The Ethical Structure vs the Drowning Child

This is the second in what I hope will become a series of short(ish) articles in which I address ethical problems and dilemmas from the perspective of the Ethical Structure – as introduced in the Morality as Playing Games series.

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In Peter Singer’s drowning child scenario, you are on your way somewhere when you pass a shallow pond or in which a child is drowning.  You can quite safely rescue the child but if you do so you’ll be mildly inconvenienced and you may ruin your clothes.  Should you rescue the child?  It’s a small cost to you but you save a life.  You’d have to be a moral monster to walk past the pond and let the child die.

Compare that to a child dying in Africa due to war or famine or malaria (sadly enough, there’s always at least one trouble spot or another).  You could dip into your wallet, extract a few dollars (a small cost to yourself) when passing a chugger and save a life.  Are you a moral monster for failing to do so?

Perhaps you might think that a few dollars won’t save a life, that too much disappears in administrative costs. GiveWell suggested in 2015 that at about $US3,300, you could save a child’s life.  It’s true that that’s a lot of money to take out of your wallet, and it’s rare that you come across a child drowning in a lake while children die in Africa at a rate of about 6 million a year (only counting those under five) – that’s more than 16 thousand a day, or 679 an hour or 11 a minute.  Not all of these die of malaria, of course, which is what you will be preventing with your $US3,300.

But if you put away $US13 a week then you could save a child every five years, which is more frequently than you could reasonably expect to save a child from drowning, unless you are lifeguard or spend your time lurking around pools and ponds.

Are you a moral monster for failing to put aside such a small amount of money?

Peter Singer would have it that you are.  If you are a well-to-do sort, who easily spends an extra $US10,000 on a car than you really need to, because it’s styled as a sports car, and you update your car every three years, then you are letting a child die each year that you could have saved.  If you waste money on a holiday, you are effectively killing a child, if you buy expensive meals, or wine, or jewellery, you are effectively killing a child.  And you should feel guilty.

The thing is, we don’t really.  Or not many of us do.  There’s a huge difference between an abstract child in a foreign land who we might or might not be able to save with our malaria nets, or our donation of a goat, or our supply of medicines and the child drowning right there, in front of us.

To walk away from a child we know to be drowning and we know could be saved would make us a moral monster.  To fail to hand over money to someone who may or may not use that money to buy something that may or may not be given to a child who may or may not die without it does not make us a moral monster.

A variant of the drowning child scenario has you on your way to an important job interview with no time to spare and you’re in your best clothes, which are worth more than $US3,300 (or the clothes and lost work opportunity combined are worth more than $US3,300).  As a utilitarian, you could say that the best option is to let the child drown and commit to giving money to an effective charity that will save another child for you.  But you won’t, because that child drowning in front of you is visceral.  If you let her drown, you are a moral monster.

Because this is a thought experiment, we can fiddle with the knobs and consider a situation in which saving the child will cost you as much as saving five other, distant children (who you can save with total certainty).  And because you’re such an ethical person, you’re actually on your way to save those five.  If you stop to save the one, the five will die.

This is basically the trolley problem in reverse.  You have the opportunity to switch metaphorical tracks to put the metaphorical trolley on a path to kill five, but you save one in the process.  You’d be a moral monster if, in the trolley problem, you deliberately killed five to save one (well, unless it was your mother, maybe – but there’s a fair chance your mother won’t be happy about surviving in that context).

But … the child is drowning in front of you and the others are distant.  Chances are, you’ll save the drowning child.  Why is that?

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In terms of the Ethical Structure, it’s entirely clear that you “should” save the drowning child and you have no obligation whatsoever to save a distant child – at least unless you are in the company of Peter Singer acolytes.

Survival is the name of the game and whatever action (or inaction) you decide on, it must promote your survival.  A cost to you with little or no benefit does not promote survival.  Therefore, shelling out a largish sum of money to save a child you will never see and no-one will really know you saved is not efficient.  Even if you intend to give the money away somehow, you’d be better of spending it close to home to show your neighbours what a good person you are.

The drowning child on the other hand is a perfect opportunity for you to demonstrate your worth.  Now, you might have noticed that I have at no point indicated that there is anyone around to see your heroics and in fact there is an implication that isn’t (because they could save the child allowing you to save your clothes).

Even if there is no-one to see you abandon the child, you’d still (in terms of the Ethical Structure) have an ethical imperative to save her.  This is because an essential part of the concept of the Ethical Structure is that you survive, up to and including the need to be able to betray others before they do when it comes to the crunch.  The more trustworthy you are, the less likely you are to be betrayed by other trustworthy people, so you are in a sort of arms race of trustworthiness signalling.

There is only person who is 100% committed to signalling your trustworthiness and that person has to be utterly convinced that you are trustworthy, so that the lie can be told convincingly – and that person is you.   For this reason, you will convince yourself that you are the type to save a drowning child even if no-one is there to laud you for it, because you want to be the sort of person who will save a drowning child and not the sort of person who others would likely choose first to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the group.

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The above might sound awful, the idea that we might only save a child for selfish reasons, but the positive from it is that selfish motives can push us towards prosocial actions.  The drowning child doesn’t care much whether the person saving her is acting selfishly or selflessly, so long as she is rescued from harm.

A follow-on question is how can Peter Singer’s good intentions be realised?  We all want to be taken to be good people (or recognised to be good people, if you prefer) but we are all selfish to a certain extent.  Very few of us are going to give up significant material comfort in order to maximise the number of lives we might save.  But we easily can be persuaded to be more selfish.

My suggestion therefore is to focus in on the benefits of an expanded circle of ethics.  In what ways can we benefit from preventing death in foreign places?  Singer has done some work already by pointing out the issue, making it possible for people to signal their worthiness by saving children from malaria in Africa (although there are diminishing returns as more and more people get on the charity boat, to the point where there will most certainly be freeloaders).  But I think we can go further. 

Lands in poverty are incubators of disease and discontent.  Wealthy people are less likely to comb the nearby jungle for bushmeat (a key vector for diseases like ebola).  Wealthy people are more likely to be educated and will understand the difference between a viral and a bacterial infection, so won’t take antibiotics in such a way as to promote the development of superbugs.  Wealthy, content people take fewer risks, they tend to prefer peace over war – they have more to lose.  We might not solve all problems by helping those less fortunate than ourselves, but there are definitely a raft of perfectly selfish reasons why we should have a go.

Ethical Structure vs the Trolley Problem

This is the first in what I hope will become a series of short(ish) articles in which I address ethical problems and dilemmas from the perspective of the Ethical Structure – as introduced in the Morality as Playing Games series.

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The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment based on a set of scenarios involving a runaway “trolley”.  Most of us would think of it as a runaway train or carriage, or perhaps a tram, maybe even a streetcar or a cable car (San Francisco style, not St Moritz style).  The originator – Philippa Foot – even referred to a tram rather than a trolley, but she was British and some American, when they got onboard, used their own strange vernacular.  So now we’re stuck with talking about the trolley problem, despite a trolley looking like this (according to Google):

Fundamentally, the problem is about making a choice between A) not acting and thereby letting a group of (many) people die and B) acting and thereby killing a smaller number of people but saving the group in the process.  You could, for example, save five by switching tracks so that a runaway train kills one worker rather than five.  Or you could push the fat man standing next to you onto the tracks to stop the train, which would kill him but save the five.  Or you could just let the scenario run its course without intervening.

There a number of variants of this problem intended to pick away at the key issue which is how we tend to utilitarian in one situation and deontic in another.  In other words, most (ie 85%) would flick the switch to save five at the expense of one, but even the most utilitarian among us baulk at getting our hands metaphorically dirty if we had to push the fat man onto the tracks (12%).  I note the fact that it is a “fat man” who is in the firing line.  The reason the man is fat is to ensure that he has the bulk to stop the train, but there’s also a significant bias against fat people (who are seen as slothful and greedy with insufficient self-control) which probably makes it easier to push one of them under a train.  I suspect that significantly fewer than 12% would be willing to kill a healthy, well-proportioned woman or a child in order stop the train.

(Imagine some sort of situation where disruption of power would divert the train onto a safe track, but the only way to do this is to push a smaller person than yourself through a crack where they would be fatally electrocuted, but their sacrifice would mean that five others would be saved.  Even I as write this I feel myself recoiling strongly from the idea – I do note that it’s a step away from using the body of the fat man to wedge under the train’s wheel and thus stop it.  I feel that the more Rube Goldberg-like the mechanism for killing a person to stop the train, where the death happens in the first step, the less likely we are to feel justified in using it.  I suspect that if the death happens later in the mechanism, we might not be quite so squeamish.)

So, if the action is remote, we more willing to be utilitarian – we’ll let (or make) one die to save five. But if the action is up close and personal, we are deontic followers of the injunction “thou shalt not kill”.  How do we explain this?

In terms of the Ethical Structure, our primary concern is our continuation as a moral agent, in other words our survival.  And our chances of survival are increased when we clear signal to others that we are not a threat.  There is a much more worrisome signal sent when we act to kill someone than when we fail to act to save someone.  Recalling the pyramidal structure, “do not kill (destroy)” is at the pinnacle.  There is no specific “do not fail to save” but there is quite likely to be a general rule that, if you can, you ought to try to save people which falls into the “do not break the rules” category right down the bottom.  It’s for this reason that it takes in the order of five lives saved to motivate us to (remotely) cause the death of one person.

It’s this “remotely” that is key.  As far as signalling goes, there is a substantial gulf between flicking a switch (even if, as a consequence, someone dies) and physically putting your hands on someone and directly causing their death.  Few of us want to be the sort of person who kills another person (because it makes it much easier to convey the impression that we would never kill anyone and that we are therefore no threat to others).  It’s much more palatable to see yourself as the person who saved five lives by just flicking the switch when you can gloss over the consequences.

The tuning of our positions with regard to each scenario (the vanilla trolley problem and the fat man scenario) is indicative of how there is variation across the population as to when to break with the ethical structure.  Only 85% of the participants in an experiment were willing to switch tracks and save five.  I suspect that, for the most part, the remaining 15% were either overly cautious (meaning that they’d be roadkill in hard times) or overly coy (perhaps meaning that, in reality, they’d be more willing to kill, but you wouldn’t be aware of it until the blade was sliding into your chest) or they just didn’t think it through.  The proportion could probably be determined by pushing the numbers of potential casualties up.  If you’ve got someone holding out when there are 20 lives stacked up against one, then there’s a serious problem with that person.  (Of course, if that one life is that of your mother, or your beloved, or your child, then it’d be understandable, but in the scenario they are all nameless strangers.)

The bottom line is that, when seen through the prism of the ethical structure, it is no mystery that we lean towards utilitarianism when forcing the train to switch tracks to kill one and save five but lean towards deontology when it comes to more directly sacrificing the life of another person to save the five.

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It’s interesting to think about the trolley problem in terms of psychopaths, or people who have damage or some other impairment in their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Psychopaths would probably fall into the 12% who would kill the fat man, since they are strongly utilitarian.  On the other hand, why do they care about the five?  As a psychopath, would you not care about the fact that more were going to do.  After all, it’s not your problem.

In the article on psychopaths, the authors talk about “wrongness ratings” and this might be another area where the Ethical Structure can be brought to bear.

It is not the case that flicking the switch to redirect the train into one person rather than five is good and pushing the fat man into the path of the train is bad.  They are all bad options.  There is a problem in many discussions about morality, even by ethicists who should know better.  We cannot point to an action associated with the trolley problem and say “this is the right thing to do”.  At best we can point to one option and say “this is less wrong than the other option” and try to justify it.  We can do wrong via an act of omission and let five die, or we can do wrong by an act of commission and let one die.

The study assessed only how wrong the act of commission was and effectively ignored how wrong the potential act of omission was.  A valuable variation of the study would be one in which the participants were asked to assess the wrongness of both the act of commission and the act of omission before being asked how likely it would be that they would perform the act of commission.  Would anyone say that killing the fat man was less wrong than letting the five die and also say that they would not kill the fat man anyway?  It’s possible that some people would have the self-awareness to admit to that, knowing that while intellectually they are aware that it’s the better thing to do (in terms of the greater good), but they simply could not bring themselves to do it (because, like, you know, they aren’t psychopaths).

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Parenthetically above, I mentioned Rube Goldberg machines.  Here’s an example:

(And here’s another.)

The idea behind a Rube Goldberg machine is that there is a ridiculously complicated series of steps to achieve a relatively simple task – and the steps themselves are likely to be ridiculous.  I was going to suggest that if the death of a stranger (fat or otherwise) involved in saving the five was a side-effect then that would make it far more palatable than if it were an essential part of the “machine”.

I also noted that there are a number of variants of the trolley problem, some of which involve relocating the fat man – for example the loop variant in which the train is diverted temporarily onto a side track on which there is a worker who is large enough to stop the train, but if he wasn’t the train would continue on and kill the five anyway.

It occurs to me that, in the initial version, the death of the single worker is in fact a side-effect.  If we break up the problem differently we can see that a train is heading towards five workers who will be killed.  We can flick the switch without any cost to ourselves and divert the train onto another track to prevent the five deaths.  It would be difficult to argue that we should not act to save those five people.  We should, of course, check to make sure that our action is not going to result in a worse outcome (for example if there were six people on the other track), but so long as the consequences of our action are not worse than the consequences of inaction it would seem to me that failure to divert the train is a moral failure, totally aside from any considerations of “greater good”.

On the other hand, choosing to kill the fat man is a moral failure because you will cause an instrumental death, rather than a consequential one.  The impression that one is a utilitarian decision and the other a deontological decision could well be an illusion.

The Problem of Evil vs The Problem of Good

In response to Pre-Creation (How Good Can God Be), a reader drew my attention to the work of Brian Davies, specifically “The Reality of God and The Problem of Evil”.  A survey of the reviews of this work gives me the impression that Davies’ argument is that the Problem of Evil misses the point and that we should instead be pondering about just how much good there is in the world.  If so, then the reader appears to have rather missed the point of what I wrote in Pre-Creation.

It’s entirely possible that Davies has a different argument to the one that I’ve surmised.  If so, the publisher Bloomsbury has got it wrong too:

Finally, though many theologians argue that evil is a mystery, Davies argues that this too is wrong and a cop out. We should rather be concerned with the problem (or mystery) of good. The real issue is `Why is there not more good than there is`. From the discussion Aquinas emerges as a hero (as filtered through analytical philosophy) but many modern thinkers do not emerge so well. Davies effectively picks holes in the arguments of Peter Geach, Paul Helm, Richard Swinburne and even Mary Baker Eddy

Admittedly, my first interpretation was that Davies was arguing that good itself is a mystery as in “why is there any good at all?”  This is sometimes argued as the obverse of the anti-apologetic argument “why is there evil in a universe supposedly created by an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibeneficient god?”  At the very least it seems to be a basic assumption for many theists – if there were no god, then there would be no good.  It’s terrifying how often you hear theists argue that, without god, they would be rapists and murderers.  Our old friend WLC provides us with an example:

Today I want to argue that if God exists, then the objectivity of moral values, moral duties, and moral accountability is secured, but that in the absence of God, that is, if God does not exist, then morality is just a human convention, that is to say, morality is wholly subjective and non-binding. We might act in precisely the same ways that we do in fact act, but in the absence of God, such actions would no longer count as good (or evil), since if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. Thus, we cannot truly be good without God.

This is the same person who argues that without his god, and “objective” morality, the torture of babies for fun would not be wrong.  Personally, I like to comfort myself with the notion that the theists making these sorts of comments are doing so for rhetorical purposes and that, if they were convinced that their god does not actually exist, they would not immediately commence a campaign of rape, torture and murder.

There’s a major difference between the anti-apologetic argument from evil for the non-existence of a god and the apologetic argument from good for the existence of one’s god.  The argument from evil is a type of reductio ad absurdum in which one starts from the assumption of the existence of a specific type of god and end up with an impossibility – the god of that type would not permit the sorts of evils that we find in the universe, therefore it does not exist.

The argument from good, on the other hand, does not truly start from the assumption of the non-existence of any god whatsoever.  Instead, there is an inherent assumption that the universe could only have good in it if there were a god, as per WLC’s argument above.

There’s a reluctance on the part of the theist to honestly consider whether the “good” observed in the universe could arise without their god.  Note that by “good” here, I refer to the actual act, intent or situation that is considered to be good, not the attribution “good” that is assigned to that act, intent or situation.  Perhaps I should explain …

An act can be good in itself – say it reduces or prevents harm, involves some real self-sacrifice (even if minor) or adds to the well-being of others.  Alternatively, an act can be labelled as “good” – going to church, abstaining from pre-marital sex or obeying some rule (don’t mix linen and wool in one garment).  Labels can be assigned pretty much arbitrarily, but once you have a method of deciding what is and isn’t good (increased harm bad, improved well-being good), then you have an objective measure by which you can judge whether an act is good.  But even aside from that, we do have measures for judging whether acts are good or not, we can basically list which acts are thought of as good and we can consider those acts.

Could the acts that we consider to be good arise in a universe without a god?

The theist, at least the christian theist, tends to think not but the reason for this is tied up in theology, in the theist’s assumptions about the basic (and base) nature of humanity.  Man is born of and in sin, humanity is depraved, atheists (according to many a theist) are atheists because they don’t want to believe there is a god so they can continue to sin.  If you take this view of the universe and only do one thing, remove god, then of course, it’s going to be dark.

To be more fair, the theist needs to place his argument in a universe which has no god and never had a god, in which the nature of humanity is not presumed to be sinful and depraved.

So, the Problem of Good … could the godless universe produce the acts that we call “good”?  I certainly think this is possible.  There’s no Problem of Evil for an atheist, but equally there’s no real Problem of Good either.  In the Morality as Playing Games series, I explain how the (western, judeo-christian) morality that we currently espouse can arise from pretty solid self-interest.  To the best of my knowledge here’s no “good” act which cannot be explained in terms of the ethical structure that I arrive at.

Some might complain that this is a “just so” story, but that’s not the point.  Perhaps our morality, our sense of what is good and what is wrong did not arise the way that I have laid it out, but even so, I do demonstrate that it could arise without a god.

This is all that is required to refute the argument that, for there to be any good, there must be a god.  There’s a way without god, therefore god is not necessary in moral terms.