https://medium.com/@AmericanPublicU/drowning-child-scenario-exposes-moral-hypocrisy-part-i-4b308e36b1d5
https://medium.com/@AmericanPublicU/drowning-child-scenario-exposes-moral-hypocrisy-part-ii-257e1e9e5475
i cant function anymore the knowledege that my life is obnjectively worst for everyone else because i consume so many resources fucks with my head i dont wan tto spend my entire life slaving for moral purposes but i know its right i dont know what to do i think im having some kind of mental breakdown
also "rest time" implies that actual rest/relaxation is the only acceptable form of "you" time. what about learning things? that takes effort and time. but every hour i'm learning how to play an instrument something like 1200 children die. i could have spent that hour resting so i could do more work to help them or helping them, then i ended up killing something like 20 children just so i could get mildly better at piano or something
no i mean that if you can be blamed for not doing something and that not doing something leads to death so therefore you are responsible for those deaths then i am responsible for deaths that could be prevented by charity or buying fly nets or whatever thefuck
My comrade. My sweet, caring comrade.
Even if you are close to the switch, the switch is a diversion. The trolley is moving forward with kinetic energy KE that will be partly dissipated as it crushes bodies. You did not push the trolley to reach that level of energy, and more importantly, nor did you tie those people to the tracks. Everything happens for a long chain of reasons, some more influential or determinative or culpable than others. In the trolley problem the main guilty party is the one that tied the people to the tracks, or made sure that the trolley would be on track to kill people, or didn't have a functional onboard hazard-detection mechanism, etc. In the drowning child scenario there is someone who either put the child in danger or let them become endangered. In the global reality there are people who are too poor to afford bednets.
Whenever we are put in a reductive quandary where we have to choose between two evils, we must see the power forcing us into that situation as the evil that is to be resisted.
We have a large amount of control over what we directly experience in our own lives and a small amount of control over what we are indirectly connected to. I hope you are able to see yourself as a good person after reading this, because I do.
yes, but when you get to the point with the trolley, if you can't stop the trolley, you still should pull the lever. better yet, you should do everything you can to stop the trolley, no matter the cost to you.
Any effort to pull the lever is justifiable, and any effort to stop the trolley is commendable. It's still the trolley itself doing the killing and the out-of-picture actor putting all the people in harm's way.
im going to just leave this comment from someone else here, and then my own
other person's comment
This is a tricky subject but I’d say that yeah I agree with you and those dork blogs that consuming luxuries while others suffer is in a sense a moral failing. Sure it doesn’t make a large difference on a global scale, and maybe being mentally healthier could put you in a better position to help people in the long run, but I’d say this is just pretty lame copium to soothe the glaring cognitive dissonance. It’s hard to swallow but I don’t see any way around it.
I would also say that this has nothing at all to do with materialism. The drowning child thing isn’t a flawed thought experiment like the utility monster, it’s something that could happen to any of us any day, and it’s not “materialist” to sit back and refuse to help because you don’t want to go down a slippery slope of being on the hook for every drowning child. Your individual actions do have moral weight, even if it doesn’t affect society as a whole. That’s the whole point of doing praxis- we’re not all going to be a Lenin. We have to make peace with this somehow, and it’s not by refusing to consider the scenario at all.
For me the way out of this trap is to just accept that acting in a morally consistent way is not really part of being human. Like, although I care about others and try to comfort the hurting and so on - probably more than most people - if I’m being honest, at some point my personal comfort and mental health are just a higher priority for me than doing good for others. And the only reason I’d agree to ruin my phone to save the drowning child is because I would be emotionally unable to deal with seeing them die in front of me. We’re selfish, I don’t know what to say. If it’s any consolation, nobody else is perfect either.
I second the advice to touch grass btw. I think this whole issue is a realization that hits everyone when they start looking into philosophy of ethics. It’s overwhelming but life goes on. Eventually you learn to accept that you’re not really as good as you thought you were but still try to do as much good as you can. There are no pat answers.
my comment
but from the perspective shown by the trolley problem or whatever, i am basically killing people when i choose to do something selfish instead of helping them not die. so the 35000 children dying every day are at least partially my fault. i could save dozens of them from early childhood diseases just by sending enough money for medicine to survive. i basically killed a dozen people today
on second thought this is probably true, but it also implies that everyone on the planet has probably “killed” someone at least a hundred times (especially if we count choosing to eat to not starve instead of giving) so im not sure if any of this matters. moral nihilism might be it at that point
join protests against nestle or child labor, there is no feasible fast way to exit this problem individually (outside of monk dispossession of material needs).
You existing doesn’t drown children
This thought experiment is yet another one from the liberal economic orthodoxy that assumes no deception or opacity or structural inequity, treats every human being as an "econ" that has perfect or near-perfect information and operates coherently, and leaves out the roles of collectives and institutions in favor of seeing every outcome as an aggregate of decisions made by individuals.
Especially in the modern interconnected economy, we are far removed from the actions, and we are subordinated to the modes of production we live under. Do recall that there have been dozens upon dozens of large experiments, just in the past century, where people strove to set up a system that would look out for the drowning children, prevent most of them from getting to the point of drowning in the first place, and incentivize everyone to use their available mental and physical resources to intervene in the rare occasion that someone got missed. These are known as socialist projects/nations/governments. And while academics in the capitalist world were thinking up abstract thought experiments to get people to acknowledge and embrace their complicity, people in socialist governments were actively managing resources to eliminate homelessness, starvation, extreme poverty, and even disease burden.
As soon as you become aware of your instrumentality in causing preventable harm to another human, you have a prerogative to orient yourself towards minimizing or preventing that harm. But you are not compelled to give up all your agency in the interest of things that lie largely outside your control: remember for instance that famine is not something that could merely be solved by charity, but is structural. The scenario presents you with a false dichotomy of either giving up all your resources (= personal agency in life) or being identified as the sole cause for the harm.
Orient yourself towards separating yourself from the capitalist system, and either undermining it from the inside or attacking it from the outside. Changing the system will do far more good than all the money in circulation being spent on charity.
a Ph.D. in Hospitality/Business Management
try not to take idiots too seriously
(There was a show that ended a handful of years ago called "The Good
LifePlace" The story arc of the second (?) season was this.)In a world in which you are an infinitely small thing with no power to change the systems that you live within, by yourself. You can acknowledge that the system is fucked and that it forces you to be culpable in harm to someone/somewhere/somewhen and also give yourself permission to not beat yourself up over it.
Do what you can, when you can, as best as you can. Its all that can be reasonably expected of you or any of us, really.
Edited: Because my brain is silly.
Man oh man is my malfunctioning brain playing jokes on me again. Yes... yes it is.
i dont understand this weird debate bro 'thought experiment' and i don't get why the author thinks it's so airtight. of course it's a highly unreasonable position to say that you should be donating all money and spending all free time saving children around the world. this is moronic and bad thinking.
a much more measured and reasonable claim would be to point out the hypocrisy in all the counter arguments (as in the second article) for people who do NOTHING to help children but espouse these values. but for the rest of us we fall somewhere in the middle. we DO donate to unhoused people, charities or political and social causes. we DO work in our community to better people's lives. we DO save children when we are passing by and they are in need of help. we do all kinds of things on a day to day basis to better other people's lives and existences. but to say that it's all or nothing is absolutely wrong and can't be taken seriously as a reasonable or even serious argument.
you do what you can, with what you have, when you can. to ask anybody to donate their life to saving other people is ridiculous and the argument can easily be turned in on itself if you consider that a person who takes this burden upon themselves will be crushed to the soul by the burden, which therefore necessitates other people easing the burden. which is the whole fucking point. we're a collective. we don't make collective and systemic problems individuals' problems to solve alone. that is pure insanity. we come together to spread the weight of the burden and make each other's lives better. so that we don't have to spend all fucking day and all of our money and effort and time and resources into saving random children around the world.
this thought experiment doesn't seem airtight to me at all. it's like a 14 year old who took a philosophy class and thinks they can own everyone with their superior logic. it's stupid. the answer is obvious and has been the same for as long as humans have existed and had the ability to do literally anything: we are stronger as a collective and we stand on the shoulders of those before us.
edit: sorry, i realized this may have come off as kinda hostile and i definitely didn't mean that at op. i just feel frustrated at the sentiment of the articles because it basically feels like what all theory and no praxis does to a mfer.
