Book: Would You Kill The Fat Man?

This is a book that explores the moral dilemma known as the trolley problem: a trolley is barreling down the tracks out of control, five people are in its path.

You have the option to divert the trolley to a side track where one large man is standing.  Do you throw the switch to save five but kill one?

Most people say yes.

Change the scenario.  The fat man is standing next to you on an overpass, if you push him over the railing his girth will stop the trolley.

Now most people say no.  Same result five people saved, same one man killed, different answer.  Why is this?

All sorts of variations of this thought experiment have been proposed.  So many in fact that the study of permutations has been given a name: trolleyology.


Or a different thought experiment: five people of the same rare blood type are in the hospital needing transplants.  Two need lungs, two need kidneys and one needs a liver.  A healthy young man checks in for a medical checkup and is found to have the same rare blood type.  Harvest his organs?  Why not?

Or this one: you go into a hospital for a routine cosmetic procedure.  When you wake up another person is laying next to you, connected by tubes.  The doctor explains the person needed dialysis but for some reason there was no mechanical device available, so they hooked him up to your kidneys.  "Don't worry," says the doctor, "in nine months this patient will get new kidneys from a donor, and you'll get your kidneys to yourself again."

Why nine months?  The argument is used by abortion proponents to explain why being forced to carry a fetus is morally wrong.

Here's a variation for Dick Cheney. A terrorist is holding five hostages. Do you torture him to get him to reveal their location?

How about if it's 20 hostages, or if there's a ticking nuclear bomb that will kill millions? At what point does the calculation change to make it okay to pull out his fingernails?

This was a relatively new subject when a class I took examined it. Considering it now, I find that my thoughts have not changed. That is, that the structure of the piece is unrealistic.

First, the questions are stated in an inconsistent manner, and make too many assumptions to be taken seriously as a psychological study.

When the situation and conditions change, wouldn't it seem reasonable that the actor's decisions might also change?

As to the challenge to Cheney, one would have to assume that torture is effective to make a positive decision. In any case, Cheney would probably torture the waitress to find out why the soup is cold.

I like this term, "ethical hiss."

David Edmonds wrote:

It's precisely because the trolley scenarios are so carefully engineered that they are of use. Real life is full of white noise, ethical hiss. The complexity of real life makes if difficult to identify pertinent features of moral reasoning.

So that's what it is. All these years I thought is was tinnitus.

After the trolley dilemma the author goes on to describe some of the odd legal and moral situations where intentional homicide has been deemed acceptable: to save a larger number of people (shooting a gunman), or cases of cannibalism on the high seas.  

Then he raises the prospect of Artificial Intelligence: if we ever design an artificial human we will have to somehow codify these moral dilemmas, which are fairly easy to describe in the abstract but get increasingly gnarly as you dig into the details.

Fascinating.

It does sound like a very interesting book (at least until you mentioned the bit about artificial humans; that should be left to science fiction writers, where it belongs). I may pick it up anyway.

NoCoPilot wrote:

By making the process into an abstract video game, conducted from thousands of miles away, the originators of the drone program have made it easier to kill 2,680 civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen

I don't agree with this.

NoCoPilot wrote:

The cultural bias against reproducing with your siblings has a strong evolutionary basis, but it has had the unintended consequence that unrelated children raised in Israel's kibbutzes rarely marry -- when they certainly COULD.

They do it all the time in South Israel.

The author describes the strange cases of Phineas Gage, who got a steel bar rammed through his head, and some unnamed other guy who got a brain tumor.  In both cases radical personality changes resulted.  Author makes the case, to a very large degree all of our behavior is determined by our brain, so how much ought we to be held responsible for it?  If a man could prove that malnutrition or beatings as a child caused brain damage, should he be convicted of antisocial behavior as an adult?  If a woman gets postpartum depression and kills her baby, is it her fault or the hormones in her brain?  

Slippery slope, separating the actor from the action.

_Howard wrote:

I don't agree with this.

Explain please.

_Howard wrote:

They do it all the time in South Israel.

Link?

NoCoPilot wrote:

_Howard wrote:

I don't agree with this.

Explain please.

What is it about my statement that you don't understand?

NoCoPilot wrote:

_Howard wrote:

They do it all the time in South Israel.

Link?

It's a joke about sibling relations in the South. Jeez.

Why do you disagree that drones make it easier, and less troubling, for Gen X and Gen Y soldiers to kill civilians?

Re: South Israel. Went right over my head. Zing!

Easier, yes, in the physical sense. Much more comfortable than historically.

Less troubling? Why would it be less troubling? Do you think these men and women controlling the drones are so stupid that they don't know what the results of their actions are? It is that knowledge that causes the problems. Interview a bunch of them ten or twenty years from now and see what they think.

Is there really a significant difference between the drone controllers and a guy controlling a flight of attack planes over the radio? Or is there some magic mileage number that soothes the brain?

I think there is a combination of immediacy and emotional distance that you don't get either with the radio-control (not so immediate, you can {subconsciously} push the responsibility onto the guys in the planes) or with guys in the planes (more distant). But in the end, I think you are right, and the toll will be paid, eventually. In fact, we are already seeing it.

A New Kind of Mental Disturbance? Drone Pilots Are Quitting in Droves

Fascinating.

Quote :

The Air Force explains the departure of these drone pilots in the simplest of terms. They are leaving because they are overworked. The pilots themselves say that it’s humiliating to be scorned by their Air Force colleagues as second-class citizens. Some have also come forward to claim that the horrors of war, seen up close on video screens, day in, day out, are inducing an unprecedented, long-distance version of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).

But is it possible that a brand-new form of war -- by remote control -- is also spawning a brand-new, as yet unlabeled, form of psychological strain? Some have called drone war a “coward's war” (an opinion that, according to reports from among the drone-traumatized in places like Yemen and Pakistan, is seconded by its victims). Could it be that the feeling is even shared by drone pilots themselves, that a sense of dishonor in fighting from behind a screen thousands of miles from harm’s way is having an unexpected impact of a kind psychologists have never before witnessed?

“Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke, that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors,” Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, told Democracy Now.

The Air Force has come up with a pallid interim “solution.” It is planning to offer experienced drone pilots a daily raise of about $50. There's one problem, though: since so many pilots leave the service early, only a handful have enough years of experience to qualify for this bonus. Indeed, the Air Force concedes that just 10 of them will be able to claim the extra bounty this year, striking testimony to the startling levels of job turnover among such pilots.

Some say that the drone war has driven them over the edge. "How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?" Heather Linebaugh, a former drone imagery analyst, wrote in the Guardian. "When you are exposed to it over and over again it becomes like a small video, embedded in your head, forever on repeat, causing psychological pain and suffering that many people will hopefully never experience."

"It was horrifying to know how easy it was. I felt like a coward because I was halfway across the world and the guy never even knew I was there,” Bryant told KNPR Radio in Nevada. "I felt like I was haunted by a legion of the dead. My physical health was gone, my mental health was crumbled. I was in so much pain I was ready to eat a bullet myself."

I have to rethink my last post. After reading that article, it looks a little like some of the drone controllers are acting like spoiled kids. Long hours? Boo hoo. Not treated like "real pilots" (which they aren't)? Too fucking bad.

In all of the reports I have heard and read about the drone program, this is the first time I have heard that they are civilians. That, I think, is not a good idea.

_Howard wrote:

Not treated like "real pilots" (which they aren't)?

Why??? Because they don't sit in the vehicles they control? Does that mean surgeons who control micro-surgery tools aren't real surgeons?

I'm sure you can come up with more - and better - analogies than that, but the fact is that sitting in a room with a joystick does not make one a pilot. Would you feel comfortable boarding a 747 and finding a drone operator in the captain's chair?

Actually I tried to think of some other analogies and that was all I came up with.

And to work, your 747 drone pilot would have to be seated somewhere besides "the captain's chair."

NoCoPilot wrote:

And to work, your 747 drone pilot would have to be seated somewhere besides "the captain's chair."

I don't know what you mean by this.

richard09 wrote:

I think there is a combination of immediacy and emotional distance that you don't get either with the radio-control (not so immediate, you can {subconsciously} push the responsibility onto the guys in the planes) or with guys in the planes (more distant). But in the end, I think you are right, and the toll will be paid, eventually. In fact, we are already seeing it.

I can't speak to the drone operators, but in the other case, there is a very strong sense of immediacy and connection to the action; there is little or no emotional distance. I understand your taking the position you do, and it is reasonable, but what you cannot know is the difference in the world one inhabits in warfare and that which we inhabit in civilian life. I don't want to make too much of it, but things are very, very different. Also, consider that the controller on the radio is not half way around the world, but is a few miles, or maybe a few hundred yards from the target area.

_Howard wrote:

I don't know what you mean by this.

If the kid was sitting in the pilot's cockpit I don't care if he has a joystick or a steering wheel.

So you're fine with a drone controller flying the airplane you are on?