Thursday 17 November 2011

Means ends and moral dilemmas

People often like to challenge each other with so called moral dilemmas. An example of it one is the following:
‘If by killing 1 person (the person is not sacrificing her/his life voluntarily), you could save the lives of millions, would you do it?’
Now let me explain why do I believe that the answer to that question is NO. I am not arguing by any means against human charity, but we do not have any obligation to help anyone (unless we have some kind of contract), so helping someone is a good dead (something more than we would normally expect), not helping them is neutral, there is no fundamental reason why we should. By not helping them we are not harming them, we are just not helping them. If we on the other hand push them to harm, then we are doing them something evil.
Lets look at a example if someone is hanging on from a cliff we can either do nothing (stay neutral), help them get up (do something good) or stamp on their fingers and make them fall (do something evil).
Further on, there is no ‘objective’ way of compensating someone who we have done something evil, by doing good to other people. I.e. stealing from someone rich and giving it to the poor does not compensate the rich person for the harm that was done to him.
So by not harming the 1 person and not helping the million we stay neutral. Our means our just and hence the ends are moral.
By harming the first person and helping the million we have still done something evil and immoral, that is not compensated by the fact that we helped the other million. By doing harm to someone pour means can not be just and hence their outcome can not be moral.
If we do not follow the above algorithm, then situations like this can be deemed moral:
  1. A gangster stealing all your money  and killing, you and your family would be deemed just if he donated some of that money and saved a 1000 lives in a poor country.
  2. Governments would be justified by exploiting minorities (look at the Nazi and Soviet regimes) to help their majorities.
Referencing my dear old friend The Young Monarchist, our means justify our ends. So consider wether harming some people (e.g. by taxes) to ‘help’ other people by ‘social services’ really is just (even if you think that the social services actually help).

3 comments:

  1. We have to remember that in ethics we often deal with questions of (1) objective ethics or (2) subjective personal ethics (i.e. opinions of people). So, actually, I would kill one person in order to save a million people IF AND ONLY IF that person was willing to let me kill him/her.
    But, as you correctly point out, I am not OBLIGED to kill that person. Whether I do it or not is a personal choice. I am not required by any higher power to help people who I do not want to help.
    Great post as always!

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  2. Sorry, I had made a mistake, which I shall correct on the post, in the definition of the dilemma I was meant to state that the person was NOT willing to sacrifice her/his life.

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  3. Indeed, if the person is not willing to sacrifice their life, then it is completely immoral for me to sacrifice them no matter how many people it may save.

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