An interesting take on it is that if, for example you have 90.000 in savings you could choose not to pull the lever and use your savings to save 20 people in Guinea, but also this would not be a popular choice I guess.
Every moment, every (in)decision you make comes at the opportunity cost of many other choices, and their exponentially multiplying secondary/tertiary/etc consequences.
These thought experiments feels like (#0) solving an optimization math problem where you're:
1. Stumbling through an unimaginably large solution space and
2. Latching onto local minima (heuristics like "choose the fewest trolley deaths"), which are probably bad answers, only to realize
3. We don't even precisely know the objective function we're optimizing. So the problem has gone "up" one level. We first need to solve that optimization problem. GOTO #0.
The whole thing feels farcically hopeless and is maybe even a recursive or self referential minefield. Yikes. So the idea of avoiding it entirely by just winging it through life using your gut, or checking out entirely, doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Hell, it might be the only way to keep your sanity. It's an unsatisfying heuristic, but...oh look, we're back at step #2... :))))))
Reminds me of Richard Posner, former Chief Justice of the Seventh Appelate court. His essay on how poor people have no wealth so you need the threat of prison to keep them in line. And how middle class people you only need the threat of impoverishment to keep them in line. So you can just fine them. And wealthy people only need the threat of loss of reputation to keep them in line.
Which is to say Posner is an idiot that knows nothing of poor people. Because all an honest poor person owns is his reputation. Where Musk... when you are that wealthy someones always going to overlook your transgressions.
People operating on different sets of facts!
And while yes, some good charities do exist apparently; I can't name any.
Edit: and no one better try to say 'WE' is a good charity.
Comment redacted to help hide idiocy... sorry.
And not to be that person; but proof please.
I really do want a comprehensive list if possible of which charities are actually worthy of even being allowed to keep existing on this planet.
You're in luck! That's exactly the problem that the Effective Altruism movement aspires to solve (namely, how to do altruism effectively.) And Givewell, in particular, is a great site for that - you can either donate to them and have them spread your donation over their "top charities", or donate to the charities yourself.
They do a lot of research, very transparently, to figure out which charities are actually achieving good outcomes. You can read their research, their thought processes around it, etc.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean those charities have "zero overhead", as you alluded to in another comment - that's not a good way to judge a charity, in general, the same way it isn't a good way to judge a company; we don't really care how much money it takes to run a company or how that money is used, we care about their profit. Similarly, if a charity uses a lot of money on things like staff, but this makes them more effective at actually (say) saving lives, then it's a net better charity to donate to than other charities.
With your scenario, there are two elements to consider:
1. Bystander Effect, i.e., someone else can help in this situation so I don't have to
2. People likely reason that Guineans still have some agency to try to subsist, so the threat is not as immediate
Compared to the Trolley problem proposed, there is a decision to be made _now_ that only you have control over and there will be an immediate effect in that people's lives will be saved in a situation where they have no option to help themselves or even get by at a bare minimum.
Ignoring the "I'm absolutely broke so who cares?" people (which while a fair point I think isn't quite the spirit of the scenario, which is will you sacrifice items of significance to you for the lives of others), I think that your scenario has too much distance and layers of abstraction as to how the money helps. Fundamentally, if we can't actually understand specifically what the charities do to save a life in Guinea, so it's harder for people to accept that the decision has any significant impact.
So I don't see any real inconsistency between your scenario and the trolley one. People aren't as accepting of the premise that the charitable donation immediately saves a life and count on the help of others whereas pulling the lever immediately has an observable effect.
A rather hilarious example is asking if they are against bestiality. Pretty much everyone is.
Asking why in more liberal circles gets you an answer along the lines of "it hurts the animals" a lot of the time.
Then asking if it hurts animals more than eating them usually results in a ban.
The cost of the lives of 5 first-world people in terms of economic productivity is like an order of magnitude greater than my savings.
But that's fine because and and I bad drivers are not.
Saying something ought to be done is not the same as doing it, basically.
And of course, while donating to poor countries is fundamentally similar to Question 3, in practice it's obviously not the same; people do seem have a 'moral discount' for things that occur farther away (geographically, temporally, or otherwise).
1) Many people's life savings is 0. A bargain!
2) If _I_ were one of the five people, I'd try and make it up to the lever puller. Lever-guy might even come out ahead.
3) If I pull this lever right away in question 3, if there are later questions about giving up my life savings, they'll be free. This might be the value lever pull! I might be kicking myself later for missing this deal.
I still think you need to pull the lever.
I still chose to pull the lever though because I don't have $18000 in my life savings yet.
(Not saying that's necessarily wrong, just to give some perspective on the "fun" corners you get into when putting a monetary value on human life, and it's so much different from the value you get where you live).
Harm caused is usually one of several factors we use to determine punishments, which is why attempted murder is punishable even if the perpetrator failed to cause any harm.
(Not saying our current system for punishment is necessarily right.)
There are pragmatic reasons as well. For me, people spend a lot to be happy like buying luxurious stuff or go to the movies/good restaurant. Saving people makes me happy. I am willing to pay for my own happiness.
1) an average person's life savings is less than 1 million
2) an average person's life is worth ~10 million
But money is fundamentally just a unit of value. We use it to compare the value of different things. We can use it to convert between labour (someone's time, which is a fraction of one's life) and goods and services. We can also use it to measure lives: 5 statistical lives lost is worse than 1 statistical life lost, all else being equal. We can also use it to weigh years lost to disability, etc.
Note that this doesn't mean things always have a fair price, and it says nothing about whether money is fairly allocated in society. And it certainly doesn't mean that people can be replaced with money. None of this is the point.
As a thought experiment, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is a human life worth more than nothing, or zero dollars? (I hope you will say yes)
- Is a human life worth more than 20$? (I hope you will say yes)
- Does a human life have infinite value? I hope you will agree that this is not the case: if it was, then we would be justified in sacrificing all of the world's resources combined, in order to save a single life. The paradox is that this would come at the cost of all other lives, which is clearly nonsensical. Even a pharaoh's life, or a king's life, is not normally considered to be worth the combined lives of all of his subjects, from the perspective of modern society. Lives have some non-zero, but finite, economic/social "value".
- Is there a fair price, in dollars, for an hour of labour or work? If there is, then you accept that there is some conversion factor between a fraction of a human life, and some amount of dollars.
Putting a price tag on a human life is something that is so important, that we ought to discuss it more often. Whether we put the price too high, or too low, is often what explains political disagreements on the provision of public goods and services. We do ourselves a great disservice by not forcing ourselves to come up with a concrete number, or by not being honest about what our numbers are. We should challenge each other's assumptions and ensure we put a fair price on it, and ensure that this price is based on the things that matter to us as a society.
Judges, actuarial scientists, and economists, all do it explicitly. Nobody agrees on a specific number, but they all pick a number. The rest of us? We do it implicitly, whether or not we're aware of it, every day of our lives. The problem is that our value judgments and our choices, especially if they are not conscious, are often not self-consistent.
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See also:
- https://fee.org/articles/marginalism-and-the-morality-of-pri...
- https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agen...
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230963-100-put-a-pr...
- https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/get-honest-about-the-price-of-...
- http://justiceharvard.org/lecture-3-putting-a-price-tag-on-l...
- https://www.porchlightbooks.com/blog/changethis/2020/all-liv...
Less directly, there's the fact that new safety features often come to luxury vehicles first, and might eventually trickle down to cheaper cars due to competition and regulation (backup cameras, automatic emergency braking).
I think mostly we don't like to think about it. This comes up particularly in the health care industry. There was the (manufactured) furor over "death panels" but there's also the very real challenge of deciding whether it's worth paying possibly millions of dollars on a drug that might have a marginal-at-best improvement in someone's survival odds. And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.
> And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.
Not only that, but even in first world countries (ie.: countries that have a good universal/public healthcare system), the dollar value of a statistical human life matters as well. There are waiting lists where you have to decide a priority rank of who gets the organ first, or who gets scheduled in on Monday for their surgery vs who has to wait, etc. Nobody likes that it has to be this way, and nobody wants to be the person that decides (in reality, it's often an ethics committee and there are rules and guidelines to follow), but that's how it has to be.
The money used to save and extend lives has to be taken from somewhere, and it's taken from the money that represents a fraction of the population's labour one way or another (it's a bit more complicated than that, especially when you consider monetary policy, and non-labour sources of income, but the general idea stands).
If you don't put a dollar value on it, then you're going to be making a lot of subjective decisions based on how you feel resources should be allocated: you're going to be taking from some people and giving to others, based on a gut feeling rather than a system. Your gut feeling might be the right one from time to time, but chances are it won't be self-consistent, and will be very biased.
Depending where in the world you are, you may have grown up to believe that humans are more worthy than animals because we have “souls” or whatever that means. A lot of our culture and religion deeply reinforces the “humans are special holy magic” feelings. I won’t develop this thought to great detail unless someone wants me to.
But in addition to that, you’re absolutely correct in saying that oftentimes the price we put on life is too low.
In addition to that, even if the price is correct, it may be difficult for us to have a good perspective on that, simply because we are talking about large numbers (we’re really bad at large numbers), and because pricing stuff is hard. Even stocks are hard to price, and people argue with each other about wildly different price targets.
out of sight out of mind.
> Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, but then your life savings will be destroyed. What do you do?
Over 70% chose to pull the lever and destroy their life savings.
People die of preventable causes in developing countries today. By choosing not to donate your life savings today to help them, you are choosing not to pull the Question 3 lever.
According to Givewell, it takes $4500 to save a life in Guinea. So for every $4500 of your savings that you choose not to donate to Guinea, that's one person you are choosing not to pull the lever to save. Have $45,000 in savings? That's 10 people you're choosing not to pull the lever to save.
I doubt that over 70% of respondents are regularly donating anywhere close to their life savings.