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More Morality

Entry 648, on 2007-11-27 at 21:46:32 (Rating 2, Philosophy)

Recently I completed a quiz at the Time web site which purported to discover something about the participants morality. The most interesting part were three questions related to the "trolley dilemma". Basically you have to decide whether its OK to change the course of a trolley in various ways which will result in the death of one person but save five who would be killed if you didn't intervene.

The results showed that as the intervention becomes less personal more people are likely to do it. If its just a matter of switching a lever 85% said they could do it. If its a matter of pushing the person onto a track only 43% said they could. Of course, what would happen in the real situation and what people think they might do could be entirely different.

But the outcome in both cases is the death of one to save 5, and it both cases you are the person who is quite directly responsible for the one death (and the 5 non-deaths). Morality obviously isn't based on the greatest good for the greatest number, its more related to social rules regarding doing harm to others because the more disconnected the person is from the victim of his actions the more likely he is to sacrifice one for the good of 5.

I suppose the complexity of the issue shouldn't be surprising because morality is a combination of multiple physical, psychological, emotional, intellectual and social factors interacting. So if the answers to this quiz were more definitive I would probably be surprised.

It shows that maybe there is no right or wrong though. I would challenge anyone to give a definite answer to these questions and to honestly claim that the opposite viewpoint is wrong. And the problem could be extended further to make a higher proportion say they would carry out the fatal action. For example, what proportion would be prepared to tell someone else to pull the lever?

It seems that there is always a continuum between right and wrong. Technically you are murdering someone in these situations, but most people would do it anyway. Obviously murder isn't always morally wrong. Maybe its never definitely morally wrong because there are always some factors which complicate any good or bad act. And if there is no absolute morality relating to something as important as murder maybe there is no objective morality at all?

Of course there isn't. Morality is just a combination of all of those influences I mentioned before. I can accept that rules and laws might need to be made which are practical but might not be entirely fair, but they shouldn't be based on anything as insubstantial as morality.

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