On the philosophical – moral implications of a 1989 Honda Civic

The top thought experiment always makes me go “This is stupid, because obviously, if you have a circle of five people dying because of five distinct organ failures and they’re all type matches, you don’t involve a sixth person, especially unwillingly, you have the dying play Russian roulette after filling out the organ donor paper work”.

As a greenie (in the US!!) with an electric car and electric bike and solar panels and heat pumps in the garage, I empathize. My own teenage son in very much similar circumstances recently got me to buy him a 1968 mercedes diesel car. I’m making myself feel better by only putting renewable diesel in it.

This reminds me of reflective equilibrium, the Rawlsian concept where we let our intuitions clash with our theoretical conclusions and find answers about what to do, somewhere in the middle.

One young man using a passenger car to drive thousands of kilometers around Europe, just so he can walk up and down some mountains, is objectively wasteful.

It’s still better than flying I think.

I think this is a lovely story and you are right to feel the way you do. Your son keeping a car from 1989 going with the embedded emissions that entails is fantastic. And if he finds a couple of friends to join him on his hikes, even better. I have a problem with the low emissions number for buses. Don’t they only hold if the bus is full? I live in a city with a relatively small population where at “off -peak” times the buses often travel their routes with four or fewer passengers. In this case wouldn’t four people in a passenger car be a better option? Car-pooling is an ignored way to reduce emissions. Two people in a car halves the emissions, four quarters them.

Passenger cars are sometimes a necessity, obviously. That’s especially true if you live in the United States,

Also, alas, Australia. Where I live, in particular, is _very_hard to get around w/o a car. (There are more and mroe electric bikes, which, unlike, I think, in the US, often go as fast as a car, are the size of small motorcycles, and are dirven with reckless abandon and contempt for road rules by young kids. It’s pretty dangerous!) Melbourne was better than where I live now, but still worse for both public transit and bike riding than was Philadelphia when I lived there. That’s saying a lot!

My best friend when I was in high school had a Civic like that, though it must have been a bit older. I spent a lot of time in it. I now have a Honda Jazz (called, I think, a Fit in the US) whic isn’t a bad car, but not as good as the older Civic in some ways. (A new Civic has, like most cars, “grown” quite a bit, so now the smaller Jazz is maybe slightly bigger than the older Civic.) One big problem with the Jazz is that it has terrible blind spots, which is especially bad with a bunch of 14 year old boys on electric bikes (or especially electric motorcycles) wizzing by 60+ km/hr and no regard for turn signals.)

@ Chris Armstrong

they really ought to have the concept of things that are morally bad, but not morally forbidden

I seem to recall coming across “suberogatory” – perhaps that is in line with this?

Suberogatory! Of course! Well, like a linguistic Honda Civic, makruh does it in a third of the syllables.

I drive my late Grandmother’s 1987 Toyota Camry. A fine, peppy little car with great mileage. I get about 300 miles to a Tankful. Tank holds 15 gallons.
I like it.

Apart from the silliness of intuition pumps like the organ donor problem, I have a consequentialist response which is a weak Pareto improvement on the case where everyone dies. Instead of kidnapping a random passer-by, the five people draw straws. The one who draws the short straw is euthanised and dissected, and the other four get their organs. All five are better off in expectation.

Thanks for the fine post. Two observations

1) Great car choice. Your son clearly knows his stuff. I was once an amateur gear head and the civic is a best in class for all the reasons noted.

2) I differ a bit on whether a hiking expedition is wasteful and self indulgent. I’d judge it a personal learning experience and one which will help him further develop as the fine young man he seems to be (no doubt via your influence). Its not always linear to say how the trip will payback a return on the investment in hydrocarbon emissions, but its plausible that it will.

Doing burnouts in a parking lot – that’s makruh. Taking a voyage of personal discovery, that’s not – at least as far as I understand the term.

I think your gut instinct is telling you that – hence the feelings, which feel off but are actually from the heart.

2 cents worth and no more

Trolley problems generally are stupid because they do not consider enough possible influences on our decisions.

For example, let’s look at the utilitarian decision in the first example. Once you consider the idea of disability-adjusted life year (DALY), you might notice that the DALYs of the transplant patients (after transplantation) are much lower than the DALYs of the donor. In that case, it would make sense to save just the one. Or it could go in the other direction.

On to the second problem.

The idea of using one of the 5 needing organs doesn’t make any utilitarian improvement over sacrificing the single person: at the end there is one dead person and 5 live ones. But using the concept of DALY, sacrificing the one with the lowest number of DALYs would be the best utilitarian solution. Or, you could simply wait for the first of the 5 to die and donate their organs. No need for a lottery. But that assumes DALYs after transplant stay constant during the wait.

But the second problem has other issues. The identified donor is uninvolved with the 5 needing transplants, and you would be making the choice to involve him.

If you don’t have that much information, you might rely on heuristics such as 5 is better than one. Or a heuristic that success of transplants is doubtful. Or a heuristic that we leave life and death choices to free individuals. Or a choice of utilitarian versus deontological ethics, whichever seems to come to mind.

And then there is decisiveness. Some might waffle until it is too late. Some might decide that they will not make a decision and so do nothing. Some might decide they need more information to make the right decision. And some might just chose one way or another.

Or you might worry about blame. If people know you were the one making the decision, you might make a different decision than if it were anonymous. Or if you were institutionally protected for your decisions.

At best, trolley problems indicate that the problems themselves are underspecified for making clear decisions because real people take a large number of things into account. We already know that.

Regarding the degree of sin or mukrah of having a car:

In this time and state of technology, there is simply no excuse any more for buying a new car with a combustion engine, with very limited exceptions. Buying and operating a used car is a different matter. Otoh you are keeping an oil consumer in operation, otoh you are avoiding the huge energy and resource impact of building a new car.

If you are contemplating buying a new car, make it electric, but consider very carefully whether your needs aren’t at least as well taken care of by e-bikes for every adult and if really necessary a carsharing subscription. In many places, most car trips are so short that they can easily and almost always more quickly be handled by e-bike.

Once one has a car, and assuming it’s a reasonably efficient one and not the worst gas-guzzler on the road, obviously one should avoid unnecessary trips but it isn’t really worthwhile to make too big a fuss each time. There’s also nothing wrong with taking a longer leisure trip once in a while, it’s almost certainly better than flying a similar distance. Car-owners can and should get in the habit of using bike or public transit where reasonably possible. The cost here is a problem because while the overall cost of car ownership is far higher than public transit in most cases, the marginal cost of driving an extra distance is probably lower than paying a bus or train fare.

Bike is always cheaper, both overall and in the margin. But public transit is often expensive at the margin. That’s one reason why free or almost public transit is a good idea. Germany was very close when they introduced access to all regional public transit nationwide for just 9 Euro per month, a few years ago. They raised the price to now 58 Euros, which is still a bargain for regular commuters (and one example showing that tens of millions of Germans have significantly benefited from the last government’s reforms, but that didn’t matter to the media owners) but not for occasional users. The sad part is that even when puclic transit is cheap or almost free, very few car owners change their habits. That was again clear from the German example: even when gas prices went through the roof and transit cost just 9 Euros per month, only a few percent of car owners wer enticed by the financial incentive to change their commuting habits. The real problem is that the car is an ideoliogy, not a means of transport for most car owners.

I’ve never owned a car, although I often had to rent one for field service trips to power stations before retirement. I walked to and from the GE plant for distances between 1 and 3 miles year round. Also to grocery stores and malls, or sometimes by bus. I tell myself if there aren’t enough resources to provide and fuel a car for every family in the world, which I don’t think there are, plus they add to pollution and kill people, I shouldn’t have one that I don’t need just for its convenience. I understand most people in the USA don’t have that choice.

Now that I’m retired in a suburb, as I walk to a supermarket I sometimes count the number of cars going by me with a single occupant. I have never, at any time of day, counted less than 100 in five minutes. I can envision a loop around town hitting two shopping plazas, a mall, and several supermarkets, using off-duty school buses, which I think could pay for itself.

The story about your son is still very cool, of course. Thanks for the statistics on cars, busses, planes, bikes and walking. I had a bike in a big campus in college, but it didn’t work in winter there, and wouldn’t here either. When my curmudgeon index is high and someone whizzes by me on a bike without any warning I sometimes say, “SideWALK–it’s right in the name!” (There are narrow bike lanes on the sides of the main roads.)

I found this discussion of the problem of the trolley problem interesting, but incomplete. The author forgets about the many other non-Japanese Asian civilians who were also on the track.

Masahiro Morioka, “The Trolley Problem and the Dropping of Atomic Bombs,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2017), pp. 316-337.

Know I’m not welcome but the aggravation induced by the sacrifice one donor for five patients gotcha is just too much. If a patient going into a hospital risks their life at the hands of a doctor doing calculations about how many other patients he can save by dissecting the patient? Then hospitals lose their utility for pretty much everyone. It’s hard to see why they wouldn’t all close down. Of course, that’s a convoluted way of saying, it’s not right to kill people. Not a believer in utilitarianism (not all problems are calculable and most trolley problems assume an impossible certainty—the fat man variation is particularly egregious.)

On the original trolley problem? I would like to see a discussion of the jurisprudence of the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of the one killed. As near as I can make out, it’s still not clear that legally premeditated murder charges aren’t justified. Mens rea is inarguable.

About the trolly problem (I didn’t read the comments yet so sorry if someone ele already made these points), I think the OP touches two different questions:

The first question, about the surgeon version of the surgeon, is that in the tought experiments we start from assumptions that we have to take for granted that are true, and we can assume a simplified behaviour from all parties, but in real life we work in a limited knowledge situation and with hipocricy, and our moral intuitions generally are built on these assumptions.
For example, the trolley problem changes a lot if you only think the train will kill the 5 people, but you are not sure of it.
When we go into the organ transplant situation, we know that in the real world there are many people who need an organ transplant, and many might have no problems in killing other people. If we legitimize the logic of maximum happiness in the real world, many people would just try to take advantage of this and go around killing others and reselling the organs, so our moral intuition clearly tells us that this is a bad idea.

The second is the problem of the limits of altruism: utilitarianism, if taken literally, asks people to be almost totally selfless, but not even saints can do that. What happens in reality is that people generally act egoistically, but moral codes put pressures to push people to be more altruistic, so even good people will be generally something in between natural egoism and socially/ethically induced altruism.
But, I don’t think that deonthological ethics can really solve the problem, apart from the fact that you can just simply summon ad-hoc moral principles and call them “deontology”, beecause deontological systems also are based on pushing people into altruism (because all ethical systems ultimately are ways to make society work with less crises).
If anything, some variants of utilitarianism still work better here when they say that enforced extreme altruism would just make everyone unhappy, and so some space for egoism should be mantained.
It seems to me that the “Honda Civic” version of the trolley problem hinges on the second problem, that of the limits of altruism and that a certain share of egoism should be granted to anyone; although this seems banal, consider that all the moral and social conditioning we had in our lives (the superego to call it in freudian terms) pushes us to deny that this is true, and also to pretend that our egoistic needs are for some reason morally funded.
I think people can think more clearly about morals, and also their own morals, when they accept that not all our actions and desires can be moral, and morality is only one of the forces that determine our behaviour, and can never become the only one.

hix, most people have no problems charging e-bikes and also it’s simply not true that most people are afraid to ride bikes. What is true is that there is a lot of room for improvement in German cities (which I assume you are referring to?). There are reasons why progress is so slow in certain places, here’s a hint, it’s because car owners have too much political power and are defending their privileges by all means.

So, this is a better writeup of my comment above at 34.

When we speak of utilitarianism, there are many situations where a direct utilitarian calculus goes strongly against moral intuitions.

This IMHO mostly happens for this reason: the utilitarian idea is very good as an explanation of what the “ultimate goal” of ethics is, but it doesn’t work in real cases because a real utilitarian calculus cannot be executed due to the extreme complexity if applied to the real world with real level of lack of information; in practical application, a variant form of utilitarianism that is generally called “rules utilitarianism” (but I would rather call it limited knowledge utilitarianism) should be applied, and this variant looks more like a deontological approach (although in reality it is still an utilitarian approach).

There are also two other questions, “are people really natural utilitarians” and “what are the limits of acceptable egoism”.

Speaking of the “limited knowledge utilitarianism”, here is an example of the problem:
Suppose that I know what are the best possible political choices, about e.g. climate change, economic policy, etc.
Because I know the best option, other people could only do wrong, so I should logically seize the power as a philosopher king and rule everyone with my iron fist of love.
It is obvious that this would lead to disaster as the sheer fact that I rule others makes other people unhappy, plus in reality I have no way of knowing that my opinion in politics are actually better than those of others: the simplified utilitarian calculus that would justify me being a philosopher king can’t apply in reality.

In the real world, we only have an approximative understanding of what the consequences of our actions will be, so we have to act through rules of thumb that ideally lead to the higest possible happiness, so stuff like “do not kill”, “do not lie”, “respect other people’s autonomy” etc., that look a lot like deontological principles, apply to our moral behaviour.
These rules look like deontology because, being rules of thumb for everyone’s behaviour, they follow the kantian logic of “if everybody did this it would be good”.
So what is the point of utilitarianism if it approximates deontology?
The point is that it gives an explanation of where these principles come from, and can even explain why all these principle might be violated at time (since, in the real world, sometime it is morally just to break the “do not lie” and even the “do not kill” rules, even if it is very rare).

When we have the trolley problem [transplant] we have a different intuition from the trolley problem [classic] because, in a real situation, there are many differences that make the approximative calculus very different: in the transplant case, you might have doctors prowling around searching for victims to get new organs, and this would make the world unliveable for everyone by creating a climate of fear (or as s.t.j. suggests, nobody would enter an hospital anymore) and therefore in the real world this would decrease total happyness, so it’s a no-no; the classic version doesn’t pose this problem, so even if inside the mind experiment they have the same structure, the classical example has a much more positive calculus for splatting the single person.
It is intuitive that, since this utility calculus is very approximative, people might have very different opinions about what is a good idea and what is not.

Then there is the question, “are people natural utilitarians?”, or more generally about the relationship between utilitarianism and moral intuitions.
Often moral theories are tested against moral intuitions, but then, if we can trust moral intuitions, what are moral theories for? Also where do moral intuitions come from?
Probably we have some basic “natural moral system” due to the fact that we are social animals (this was Darwin’s opinion), but most of what constitutes a “moral system” are social norms that are learnt.
We mostly learn this stuff in childhood from our parents, and more or less this kind of conditioning is well described by Freud’s concept of the “superego”: first my father tells me not to put fingers in my nose, he repeats it a lot and I don’t want to be scolded (or I desire to be loved), and at some point I introject this norm and stop putting fingers in my nose.
All these introjected norms become unconscious and the “eye of conscience” inside my head.
The “social animal” part is what makes us care for these injunctions and introject them,
so we all will have, so to speak, a “superego directory” in our minds, but the content of this directory changes for every persons, since we all will have recieved different injuntions (though many will be common inside the same society).
Since the superego is inconscious, both the “natural moral system” and the socially generated superego will give us moral intuitions.

So, already from the “finger in the nose” example, it is evident that not all these injuntions will have a pure “utilitarian” character.
On the other hand, there is a similarity in the fact that the superego, after all, records the demands other people make on us, and utilitarianism demands from us to take in account other people’s happiness.
So the relationship between moral intuitions and utilitarianism is this:

We have a natural tendency, due to the fact that we are a social specie, to care about other people (probably a restricted group of individuals that would be our “tribe” in a natural setting) and about what they think of us, both to avoid blame and to be loved/liked.

This natural tendency, plus an ability to “register” these things in our subconscious, create the “superego”, an internal moral code.

But as societies become more complex, this moral code has to work for a larger and larger number of people; if we extend this process ad infinitum, we get to the point where we have to care for every person, for humanity in general. This abstracted approach gives us utilitarianism, where we care “in the abstract” for all humanity, and instead of demands and injunctions we have an abstract commitment to other people’s happiness (since abstract humanity cannot give us “injunctions”).

So the usefulness of utilitarianism is not that of making people more moral (since people can ignore utilitarianism like they can ignore any other moral system), rather, when we are in a situation where two different moral systems are in conflict 8something that happens quite often) we have a logic (or at least one abstract principle) by which to understand what is the better one.

Here to the third question, “what are the limits of acceptable egoism”.
So I’m going on with my “superego” analogy, and note that when I apply “utilitarianism”, I’m putting overall utility above my own interest, and therefore I’m acting following my superego, and not my immediate desires.
But, my superego is just a collection of what other people want from me, so a society where everybody acts ONLY on their superego is unworkable and nonsensical, since somewhere someone HAS to desire something for himself/herself for the whole system to work; even if we reject psychological egoism based on the idea that we are a social specie and thus we have empathy (cue Darwin) it still is the case that when we use empathy we have to impute some egoistic desire in others, otherwise empathy would be useless.

Therefore, if people really always acted on pure simplified utlitarianism, everybody would be unhappy, thus defeating the whole point of utilitarianis.
Here comes again “rule based utilitarianism”, where we have to assume that a working form of utilitarianism has to accept that people need a certain “accepted level of egoism”, otherwise the system would be so rigid that only saints[fn1] could live by it, and therefore useless.

I do not have a good way to tell exactly how ample is this “accepted egoism area”, but it seems to me that a Honda Civic fits into it.

“also it’s simply not true that most people are afraid to ride bike”
In general not at all, never claimed that. On the typical routes here, yes. The broader point if you like besides me being angry and self expressive is that it can get costly to go against prevailing social customs, among other things because they tend to get reinforced by absolutely idiotic rules like a ban on charging based on distorted risk evaluations. It just adds up to a no bike town, even so there was a visible push in the other direction with all the bike signs/bike lane that really is just part of the big street all the same effort.

@Tm 41

From the translation that I got of your article, the landlord can totally forbid you to keep and/or recharge the bike in the common areas, that is where most people who don’t have a garage usually keep bikes.

Objectively, yes, driving halfway across Europe to walk on some hills is makruh; ecologically it’s practically the definition of makruh.

Subjectively, he’s your son, he’s living his best life, you love him and you’re proud of him.

Objective is good, but subjective is who you are – and besides, subjective includes a bunch of tacit knowledge that objective may not know about yet. We should all let objective overrule subjective a lot of the time, but not all the time and certainly not automatically. (I feel like there ought to be a snappy “my karma ran over my dogma”-type way of phrasing this, but as far as I know there isn’t.)

Also, minimalist hiking sounds great (in a gritted-teeth, very much not-for-me way), but I really hope Jack’s bare essentials include a phone. And that he’s seen 127 Hours, and preferably Fall, and maybe Alive and/or The Mountain Between Us… This is partly the very-much-not-for-me thing, but it’s also me speaking as the father of a young man, who when he was Jack’s approximate age was firmly convinced that he was immortal and invulnerable. The call we got from him one morning (UK time), from a mountain in China – beginning, of course, “I’m OK…” – will live in memory for a long time.

Breaking news: improperly handled or stored batteries may catch fire. This is completely unlike other forms of stored energy, such as petrol or natural gas, which are notoriously incombustible.

I’m looking forward to yet more staggering revelations, such as ursine defecation locations and the nature of the religious beliefs of the pope…