Quote:
Originally Posted by Makarov
I think that you're too quick to dismiss the idea of measuring the value of human life versus the value of animal (or even plant) life (especially in our current circumstances where humanity poses serious threat to thousands of other species.)
For example, let's frame the discussion in a classic moral dilrmma: the railway man. A train carrying x number of lions is hurtling down the tracks. At some point, the tracks diverge: one path leads to a brick wall (and certain death for all of the lions on board the train) and the other path leads to a clear path with one human being tied to the track (certain death for him or her if the train is diverted to that track.) What should the railway man (responsible for choosing which track the train should proceed on) do? Morally, what number of lion lives equal one human life? What if evrey last lion (30,000) is on the train and only one (of 7 billion humans) is on the track?
At some point, surely, it becomes a difficult decision for the railway man.
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This isn't the point of that thought experiment, and it is only half of the thought experiment.
The "railway man" (actually usually referred to in terms of a "trolley") is meant to illustrate the moral difference of actively engaging in conduct that will produce an unfortunate result. For example, if you have 10 people in a trolley car hurtling towards a split track, and by flipping the switch you save the ten people but kill the five others who are stuck on the track they'd be diverted onto, you have directly participated in killing five people. If you don't flip that switch, you are a passive bystander who could have prevented the death of 10 people. The point is that there is a perceived moral difference between actively doing something that leads to a undesirable result, and passively allowing it to happen.
The second part comes when you present that thought experiment to people. In the abstract, at least, most everyone agrees that you have to flip the switch. The utilitarian calculus just moves people in that case. But if you change it slightly, the results change. The second part is this: you now have a trolley car with ten people on it heading towards certain death. There is no switch, but you're standing on a bridge overtop of the tracks, and there's a fat man there with you. If you push him onto the tracks, he'll be killed, but the trolley car will come to a stop (don't ask how this works in terms of physics - it's a thought experiment). People are much less likely to be willing to push the fat man than they were to flip the switch. Which engages all sorts of questions, many involving empathy.
So your analogy is misplaced.
In my view, there is no calculus of lion lives vs. human lives. The best way, practically, to approach the problem is to ask which path better serves the flourishing of the human species. If we're worse off, on the whole, to have 100 dead lions as opposed to one dead person, that's where the line is.
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EDIT: I don't want the above to be misinterpreted as my view on moral theory - it is a moral statement but it's purely a pragmatic one. I think utilitarianism has so many nails in its coffin, it's not tenable philosophically, but I simply have nothing better to offer in so far as how we can survive in the real world.)
Turning back to empathy and the problems associated with it, this is worth a listen.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/t...-of-cold-blood
There's one particular part of that discussion that I'll bring out: studies have been conducted wherein it's determined the level of emotional reaction (outrage, sadness, what have you) attached to a reported event depending on who the victim is. The most telling result there is that the larger the field of victims, the less people seem to care about it. But more significantly, that holds true
even if the larger class contains all of the members of the smaller class.
Put another way, if there is a story about something terrible happening to an innocent young girl, people will generally have a highly emotional response. However, if the story is that the same thing happened to her and her brother, the response is decreased. If it's to her, her brother and a dozen others, the response drops off a cliff. This is a problem with the way we're wired and explains to some extent the disproportionate outrage we see to stories that are not statistically significant, like this one.
I know the usual reaction is to say, "just because other bad things are happening doesn't mean we should ignore this bad thing". That's fair. But our psychologically ingrained tendency in this area
is a problem, because at every level (individually, socially, globally) we have finite resources. That includes the number of things we can focus our attention on. The ALS ice bucket challenge resulted in a massive donation influx to ALS research but corresponding decreases elsewhere. These things are flexible, but not infinite, and at some point enough is enough.