I read an excellent science fiction book recently with an ethical dilemma similar to the famous switch-the-train-tracks ethical dilemma, and I thought it might be fun to chew over here. The dilemma is a pretty big reveal, so I’ll spoiler the title of the books in the series:
Seven Surrenders, the sequel to Too Like the Lightning
And here’s the (modified) setup:
You live in a world without war. There hasn’t been war for hundreds of years, and there’s very little death. But you uncover some sinister information. A secret cabal that includes insanely advanced statisticians has modeled society to the point where they can predict social tensions that are likely to erupt in war, and they’ve been able to pinpoint key individuals whose deaths can ease those tensions. A politician who’s too aggressive will leave the political scene if she mourns the death of her husband. An engineer working on a material perfect for military applications will not have his work replicated if he dies. A real-estate tycoon whose purchases are growing ever-more-rapacious will be hamstrung if her secretary is no longer in the picture.
So, for the past two hundred years, members of this cabal have been ordering assassinations. No more than a dozen a year over the entire earth, and they’re quick and painless and virtually undetectable–it was sheer coincidence that you learned of them.
Their methods are, as near as you can tell, responsible for centuries of global peace (you may or may not suspect that they’ve also grown very wealthy off of their activities). And they assure you, credibly, that there are three assassinations that must happen in the next four months; each one that doesn’t happen will dramatically increase the odds of the next war.
They beg you, for the sake of everyone, not to rat them out.
I wouldn’t rat them out, but not because I believe they’re ethical or not. That wouldn’t enter into it.
If I was to rat them out, then I would clearly be responsible for a massive increase in future wars due to shutting them down - which means that they’d be able to predict that I would do that with their models. That means that if I was going to ever decide to rat them out they would already have sent hitmen out to kill me or otherwise wreck my life. I’m susceptible to blackmail and threats, so, scared shitless, I’d back away slowly.
Assume there’s something–you’re too important to kill quietly without an investigation, or your evidence is already archived elsewhere when they find out you know.
I’d ask for a detailed explanation of how it works, to be sure that it does work. I’d ask for strong evidence that cause and effect are as strongly linked as they seem to be. Do the victims have to be killed? Can’t they be thwarted some other way?
But, if convinced, I keep mum. Sacrificing three people to save millions (not to mention the loss in money, goods, cities, art treasures, etc.) is a good price to pay. Even murdering three innocent people.
Their methods might (or might not!) have prevented war for two hundred years. But will they be able to keep on preventing war forever? And when war comes, what effect will their methods have on its severity?
I’m also highly skeptical that their methods could work. Take that too-aggressive politician, for instance: If her husband dies in an accident, or of natural causes, she might retire in mourning… but what if she had found out that it wasn’t an accident after all? That’d push her from likely to start a war, to almost guaranteed. And I have absolute, 100% proof that it’s possible for their secrets to come out.
There is absolutely no way I can be convinced that any such system would work. None. Not because I have doubts about the ability we might have to make logical predictions and so on, rather I know already that it CAN’T work, because human BEHAVIOR doesn’t function in the manner required for any predictive system TO work to that degree.
So “rat them out” I would, with extreme prejudice. Provided of course that I could actually do so. After all, it’s a pretty tall order to go about proving a vast conspiracy like that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done before.
But yes, assuming my “ratting” would work, that’s what I’d do without pause.
That’s assuming you want a real answer. If you only want fantasies, then you could stipulate that the impossible IS possible, and that I could be brought to believe it, and that I really WOULD directly believe that I was causing a world conflagration by interfering with the assassinations. In that case, my entirely fantasy answer would switch to me being a true Hero, seeing brilliantly that the actual cause of the evolution towards war were the assassins themselves, who’s efforst to stem wars, were actually bringing about imbalances that would lead to the greatest war of all, so I would arrange for them to all be assassinated instead of the butler, or whomever.
Totally aside from the question of whether the individuals ought to die or not, there’s another question- should this be secret? Not the specifics but the general knowledge that such an organization exists and does what it does for the overall benefit of mankind. IOW, should this small cabal retain the right to make that decision, or should it be up for public debate?
These are interesting questions. Assume that they can’t answer this question, except to say that they argue convincingly that revealing the truth will increase the risk of war within weeks of the revelation.
This, however, isn’t all that interesting IMO. If their methods don’t work, the question is trivial. Decide what evidence they could offer that you’d personally find persuasive, and include that in the hypothetical. Again, the discovery of their methods was a fluke; assume they’ll plug that particular leak that led to your realization, and that it’s unlikely they’ll be discovered by anyone else unless you spill the beans.
Cool, you don’t want to engage in a hypothetical. Stop by my house, I have a cookie for you.
Heh–I almost reframed the hypothetical this way, and I think it’s a great question. What if, instead of learning about this and having the chance to reveal it to the world, it were put before you as a vote? Again, unless you’ve got a disability that prevents you from engaging in hypotheticals, stipulate that the evidence offered to you of the success of this system is highly convincing: you believe that social tensions can be manipulated by this cabal in a manner that prevents war, at the cost of a half-dozen fairly painless assassinations of innocent people each year. Would you vote to continue or to end this program?
The evidence I’d need is evidence that I didn’t in fact learn about their operation. You say that my learning of it was a fluke, and very well, maybe it was. But flukes happen. And what happened once can happen again.
Okay, I’ll give you that. Once every two centuries, someone might find out about it.
I’m not trying to write a novel here; read the spoiler if you want that. The central interesting ethical question isn’t how good they are at hiding the system.
Without fighting the hypothetical, if I were quite sure they were doing what they say they’re doing I’d let it continue. Unlike the Omelas example, there doesn’t appear to be any suffering involved, just such quick deaths as we all get eventually without a bunch of damage and disease to muddy the ethical waters. “I have a little list, they never will be missed.”
Such advanced statisticians, and they couldn’t figure out YOU would find out? I’m doubting their perfect ability to preserve peace with the minimum loss of life.
E’rybody gonna know what this CABAL is doin’! Hide your kids, hide your wife, they assassinatin’ ERYBODY out here.
So killing Abraham Lincoln, before he becomes president, would have been fine with you. You would have prevented a horrible civil war and ensured a peaceful secession.
I think this is a little unusual, inasmuch as fighting aspects of the hypothetical, or at least fleshing out a credible form for the hypothetical, is pretty interesting in itself.
But let’s accept that there is some form of the hypothetical that’s credible: that we have a society where overall pain/suffering/death can be reduced very substantially by the selective occasional death of a few people; and that these statisticians can predict who to kill with sufficient certainty that the “expected social return” from each rare death is large and positive.
It seems to me that the simplest ethical approach is to apply the Rawlsian veil of ignorance here. If I’m a member of this society, prior to knowing if I (or a loved one) will actually need to die under the rules, do I buy into the arrangement? Am I prepared to accept a small chance of untimely death in return for a greatly improved expectation of well being?
If ignorance of the arrangement is essential for the system to work, then obviously we can’t actually put it to a vote. All I an do in the given situation is to make and honest assessment of how I think people likely would vote, and perhaps decide that it should require some kind of supermajority to proceed. If I believe the vast majority (as defined in the “vast majority” thread!) of people would be in favor of the system, accepting their own small change of death, then I should stay silent and allow it to continue.
