Dragon Phoenix’s question about saving 10,000 unknown people or your most loved one. Raised for me the idea of this number ‘game’.
Given an unavoidable choice between saving the lives of one group or another, what number of beings’ lives in the first group would feel equal to the life of the being in the other group.
a) How many unkonown peoples’ lives would you weigh against your closest loved one’s life ?
b) How many unkonown peoples’ lives would you weigh against your own life ?
c) How many unkonown dogs’ lives would you weigh against your closest loved one’s life ?
d) How many unkonown dogs’ lives would you weigh against your own life ?
e) How many unkonown dogs’ lives would you weigh against one unknown Human’s life ?
I should have added, where all dogs involved are owned and well kept pets. And where the unkonown people are chosen completely randomly, some children, some elderly, some criminals… (so approx 1/3 would be Chinese for example).
For myself, my answers would be
OK I guess I’m barking up the wrong tree, in trying to get people to put values on these questions which are in essence allmost unansweable. But then again I felt I could give approximate answers myself, so maybe others here can as well?
I can’t answer these questions. It’s all “it depends.”
If some Galactic Wonder Baddie was saying I had to shoot my husband or watch 10000 people die, I’d refuse to do anything. Shooting my husband would simply be putting off the day when GWB (hey! That was completely accidental, and velly amusing) would find a different reason to off the 10000. And that’s the problem with this hypothetical. I wouldn’t trade my husband’s life in order to make a deal with an extortionist. Why? Because I don’t trust extortionists!
In movies, you’ll always see the GWB holding Vacuous Heroine hostage. Ass Kicking Hero bursts onto the scene and GWB holds a gun to VH’s head. “Drop your gun or she dies!”
But if AKH drops the gun, both of them will die. That’s what GWBs do. They aren’t to be trusted to live up to any agreement, implicit or explicit.
b) ~5 (assuming the instinct for self-preservation, which can be very powerful, doesn’t override the logical part of my brain.)
c) All of them
d) All of them
e) All of them
And by “all of them” I mean that I’m willing to let the entire species of canis lupus familaris go extinct to save a single human life, although I’d rather it not come to that.
So, a person lies in bed with death approaching. The Galactic Wonder Baddies hand you a box and say if you push the button every dog on the planet will keel over dead and their combined life force will be transferred to the dying person and they will be saved. I am surprised that anyone would push that button given that price.
Isn’t there a philosophical conundrum that relates to this? It’s been awhile so I may remember it a bit wrong but it essentially postulated that you could make a perfect world but to do so you have to torture one child to death. I thought the argument had it that making a ‘perfect world’ based on one painful death is fundamentally flawed and the ‘correct’ answer to this is to not kill the child.
The above seems similar. While I value human life more than a dog’s life I do value dogs’ lives as well. When you increase the problem to the extinction of a species to save one person I think the single human has to lose out in the balance.
That’s a bit different from the scenario that I was thinking of. I was considering the scenerio where I had to choose to push a button to kill the person, or push a button to kill all the dogs.
Even so, having thought things over a bit more, I feel that I should modify my answer. Take every instance of “all of them”, and replace it with “all of them - 5%”. Causing the sudden extinction of a species is probably a bit worse than ending a human life.
Also, my decisions are only valid if I know nothing about the person who is rigged to The Device. If I talk to the person for a while, and discover that they like to kick dogs for fun, they’re toast.
Really? I’d torture the child, on the grounds that, in the current world, children suffer the equivalent of torture every day. To end the turture of multiple children with the torture of a single child seems like a good deal to me.
I have to agree with you, actually. I didn’t think very hard when coming up with my original numbers. Consider my answer modified to be “all of them - 5%” for the dogs
Whack-a-Mole, you’re probably thinking of the Grand Inquisitioner’s dilemma, devised and dramatised by Dostoyevski (sp?) in The Brothers Karamazov.
Actually I’ve heard (in newspaper reports) that already there are lots of species that go extinct every day, only no-one (except a few biologists) really cares since they are not the cuddly kind. Think lots of species of bugs in rainwood forests. From what I understood not even all biologists find it a big loss. IANAB, so feel free to correct me on this.
Sorry I said > 10,000 not to mean 10,001 but to mean that the number 10,000 from the original idea in the other thread was too low.
Thinking more about it,
c) would be All Dogs, I don’t think I could live with myself afterwards though.
d) would be All but a few breeding pairs of dogs. Luckily I wouldn’t have to live with myself afterwards.
the answer for
e) I find floats about whenever I think on it, sometimes it feels like 20 pet dogs for 1 human life, other times it feels like All Dogs for one life.
One of my philosphy professors liked to call questions such as this “lifeboat situations.” The archetypical example would be, “What would you do if you were in a lifeboat with three other individuals and there was no food left?”
The point is that (a) these are situations that are not likely to ever happen in somebody’s life, and (b) because the hypothetical is so far outside the realm of experience, there’s no way to judge ahead of time what one would do in such a case.
a) Do I get to interview the people first? How many are Republicans?
b) Ditto
c) What kind of dogs? If it’s those little yappy things or rats in dog suits, then none. If it’s Australian Shepherds, then it would depend on if my loved one has pissed me off lately.
d) None
e) See (a).
I think the value in such stupid questions is that it helps us think in terms of cause and effect different to our usual situation.
Imagine this equally stupid scenario
Walking home from work you get hit by a bus, and passout.
When you awake you are in hospital, and soon learn you had been in a coma for three years. After a while you recover fully.
A few months later you realise you havn’t seen a dog since the accident, when you ask about this you learn that your life was somehow saved by a genetically engineered virus, that had the sad side effect of killing of all of the canine species in the world. WOuld you prefer to never have survived in order that dogs were still in existance?
I would I think rather had died in the above situation, but as others have pointed out biological species become extinct all the time without us worrying too much about it. We also living in the prosperous parts of the world, rarely do anything like our full potential in helping other humans to live, especially when the other humans are unknown to us.
A. 1
B. 1
C-E can’t say. I’d assume that if you killled all the dogs, that would kill more then 1 person. Blind people getting hit by cars, people getting deppresed and commiting suicide etc.
On to that perfect world torturing a child thing. The awnser is oblviously not to torture the child. Because if you had to torture 1 child to get it, the world would intrinsically be imperfect, so the whole concept is flawed.
