Rescuing the miners and the babies

Risk aversion says you should choose strategy 1 both times. Same expected outcome less risk.

What about either save 10 childern or save 100 babies 10% of the time and at the other times lose them all?

You are in charge of making the decision. You do so, and bring out 50 babies. Do you tell the parents which strategy you used?

[the other option is to run down to the mine railroad and throw the switch sending the 775,000 lb steam locomotive smashing into the side of the mountain, killing the obese engineer (driver) and brakeman but opening the path to the 100 babies]

50 babies have been rescued. The commander of the Nazi occupation forces will allow you to return them safely to their homes if you abandon the other 50 to the flames. Or you can take a 50% chance to rescue the others, but if you fail, troops will execute the 50 babies. What do you do?

I would probably even pick strategy 2 if the percent chance of success was only 33%…

/ I should probably not be put in charge of emergency responses….

The trolley problem has led me to give up on the search for an 100% internally consistent moral theory. John Dewey looks better everyday.

I agree with Thornton Hall, but as part of my distrust of the mechanics of the trolley problem stories, I’ll volunteer that the claim of “100% probability” in saving 50 people suggests to me that they are in a circumstance where some of the miners/babies are in a less immediately dangerous circumstance than the others, and taking strategy 1 involves intentionally choosing to consign a specific group to death in order to save the others (rather than it being unpredictable which 50 are saved). In that circumstance I would choose strategy 1, at the last feasible moment, which is what they do in movies when a ship’s hull has been breached but some of the crew can be saved by sealing off compartments where other crewmembers are still alive.

From a probability stand point both scenarios are equal.

For any given one individual baby the odds are at 50% for scenario one or two.

This question is more about ones appetite for risk. The risk adverse take the certain out come. The risk takers, the second.

A H @2

Risk aversion? Are you saying that saving 100 miners/babies is less than twice as good as saving 50?

Losing all 100 babies is more than twice as bad as loosing “only” 50. I believe that the argument from utility is for strategy 1.

However, I am somewhat of a risk taker (and not a devout utilitarian) and would probably take strategy 2 – depending on many variables, especially my internal “gut” feelings about the 50% chance estimate. I also should probably not be in charge of such decisions.

If 25 saved and 75 lost is strategy 1
and 25% chance of saving all 100 is strategy 2?

As previous comments have mentioned, the details which determine the probabilities must be specified so we nitpickers can be sure of the exact probabilities (maybe an evil villain offers a coin flip) before we pick a case. Assuming the probabilities are in fact exactly as stated (which is unlikely to happen), I would pick case 2, as in, “Do ya feel lucky, punk?” – yes, I do, and if I ever deserved a break it’s now, and if I’m wrong at least it’s more evidence for the faith-heads that there is no god for whom humans amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

How do you know that the probability is 50% in Strategy 2? I would rather have the problem be stated more realistically as “We have a second strategy. Either everyone lives or everyone dies, but we really don’t know the probability because we’ve never done this before, at least not under these circumstances. For what it’s worth the Alice says it is probably going to work, but Bob says the chances are slim to none. So the relevant question is not ” At what percentage, if any, would you switch strategies?” but is “What evidence for the possible success of strategy 2 would cause you to consider that over Strategy 1?”

OTOH. A problem that I read about today may be close to an actual instance of the problem as stated: Whether or not to dilute the doses of the ZMapp Ebola treatment to treat more people, but with less certain efficacy. The efficacy is at least theoretically knowable to a reasonable precision, but is of course not known right now.

Scenarios like this are generally used to justify moral absurdities. They presuppose an omniscience that doesn’t exist: that you actually know you are making a choice like this. We never do. If we had that kind of ability to know, we would have known that the situation was going to happen before it did, and prevented it. The only purpose of such scenarios is to reinforce our erroneous belief that we have some kind of control over the future. We do not. The cost is that it is this very type of reasoning that routinely gets us into wars, which never seem to turn out the way we’d planned.

An ethical system that relies on the ability to be omniscient is like a mathematics that relies on the ability to get a sensible result when dividing by zero.

I am with urple — there is no way to know the probabilities with that kind of certainty, so all kinds of other issues enter (e.g. framing effects).

Heck, even defining the probabilities is problematic — if you adhere to a Bayesian view of probability, scenario 2 means your belief in the outcome is completely uncertain (you have no idea if everyone will live or die, giving your prior probability of each as 50%). Basically a Bayesian is saying “either we save 50 or we try something where we have no idea if the miners (babies) will live or die”.

A frequentist view of probability sees the 50% as what happens in multiple rolls of the dice, in which case the two scenarios are equal (both save on average 50 people). That means something else besides logic makes you decide between the two scenarios.

I like the heroism bias of CP Norris above, and what I see happening there is a frequentist view (doesn’t matter) followed by the Bayesian view (we don’t really know with scenario 2, so maybe we’ll get lucky).

@Alan White: in a sense that puts the moral onus on the evil manipulator and changes the ethics of the problem.

Jason–my post meant to bracket the problem to put concerns about realistic probabilities about 50% aside with a posit that they were assumed in the manipulator scenario, nothing more. What’s left is on us.

Like the trolley problem, I think these sort of exercises give us little insight into what we should actually do (still less what we WOULD actually do) simply because we live in a world where absolutely nothing is mathematically certain (even, as once famously pointed out, that the sun will rise tomorrow). Which is basically another way of stating Ted Lemon’s point @23 – we are always uncertain because we are never omniscient.

Of course in this world even estimates of probability are almost always uncertain and known by all to be uncertain – that’s why we do Bayesian inference.

Reminds me of a report on NPR today, which mentions Ukrainian forces in Mariupol dividing themselves into two groups, one of which will fight to the death so that the other can get away.

Seems to me that the obvious answer, if it’s possible, is to defer to the wishes of the miners or the parents of the babies. to me, the more interesting question is how one would go about resolving differing opinions about the correct course among the miners/parents in question. for example, should the members of the “at risk” group be given more or less weight than those in the “safe group?”

I’ve always worked really hard to avoid situations where I might face these exquisitely balanced and seemingly artificial moral dilemmas. So far it seems to be working.

I like Donald Johnson’s comment better than mine, and in fact I’ve dealt with moral conundrums mostly by avoiding them.

We used to have a local opera company. After prolonged applause the audience would depart en masse to the adjoining parking structure. The eldest tended to arrive earliest and park nearest the exits. The younger typically arrived later and parked on the higher levels, and were quicker to reach their cars. The situation was like the rivers in Siberia which run north to the Arctic, flooding in the spring when their sources thaw before their outlets and in the fall when the outlets freeze before their sources.

Making my way through the ensuing deadlock entailed endless repetitions of a dilemma: should I be kind to a few olds, who have just reached their cars and have not had to wait, or to the hundreds of cars behind me? A straightforward utilitarian calculation would say that those late to their cars should have to endure what might seem to be an interminable delay. People tended to let them go ahead, though, to the detriment of the majority.

I chose to make my mother walk a short block (it was good for her!) and park where such problems didn’t arise.

I expect that at least a small minority will be at least mildly offended by the following, but when this sort of thing comes up, I find it impossible to resist quoting this:

[I]f you want to corrupt people by direct propagation of ideas, moral earnestness is pretty well indispensable. […]* A third point of method I would recommend to the corrupter would be this: concentrate on examples which are either banal: you have promised to return a book, but … and so on; or fantastic: what you ought to do if you had to move forward and stepping with your right foot meant killing twenty-five fine young men while stepping with your left foot would kill fifty drooling old ones. (Obviously the right thing to do would be to jump and polish off the lot.)

Elizabeth Anscombe, “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt the Youth,” Human Life, Action and Ethics, pp. 162–63.

Obviously, the last sentence is the offensive one, but for what it’s worth, I think Anscombe’s thought is deeply right.

*Put in brackets to indicate that this is ed., the later ellipsis is in the original text.

My kneejerk reaction is to try to save them all. That approach has a whiff of Kantian-Hollywood nobility and all-around egalitarianism. All or nothing! Kant AND Hollywood can’t be wrong. Right?

The presumption that the miners/babies/rescuers are all identical, interchangeable units of value is perhaps better suited to an economics discussion than a philosophy one. Likewise the burbling about probability, certainty and accuracy.

Take Pike River Mine, for example. There one question was: do we send rescuers to their likely deaths in an effort to find out whether there are any miners still alive after the explosion? After the second explosion the question became even more acute.

So in real life the philosophy questions very rarely come up, and when they so they’re very much more personal. Do I, the mine safety manager, drive out to the mine when I hear the first report? Or should I ring my lawyer first? When I get to the mine, should I attempt to take charge? Should I volunteer to go in to investigate?

Similar situations occur not just for those immediately involved, but for anyone who hears about the events. Should I send money? Well-wishes? Put a post on Facebook saying “20 ferals die in mine, more to follow with any luck”?

Sorry for the repeated posts, but I thought it’s worth pointing out that a ridiculous number of drownings occur when some idiot jumps into the water to save someone who is in distress. This study from Turkey found “In this 4-year period, 88 “rescuer” drowning incidents occurred in which 114 “rescuers” and 60 Primary Drowning Victims died from drowning in Multiple Drowning Incidents; 114 drowned “rescuers” rescued 47 victims before they died from drowning.

The statistics for other situations are not as bad, but it’s still distressingly common to hear of case where (for example) someone stops at a car crash and is run down by a passing car that didn’t see the crash or the “rescuer”. Or simply runs into the back of what is now a multi-vehicle pile-up, crushing people between the cars in front.

In the above thought experiment, how many rescuers are required and what are their chances of survival? What risk is there that the “mine collapse” will spread and put other people at risk? If they are evacuated, can the proposed rescue still take place or is it evacuation instead of rescue? Are the rescuers volunteers, or are they employed in roles that make it difficult or impossible for them not to “volunteer” for dangerous rescue roles?

I’ve thought there must be a class of questions I would call meaningless hypotheticals. My inspiration is the question we must have all asked ourselves (?), “What if I stood up in the middle of this theater and yelled….” (or whatever outrageous action you choose). There is no answer, because there is no question.

Do you philosopher folks have such a category?

Option 2 is unequivocally better. The expected number of survivors is 50 in both cases but the survivors are much happier in the second case, so utility is far greater. Not having lost half their mates nor fraught with survivor’s guilt, they will happily return to their lives in no time at all. The survivors in option 1, not so much. This is at the root of the three musketeers ethic. Who wants to live without his mates?

Of course, if we want to be real, most mine disasters are, in fact, predictable, and so discussions of this sort are actually excellent propaganda tactics that help to draw peoples’ attention away from that fact. (I am sure the author of this post did not intend this as a propaganda tactic; I’m just saying that we should be careful not to play into the hands of propagandists with our philosophical inquiries, and hence should categorically reject questions of this sort.)

Since none of them are foetuses, our moral obligation to protect them is dispensed with; let God sort them out.

“Since none of them are foetuses, our moral obligation to protect them is dispensed with; let God sort them out.”

Ha!

Tim ARmstrong has written about cannibalism among sailors surviving shipwrecks, going back to the biblical story of Jonah. Apparently there’s a real life choice between sacrificing the weakest and using lots. http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Cambridge-Studies-American-Literature-ebook/dp/B008FOSL5E/ref=la_B001H6KLU0_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1409414051&sr=1-2

Ingrid, this is (in large part) what John Broome’s Weighing Goods is about.
It’s interesting that some commenters have posed the problem as a choice between equality and risk aversion. One of Broome’s points is that Harsanyi’s Theorem shows a surprising connection between attitudes toward risk and attitudes toward equality — a logical connection, that is, not a psychological one.

I agree reality is more similar to the first though probabilities are highly uncertain, but we are discussing hypotheticals, so that should not deter us from considering the second, but the chance of ever facing such a situation is so fantasical, I doubt there is anything useful that can ever be learned from considering this. Angels..pins..

Human beings exist as parts of a network, and the value of a network increases exponentially with size. So the expected value of 100 saved humans should actually be more than double the expected value of 50, shouldn’t it? On this basis I would take the 50/50.

Drop it to 50/50 of 98 humans vs. a sure-bet 50, though, and I’m unsure again – since while I think there is a greater-than-zero ‘network value’, I don’t know how to evaluate that versus the value of a human life.

In the case of the miners, losing all of them represents a heavy hit to society. 100 families will lose their paychecks. Losing only half of them means that (if unionized) the survivors can adopt the families of the dead men, leading to an effective loss of only half the family paycheck, a better result than a total loss. Choose option 1: Rescue 50, write off the other 50.
In the case of the babies, they have contributed nothing to society or to the economy. Being non-productive workers, they represent a drain and an expense on both. They are therefore less important. Flip a coin. Saving any of them represents a risk: we cannot know if one of them will be the next Einstein or the next Hitler. Choose option 2: try to rescue all. If you succeed, you’ll be a hero, if they all die, they can be quickly replaced.
:)

I strongly agree with Urple and disagree in detail with Karsten.

Say the species is extinct except for me and 100 babies. (Ignore any problems I will have raising 100 babies by myself.) This is a narrow genetic bottleneck and there’s a strong chance we’ll die out from inbreeding depression etc. But 100 is better than 50, so if it looks like the same outcome on average, I’d try for 100.

On the other hand, say you’re selling babies to people who want to adopt into good families but can’t get them legally. And say that 50 gives you a decent profit while 100 gives you a fantastic profit. Then it’s better to settle for 50 and prepare for your next batch, because if you lose everything then you are sunk into poverty and can’t rescue any more babies, but if you are a going concern you have the chance to hit the home run next time.

If logistics is the important thing then you should call in that you will rescue 50, and then other people can have supplies ready for 50. If it’s either 0 or 100 then they don’t know what to prepare for and they are likely to allocate resources in some suboptimal way.

The basic theme is that outside factors may change the payoff, so that the payoff for rescuing 100 is not twice the payoff of rescuing 50.

But as Urple and others pointed out, in reality we hardly ever know the odds with any reliability. You can figure you can probably get half of them out, maybe more or less. Or you can try a strategy that has a one half chance to rescue them all, as best you can tell. But you know that you don’t know very exactly at all.

It’s a fire. Maybe you can rescue around half of the babies. Or maybe you can put out the fire before it gets bigger. If it’s worth trying to put out the fire then that’s worth the efforts of everybody who can contribute much to it. Because if it works, it works. If it won’t work then you need to salvage what you can.

Put that way, my instinct is to assign everybody who looks useful for putting out the fire, to putting out the fire. If it looks like it will work. And put everybody else to work rescuing babies, while that can be done safely. Even apart from the babies we’re better off if we can put out the fire.

Externalities are important. They can change the odds of success. They can change the value of different kinds of success.

But that’s in the real world. In Lady-or-the-Tiger questions where the intention is to balance things exactly so there’s no known reason to choose one side over the other and then see what people choose, if we agree that the value of 100 babies is exactly twice the value of 50 babies and the probability is exactly 50%, then AH has a point. Other things equal, you and everybody clse can plan better for a known outcome than for an unknown outcome. But if the average of 100 and 0 is not 50 for you, then you could get any result.

Cian has a point, if you need to think about your own rewards. If you get rewarded for success with no penalty for failure, then you should go for the sure thing. Unless that does not count as success.

If you get punished for failures with no reward for successes, then you might as well try to rescue them all and hope for the best.

If you get punished for violating rules, traditions, laws, etc then you should do whatever looks closest to the existing rules.

If you get rewarded for looking good to the media, then you should be good at telling the media what you’re doing, why it’s vitally important, why each next step is critical and could lead to ultimate success or failure, whether each step has succeeded and how everybody needs to feel about it, and finally announce victory or defeat. It isn’t if you win or lose it’s how you play the game. And trying to rescue all of them is the better story.

Societies face variations of this problem on a daily basis. The solutions are guided by the local legal or institutional framework, religious influence, cultural / societal norms, financial considerations, potential political ramifications, and emotion. (Within emotion I’m including everything from physical attraction to empathy to racial prejudice).

For both scenarios presented, assuming all points are exactly as presented, I’m not aware of any societies which would select to save 50% and doom 50%.

Who would make the selection? How would the selection be made? Coin toss? Would the “selector” be isolated to avoid receiving bribes to save a certain group? Who selects the selector? Would the selector attend the funerals of those he had assigned to die? Would families of the dead be permitted to sue the selector? Would families of the living pay his legal fees?

Some additional angles:

The 100 miners are in 2 groups. The 1st group are humanitarian award-winners who are on a fact-finding mission to improve mine safety. The 2nd group are criminals who had selected mine work instead of kitchen duty. An informant reported that they were planning to dig a tunnel to escape.

Solution: option 2. try to save both groups

Among the babies in the 1st group is one who is believed to be the newest incarnation of the Dalai Lama. Millions of Buddhists are following the story. Among the babies in the 2nd group is a newly born English prince, in line to be King.

Solution: option 2. try to save both groups

On an everyday level though, in real life, societies frequently choose to save some and doom others. Health Departments and funded medical researchers choose which diseases to focus on. Regulators choose which safety requirements to enforce and which operations (including mining) to target. Foreign aid organizations choose which countries will receive emergency food support.

You are a new Ambassador to an impoverished country. You have a remaining budget for the year of $5,000. You’re presented with 2 requests for approval:

1. End-of-year party for the diplomats, embassy staff, and their families. They have had a difficult year; morale is low; they are all looking forward to the party. They are planning a series of arbitration exercises to prevent conflict between remote villages. These exercises have been effective in the past. The party will include honoring local staff who were injured during exercises earlier in the year. The budget was $8,000, but the planning team has trimmed the food and presents down so it’s down to $3,500.

2. The northern provinces have had another bad harvest, and food supplies are low. A village leader has sent a message to the Embassy that food and supplies to support his village would require $5,000 to get them through the winter. They estimate 100 lives can be saved. Your advisors say that you will receive frequent such requests, that other villages will quickly ask to support them as well, and that there may be a violent backlash if the neighboring village sees you supported only their neighbor, with whom they have a land dispute.

Additional funds have not been approved.

I have a question.

When in history has anyone faced a dilemma much like this? What did they do and why?

Yeah, it’s not just subs crash-diving either. What if there’s an issue with emergency bulkheads and a hull breach? Do you wait for a proper evac or immediately seal the doors to decrease risk of further damage or complete loss of the ship? I don’t know any specific real world historical scenarios, but it has to have happened or at least be possible and not unreasonable to assume it could happen without being contrived.

On further reflection, in military situations calculation along the lines of the post seems to happen at higher levels of command. At lower levels, it’s “all for one and one for all”. That is, a lieutenant will risk a platoon to save one or two, but a general will sacrifice a battalion in the hope of saving an army. Or the battalion will sacrifice itself -as the Theban Sacred Band did so movingly at Chaeronea.

Captain Kirk would try to save them all. Spock would complain that it was not rational. C.P. Norris is correct that there is a heroism bias in fiction that probably effects how some of us react to this dilemma. Kevin (and Spock) are probably correct that this is pretty stupid behavior.

Spock will act on impulse then rationalise his decision afterwards. Kirk and McCoy will laugh about it.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Galileo_Seven

Push the fat man off the bridge. It might not save them, but it will buy some time.

Push the fat man off the bridge. It might not save them, but it will buy some time.

The fat man consumes more air than the others. Plus you could feed more people with his corpse if you have to resort to cannibalism.

#87 dsquared

The guy who says “we can certainly save 50 miners might be telling the truth but the guy who says “there’s a 50% chance we can save evrybody” s very likely to be bullshitting. So option 1 in both cases.

I think one of the most interesting things about this sort of question is the variety of external factors people choose to bring to it, that were not included in the problem.

I like to imagine it’s some sort of orphanage or nursery. They should not have 100 babies together, an infection could spread through the whole population easily. But they did. They should not have them in a building that’s designed so that with the fire blocking the main entrance, all the evacuation stuff has to go through two narrow doors and two narrow corridors. Considering the fire hazard, they shouldn’t have built that building in the first place. But they did.

Now you have a choice. Try to put out the fire, or try to rescue babies while the fire burns. It’s your professional judgement that your people can probably get about half the babies out before the fire gets too bad to get any more. And you have a chance to put the fire out before it kills anybody, but once it gets too bad you won’t be able to stop it at all.

And my natural instinct, unless the details prevent it, is to do both at once as best we can. Put the guys who’re best at putting out fires to work putting out the fire, particularly working from the outside near the main entrance. Put the people who don’t have those skills to work going into the narrow entrances and passing out babies. A baby-bucket brigade, if possible. If one has to take priority then decide which has priority, otherwise do both as well as you can. Anything the anti-fire guys do to delay the fire gives time to save more babies.

But the story is designed to make it as evenly balanced as possible. Like the Lady or the Tiger.

And the second interesting thing I see from that, is that when it’s balanced as well as the originator knew how, still sometimes people take strong definite stands for one over the other.

Like, say you have a choice between two vanilla ice cream cones. The cones are almost identical except:

The first cone has a slight crack that extends almost all the way down. If you eat it slowly it might eventually start to leak, and if you push on it hard enough at just the wrong angle it might crack open. It has your initials engraved in the ice cream on top where it’s easy to see them.

The second cone has somebody else’s initials engraved in the ice cream on top where it’s easy to see them.

Which would you choose?

Not unlikely they could get people arguing about it.

“Take the one with the initials! The other one will leak and crack open.”

“No, man, the second one was *meant* for somebody else. You don’t want the one with the wrong initials.”

“That’s stupid. It makes no difference and it will be gone after the first lick. The first cone has this big physical flaw that you can avoid.”

And not unlikely after a few rounds they’ll be arguing like Republicans and Democrats even though in this particular case there’s no significant difference between the choices.

When instead they could be arguing about the Democratic Party and the GOP where the vital differences will determine the future of the whole world.

I have no strong opinion one way or the other on these. The correct moral reasoning is to maximize the projected number of lives saved. If it was a sure thing to save 51 then that would be the right thing to do. If it was only a sure thing to save 49, then you should take the risk. In the contrived exactly even scenario it just comes down to whether you’re more risk averse or risk tolerant.

I don’t think the scenario is any different than if it was a choice between getting $50 for sure or a 50% chance of getting $100. Of course in the scenario with the miners we should let them decide which to go for themselves. As for the babies, who knows who in this hypothetical scenario is responsible for making such a decision. I wouldn’t second guess either decision.

#89 Shatterface

From my limited experience of the matter, and by ‘limited experience’ I mean watching Chicago Fire, fire fighting squads are split into those who fight the fire and rescue teams responsible purely for dragging people to safety: two different jobs.

That seems like the obvious way for me.

But somehow the way the question was stated, you are supposed to do one or the other.

I can imagine that, like everybody has to go through one narrow door and either team will interfere with the other team’s functioning so if you try to do both then neither gets done.

But it doesn’t come natural to me. If it looks like there’s a chance to do both, I want to do both.

s/b “most of the time”. Apologies.

And I should have closed quotation marks at the end of the comment.

I’m having a lot of difficulty imagining any situation where both A and B could be a possibility, outside special situations like mines. The helicopter on the roof waits for the elevator to reach both levels of the building and return? Maybe. The one ambulance in town doesn’t leave until the building is empty? Ambulance drivers probably have an ethos preventing that. Everyone ignores the babies while trying to fix a mechanical problem, or blow a hole in the side of the building, that will render the fire moot? As the chances grew that they would fail, would they really just stand there while babies died behind them? The only person with the keys to the building drives across town instead to cut the power, even though there’s a lot of traffic and he might not get there in time? Everyone goes out to construct a batsignal? The only thing I could think of was a situation where there were enough people to definitely rescue 50 if each carried one, but if each carried two, there was a chance both would die (because the first one picked up got carried around for longer). And the opposite seemed more interesting: what if it was standard to try to rescue two, but it turned out that always leaving with one improved the survival rate?

Priest @6 finds the way home:

50 babies have been rescued. The commander of the Nazi occupation forces will allow you to return them safely to their homes if you abandon the other 50 to the flames.

Obviously, you round up 50 miners with pickaxes, and attack the Nazis. Since armchair posers of trolley problems are much easier to physically intimidate than Nazi occupiers [citation needed], this approach resolves the original problem as well.

Fascinating. The question is interesting because it motivates me to consider my moral values. Option 1 is repugnant because not trying to save everyone is bad. Option 2 is repugnant because risking half in the chance of saving all is bad. After reading the fascinating comments, I find I’m afflicted with the heroism bias, and would try to save them all because Heroism.

Reading the comments was very educational. So many didn’t want to address the question as stated, but wanted to quibble and avoid it. I agree the question is not practical. It’s clearly not intended to be. This is not about rescue math and decision making, it’s about morality.

In a real situation, I’d go with option 2 and work like hell to change the math.

Thank you all for the mental candy.

Maybe it’s just my poor little head, but these problems underline why I hate frequentist probability approaches to one-off situations.

Anyway, option B may average out to saving 50 lives if you do it a hundred times, but the whole point is that you only get to do it once. You’d have to get up to a subjective 80% or 90% probability of success before it’s worth even considering the risk of option B.

Certainty wins every time. Option B basically forces you to gamble with 50 lives. Imagine if you had 50 babies already safe, would you put them back in danger for a coin flip of rescuing 50 more? That would surely be immoral.

Your inventiveness is impressive. Still I don’t think this has much to do with moral reasoning.

How much time do I have to make this decision? Can I put it off for an infinite amount of time? If so, I will postpone it until the minors grow up enough to replace the miners.

Are these human babies? Because I would not worry much about baby ants. Also the ants could certainly not replace the miners except on a very small scale.

The situation wherein I must make a rushed decision about human babies on this basis in intolerable. No human would accept it. Here’s what would happen in real life: we do one or the other option based primarily on conventional wisdom (what does it say in the manual that we should do?) or if there is no such wisdom then we choose based on some transient irrational factor, such as being a tiny bit closer to the magnet of imagining all the babies saved, or the magnet of “I am rescuing this baby NOW!” Having chosen one course, we immediately experience the endowment bias and a continually increasing sunk cost bias that reinforces our decision (we stick ourselves to the magnet). This serves as a sort of moral painkiller.

At the end of it we sue whomever it was who put us in this situation. Fire codes improve, future lives are saved, and we start to think the Triangle Waistcoat fire was a good thing.

BTW, we are in this situation right now as a species. Do we sacrifice now to rescue our children from global warming, or do we bank on the possibility that no sacrifices will have to be made and some miracle will save us? Humanity as a collective is obviously choosing the latter– accompanied by a whole lot of probability denial.

On second thought, I am going to save the ants. They will do well in the far future and I will need some friends.

So, on an adjoining thread, John Quiggin is asking for enough donors to pony up $1K so that he can enjoy a refreshing ice bucket bath after his upcoming triathlon. Last I checked we weren’t there yet.

Charity is a slow-motion performance of moral decision. I’m a man of means, and although I’m rather generous with friends and family, and respectably generous in the conventional way, I’m strongly inclined to hold tight to my millions. My acquaintances tend to upbraid me for my unwillingness to spend money on myself.

Professors love such gendankenexperimente because their students are obligated to serve as subjects. They’re easy to carry out, but not especially informative, because not only are their subjects WEIRD, they’re also young. We can find out what they think they think, but they haven’t had the time or wherewithal to do anything.

We can, though, measure what people actually do, noting how they vote or donate, how far out of their way they’ll go to put their trash in a suitable receptacle (not very far), and so forth. We seem to be more horrified by the beheading of a reporter by a terrorist group in Iraq than by the beheading of a housekeeper in Saudi Arabia or botched executions by injection in the U.S.

Compared to the daily news, such undergraduate puzzles are unrealistically bloodless. It might be better to wonder whether nuclear weapons are the right way to handle Ebola or drones in Ukraine.