Alright: I think I owe you a fair, considerate rebuttal. I apologize for not doing this sooner - I thought that what I saw was so simple, so easy to see. And I may be wrong about this - there have been arguments in the past in UGS where I've been proven wrong (and also ones where you've kindly corrected me). So I think I owe you a response, in kind.
A huge part in our disagreements has to do with your constant questioning of the conditions of the puzzle. I believe that this is unnecessary, and counter-productive to what the puzzles are trying to accomplish. For instance - we spent many paragraphs arguing about the whether flipping a switch will guarantee a dead stranger, or whether throwing a stranger over the bridge will stop the train. And in the case of the second puzzle, you spent many paragraphs arguing that you won't want to contribute to the mail-in envelope because it might be a scam.
Now this is entirely unnecessary. Surely you must see so yourself? In the puzzle, the conditions have been provided for. In the first puzzle, you are told - the only way to stop the train and save the 5 people is to throw the stranger over the bridge and have his body stop the train. You must accept this condition for the puzzle to proceed. Also, in the second puzzle: if you send a mail-in cheque the puzzles says that this money will 100% end up saving the lives of a hundred little girls.
It may not be so in real life - but it doesn't matter: the puzzle isn't real life. It's a thought experiment, designed to test out your responses, to see what meaningful patterns there are when we think about such situations. Questioning the puzzle in terms of real-world conditions is counter-productive, to a point. We don't want to know if the mail-in money is a scam - the puzzle says that in this particular case, it isn't and we know it!
Now, if you may argue and say that you won't contribute if you think it's a scam, but what if you know it isn't? That is what the puzzle is proposing. And it is interested in your choice because it demonstrates this abstract value-system vs the emotional value-system that exists in all of us.
If that isn't clear enough - then let me give you an example of another puzzle. Do you remember the puzzle of the boatman who needs to transport a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage across the river? The puzzle says that he can only transport two at a time in that boat of his. And you don't question this, right? Because the puzzle is merely trying to test your logic/thinking skills. You don't say - oh but that's ridiculous, surely the boatman can carry all three at once in his boat - after all, the cabbage is so small! And you don't see - oh that's ridiculous, that can't happen in real life - all we need is to tie a piece of string around the wolf and let him swim behind the boat and so i can do it in one try. You accept the constraints and the suppositions of the puzzle because the puzzle is designed that way. And questioning the design of the puzzle does nothing to illuminate what it was designed to test - in the boatman's case - logic; in the moral puzzle's case - our competing moral systems.
This is so simple that I do not understand why you keep questioning the puzzle. And I also do not understand why it is so hard to give a definite answer. You have to remember that this puzzle was originally done for research purposes - we're put in a behavioral lab, with the head researcher watching us, and one-way glass at the end of the room. We are expected to give definite answers, e.g.: yes I would kill the stranger; yes I would flick the switch. We may quaffle when we give our reasoning, but apart from that - very simple, binary choices. I do not understand why you must go into so much detail (and question that puzzle) if the puzzle was designed from the get-go to be binary. State your choices, and then maybe we can argue about your reasons, but everything is definite. As it should be, in a study.
This paragraph is uncalled for. Did I say my decision was special? Which statement of mine said Joshua Greene's research is invalidated? When did I say I corresponded differently?
Well that's easily answered. Don't go acting hurt on me - you called it upon yourself. This statement of yours: "My justification is purely moral, and would be unaffected by the throes of technology or "things we as a species inherited from our ancestors"." It is usually unwise to reject an alternative explanation of things by saying that your decision is purely moral, when the vast majority of people studied responded exactly the same way you did, though they gave different explanations. If that was the case, then either they all have similar moral convictions as yours, or there must be some lower-level explanation of why we act the way we do. The first choice is unlikely because these people studied come from different backgrounds - some atheist, some buddhist, so on so forth. So the logical explanation is the second one, and Greene's theory provides an alternative explanation, one you rejected in a sentence.
In the first place we're arguing on different grounds. You're trying to explain why given the chance we'd push a button to kill rather than do it ourselves, while I'm trying to show you why it's bears less heavily on my moral conscience to kill the stranger in Scenario B instead of Scenario A.
We are not, actually. Think carefully about what Greene's research shows. You say that it bears less heavily on your moral conscience to kill the stranger in Scenario B instead of Scenario A. You imply that your reasons are unique to yourself, that they are 'purely moral reasons'. They are not. Most people who take this puzzle choose exactly the same way you did. For whatever reason, something makes them more likely to kill the stranger in Scenario B instead of Scenario A. That difference, Greene says, is due to the way our brains have evolved - one part handles emotional responses, like the throwing of the stranger off a bridge, and the other part handles abstract moral valuations, like the flicking of a switch to sacrifice one person for five. And because of the places in the brain that handles these two problems, one feels worse than the other even though the net effect is the same - either 1 person loses his life, or 5 people lose their lives.
Perhaps your decision is not influenced by this, but I doubt it. As I argued above, there is something else, something lower-level that must be in play here. Something that's instinctive to our natures, so much so that we struggle to give our own explanations for what we just did. For instance - you argued on moral grounds, being a staunch Catholic. I, however, gave the reason: 'because flicking the switch feels less bad than throwing the stranger'. I actually wrote that down in the survey, and I felt very dissatisfied with my inability to explain the difference in my decisions. But whatever reasons we gave, our base motivations remain the same - something Greene's explanation provides for.
Why are you so unwilling to accept his explanation as the fundamental basis on which you made your decision?
For example, you would rather knife a man in his heart than skin him alive and watch as fever and infection slowly take the life out his body (both methods are ancient methods so evolution is not a factor).
This is irrelevant to the discussion. The difference here is between an abstract moral decision and a physical moral decision. This example does not give such a difference.
I find it no easier to push a button than drive a knife through someone's heart. To be honest, I don't think anyone does either. Otherwise we wouldn't have soldiers with psychological problems (and this definitely isn't something new). They're in tanks and airplanes these days, surely it's easier to kill someone at a push of a button right?
This is a nice emotive argument, but we know that this isn't true. First, the abstraction that we're talking about here is global vs local. Which implies that the people who ordered the nuclear strike suffered less guilt than the soldiers who killed in the battlefield. Oppenheimer, for instance, has the blood of thousands of Japanese civilians on his hands, but his guilt does not appear to be in proportion to the number of people he killed. In fact, he felt relieved when the first bomb test - Trinity - went well. And if that isn't enough - he suffers from little PSTD as compared to the many infantrymen who came back from the war psychologically scarred. Greene's hypothesis supports this observation - because calling and building the nuclear bomb is an abstract decision, it doesn't feel as bad as stabbing someone in the heart when you first call it. And perhaps the only way to truly feel the guilt would be to force these people to visit the strike zone and show them the pain and tell them: you did this, you called this.
And even if that isn't so - I challenge you to find me the numbers of airmen with PSTD vs the number of ground-based troops with PSTD. It is unlikely that the airmen suffer from guilt more than the ground-based troops - after all they delivered their payload and never stuck around long enough to see the results of their destruction. Your argument does not hold true. And while you may say that it is different for you, that calling the nuclear bomb is worse for you - evidence doesn't appear to show this to be true. You are more likely to suffer from a breakdown if you'd gone out there and shot someone than if you made the decision to call a nuclear strike. You may feel guilt, I'm sure - but it won't be as bad as the poor soldiers that were sent out there. None of the people who called the nuclear bomb strike had nervous breakdowns afterwards - not Churchill, not Johnson, not the scientists, not Feynmann, not anybody. And that's bad.
This may sound offensive, but Greene's research tells us why. And he demonstrates this with the moral puzzles. His conclusion is that we have to be very careful with how we make our moral decisions. If it's abstract - we must be doubly careful. Because things that should make you feel very nervous and guilty don't feel as bad (or as good) as they should.
And surely that isn't a bad thing to support?
