms would also hold for universalistic forms of deontic logic).

Toulmin’s “The Abuse of Casuistry” describes concretely contexted ethical thinking, with special attention to the Catholic Church’s ways of treating the utilitarian-deontic dilemma.

I’m afraid I skewed their data. I opted out at the fourth scenario.

I also opted out at the fourth scenario. An un-presented option is suicide, rather than murder.

The survey was nonsensical. Some of the nonsense has been listed upthread.

I find it hard to believe that serious ethicists can inflict this sort of thing on people. I guess they are trying to load their scenarios with various theoretical considerations and test which ones people will prefer/react to.

I lost interest in the test at the question about someone (a woman, no less!) having developed two substances and not knowing whether they were a cure or a deadly poison. I’m a chemist (and a woman, no less!), and most chemists would have a pretty good idea just from the structure of the compounds which would be which. And (ahem!) one tests such things on microorganisms or, at most, a vertebrate like a mouse.

Part of the descent into nonsense comes about because the test designer wants to force choices. So he (the actual sex of the investigator, apparently) puts time constraints on the scenarios (You are driving a motorboat…) which make them much less believable than most of our real life, which is where we derive our ethics.

My snark about the sex of various participants is a minor point of what I’m saying, so don’t bother to read much into it. It’s just that, as a woman chemist, I was quite offended by the stupidity of the imaginary woman chemist in the scenario. Perhaps I should have been offended by the stupidity that went into the development of that scenario.

I completed the test, but have to say it’s extremely lame:

– if I could be 100% sure of the outcome, of course I would choose 5 lives over one life
– we never, ever face such situations in real life, so I don’t understand why philosophers rely on them
– and if we did face such a situation, we wouldn’t have the time and composure to engage in moral reasoning, but would go by instinct and character

Compared to novelists who spend several hundred pages outlining situations, events and characters leading up to moral dilemmas that are generally far less dramatic, I don’t think this holds up very well.

Oh, and I continued to check boxes so that I could see just how far the nonsense descended.

So I contributed to meaningless statistics in the results. There may be an ethical problem with that, or perhaps it is extremely morally good to bust up something that can’t possibly provide useful results, even though its designers believe it might.

In unfairness to Eric there should have been more proofreading.

As usual, there’s been a lot of complaining about abstract thought experiments in this thread. I’m ambivalent, so let me play up the contrarian side by way of analogy. There’s an old joke about a physicist who, for some reason relevant to the punch line, goes up to a blackboard, draws a circle, and then says, “Imagine that’s a cow.” The point is, what the cow looks like is not usually relevant to the kinds of questions physicists study. There’s this assumption that ethical theorists are supposed, at the end of the day, to tell us what to do with ourselves in highly contextualized situations–and there are plenty of ethical theorists who think so too–but that’s like assuming theoretical physicists are useless if they can’t give us very specific instructions about, I don’t know, how to design cow-friendly space shuttles or something. There’s a lot of thumb-twiddling on the “high theory” end of ethics (just look at metaethics–zing!), but there’s also a lot of just straight-up moralizing crap on the applied end. There’s a balance to be had between crazy thought experiments and down-home folksy wisdom, but why think everybody should be looking in the same place?

I agree that trolley car tests are pretty useless at assessing people’s moral sense. But I thought that this particular trolley car test was looking not at that, but rather at whether people with advanced philosophical training respond to trolley car tests differently to people without? If that’s the case, the whole thing might be meta enough that the idiocy of the questions isn’t very relevant.

It amazes me that philosophers don’t realise how stupid, silly, ridiculous and nonsensical they are. Don’t they read the internet?

And those reasons are…

I don’t know: I like trolley car problems, because they show up quite nicely the trickiness in sorting out things like deontological, consequentialist, and virtue-ethics. But also how, as you start to bitch about the construction of such problems you see how many of them are actually, in practice, lead you to similar actions.

My favorite “trolley car” problem is one with which I’m quite familiar, and that’s “Marines don’t leave Marines on the battlefield.” Is this discussed in the ethics literature? At first it sounds insanely contra-consequentialist policy (“Why rescue one guy when it might cost the lives of five others?”), but in practice, it gets all Marines to work better together across the board, to take greater risks, risks which might, because of their daring, reduce the risks of everyone at hand. So: is this a consequentialist, or a deontological/virtue-ethics backed policy? Seems starkly the latter (and the training is very much in virtue-ethics domain), but actually has very strong consquentialist grounds, too.

Can I go back to reading Geertz and Rorty now?

Anyone have a recommendation of a text that studies these issues but is accessible to casual study? I’m interested but unwilling to wade through a primary text.

OneEyedMan–If you mean you’re interested in normative ethics, I’d recommend James Rachel’s “The Elements of Moral Philosophy” for starters. If you mean you’re interested in the psychology and sociology of philosophers, I can’t recommend any books, but John Emerson seems to have a lot of opinions and anecdotal evidence.

“Disciplined Minds”, Jeff Schmidt (nNot specifically about philosophers”. McCumber, “Time in the Ditch”. Reisch, “The Cold War and Philosophy of Science”. Mirowski, “Machine Dreams” (not specifically about philosophers).

John Emerson:

I think that the canned trolley-car ethics taught in top schools, beyond allowing us to interpret the way some people think, may actually be a contributing or constitutive factor of those ways. Arguing with whiz kids on the internet about political topics, I often encounter cold-blooded, decontexted, hypothetical, jocular, mad-dog-rationalist ways of thinking that I suspect come from their schooling and very possibly from philosophy.

Yes, but you’re overlooking the strong selection-amplification cycle. To do well in philosophy courses requires that one be able to do this sort of decontexted analysis without collapsing in rage or frustration, and then those selected people have their tendencies amplified by working with this kind of philosophy.

I agree with you that the habits of mind canned-trolley-car philosophy instills are bad habits, an upscale version of Jack-Bauer-thought. In both cases the defect IMHO is in the *story*: both the story itself and the way it is told.

If the point of the test is truly to investigate whether respondents with academic philosophical training respond differently to a suite of moral dilemmas , then the test is certainly a failure. These are not true moral dilemmas, they are potted set pieces — they do not measure anyone’s “moral sense”, but instead measure one’s tolerance for this particular sort of story. And worse, people who are so put off by these set pieces that they don’t finish the test aren’t included in the results at all.

These are not true moral dilemmas, they are potted set pieces—they do not measure anyone’s “moral sense”, but instead measure one’s tolerance for this particular sort of story. And worse, people who are so put off by these set pieces that they don’t finish the test aren’t included in the results at all.

This is a very cogent critique of the study. Why not include as an additional answer something like “this question is ridiculous and has nothing whatsoever to do with ethics”? My guess is that those with no formal training in ethics are more likely to give such an answer to these “dilemmas.” But it would be interesting to see if the data upheld that intuition.

Well… it indicates that you’re a douchebag.

I found the test thought provoking. Also, I was happy not to see a violinist. I got so sick of that guy during my one moral philosophy class.

But, these types of scenarios are sort of stacking the deck against virtue based ethics. For example, much of the reason for the Catholic distinction between “killing” and “letting die” is recognition that we have imperfect information about the results of our actions. And, if there was ever a month that demonstrated just how wrong even experts can be at predicting future outcomes and estimating risk….

(I’ve got to quit looking at the market every 10 minutes.)

@73 agreed. On the other hand, my favorite response to such scenarios comes from those who think they possess superhuman powers and will use them in those situations. There is a noticable correlation between personality types and those who say “But I could save them all, even if you couldn’t”

these types of scenarios are sort of stacking the deck against virtue based ethics. For example, much of the reason for the Catholic distinction between “killing” and “letting die” is recognition that we have imperfect information about the results of our actions. And, if there was ever a month that demonstrated just how wrong even experts can be at predicting future outcomes and estimating risk….

Right. it’s interesting to recall that this exact trajectory is central to Keynes’ work. The idea that important decisions are not, and cannot be, based on known probabilities of various outcomes was carried directly over from his early interest in philosophy to his economics.

Oh, I’m no philosopher. Just a Joe Sixpack who is tired of Randroid types who try to tell me that they’d just use Aikido to kick all the children to safety. Weakling.

But the primary thing that makes a situation realistic is the uncertainty of the outcome. If the outcome is uncertain, the clear choice disappears and everyone chooses the easy way out.

People draw different ethical conclusions in real world, messy situations all the time, and they act differently as a result.

Right. In the real world, outcomes are uncertain , so people use various rules and contextual cues to make decisions. If you want to study people’s moral intuitions, you ahve to explore what practical heuristics people use for making decisions and what aspects of a situation are judged relevant. Not pick out a tiny subset of factors and conclude that if people don’t respond deterministically to those, they’re inconsistent or confused.

The comments here are of the ludicrous “I refuse to answer your hypothetical question” type. Yes, reality is more complicated, but that’s irrelevant. You can still offer an answer to the question that says something about your moral preferences. People complaining about that is like being at a dinner party and being asked an either-or hypothetical question and choosing neither. Sure, it’s more realistic, but it makes you a douchebag.

If anything I think people are going easy on the survey. It really does point out the problems with moral philosophy. The issue is that the questions abstract away from the stuff moral preferences are really about, and then ask you to come up with a “moral intuition”.

Police Officer: Mr. Philosopher, I’m investigating the drowning of your friend Mr. Hypo Thetical out at Lake Kant last weekend. I’ve just a few questions for you. Tell me what happened.

Philosopher: Well, we saw these 5 swimmers in trouble, and Mr. Thetical is really fat, so I pushed him overboard.

Police Officer: You’re under arrest for First Degree Murder. You have the right to remain silent . . .

Rea, I think you should expand on that. Hypothetically, I’m a network executive who could launch CSI: Bentham.

All blog commentators should familiarize themselves with “The Vital Importance of Being Ernest”, Monty Python, Spinal Tap, “The Big Lebowski”, “Fargo”, and The Firesign Theater. These works teach you to stay on topic and help you elevate the tone of the discourse.

Quite true, John, and moreover, anyone familar with that list would respond to these hypothetical choice-of-certain-outcomes moral surveys by saying, “Everything you know is wrong!”

Ah, yes. Sorry, my Wilde period is about ten years behind me now.

Bad Dr. Science! A page from a standard reference! Study ethics for ten years and get back to me. How could a non-ethicist ever understand ethics?

Most recently people have telling me that all the things I want in philosophy (or economics) are there on some back shelf somewhere, but just mixed in and covered up with a lot more of the stuff I don’t like. I think that it was pretty reasonable of Dr. Science to comment on the basis of the three main types of normative ethics. (Is there a non-normative ethics?)

In general my objections to economics and philosophy are to what I see as their dominant trends, and especially have to do with something many of the best scholars think is not worthy of their attention, undergraduate teaching to those who will not specialize in the field.

Few actually defend Algernon’s ethics. In fact, I feel confident that he himself would denounce himself in no uncertain terms.

I confess that to me Conservatives of the British sort all seem like Algernons to me, whereas American conservatives seem more like Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…..

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

That’s IMHO what various commenters mean by saying the scenarios lack “context”—they lack social context, and social context is where our moral judgements come from.

I don’t think that’s quite it. We make moral judgements about strangers all the time. Strangers have lots of moral valence. To me, the lack of context comes in in:

–the assumption of certainty, which is huge. This is done precisely to isolate a single choice from everything else about the situation. It makes the cases absurd on their face, as someone implied above certainty is a bureaucratic / legalistic assumption designed to make for artificial clarity in applying a law. And how you assess gather and assess evidence and how you choose to treat uncertainty is a big deal in practical decisionmaking, and part of being moral.

–the failure to acknowledge multiple, competing moral demands, such that something can be moral and immoral at the same time, or immoral and necessary, or moral in one way and immoral in another. The fascination of real moral narratives comes in these hard cases, not because they are puzzles that admit of logical solution but precisely because they are not.

Yes, indeed, people’s moral judgments are more complicated in real life than in hypothetical situations. Also, gravity makes things fall!

I think MQ is quite accurate in pinning down what’s inauthentic about these scenarios. I had simply assumed that this was done intentionally, so that one could actually draw scientific conclusions from the answers. Without certainty and limited choices, what can one really say at the end of the day.

Seriously, I think there’s a really interesting aspect that is really hard to study, namely, that the moral judgments people make are often predicated on self-delusion. In order to avoid the difficult questions that result from defined outcomes, people simply fool themselves into thinking that what is inevitable (or as nearly so as is possible in the real world) is not.

BTW, I did think the “name the fine” problems were ludicrous. What on earth could you learn from that answer?

No, I preferred the harder sciences.

Looking back to this:”Not pick out a tiny subset of factors and conclude that if people don’t respond deterministically to those, they’re inconsistent or confused.”

If they’re using this to accuse people of inconsistency, well, I couldn’t agree more that that is pretty damned stupid. If they are trying to identify inconsistencies, maybe in the hopes of identifying the factors that lead to these inconsistencies, it sounds pretty reasonable to me.

I’m an academic moral philosopher, and this test doesn’t have much to do with what I read, write, and teach, or with the mainstream of moral philosophy. By all means criticize the test (if you’re sure you know what it’s intended to measure) or the use of implausible hypotheticals (if you’re sure you know what those who use them use them for). But the move from ‘this test sucks’ to ‘moral philosophy is nonsense’ and/or ‘academic philosophy is bankrupt’ doesn’t work.

I thought the point of the “fines” was clear enough. How much of punishment should be based on the outcome and how much on the intent? I

no one seems to have been thinking about why the test asks you to make judgments about several similar-but-different scenarios. it’s not about any one scenario, it’s about the change over scenarios.

in this perspective, the questions about fines are much less ridiculous than people seem to think they are.

Another person who bailed out about four questions in. I have just never found any of this sort of question to apply to my circumstances, nor known anyone who claims to have been helped by them except by a handful of utter moral cretins.

The firefighters question bugged me because it hit on something I actually did get training in, when I got my lifeguard certification. A lot of the emergency help part of lifeguarding is about preparing yourself to do what you can to improve people’s chances until the experts arrive. And we actually had a lesson on what do with messes where multiple people are at work and at risk of getting in each others’ way, with an emphasis on loud clear communication, like “Bob! Move that guy left!” as you haul up someone who needs to go into the space Bob put another victim who can rest in the next space over, and so on. I know that firefighters (at least some) get training in the same thing, since a firefighter taught us that lesson, so in the experimental question, the firefighter with the five babies to rescue would yell for their partner to move the one, then carry on.

The trapped-divers one had me thinking things like “What if two or three of us took some knockout stuff and went into deep sleep for the duration? Beats killing our buddy.” And so forth and so on. There seemed to be no suspicion that properly trained people might have access to options that do less irrevocable harm, and that while they increase some risks, greatly reduce others.

Real life example of the classic Cat & Counter Conundrum

http://gizmodo.com/5064773/motion-detector-turns-on-blender-strobe-light-when-cat-nears-for-hilarious-results

#105, this stuff was fairly common when I was an undergrad philosophy student in the mid 90s.

I recall Derek Parfit as a visiting prof imagining a parent, offered the chance to guarantee her child a happy life, on the condition that she, as soon as she had taken the deal, would never know of this happiness and would go to her death believing her child was miserable. That many parents can be expected to take this deal went to disprove the notion that parents put their child’s happiness ahead of their own because it makes them happy to do so. (Ie, everyone is selfish by definition.)

One brave student, just as Parfit was moving on, raised his hand and began to stammer the half-formed objections I was also thinking of. But … but … at the time of the parent’s decision … definitions of happiness … artificial scenario… Parfit shut him down and moved right along. I lost my naive faith in academic philosophy and big-name genius professors.

105 & the first two sentences of 114 seem right to me. I too quit after a few questions, irritated at the set up & knowing better than to suppose the designers would reform. Also, 116– they’re looking at the differences between people who CLAIM an AOS in ethics and those who do not. Any boy with survey toy can claim to be an ethicist. Any gal with or without survey toy can too. and? it’s not like we can quiz the people who take this survey and find out if they really have such expertise as they claim.

Cannoneo (115): what stuff, exactly? Philosophers often use artificial scenarios, and have done since Socrates. But the question is, what do we use them for? The experimental philosophy movement uses them in empirical tests intended to uncover patterns in people’s ‘moral intuitions’ (whatever they are). This is interesting, but highly controversial, not at all the mainstream, and as far as I know wasn’t going on in the mid-90s.

Parfit doesn’t use hypotheticals in anything like the same way: his scenarios are typically intended to isolate a particular move in an argument; or to show that a principle we take for granted has strange consequences, or is in tension with other principles; or to illuminate real cases by exaggerating particular elements of them; or as persuasive rhetoric. One reading of your encounter with him is that your friend’s objections weren’t objections to the argument being made, which is just that psychological egoism is false. That conclusion doesn’t depend on any of ‘at the time of the parent’s decision … definitions of happiness … artificial scenario…’, so far as I can see. One difficulty of teaching philosophy is that most people don’t stick to the point in discussion: we move all over the place by association. Of course, it’s possible to be an arsehole about keeping students on track, and maybe Parfit was one. We all have off days.

Sam C, my sense of Parfit’s device was that its artificiality made it useless for the purpose he intended, which is why I put it in the trolley car category. I take your point that invented scenarios and thought experiments are not inherently stupid and in fact are often indispensable.

The thing is, my intuitions were and are *with* his argument that psychological egoism is false. In my inexperience, perhaps, it seemed like a compelling theory whose refutation needed a fuller account. I still think the scenario falls very far short of that. It was the scenario, not the argument it was put to, that troubled me.

But I shouldn’t imply any judgment on Parfit. It remains a vivid memory for me because it made me question for the first time the always-reductive tendencies of analytic philosophy. These had appealed to me, as a young and rather sheltered man, because they favor a knack for logic over any accumulation of experience or social sympathy.

(oops: ‘Cannoneo’ not ‘Connoneo’ – sorry)

Actually, the “how much would you fine for X” questions struck me as the only good ones in the entire test. A big issue with most questions was the attempt to artificially jam a highly legalistic, top-down “legislators” framework onto moral questions that don’t fit that frame at all. But the question of how much you should penalize people based on the unintentional results of careless negligence is a very relevant question that societies actually do have to hash out through an impersonal legal system.

To do well in philosophy courses requires that one be able to do this sort of decontexted analysis without collapsing in rage or frustration, and then those selected people have their tendencies amplified by working with this kind of philosophy.

This is certainly an emotionally appealing explanation for my short-lived experience of said courses.

Pitkin has it right:
If you want to study people’s moral intuitions, you have to explore what practical heuristics people use for making decisions and what aspects of a situation are judged relevant. Not pick out a tiny subset of factors and conclude that if people don’t respond deterministically to those, they’re inconsistent or confused.

and this is a good point too: That’s IMHO what various commenters mean by saying the scenarios lack “context”—they lack social context, and social context is where our moral judgments come from.

Right. As several people said above, I based my calculation of the fine not on what the person’s life was “worth,” but what I thought would be an amount significant enough to hurt the wrongdoer, yet not so significant that they would go to great lengths to avoid paying it (bankruptcy, fake death and move to a new city, move abroad, etc.). The amount I put in that answer isn’t anything at all to do with whether I think it’s worse that a “little girl” got killed by a drunk driver or a “person” got killed by a bag of concrete. It has to do with “What amount will best accomplish the goal of punishing the wrongdoer, dissuading him/her and others from similar carelessness in the future, and actually having a realistic chance of getting paid?”

Other than that, my major objections to this quiz are a) forced, ludicrously unrealistic choices, b) no opportunity to discuss things with other people in the scenario (like the chemist-testing-her-poison/vaccine), and c) no acknowledgment that the ability to buy time is valuable, especially in high-pressure situations where another solution may emerge.

B) is particularly egregious, because the best real-life example I’ve seen in recent years were the doctors during Hurricane Katrina that were trying to make decisions about oxygen, medication, etc. for terminally ill patients. In many cases there one could ask the patient what they wanted to do.

This artificial world of individual moral actors who don’t have any social ties or context is just beyond stupid to me. I really don’t understand how abstracting problems out to this level tells us anything useful, or valuable, about what it means to be human and how to be a better one.

But that did mean I learned that Schwitzgebel thinks people might be basing their judgements on whether the hypothetical involved you physically touching the person you harmed. Is there any group of people with less grasp on how people assess moral decisions, than moral philosophers?

He’s not a moral philosopher; to the extent I understand his research into this question, his work can be described as a criticism of many of these types of introductory ethics examples. I think the hypothesis here is that rather than any dominant theory of ethics or morality, some more primitive reaction like proximity to suffering (homeless guy here vs. starving person 5000 miles away) or physical repulsion (physically killing vs. letting someone die without touching them) is what underlies people’s intuitions.

I doubt the guy’s conclusions are going to be ‘this proves that morality is about physically touching’; I suspect it probably underwrites a criticism of the limits of these kinds of introductory toy examples.

Cala– true, he’s not a moral philosopher. That, however, will not be likely to stop him from claiming otherwise (hasn’t stopped any of the other professional surveyers)

I wonder if John Woo spent any time studying moral philosophy. Would it have made him more or less prone to the sort of reasoning reflected in the “torture memo?” He seems to have wrestled with some of the same questions (even if he did wind up entirely off the mat).

“novakant 10.16.08 at 1:34 pm
I completed the test, but have to say it’s extremely lame:
– if I could be 100% sure of the outcome, of course I would choose 5 lives over one life”

Hmmm. I found myself wondering if the 5 people who were on the track had deliberately placed themselves in a dangerous/risky position (for a thrill?). This affected my thinking about whether I could justify killing the one person on the side track whom I imagined to be an innocent bystander.