Hypothetical moral quandary

[gr8artist]

The original concept was a forced choice between "stop the villain now but definitely kill some people" and "let the villain free and definitely spare some people, though more might die as a result of the villain's future actions."
By establishing some over-the top set-up, we can make this happen without leaving room for the hero to come up with another solution.


The hero is trapped in a room with one door, alone, and with no tools, powers, or knowledge that might aid him.
There are two buttons, on opposite sides of the room. Pressing either button opens the door and lets him out.
30 random people are outfitted with devices they are unaware of and which are undetectable.
Pressing the left button makes the devices explode, killing the 30 people and anyone within 20 feet of them (20' because fireball).
Pressing the right button releases a chemical agent from each device, which has a 5% chance to kill anyone exposed to it, but also injects the wearer of the device with a vaccine that will guarantee their immunity to the disease.
The hero knows nothing about the chemical agent, other than that each device will likely expose 100 people in a day.
The villain is one of the people outfitted with a device. If innoculated, he will retire to his secret lair and never commit another crime, though his chemical plague might kill off the rest of the world.
No one else is aware of this dilemma.
Refusing to press either button after 1 hour will result in both effects being triggered simultaneously, killing 30 people, 30 crowds, and roughly 5% of all people exposed to the 30 chemical sources.
The hero knows the instructions and information presented to him are guaranteed to be true.

Kill people now, or probably kill people later.
Option A kills 29 innocents and 1 villain, plus 30 possible crowds or groups of people.
Option B guarantees the survival of 29 innocents and 1 villain, but will likely kill a great number over time.
The hero can do nothing but select A, B, or BOTH, but is free to do as he pleases after any of the effects are triggered.


The only thing he can do is calculate the probable number of people that will die to each method and press the button for the least loss of life overall.


An alternate experiment, using the same button/door room as before.
The villain is a homicidal genius with immense power, and ONLY the hero can stop or restrain him (like Bizarro, Apocalypse, or Doomsday to Superman).
A kills the villain and a room full of innocents.
B renders the hero powerless for up to one month, and no one will be able to stop the villain during this time. However, the innocents in the room are all made invulnerable for 1 month, and cannot be victims of the villain or his schemes during this time.
Selecting neither deprives the hero of his power and also kills the innocents, though not the villain.

[Lheticus]

The original concept was a forced choice between "stop the villain now but definitely kill some people" and "let the villain free and definitely spare some people, though more might die as a result of the villain's future actions."
By establishing some over-the top set-up, we can make this happen without leaving room for the hero to come up with another solution.

An alternate experiment, using the same button/door room as before.
The villain is a homicidal genius with immense power, and ONLY the hero can stop or restrain him (like Bizarro, Apocalypse, or Doomsday to Superman).
A kills the villain and a room full of innocents.
B renders the hero powerless for up to one month, and no one will be able to stop the villain during this time. However, the innocents in the room are all made invulnerable for 1 month, and cannot be victims of the villain or his schemes during this time.
Selecting neither deprives the hero of his power and also kills the innocents, though not the villain.

I like this scenario better than the first one since what I was trying to say wasn't more MIGHT die, but more WILL die--at least, it would be an extremely surprising event if none did in the event the villain escapes. Maybe decrease from a month to a week--the average villain can get a LOT done in a week in terms of general mayhem.

[WarKitty]

A thoroughly de-heroed version:

You're a police officer chasing a terrorist cell. You've managed to corner the last member of the group, though at the cost of the rest of your squad. You're out of ammo, though you have physical weaponry with which you could take down the terrorist.

The terrorist has lit a fire in a building with an unconscious civilian, who you could save with minimal risk. However, he is also himself rigged to a suicide vest. You are not far from a crowded area, and in the time it took you to disarm the bomb he would be far enough gone that he would have had time to detonate his vest, killing a much larger group of people.

[Crow]

A thoroughly de-heroed version:

You're a police officer chasing a terrorist cell. You've managed to corner the last member of the group, though at the cost of the rest of your squad. You're out of ammo, though you have physical weaponry with which you could take down the terrorist.

The terrorist has lit a fire in a building with an unconscious civilian, who you could save with minimal risk. However, he is also himself rigged to a suicide vest. You are not far from a crowded area, and in the time it took you to disarm the bomb he would be far enough gone that he would have had time to detonate his vest, killing a much larger group of people.

Is the vest on a dead-man's switch (do I see him clutching a detonator)? Or is it command-det?

[WarKitty]

Is the vest on a dead-man's switch (do I see him clutching a detonator)? Or is it command-det?

Command detonator - a dead man's switch wouldn't really work.

[Crow]

Command detonator - a dead man's switch wouldn't really work.

Well if I have cornered him, I guess I'm going to probably kill him. But will I really not have time to help the unconscious person? How long am I going to draw out the killing for?

[WarKitty]

Well if I have cornered him, I guess I'm going to probably kill him. But will I really not have time to help the unconscious person? How long am I going to draw out the killing for?

Given that you're as written using melee actions


But in any case...think of thought experiments as the philosophical version of science experiments. What you're trying to do is hold as many variables steady as possible while adjusting just one thing and seeing how people react to that thing. It's unrealistic in the same way a controlled laboratory experiment is unrealistic, but that's not really a flaw. It's not designed to reflect real-world actions. Complaining that the scenario is unrealistic is kind of like complaining that physicists like to deal with things like perfect spheres and frictionless surfaces.

[Crow]

Would a better way to do this would be like this?

The terrorist has an explosive vest, rigged to a dead-man's switch. He has taken a child to use as a human shield. You manage to corner him, and could kill him, but it would take the child (and you) with him. He tells you the child doesn't have to die, if you'll just let him get out the door.

As you point out, to make these things work, everything above is considered "true", meaning he keeps his word and lets the kid go, or you shoot him and kill the kid along with him. The hard part about these is that they all end up being variations of the Trolly Problem.

[Asta Kask]

James Bond would find out a way not only to kill the villain and rescue the child, but also have sex with the child's mother within ten minutes.

[hamishspence]

At the other end of the scale, pre-Imperial Thrawn would shoot through the child if he thought it was the only way to stop the villain.

But then, even before he joined the Empire - Thrawn was exceedingly pragmatic.

[Crow]

James Bond would find out a way not only to kill the villain and rescue the child, but also have sex with the child's mother within ten minutes.

This would be of course the only right answer.

[SiuiS]

Some laws are simply requirements that we all do the same arbitrary thing, like the color of road signs or which side of the street to drive on. But a mob boss isn't being indicted for painting road signs the wrong color, but for bank robbery, murder, extortion, etc. These are definitely based on moral principles.

That laws involving mob bosses coincide with morals does not mean the laws are based on morals. Just that "don't be an ass hat" is often economical as well as moral.

[Mando Knight]

Indictment isn't moral rebuke. The law is amoral. It has to be; is important to delineate which side of the road to drive on and what color road signs should be, but those aren't moral at all, unless you're reaching.

I disagree entirely on your assertion of the purpose of law, and would rather insist the opposite: the law must be moral, or else it fails its citizens. The assignment of arbitrary but useful customs (side of the road to drive on and colors of road signs for instance) flows from the moral duties of the government to protect its citizenry. There are a great many things that the law regulates or prohibits that fall well within the sphere of morality (do not murder, do not steal, do not discriminate against another on the basis of their skin color, etc.) where the economic concern is secondary at most, and economic laws and regulations work primarily to protect those involved.

Whether the law succeeds at being moral is another discussion entirely, and unfortunately most of the reasoning behind my beliefs on the purpose and function of the rule of law is too deeply rooted in topics that are beyond the scope of this forum.

[Wardog]

I disagree entirely on your assertion of the purpose of law, and would rather insist the opposite: the law must be moral, or else it fails its citizens.

I agree - I've seen this "law should not be moral / care about morals" meme a few times, and disagreed with it for the same reasons you give.

It seems to be based on a very narrow interpretation (or misinterpretation) of what "moral" means - I suspect as a result of some people advocating legislating according to one particular moral stance, and other people disagreeing with that moral stance and/or that it should be legislated on. But that doesn't mean that the law should always be amoral, just that a) not everyone agrees what it should be (which will be the case whatever you base the law on), and b) not everything is suitable for regulation by law (which is also true for both moral and amoral issues).

And I'll leave it there because I don't think we can go into much more detail than that without breaking forum rules.

[SiuiS]

I disagree entirely on your assertion of the purpose of law, and would rather insist the opposite: the law must be moral, or else it fails its citizens.

Agents of the law disagree with you. I believe laws should be moral as well, but that belief does not make them so. Nor will it.

Kind of like how US police are not requires to protect or help any individual, they only need to protect society as a whole. I find this dysfunctional, but it makes a certain amount of sense in the 'what people think a thing is and what the thing actually is are different' sort of way.

I would also go so far as to say morality cannot be legislated, actually. Morality is not rote action but a decision. Right action without right thought is not moral. But that's quite a tangent and only relevant in that it highlights my ability to understand the amorality of a legal system.

[Frozen_Feet]

If laws must be moral, there needs to be a system of morality above and beyond any single set of laws.

Suffice to say that the discussion on natural rights has been going on for a long time and we don't have anything better than UN's declaration of human rights to go by.

Legistlation of pretty much any nation consists mostly of things that have nill to do with those rights.

Ideally, yes, all laws would naturally follow from and serve some principle of justice or another. The specificity of laws required in the modern sadly means that noble purpose often gets buried under semantics. Seeing the spirit behind the letter of the law is hard enough when said spirit was firm in mind when the law was passed, nevermind when it's an afterthought.

[SiuiS]

Basically. You could only have a moral legal system if it was primarily tribal in function – decided based not on any actual law or rule but based on the moral understanding of those who have been allowed to make judgement.

We've all seen how effective that is.

[Coidzor]

Basically. You could only have a moral legal system if it was primarily tribal in function – decided based not on any actual law or rule but based on the moral understanding of those who have been allowed to make judgement.

We've all seen how effective that is.

Honestly, I'm not so sure about that.

I mean, Caesar's notes on Gaulish crime and punishment may stick out to some people, but that's not generally what people are reading his accounts of the Gauls and how he conquered them. And while anthropologists eventually started paying a bit more attention to such things when encountering and documenting peoples still solely existing at the tribal level, most of us aren't really all that aware of what they've found there.

[SiuiS]

Gauls? I didn't mean historical tribes. I meant the form of jurisprudence.

When your only moral compass is whether or not the guy who says Good/Bad says it's good or bad, that goes to that guy's head. He makes decisions from ego as much as from moral rightness, and things go bad. This is why people in the US don't like the Deep South; they aren't beholden to laws we all accept and they aren't willing to hear any pleas. Or that's the assumption, and it's the same assumption for gangs and organized crime.