Hi welcome to classical stuff you should know a podcast about classical education classical books the ancient world and kind of almost modern world but whatever you want to talk about my name is Graham Donaldson and I am joined with my two colleagues in classicism AJ Hannenberg that's this person and Thomas Megbee hello and today Thomas I'm coming with you I got a problem okay and it's a dilemma okay an ethical dilemma okay and I don't have a matrix through which to approach this dilemma do you see that they're remaking there's a new matrix coming out yeah no resurrection it's like Neo goes back to work well he's like he's like Neo's in a psychiatrist's office it looks like the first movie it looks like the first movie remade except Neo is like 60 woof I know and he's like I don't like my life follow follow the white rabbit that sounds exhaust yeah it looks exactly like meets trinity in like a Starbucks and he's like I feel like I know you and she's like me too it looks like a resurrection oh weird with I know they didn't get plugged back into the matrix and that was the deal they made with them I don't know I didn't watch the last one because the last one and I didn't watch it because the second one was so stupid and I didn't watch them I never saw the third one that's like the first one for me being grumpy about movies and then remember that before um every other episode yeah anyway so I have my ethical dilemmas and if I only had some kind of framework to work with these ethical dilemmas I would be a better person sounds like I'm coming to you maybe with one with my help you can just take an online quiz yeah seriously wasn't like about this yeah what should I make I did that I was Hufflepuff you know you input your ethical decision and the answer was Hufflepuff yeah that was very helpful wasn't uh okay so hey speaking of ethical dilemmas gentlemen I have a horrible news are you ready for this horrible news yes yeah you uh you know you'll you'll wake to a strange site now we'll explain that strange site my centipede are we doing Kafka yeah we're doing Kafka you've turned into a centipede was it a cockroach was that a German that's all I'm sure that I copied this word from Wikipedia so in case anyone's looking for the reference here's what you see as you wake up there's a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks ahead on the tracks there are five people tied up and unable to move the trolley is headed straight for them you're standing some distance off in the train yard next to a lever if you pull this lever the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks however you notice that there's one person on the side track you have two options do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track pull the lever lever diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person which is the more ethical option gentlemen go lever for sure why it's like the Kobayashi Maroo you're saving four people uh five people to even better than that uh oh but well I mean the equal you know like you're losing one you're saving five so that's okay man hey man you're walking in the where with the woods San Francisco where there's trolleys uh sure and San Francisco it's with the woods in San Francisco like mine cars you want to live in the woods hang on the map so you're walking in San Francisco and this trolley is coming down to the street and there's people like are they tied to the tracks kind of like a rocky boenkel style yeah exactly yeah so yeah so the type of track you didn't cause this this isn't you didn't do anything someone else is to blame uh uh but once you pull that lever you've made a contest decision you entered into the game let's get that and uh you are now culpable before that you're not culpable you're just an agent no problem I mean if you're rascal if you've already killed one well three people so like rascal if you like that decision really quick no I do not pull the lever I mean I'm sorry I mean people are gonna die but um not your fault I'm not going but it is your who am I who am I to play this is your fault because you are choosing not to pull a lever you could have pulled this is so now it's your fault but no no no it's absolutely your fault you could have taken action and you didn't okay so if you if you see a drowning child and you say oh that sucks and you don't do anything the dad has a right to be angry about this is his dead child no this is um uh I get to choose who drowns that's different this is I this is not I save someone or don't save someone this is I make a decision who lives in make a decision who dies you would if someone was drowning if you had a chance to save someone drowning I would try to save that person drowning but this is different from this because in this one it's like you've got you've got people drowning in a tub and you can pull a lever to divert the water to somebody else to drown another kid and then you're doing that instead it's very different I still feel like net gain of four is a pretty compelling argument okay well that's just math why it's simple arithmetic yeah interesting I know you're mocking me I still feel like I would pull the lever let's okay well I just yell sorry bro you know um what would my automated Tesla do if it's if it's driving uh it's obviously utilitarian so I would pick that so we'd like run everyone's like social credit score maybe like there's four criminals versus like one teacher or something so AJ chooses to pull the lever to I mean you didn't even ask because on the track like that could be your mom on the track like what would you if it's I mean if it's five serial killers in the car it's five hitlers and it's one and your mom is well five pillars first of all not possible but if it's five serial killers all one car like that's just a historical one point of my trolley example where you're gonna call credibility is there yeah great okay hey in San Francisco trolleys go wild all the time I don't think that they can be any whatever yeah and the levers to divert them are incredibly public who tied these people up that's these are the real questions we should be asking why is everyone standing on the tracks whatever they're tied up the people tell the girls like stupid moose and screw like that leaves what's her name rockin bullwinkle is the show I don't know what her name is I like it for us and not sure I'm glad we got to the bottom of that squeal I guess it's good so AJ you are taking the side that is the number of lives that you save I find your lack of asking who's on the track disturbing I don't really care I think it's worth considering but anyway you're saying that it's purely the numbers so it is better for one person to die instead of five so that's it's kind of boiled the decision I run my entire life my cold clinical mathematics yeah naturally that's yes and Graham you're saying you don't want to be complicit in murder yeah so it comes down to agency uh this is interesting so as you might imagine there's no third way like the like Kirk and Kobayashi maroon they're like not always oh to resolve the situation yeah with everyone surviving no well the whole point of the Kobayashi maroon is that he like changed the program I know I so I guess you can't I throw myself in front of the trolley and stop it no you don't you kill an extra person you and then it would go and still kill people yeah sure if they can make it through five people killing them I feel like you could make it through six right but wouldn't my like luscious body gum up the works uh what everyone on youtube is like I he's just he I feel like every episode he looks for an opportunity to talk about his luscious body yeah that's probably the problem with every other stuff that Graham is starting his modeling career he wants to start it off from here oh when I was in Instagram influencers yeah you did talk about that means the production that's actually true your luscious body is your means of production if you have the means you got to produce boys so you two are taking two I don't like this two different views toward how to make this decision but ultimately you're ending at a point of disagreement about which one is the right one correct well mind's the right one but how how would I resolve a conflict between the two of you you know let's say let's take like a really slow trolley so we have lots of time to discuss what the right decision is how would you try and persuade the other person let's say it's the two of you wake up and have to make this decision together how would you move from there to then saying what we should do with this I need to persuade AJ that his numbers game isn't as good as my agency you could agree with him I would propose a slap fight this is going any other thoughts on pound for pound I think mathematically I could take him this you probably could you know I'm gonna disagree with that he's look at his reach he's like an albatross I guess how do you like that not the direct and executive here AJ and I once had a a duel on campus a slap fight no it was we were playing a game of all the kids we were playing a game of assassin and AJ and I were the last two alive in the whole campus we kill all the kids um and teachers we are and we decided we were gonna have a public duel with swords and AJ me because it was reach the funny thing is in both of our heads it was glorious there's a storm coming in the background it was the last day of school had seconds to watch and see who got hit it was this huge thing and then we watched the video and it was just like wailing it's just like wailing around foam isn't clearly awkward English teachers hitting each other with foam swords and it's not it does not look cool it's not our finest I was but how would I mean I don't know how you would convince somebody um like it um I mean so physical force is an answer to physical forces an answer I think that if you are pulling or not pulling the lever you are existing in the world saying I am somebody that needs to always solve issues what do you mean and no matter what decision you make yeah it's it's like um if you honestly came across that situation like there are so many doubts as to as to what's happened even just happening that to be able to say oh this is I'm living in the trolley problem versus maybe this is a movie or maybe there's like this is a set that's going on or maybe there's like this is a controlled thing and I just don't realize it because I've just happened to stumble upon it um I don't know there's just like so many factors that um that I feel like not acting is the prudent choice in this one and if and then if five people get killed it's a tragedy but if one person gets killed because of my action um it is a tragedy that I'm to blame for yeah to take it from your example earlier you're talking about moving water from one place to another and killing someone's kid imagine you then have to like explain to the parents I chose to kill your kid I saved five lives by drowning your child yeah exactly not cool anyway that's something but to me this has always been very easy is that you don't pull the lever but you don't pull the lever I assume in the same way AJ it's easy for you to say obviously you both a lever I mean weirdly enough kind of yeah I mean there's two possible tragedies either a tragedy of five deaths or a tragedy of one death my agency in this world is to prevent the five death why how's that your agency why is that your calling because I'm next to the level of the ability to do I have the ability to do it and so if I can make for a smaller tragedy in this world the question would immediately become okay mr. Donaldson would you would you do it if the numbers were changed what if it was it's going to kill one person or I can squish five people no no it's it's going to kill a hundred people or one can you divert it what if it's a thousand people versus one would you divert it if it killed one over a thousand I still feel like it's not my place to be to this your place you're by the lever no no no literal physical location no it is not I still don't feel like I am that it is right for me to be deciding who lives and who dies perhaps it isn't right but the choice is yours and I'm not gonna make and I'm not gonna make so you have you have abdicated your your potential to save that many lives this feels like to me an old episode of Star Trek where it's the what is it the Kobayashi maroo exercise they want to know if you as the captain of the enterprise are going to send one man to his death to save the crew that is your choice no no it's like there's a ship in the Klingon zone and you got to go and you're gonna get blown you're gonna blow your ship up to try to save the crew of the Kobayashi maroo or you just say like sorry guys you're in the you're in the Klingon zone tough it out I forget the exercise but there's there yeah there's an exercise where they need to know you need to be willing to sacrifice one for the sake of many are you gonna risk your ship and you're in the simulation as you always die yes or are you going to uh sacrifice let that other crew die and not risk your ship and I'm and it's slightly different because you know you've got your it's like it's a circle you are the captain ready to take more control of yours your crew or like strangers strangers um or general population it's but um in that case there's a question of responsibility you are a captain it's a responsibility to protect everyone in the federation that you can it's your job like you are being you're chosen and paid to do it but then they know that you're next to the lever and you could make a difference that's the thing is it is still your choice whether you want it or not it's yours but why can't you make the choice but the responsibility of doing it is the question like if in the end you you're you're in the final judgment and god's saying um under what authority did you feel like you were allowed to make the decision of who lives and who dies I don't feel like I have a leg to stand on my my answer would be whether or not it was my authority the choice was given to me and so I made the best choice I could like you it whether or not your choice yeah so then I made the best choice I could too you have the responsibility right whether or not you chose that whether or not you should have that is beside the question the responsibility is yours yeah but we both made the choice you chose to pull a lever and I chose not to so you know you still have to answer my numbers question if the numbers were way different would it change I would I don't feel like I could kill a man to save a thousand I don't I don't feel like I can't what about what if it was everybody versus one I also don't feel like all humans you live with one guy they all die and it's you and like Craig uh-huh um well when we're talking about like even the survival of the human race and it's what someone's given me authority to well even the situation is so absurd that I feel like it doesn't it's not going to launching toward New York City you can redirect it but it's going to go to you know middle of nowhere Canada one person lives so you know you can redirect it either 10 million or 15 whatever the number is 10 million people die or one person dies that's and yeah and maybe because it's New York New York retaliates and then there's more death as there's more death as there's something to be said about the scale so when you have millions of people in new radiation and a city with all of its art and culture and history and all that kind of stuff then that changes the calculus but when it's like a trolley of five or a trolley of one and it doesn't affect anything else in the world other than just these five people in this one person that feels like it's a different kind of scenario but it hasn't hasn't that sort of like then it is a calculus but if it doesn't change the calculus it just makes it just makes it more severe it's still calculus it's still a calculation right doesn't that sort of undermine the position you take huh you by saying that it's so many people changes the choice i would make means that you are still depending on math math to make your choice so why does fewer people at what point does it switch yeah it does it does switch the scale of it changes it um so we're talking whole cities but if we're talking like you're walking down the road and there's five people versus one person um that is a different that's that's different okay last comment one more for me do one more for me sorry i know you plunged us into this is the way so before it's a last comment each person then we're gonna move on i guess i try to adhere to i was with a could i do that i was studying count this weekend i was pretentious but he had assignment so i was looking at count and his his way to evaluate morals is what i do it could make this a universal rule right oracle imperative with a categorical imperative and here i think the categorical imperative is to save as many as you can and i say this knowing that when you begin to weigh human life in a calculus that never goes well right so it's it's the lesson of crime and punishment when you begin to weigh the value of human life against like decision-making i don't know when you start to do the math of people that's not that's never a good math but i think maybe the difference is rest conicov is bringing into their evil or goodness as a as a piece of the question i think if i can save a lot of people it's either it's either one or it's five i try to save a five grandmas comment the context matters so i mean if you have the bomb coming in then you then presumably it's being launched by a belligerent power and then the numbers the number calculus seems to be a little bit more appropriate when it's something a sort of absurd or something it's more called the commonplace it's not a belligerent um it's not a belligerent power who's trying to destroy a whole people it is sort of the common tragedies of everyday life a car accident um people about to get hit versus one person getting hit um do you like you know close the train and close the the gate on the train and crush the worker um or let the train fly off the the cliff like one of those sorts of situations i feel like um putting you standing up and saying i'm going to decide sort of who lives and who dies is uh arrogant and um and yeah morally culpable yeah that's actually right always giving me a joke that's okay is it a funny one i'm going to laugh at this joke you never left i never let's keep going so the point of that exercise is us spending ten minutes uh talking through those things Graham have you changed your mind after that ten minute back and forth would you do something different based on so back to original trolley problem yes it was no no original trolley problem no but uh but talking about it in terms of um scale so like like whole cities of people does seem to change the change of the principle yeah aj have you changed your mind again specific to the trolley problem we started with would you make a different decision yeah Graham always changes my mind i don't know if i fully changed it but it maybe i've never thought about it completely enough and his position is a strong longer right where where am i the guy that gets to choose who dies that's a great question sure so it's like what's what Gandalf said to Frodo about gandalf say to Frodo he said golem is that Frodo is like man i wish i just free i wish bill will free and killed golem and gandalf's like yeah would you make that choice can you choose to get delivered die Frodo maybe golem has a part to play in this saga he did maybe he says that's his extra comment is the joke are we past the joke now i'm sorry i was going to be the chances to go for it so but the point getting to the end of it is even after ten minutes of discussing i know it's short i know a conversation could go longer than that uh both of you were still arguing for your positions so i what for just as third party observer it seems like you all had a deeper way of thinking about this problem then you went into it with but ultimately your position stayed the same right is that a fair way of putting it some because i'm american i don't have to change my opinion i'm dug in and i'll never change i'm not making that point but i'm fine for you to take that man if you want to that's not how i feel um but the point is that in a in you know talking about ethics the a point to take away from this is that you'll see different that we've talked about this before with alistair macon tires after virtue is that most ethical discussions end up being two competing schools of thought fighting each other and there's no coherent way for those ethical um traditions to talk to each other because they're incorporating different values so aj is arguing from a consequentialist view that takes the outcome of the matter into effect and perhaps the primary thing to take into effect and again it becomes a very simple problem do you do fewer people die if you will ever or do more people die and that makes the decision for you grand is taking a non consequentialist view where it's not so much about this specific and maybe even an agent-centered view which will we'll talk about what all these things mean you're focused on the person themselves that the virtue of the person making the decision matters and so there's a different calculus that goes into effect you know the number of people at some point might necessitate murder but it's no murder that you're asking that person to commit correct is that fair yeah and the problem then is that those you're looking at different things and you can't talk to each other because aj is wrong and one's right that's what i meant to say gram's obviously wrong like i said i'm dug in and i'll never change but um so almost by definition they can't talk to each other because what aj will point to is yeah but the numbers what gram will point to is yeah but the person making the decision and those two views can't talk to each other is that a fair way of sweating it and yes maybe you gain a deeper appreciation for what the other person thinks but ultimately you think they're wrong um so this is uh again the point of this is to talk about what some of these different frameworks are so you can recognize them and i think part of that is to say then what is the other person focused on so again it's only a 10 discussion in you know i don't know how dug in you are on a made-up trolley example but gram if you wanted to persuade aj you might look for then some consequentialist way of talking about this what are effects that aren't being taken into effect by aj by focusing just on the lives on the you know the whether you pull a lever or not aj how can you make a moral argument about the goodness of the person pulling that lever and in that way you can talk more directly to each other does that make sense yeah i do think what we should do is just kill a guy who made the trolley yes he's obviously he's obviously the one to blame he's obviously the problem with this i'm okay with that so let me run through these of what some different ways of thinking about i guess maybe to zoom out even from that is we're talking about ethical decision-making you all have any when someone talks about an ethical issue or an ethical question what makes it ethical has to do with right now i think that's the easiest way to put it yeah it's not so i would also add that i think there's a difference between if the dilemma is should i lie or should i tell the truth just in general i don't think that's an ethical dilemma because there's a clear right thing to do i think what's special about the trolley problem is you have two bad outcomes and you're a bad thing is going to happen one way or the other how do you think about which one is less bad than the other that makes sense so there's something to a clear right and wrong i wouldn't call it dilemma in the same way that the trolley problem is people might disagree with that but let's just mind tuition on it and there's some books on like business ethics that'll call it that too the decision of like whether to cheat on taxes or not is not really a dilemma you're one is clearly right one is clearly wrong right so i referenced aj's views as consequentialist is what is consequentialist mean focuses on the consequences of your action care about the outcomes consequentialism can be broken down into a few uh specific schools of thought and these are ones that you have probably heard of before and so please start throwing out some kind of paragons of each of these schools as we go through them if you have any of that kind of mind the first one probably the most common is utilitarianism so what is utilitarianism what do you all know about just maximizing the happiness take whatever action guarantees the most happiness for the most people yeah you'll get some people who disagree on the most people part because like in theory it would be just the most happiness so like for the trolley example if the one person is like a super happy person in the five or bumps in a log you'd kill the five bumps in a log because they wouldn't you know or if the five or suicidal you would take that into account right or you know just don't want to be allowed or whatever i'm sad yeah it is sad so as the whole you might have to kill some people and i should have said this the trolley problem comes from philipafoot um uh um uh uh uh philosopher who was a part of kind of introducing like virtue ethics which i guess we'll get to in a second so utilitarianism you are in the ideal form from bentham you're actually trying to measure utils you're trying to measure units of happiness and then everybody calls the unit of happiness is one util a util so you'll get different so it's so even it's like a crypto which is the most bitcoin at the end is that no we should start utils oh sure yeah we don't ever want to um but what aj saying it's not even just the number of people it's again the happiness outcome from that so yes you'd assume five people being happy is more than one person being happy that they're not dead but not necessarily right it no matter how they feel about living okay so i want to maximize my happiness i want to kill anybody yes exactly that's actually a good point so if i'm not killing anybody my utils don't have a deficit and again that's where you're taking into account the agent you're taking into account the person making the decision more so than the outcome of that decision and that's what i didn't realize i was so selfish well speaking of selfish let's move to the second one the second one is the egoist school the um the egoist school would be what is the best decision for me personally now this is where i'm shocked you all didn't ask who's on the tracks but again that'd be where you know gram your wife is the one person and then the five are five strangers you know you don't have on the lever boss rangers so you're welcome for that one but i guess your wife is in the car of the five there is a complete question and then for the one on the track make the decision now gram it's okay so good for you know to make it more problematic for a day to be you know what is that just pull over here that's fair totally fair i support your decision um there's a fitting under the egoist school is the objectivist school which we were joking about a little before the program is anything about objectivism oh they want to know how much money they get if they pull out labor the objective is school i don't really know how the objective is to think about the trolley problem oh same as the ego yeah there's i think i think i think i think so i ran is the kind of creator of the objective is how rich are the people on the track oh people are the people on the tracks like like industry leaders oh oh like how valuable are they to society as a whole the direction i was taking it is that or they bureaucrats yeah and then that gives them no um the i'm ready to book called the virtue of selfishness and you'll see this in objectivism that selfishness is not a bad thing to be protected from it is a good thing to be embraced and understood there's like a there's like a ethical form of selfishness you're doing what's good for you it's not far off from Adam Smith what's good for you ends up being good for others therefore you should follow things that are good for you don't try and be a martyr is one for another okay yes you're thinking about it no it's just the other thing i'm thinking about is this is sort of like an ethic that is portrayed by a character that we're currently reading in 12th grade english in crime punishment there's a character named peter petrovich leuzen who actually posits this with the idea being like if i make up a bunch of money if i make if i give up if i see a starving poor man and i take my coat and i cut my coat in half now two people have half a coat but if i go and i make like a bunch of money and live my life and sort of take care of myself that's one less person in the world that needs to get taken care of and maybe my like leuker can trickle down well by my by my industry also business and then if everybody does this we'll have lots of businesses and then he'll be able to get a code if he wants one yeah exactly that's sort of his uh loosens but he also uses that to justify like kind of being a dink right yeah he's kind of a hard doofus yeah so he has a he states a reason but it's not the real reason yeah it's a thin veil for him trying to like um marry this girl which i think might be a fair criticism of egoism and maybe objectivism that it's kind of dressed up as a philosophical theory but really it's do whatever's best for you yeah just sort of yeah i don't know if you need much of a selfishness exactly um then finally in the consequentialist school would be a view toward the common good so the common good probably would be closer to what aj is arguing for that you can just weigh the number of lives it's better that there'd be five people who walk out of this experiment than that there's one person not experiment but experience on it with global warming i mean like that's five less consumers so yeah uh and i would actually do that for the less co2 admitted into the yeah i don't like this at all this is getting dark very fast i don't know what i expected but okay so those are more your consequentialist schools so again the point in there are three big categories and then some more specifics we're going into but consequentialist is that first group and the focus then is on the outcome of whatever policy idea that you're having uh and that would be closer to what aj is arguing from before um i yeah we'll go into what broadly is called non-consequentialist but there's actually a third one that's agent-centered which is also non-consequentialist so just stick with it um aj you said you had read Kant recently you i think made reference to the categorical imperative can you say that again what is the categorical? well let me clarify i read about Kant i didn't read any actual Kant we were working on a paper but the categorical imperative if i understand it correctly is that i should act as far as right and wrong is concerned in such a way that the things that i choose i would be comfortable if i were to make them a universal rule yeah so should i lie to my wife well would i be comfortable saying that that is what every man should do in every circumstance no no should i tell the truth to my wife would i be comfortable saying that every man should do that in all circumstances yeah i think so i think all circumstances boils down to like what you're cool with. Oh, yeah, people would be like me.
Yeah, of course they should. Well, I mean, that's also kind of his point, is that morals aren't connected to reason as much. Yes. Like they are kind of, but they are like foundational for a reason.
Yeah, that's a cause project is to try and separate ethics from religion. And so the categorical imperative is one version of his answer to that. I think the second one is content also like a rights-based view. But yeah, and there are people who will make fun of the categorical imperative because you can say funny things like, I'm wearing a dress shirt on a Saturday.
Should I, should everyone wear a dress shirt on a Saturday? Like you get into like silly imperatives for everyone to live out. But you can probably just say it's not a moral issue. At that point, it's really fair.
But I don't think about it. Because the categorical imperative is more moral things. Yeah. And I guess that's the same.
That's how we set it up at the beginning of. We're talking about a specific kind of problem here. But again, in the same way, should everyone commit tax fraud if that's like a situation that you're in. And obviously, that would create huge problems.
Therefore, it's a thing you shouldn't do. I take Graham's point though that categorical imperative feels like it's kind of stealing in some other framework to make that decision and then saying everyone should agree with me. But then by framing that your shirt example is a moral issue. We are now also appealing to a category of things in order for a categorical imperative to work, which is that there is a understood moral issue versus a moral issue, which is what we wear.
And so if we already know what that distinction is, then the categorical imperative needs something a priori for it to work. And then we're already talking about morality. And why don't we get a categorical imperative if we all know what morals are? It wasn't that Con's point was that reason there has to be something that we, what is it?
Space and time are it's really complicated. But space and time are things through which we interpret sense-experience and sense-experience is individual to everybody. And so there has to be something we're bringing to the party. One of the things that we bring to the party is moral.
That's my basic understanding of it, is that it's not like it should kind of be based on reason, but it's not subject to sense-experience. I'm probably just butchering this. You're nailing it. No, I'm all for it.
But again, this is kind of an answer for how one should live. I guess it's the way to say it. It's just kind of sidestepping the moral part of it and saying what's the right way to live, maybe is one way to go. But so after that for a non-consequentialist view would be a rights-based view.
And again, I think this is con also, it's summarized as treat people as ends and not means. That's the way I don't want to hear it. The quote is act in such a way that you treat humanity whether in your own person or in the person of another always or that look like what would a rights-based approach be to making a decision. You can never treat a person as a means to an end.
So if the end is like, I don't know, economic success for everybody, I could never use a person as a means to get there. He is the end. Yeah, so it would be in contrast to the consequentialist view which you would say, hey, number one, the one person who's getting swished, your life is now a means to everybody else's improved happiness because you have one utils and these have five utils. And so you're treating that person as a means to the ends for everybody else.
I think that, yeah. Whereas if you let everybody get swished, if you let the five people get swished, at least then the decider hasn't done that, hasn't dehumanized the one by choosing him or by choosing to kill him over the other people. Otherwise, it's an inevitable thing is happening as opposed to I've chosen to kill him. Yeah, but I mean, AJ's point is where it's like, your lack of choice is a choice.
Like you were choosing, well, no, there's still the element of Dalek. It doesn't work. Right. Isn't that from Batman?
Isn't it where the two ships and one can blow up the other one? It turns out the thing doesn't work? No, no, no, no, no. Don't they just chuck it overboard?
The prisoners do, but don't the wealthy people try and press the button? No, I guess not. I think they chuck it. Nobody presses it, right?
You're totally right. And that's why Joker gets mad as he thought somebody would. We blow someone out in the dump. That's fair.
Okay, so non consequentialist, you're not looking at the outcome. We have a categorical imperative. So act in ways wherein you think everyone should act the way that you're acting under the circumstances. A rights-based view which would say, don't treat people as mean, treat them only as ends.
And then another option, another category under this would be a fairness view. It'd be a heart of John Rawls before. So do you know his veil of ignorance or his face? No, I can't remember.
So the Rawls position is that you should act in a way where essentially you should remove yourself from the situation and imagine that you are an objective observer of what's happening. And then ask yourself, what is the most just, what is the fairest thing that should happen? Pretend I'm not a player in this circumstance, what is right, what is fair, what is just, what is the good thing that should happen? So as opposed to, how would he solve the trailer problem?
Just like, it's fate. Sorry, guys, sorry, five. You don't get squished in the one person doesn't. What would I want to happen?
Well, I want the guy to pull the lever and save the five. So it's remove your guilt from the situation. Maybe it's one way, so like you having to live with five people having died because you didn't pull the lever would be the thing you take out. Or even taking out, I feel wrong about, I think it would lead to pulling the lever and having it go to the one person.
Because you would take out your opinions on the matter. It would take out, just like if you're looking at. But isn't thinking that five lives are worth the one life also an opinion? Yes, in the same way that categorical imperative is probably stealing something in.
It feels like you still have to know what is just. The point being, what would be a better one? If there's like a moral problem where you stand to benefit from something happening, that's what you should take out from it. So maybe in this one.
You're in a game show. Yeah, or someone offers you money. You know, they're in the trolley problem. Save my baby.
And then they'll give you a certain amount of money. Like that's the thing to ignore from it. Is that kind of a confounding factor? I think that's the easiest way to think about that.
Gotcha. Trying to figure out what is the fairest thing by removing your individual interest in the situation. And the last one in this non-consequentialist view would be some version of divine command or pick your ethical system or religious system. Those arguments for law are not based on outcomes.
It's based on like God, you know, whichever religion, whichever God has commanded, this is the thing to do. So how do we apply that to the trolley problem? You know, probably the commandments and not murder kind of minds. So yeah, I think the Christian would have to grapple with them being okay, pulling that lever.
Killing somebody? Or to say that God has commanded us to weigh, I don't know, the number of lives, do you know what I mean? When this goes back, and this makes me think of Kierkegaard again, where God commanded Abraham to do something that seemed immoral. Right.
And Abraham then sort of like held these two absurd things at the same time. That God, you know, we can go back and listen to the episode, but it just reminds me of that absurd position that Abraham found himself in. But in this one, it feels like if you have some sort of view of the immortality of the soul and also a view of, don't kill them of like, don't want to kill people, then you would have the point, maybe the Christian position would be that, you know, those five people, when they're dead, and they're in heaven, they'd be like, hey, what's the deal with the trolley? What just happened?
And God would be like, yeah, well, I mean, I don't know. I don't know. Are you saying it's like a let him die, let God sort of die, God sort of die? Maybe, maybe, maybe that is this.
Don't let God sort of die. No, not kill them, let the people, like, but then I think back to the tongue of bomb one, like as the Christian position to let New York City get nuked because instead of saving New York City and like killing the dude in Wisconsin, or the dude in up in like Montana. He was there. I don't know, it's a, it's an overstep.
Yeah, and so if you're, so like, Sartre has a famous essay existentialism as a humanism, and which is like an introduction to existentialism, it's very good. But in that he'll say that this divine command category is unhelpful for answering any of these ethical problems because all you really get are sentences from a Bible that are hard to apply to real life. So you can also just look and say, actually, this is so specific to a situation that shall not murder doesn't, doesn't bother this, right? So just to say, there are situations where maybe that's clear or not, but somewhere maybe the divine command isn't a helpful category to think through, what the right thing to do is.
So maybe there is no blame, maybe then the, the individuals pulling or not pulling the lever, it does not fall under a virtue mandate like am I doing the right thing or wrong thing, it's just I made the choice and did the thing. And a tragedy befell. Could you, could you avoid the whole issue by saying, I'm gonna roll a dice and if it's odds I pull it and if it's evens I don't, and that way it's all of your self of all guilt. And it's still a chance, but there's a chance you might say before.
And then you can say like, I'll show you what to do. You guys lost lots, you guys lost lots. Someone bring me a helmet. Hey guys, I've told it.
Catch us. Because I'm thinking, you can take it the other way and say, again, just to speak from a Christian perspective, Christian has a high view on the value of human life, therefore saving more human life is better than saving fewer human lives. Like you can make either one of those arguments and they both kind of fit in that same framework. Just to wrap up on the agent-centered, which is the so consequential is non consequential as an agent-centered or those three big categories under agent-centered, we're focused on the person himself.
Again, this is where I think Graham is more focused, first would be a virtue focus. So virtue ethics, what is, how would you talk about virtue ethics and what that? I don't know. Oh.
Is that the deal type? Is that the truth? Yeah, so like the point more so is, am I the decision-maker making a virtuous decision, which is not, is the outcome virtuous, am I virtuous? Am I brave in the face of combat?
Am I honest in the face of some complicated situation? So outcome doesn't matter. Correct. So it seems to be the position you are taking place.
Is the thing I'm doing a virtuous thing. But even then, it's hard to figure out, are you more virtuous in letting- I'm abstaining. Five died, I'm staining, or is it more virtuous to take whatever guilt hit is going to come? Sure, but those outcomes are separate from it.
It's my action, one, that is good or not. And the only thing is, I don't know if you can answer that without some sort of consideration. No, no, the thing is the actual answer for the virtue person then has to take your own life out of the equation. So the answer to the virtue-based one is, I will attempt to stop the trolley even if it kills me and the other five people.
And then even if at the end six people have died, like my private virtue is better than like standing around and being like, oh, no. Sure, I think I have the fair answer to it. It's outside the options though, you only have the options. All right, well, I cracked it.
You solved it, you fixed it. And then finally- That's what a gentleman would do. Just try to throw himself in front of the train. Yeah, try to like knock around.
Well, we'll say it's past you. So there's no way you're gonna outrun it and get to the people at all. You have only the lever. It's a mile down the line and you have a little video screen of what's happening.
I didn't say this before, but the trolley problem, any other, you know, sometimes you talk here about brains and vats as ethical questions. Wait, what? Well, we're gonna pick up our actual brains and vats. The philosophical question goes like this, whatever.
The question goes, let's say, AJ and Graham, I give you the option of your every experience of living is going to be one of pure bliss. You're going, you know, imagine, AJ wants to go live in the Redwoods, North of San Francisco. You get to go do that. So human.
You're gonna have all the money you want. Go anywhere in the world, but, but, you're only going to be experiencing those things. They're not actually happening. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna connect your brain to a bunch of electrical wires and you'll have the experience of doing all these things, but you're not, your body is not actually doing those things.
Would you take that trade? That's the brain of that. I don't want to go into it. I'm posting it to you.
I'm not gonna, sorry, I guess I should have done that. So the trolley problem. Let me just get the last agent's interview. Is that, you know, since we talked last week about the communist manifesto, a Marxist view would be an agent-centered view.
So you would be looking at, am I making a decision that is most in line and most in support of the proletariat or most in taking down or addressing the bourgeoisie? Am I acting in such a way that it's furthering class consciousness, that's furthering Marxist ends? Again, that's a, am I doing those things as opposed to an outcome? You can put other categories in here, like a feminist view, am I acting in such a way that is to the benefit of women?
And, yeah, so again, those are more agents interviews. Is it a trolley and a presser? So the trolley problem doesn't line up with this one very well, but again, this would be, you know, am I retweeting things that are supportive of oppressed people? That would be a more Marxist view.
Whether it gets retweeted or not, you're still acting in a way that supports groups that are oppressed. That would be one way putting that. Okay, so I've walked through all these different things, this consequentialist, non-consequentialist, an agents' interview, after hearing all of those, are we any closer to being able to talk amongst the different groups? Are you, you know, now that you have kind of a breakdown of all of them, does that help in understanding these different lines of thought talking to one another?
Maybe, but I mean, it's, like, I don't think the answer is be literate in all of these different views. And then, like, you know, it's like worldview analysis. Like you need to know if you're talking to a consequence list or that you can, like, put it in his terms. I don't know if that's the answer.
I don't think that's the answer. I don't think that's the answer. I, you know, as I am unhelpful in my episodes, I think most of the takeaway is that there's kind of an irreparable conflict here, and I don't know it. There's not one single answer.
I do think it's helpful to understand when you're talking about personal virtue. Would you say it was personal virtue the actual answer? You were at the whole time, yeah. No, it's to understand when you're talking to someone who is not speaking in the same language you are, and that's where people start talking past one another.
This is, after virtue, I referenced it already in this episode, and we've talked about it before. I've talked about this anyway. It's been, I'm sure, 100 episodes have done this. The most striking feature, this is a quote from that book.
The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements, and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this, just that such debates go on and on and on, although they do, but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture, and then he has three examples to go through, we're not gonna do that here, but I think one of them is war, I think one of them is abortion and I'm sure the third one. And he'll present three very compelling arguments that all three disagree with each other.
Capital punishment, I think. Probably the third one. And so then the question that being, what do we do about that? So that's where I wanted to take this to, if you have thoughts on that, of we have people with different philosophical backgrounds that faced with an ethical problem the way you two were, immediately have a reaction as to what's right.
And then it seems there's not a way to then deal with that disagreement to find what is in theory the right answer. So is it really, are you postulating that everybody's kind of divided into all of these different kinds of schools? Yes. But not through deep study, I think we just fall into them.
So the answer isn't just like, all the consequences should start to commune and all the non-consequential should. Like, is that really the answer? Is this tribalism of like-mindedness? I don't like that answer.
Yeah, but that also shouldn't have been true of history. Oh, it's not that like small villages of people in the Dark Ages, like after the fall of Rome when people are huddled together for survival weren't huddling together because they were all consequences or they were all consequentialist or whatever. It's just that only thing that's a practical way of doing it is saying like, go find everybody that you agree with and go form your own society. Yeah, it's one way to take it as Jonathan Hight, the right to his mind, he's trying to look at this question of why do people disagree?
And his argument is that these ethical frameworks exist to bring people together. They exist to bring groups together so that there's- I mean, these differences of bringing people together? I'm saying that the fact that there's more than one of each of these people, his example is closer to saying that religion, the purpose of religion is to bring people closer together, which gives an evolutionary advantage to that group of people, which then passes on those beliefs to the next group. So that's one way of answering this, is that there are benefits outside of the morality itself.
It's just like a memetic complex that can perpetuate itself. Yes, and so the point isn't that utilitarians are right or wrong. It's that a group of people who are at utilitarians band together, and then that perpetuates because the group perpetuates. Does that make sense?
Yes, I've always found that to be like a bait-and-switch kind of argument or like a, it's a little like, you know, oh, we got you all fair about more issues, but really it's just so that your genes can spread. Yes, I mean, that's his argument. Yeah, I cut you off a little while ago. I know you're- You can see those wheels turning.
I know. Yes, sir. Let's say something. Come back to me.
I'll raise my hand again. I'll say one more about this. John Hight, just because I find him interesting in this book interesting. Just so we can get listeners on the same page, is he the same person who has said that like, there's a temperament amongst people who are more liberal and a temperament amongst people who are more conservative?
Is that, does he write that book? Or is that something else? Yeah, he, there's like a personality component, but this book is more focused on the values that differentiate people who are politically conservative and politically liberal. There are different categories that will elicit a response in the two different political.
I mean, people. Yeah. So I was going to say, so you're going to postulate that there's no way for these two camps to talk to each other or to come to any resolution about their moral issues. I don't know that that that's true, first of all, Graham and I almost did.
Nice. We're bros. And you all are bros, but you disagree on, so sorry, the problem is that we face with the trolley problem or any ethical problem. I think a moral relativist could very easily say, there are hundreds of right solutions.
It doesn't matter which one you believe, just believe one. But I don't think you all would say that. Maybe we can't know the answer between, so we're bros before no. I hate everything and I hate that you just said that.
But my point was that at the end of it, you asked if our minds had been changed, and both of us said there was some progress, right? And so there's not only that, but I think the start is to start speaking to that worldview and leave the problem alone for awhile and say, okay, well, you're coming from this perspective, I'm coming from a different one, let's talk about that. And I couldn't help but think of an example for our non-Christian listeners out there, I'm about to wax Christian for half a second. Get those four star reviews, find it out.
Get those four stars. I'm fine with that. So I've been listening to another podcast about the Fallen Church, and one of the recent episodes was about this author, Joshua Harris, that wrote the book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The podcast is the Rise and Fall of Marcel.
Yeah, it's a great podcast. It's really interesting. It's really well done. Ooh, yeah, they put a lot more effort in the production than we do.
I mean, ours is great. So he wrote this book when he was really young, and it was obviously a moral standpoint. It was a moral standpoint about dating and about, courtship and about how parents should be involved and how marriage should work, and what changed his framework was seeing that work out in the world, and growing up from 17 or whatever he was when he wrote it to being an older fellow who now has walked away from the faith entirely. So my question would be how did his moral framework change?
Because his moral framework seemed to change. I mean, maybe his school didn't change, and it was still a results-based thing, or it was a personal virtue change thing, but it's entirely possible that not only did his standpoint change, but his framework changed, right? He changed into a different kind of ethical framework. So I think one of the ways that we come to different resolutions about these, because people's views on these things change, is watching our framework work out in the world.
For example, Luton, the guy from Crime and Punishment, believes that you should never divide a coat in half, because everybody will have coats if we all work for our own self-interest, put 20 years on that opinion, and then show him a guy with no coat. Or then when his fiance works for her own self-interest, it really bugs him. Yeah, or the guy that employs him works for his self-interest, and all of a sudden, Luton is out of the job, and can no longer even, doesn't even have a coat to put on his own back, right? And maybe his employer espouses the same framework that he had.
Well, this is how these frameworks change, is when you see them fail to work coherently in the moral world. Not like that answer. And I do think that you all talking from the beginning is a helpful example. Again, just to say, one way of answering, in the way that McIntyre will answer the question, and after virtue is to say, you need to embed yourself in a community to learn its stories, to understand how they make decisions, but then he'll- That's exhausting.
But you ended up in a point where the only way of making right decisions is to exist in a small community, which maybe is a good answer. I think it is a good answer. I mean, no, because I think- More agreement, I like this, between two. No, because there is something that changes, I mean, this is Plato saying that the virtuous city can only be as big enough so people can hear someone talking.
There is something about when communities scale up, that virtue can't scale up with it, that you have to sort of, or that the utilitarian ends up having a flavor that it doesn't have when you're in a small town where the utilitarian answer is like, we got to kill John. And John's like, Whereas when you're in the command center and you're making these numbers calculations, you're in a different situation. So I think there is something about the, maybe Jonathan Hite talks about this too, that like the evolutionary that things can get passed on from a group of people much more easier, much more easily when it's a group of 3,000, a culture of 3,000 people as opposed to a culture of 350 million people. Right.
I don't know. So I do think he's thinking of smaller numbers. I think he's even thinking smaller than 3,500. I think he's thinking of groups of 100.
Yeah, I just, yeah. How can the only way that something can pass its culture down throughout the ages that is a billion people is when its culture is a localized thing? So you think of Catholicism, like you can take on, or you can dog on the Catholic church all you want, but it is congregations that pass themselves on with groups of 100 people, but also with a billion. And it's sort of this living thing.
So I don't know. It's interesting. I think there's something too small communities that we as modern people just now are looking at it almost through the guys of, since that doesn't exist very much in the modern world, we're realizing, oh, there was stuff going on there that we didn't. Yes, my only point is that we can talk about the benefits of small localized living.
I'm sure, you know, think of a small village where you work and live in the same area, lots of like health benefits to that too. But then we also talk about the dangers of echo chambers, and that would be a literal echo chamber. Oh, no, I still think the pastor was right in Footloose. He shouldn't let that outside music come in and ruin in the community.
That wasn't quite the best in the Footloose, but at least you got to get the music. I also think that was the message of Footloose. No, stop, I don't like this. So just as a way of landing it, I don't have like a total satisfactory ending.
I think acknowledging that there are different strains of making right and wrong decisions about what's right and wrong is important. And your banal observation for the day is that different people think different things are right and wrong. But is it a healthy community one that has that disagreement? That's what my take away from all this.
And again, we saw it in the first time in a few while talking. I think that being around people who don't agree with you, I think there is a benefit to that. So I'm much more pro, you know, larger society than you are than maybe you are from what you're talking about as small villagers. I think there's a benefit to seeing and understanding that other people think about things differently.
And so you have a caution about, maybe point the second, that you have a caution about your own views. So think about when you all were answering the trolley problem, I know I put you on the spot, but most of your reaction was kind of instantaneous. It was just like, I think this is right. And then you can come up with a rational defense of why you think it's right and wrong, but this is height's point, Jonathan height's point, that a lot of what we think is right and wrong is an emotion.
Or we feel it immediately and we come up with a rationale afterwards. I think it's fair to be cautious of why do we think something is right, am I just digging in my heels because I want to be right or do I actually think this is a correct position? Is this why you read Vox? I've talked about this before that.
I try and balance my media consumption where I want a left leaning news source and I want a right leaning news source. So I listen to both national review and Vox. I've learned that people think I'm saying Vox when I say left leaning, but I would, anyway, VLX is what I say. But how much time we go, this may be a good question.
Okay, I'll save it for the after episode. So just say, I think there are benefits to all of that. And just as a maybe third and final point, I think there should be a healthy skepticism of views that benefit you. So I think a skepticism of the egoist view would probably be healthy, but in all that to say, I think that some of these are better than others.
So I'm presenting them somewhat objectively as these are different options so that they can be observed and noticed I don't do that to present them all as equal, right? Maybe we'll go into that in the in between. I'm curious what Graham's question is. Is it intro to ethical decisions, different ways of thinking about an ethical problem and an introduction to the Charlie problem?
Do you know that when they are designing autonomous cars, they actually had to consider the Charlie problems? Because if your car is making a decision about running somebody over and going like, oh, no, someone's in the road, I'm going to go off to the sidewalk and there's like 20 people on the sidewalk. Or if the thing on the sidewalk is a pole and if it veers, it means it kills the driver. Like they have to make a decision about whether or not to kill a kid in the road or the person driving the car.
And one of those is making a payment to the car company. So I would imagine that the choice it's making is to save the driver. Yeah, but what if it scans that kid and realizes it's like kid president on YouTube or whatever? Well, I'm scared for the future when it's like a quick MRI and it can tell that the kid has some terminal disease and that it's measuring the terminal disease in its driver and it quickly calculates which one has more life to save.
Skynet. Let's stop, man. All right, if you don't want Skynet to take over our future, you can become patrons. This feels like a horrible thing.
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I'm not a whatever you want. I mean, there's within a bounds of reason. But this is Graham, Thomas, and AJ signing off. Bye.
Ciao.