I think that, in your scenario, most reasonable people would say the guy with the babies tied to him (lol!) would be liable for their deaths as he was the one that purposefully put them at risk. That’s why I tried to change the original trolley case to remove the evil philosopher tying the guys to the tracks, but that the people just happened to be on the tracks (we don’t know why).
Perfect knowledge is not required - some knowledge is. Human action in a social environment would be impossible unless people were able to be reasonably sure, if not 100% certain, how other people would act.
People own themselves. Killing them may well by thought of as a violation of their property rights, then. Property is plainly addressed.
The scenario’s are not analogous: Using a nuclear bomb to save the few people the gunner would kill is not proportionate, using a rifle to shoot a few sufficient babies to be able to take the gunner out is: In Ego’s example, you kill a few to save a few more. In yours, you kill many in order to save a few.
Not in the scenarios as I set them up, as can be seen by the differences between pulling the switch in the trolley case, but not pushing the fat man in the second case or butchering the traveller in the third case.
The scenario is not analogous to the trolley case, but to the pushing the fat man case. In the trolley case you action (pulling the switch) kills the single person. However, you did not intend their death, and their death was not the means to save the five other people. In your example, though, if I kill someone because you have a gun to my head telling me to, the death of the other is something I intend, and their death is the means by which I save myself.
Good question. Or, what if the people were on the tracks because they were backing off from prowling tigers. We don’t normally assign moral responsibility to animals, so the animals cannot be blamed for purposefully constructing the set up, unlike the evil professor.
I’m not sure that this undermines traditional rights theory, it just means that rights theory is more complex and multi-facetted if it is to account for people’s moral intutions in cases like these.
That would suggest that not saving the five people would be moral? How can you square that with people’s moral intutions?
It is one thing to say that the people involved have no right that you save them, and so you have no obligation correlative to that right. But, unless you can show that all obligations to others are correlative to rights that they hold against you, it is quite another to say that you have no obligations to help them that are not correlative to any right they hold against you.
I suppose doing nothing would in fact be better than doing something in the case of pulling the switch. In the case of pulling it one has now caused a death to take place. In the case of doing nothing, one has eschewed no obligations that they can be said to have.
Surely the rights-violator would at least owe the victim compensation?
Grant, at best the natural sciences can tell us what phenomena occur when we engage in ethicizing. Facts cannot speak for themselves though, and this is perhaps why Kant was so intent on stressing that morality must be known a priori. All the natural sciences can reveal is which internal bodily functions coincide with which actions we take. If I recall correctly, Steven Pinker associates cognitive as well as emotive facets of the brain as active when engaging in moral reasoning. But such explanatory accounts of what morality consists in biologically, how it arose &c. are of little use in grappling with it. Conceptual work is necessary to resolve the issue of what morality is, exactly, if we are to achieve more than mere correlation. I agree with Richard’s counter on natural rights.
-Jon
This is so funny and disturbing for a Monday morning.
Lol. definetly.
Well, now, free will is a thorny idea, is it not? Is a woman who acquiesces to sex under threat of death not raped because that was her free will? Since we seem to be using examples of strapping ridiculous things to ourselves, ought the Somalian, watching his children die of starvation, stand by idly while a fat European, wearing a jumper made of donuts, skips merrily through, refusing to part with a single one? I know many here will say yes. Yet I think the ethics of civilized man operate only in civilization. When people starve, when killers threaten, we have lost civilization, and are now dealing with a primal and animal situation. We are animals, just as we are men, and while it is very nice and convenient for people to moralize from an armchair for those facing death, I am unconvinced that it is legitimate.
I can’t agree with any of this. It’s not fair to claim that someone acted in free will when he/she is being subjected to torture. In that case, the real agressor is the coercer, and that’s who should be charged with the crime.
Ignoring whether or not you want the coerced to be charged with the crime, do you want the coercer to be charged with the crime?
Those are all straw man arguments. Obviously the women was coerced into having sex under threat of force which goes against the whole idea behind libertarianism.
But that’s beside the point. You’re using the same logic as the statists - we must sacrifice the individual to benefit the masses. That kind of thinking leads us down a long and slippery slope not to mention that it isn’t compatible with libertarianism at all.
On the contrary, it is you who asks the individual to sacrifice his life to preserve the smooth operations of the contractural society. I do not propose that one who is hired to steal (as if a starving person has the resources to do so) for a starving man is right to do so, but only the party who is actually operating under coercion.
This is true. The ethics of civilized man operate only in civilization. When people are starving or being threatened, their time-preference tends to rise. They become more short-term oriented and less civilized. They tend to lose their moral inhibitions and behave like other animals instead of human beings. They tend to lose their moral inhibitions.
The thing which seperates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we can critisize our behaviour and establish norms. Our ability to make moral judgements is what seperates us from the rest of animals. And it is perfectly legitimate to judge morality in extreme situations. Most people have trouble with it because they have confused, muddled ideas of right and wrong rather than a clear, consitent, well thought out, and complete system of ethics. Many just give up trying to discover one because they are unable or unwilling to put the effort in. Testing our ideas in extreme situations to ensure their consistency is the more civilized thing to do.
If I die, no one necessarily wronged me:
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If I had asked someone to kill me, no one wronged me.
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If I had died of old age, no one wronged me.
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If I had been struck by lightening, no one wronged me.
There needs to be an aggressor acting upon his/her free will.
If I had been shot between the eyes, however, chances are someone wronged me! Now, does the gun get the blame? No, the gun isn’t the aggressor acting upon his free will.
Do I blame the man who pulled the trigger? Probably, unless he wasn’t acting upon his free will. If he was acting under the threat of death or the stress of torture, the aggressor is the beast threatening or torturing him.
edit: didn’t proofread 
I believe you will have to make a more rigorous case than that to convince me that anything seperates us so essentially from other animals. I have studied zoology as a hobby all my life and my college education is in biology, and I can tell you that some animals have social norms just as we do, albeit less sophisticated ones, and that they make judgements, which can in a sense be called moral judgements, of their members who violate those norms.
I suppose it is your position, based on your tone here, to agree with the previous poster who basically said that the mass-murderer strapped with babies ought to be allowed to rampage unchecked, lest we violate the rights of the humans strapped to him.
I am curious as to what you mean by “testing” moral ideas. How do you test such things? Do you view the results of certain behaviors? Who is to judge which result is best?
I agree with everything you said. I just want to add that it is as much of a crime for 100 people to act in concert in the murder of 1person, as it is for one person to murder 100 people.
And I think that the whole idea that it is justified to murder innocent people to stop an agressor, justifies terrorism. If country X is bombing nation Y and causing alot of collateral damage, a terrorist might say it’s justified to kill innocent taxpayers from country X, because they are funding the bombing. By killing a number of taxpayers, X now has less resources to build bombs with. The terrorist might just dismiss the fact that they’re innocent by saying they’re hostages that are a necessary sacrifice to reducing X’s aggression.
Obviously, you have to employ reason. If someone is going on a murderous shooting rampage, you don’t go and blow up every ammo-shop in town to prevent him from getting more ammo, you go for him.
Hah! What innocent taxpayers? As you say, they are giving away their money with the full knowledge that it will be used to harm the people of the terrorist’s country, and that they are under threat of force, under your calculus, matters not, they should resist to the last. Otherwise, they literally labor to help kill the terrorist’s countrymen. There are no innocents there, excepting children, and again we come to the human shield dilemma. Anyone who holds your position and pays their taxes is a hypocrite, for surely, any government shall use your money to do injustice. Indeed, if you work at all, you are helping support an economy from which the government draws resources to commit atrocity. Until unjust government is done away with, any non-black-market activity makes you a hypocrite.