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People Become More Utilitarian When They Face Moral Dilemmas In Virtual Reality
First time accepted submitter vrml writes "Critical situations in which participant's actions lead to the death of (virtual) humans have been employed in a study of moral dilemmas which just appeared in the Social Neuroscience journal. The experiment shows that participants' behavior becomes more utilitarian (that is, they tend to minimize the number of persons killed) when they have to take a decision in Virtual Reality rather than the more traditional settings used in Moral Psychology which ask participants to read text descriptions of the critical situations. A video with some of the VR moral dilemmas is available, as is the paper."
So, we're assuming that all participants considered the death of (virtual) humans to be a bad thing?
... (they tend to minimize the number of persons killed)
Anyone who's played Black & White knows that's not true. They don't even minimize the number of persons killed by poop.
In the various versions of the train dilemma, you have two options 1) don't act and five people will die; or 2) act and only one person will die. While I see the logic of your argument, and tend to agree that it is the best overall or numerical result. It does seem to be a rather chilling choice. It avoids the premise that by taking action the actor becomes a murderer; having taken action that directly resulted in the death of another. In the other case the actor is only a witness to a tragic event.
Until you're faced with the choice of saving your sister versus five anonymous others.
Utilitarianism is false, because no human being can know how to globally maximize the good. They just believe they do, and then use "the end justifies the means" to commit atrocities.
Our quirky affective behavior is arguably an optimal heuristic in a world where you only have a peep-hole view of the global state of things. For example, in those trolley dilemma you're _told_ that the trolley is random. But we're hard wired to believe that nothing is random, which means you have to fight a belief that the trolley was purposefully sent to kill those five individuals. Maybe the lone individual would save the world. In any event, maintenance of the status quo (letting the five get killed) is, again, arguably an optimal behavior when there is insufficient information to justify doing something else.
He is not only a witness if he KNOWS that he had the power to prevent the five deaths at the cost of one other. Inaction is also an action by itself.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Harm and benefit according to whose definition? Utilitarianism is incredibly subjective.
"Become more utilitarian", i.e. they choose to save more lives, which is already at 88% in a non-VR, simple textual scenario like the trolly switch issue.
This is odd, because in most scenarios of VR, people seem to want to throw a switch to deliberately divert a trolly from one person to kill 5 instead, as long as they have a chat line where they can type "lolf49z!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
He is not only a witness if he KNOWS that he had the power to prevent the five deaths at the cost of one other. Inaction is also an action by itself.
Yes, and that ultimately leads to the "next level" of utilitarian dilemmas. What if you're a doctor, with five terminal patients who all need different organs. In walks a healthy person who is (miraculously) compatible with all of them.
Should you kill the healthy person, harvest the organs, and save the five terminal patients? (For the sake of argument, we assume that the procedures involved have a high chance of success, so you'll definitely save a number of people by killing one.)
Many people who say we should flip the switch in the trolley problem think it's wrong to murder someone to harvest their organ and ensure the same outcome. Why is "inaction" appropriate for the doctor, but not in the case of the trolley?
(I'm not saying I have the right answers -- but once you start down the philosophical path of utilitarian hypotheticals, there's a whole world of wacko and bizarre situations waiting to challenge just about anyone's moral principles. I can't wait until the "I was kidnapped and forced to keep a famous violinist alive" scenarios come up!)
It's a chilling choice, but the train dilemma is flawed when you consider that it would never happen in real life anyway. I'm not saying that the 5 vs. 1 scenario wouldn't happen, but I highly doubt someone is even going to consider the second option at all if presented with the scenario. If the thought doesn't even cross the person's mind, there's not a choice being made between the options. If no choice is being made in reality, the thought experiment is worthless as a way explain human behavior. The whole concept of the thought experiment is undermined when you realize that it's not something any person would ever end up doing because of another variable that the thought experiment does not consider.
Maybe it's best to try and switch the lines but fail. Then you only have one count of attempted murder.
I can't believe that people still think that these trolley car "thought experiments" are telling them anything novel about human moral instincts.
All they are are less-visceral variations on Milgram's famous work. An authority figure tells you you must kill either the hot chick on the left or the ugly fatty on the right and that you mustn't sound the alarm or call 9-1-1 or anything else. And, just as Milgram found out, virtually everybody goes ahead and does horrific things in such circumstances.
Just look at the videos in question. The number of laws and safety regulations and bad designs of the evil-mad-scientist variety in each scenario are innumerable. They take it beyond Milgram's use of a white lab coat to establish authority and into psychotic Nazi commander territory. In the real world, the victims wouldn't be anywhere near where they are. If they were, there wouldn't be any operations in progress at the site. If there were, there would be competent operators at the controls, not the amateur being manipulated by the experimenter; and those operators would be well drilled in both standard and emergency procedures that would prevent the disaster or mitigate it if unavoidable -- for example, airline pilots trained to the point of instinct to avoid crashing a doomed plane into a crowded area.
The proper role of the experimenter's victims ("subjects") is to yell for help, to not fucking touch critical safety infrastructure in the event of a crisis unless instructed to by a competent professional, to render first aid to the best of their abilities once help is on the way, and to assist investigators however possible once the dust has settled.
Yet, of course, the experimenter is too wrapped up in the evil genius role to permit their victims to even consider anything like that, and instead convinces the victims that they're bad people who'll kill innocents when ordered to. Just as we already knew from Milgram.
How any of this bullshit makes it past ethics review boards is utterly beyond me.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
The healthy person isn't part of a potentially doomed set unless you harvest his organs.
You cannot ethically *start* the process of saving lives by unnecessarily killing someone.
In the train scenario, either 5 people die, or 1 person dies. There is no other option, because there's no way to stop the train in time. Your choice is simply whether to:
a) minimize the deaths by action, or
b) maximize them by inaction.
In the organ harvest scenario, you have a potentially doomed set, and a non-doomed set. You also have numerous options beyond:
a) kill the healthy guy for his organs, or
b) don't kill healthy guy for his organs.
For example, you also have:
c) convince the healthy guy to donate a subset of his organs which can be spared in order to save some of the terminal patients.
d) continue looking for compatible harvested organs.
e) harvest organs from the first terminal patient to pass on in order to save some of the other terminal patients.
There's more, but I think you can see the difference between the two scenarios.
Harm and benefit according to whose definition? Utilitarianism is incredibly subjective.
Exactly. I recognize full well that killing 1 will save 5, and in general I do not have a moral problem with choosing to alter fate to change the outcome to favor the 5, but I do not view any of the participants in the video cases as being faultless.
You and others are walking down the train tracks, a train is coming, and none of you move. Why arent you moving? Maybe that lone guy on the side track knows that the train isnt going to run down his track, which full well makes me a murderer if I divert the train to his track. The larger group has to take responsibility for their own damn actions.
That, my friend, is utilitarian in my eyes.
"His name was James Damore."