Harland Harrison wrote: HH> I cannot believe you mean your words, Brian Holtz. <HH
I always mean my words. HH> Now you only kill fat men to stop trolleys, instead of always saving life. <HH No, in the TP I always choose to save the maximum number of lives. You don't. HH> You must kill somebody especially if it takes him by surprise. <HH Whether it takes the innocent by surprise is irrelevant, except insofar as the tradeoff between giving him a chance to be a hero, and giving him a chance to prevent the saving of the greater number of innocents. HH> If one fat man wants to live, you call it "selfishness". <HH If you think that self-interestedness is always a negative attribute, then you're going to be a very self-conflicted libertarian. BH> I'm not advocating killing anyone in our universe, because as far as I know it currently contains no runaway trolleys of the kind stipulated in the TP. But if it did, I would indeed advocate killing the fat man <BH HH> Then say everything is OK because trolleys never run away like that. Do I understand you? <HH Obviously not. If I thought the TP was not possible in our universe, why would I use the word "currently" above? HH> Why don't you sense that killing is wrong? <HH Killing is not always wrong. HH> If you belonged to an army at war with Germany, you could kill Hitler even if the baby died, too. <HH BH> Harland said it would have been acceptable to kill an innocent baby that Hitler hypothetically always kept at his side if doing so were the only way to kill Hitler <BH HH> I do not approve of murder. So I never said that you could kill anybody, including Hitler. I said that a soldier, at war against Hitler's Germany, might kill its leader and even civilians around him, if necessary. <HH "Why don't you sense that killing is wrong?" HH> You can never accept killing as an end in itself. How barbaric. <HH How obtuse. I have never said that killing is an end in itself. I have always said that the end in the TP is to minimize the loss of innocent life. HH> If your trolley story never happens, it proves nothing. But you claim it "slam dunk refutes" libertarians who do not believe in aggression. <HH If you're going to claim that counterfactual thinking and thought experiments can never prove a point in ethics, that's just ignorant. HH> You even call this murder an imperative, so I assume you would do so whenever you get a chance. And the opportunity does come up every day. In the same essay, the "Transplant Surgeon" faces the exact same dilemma. <HH It would only be the "exact same dilemma" if there were only one organ donor on the planet who could save the other patients, and the other patients would surely die otherwise. Not only does that not "come up every day", but I'm confident that it has never happened. HH> Do you also call the patient selfish, because she wants to keep her own organs? <HH Selfish in the sense of self-interested, yes. HH> The doctor can save lives with her liver, lungs, pancreas, kidneys, bone marrow, skin, heart, and more. Should he take them? <HH If taking them from that particular patient is literally the only way to save multiple innocent lives, then yes. HH> Like your slam-dunk push of a man to his death beneath the trolley, organ theft surely refutes non-aggression. But few people in this universe will approve. <HH If taking them from that particular patient is literally the only way to save multiple innocent lives, then I suspect that a majority of people would, like me, reluctantly approve. HH> In fact, J. J. Thomson could not find anybody at all who would kill a patient to steal her organs, either. http://www.uwec.edu/philrel/Prism/PRISM2002/page0036.htm <HH Thomson's Transplant Problem talks of an organ donor with "the same, relatively rare, blood type". By contrast, in the TP there is only one innocent on the planet whose death can save the others, and you have zero role in picking out that innocent. HH> You should not get these temptations to commit war crimes, or condone transplant murders. <HH You should not get these temptations to torture bunnies or misrepresent my positions with misleading disjunctions and deceptive over-generalizations. HH> So I do not support you for Federal office, Brian Holtz. <HH If I knew my vote were the one that could put into office someone so morally confused as to be willing to sacrifice 298 million innocent lives just to keep his hands clean, then I would seriously consider withholding my vote from him. HH> The US government and its allies really do commit murder and torture. They can kill Moslems with impunity now. Will atheists come next? Will Libertarians follow? <HH This is silly. Who has the US government ever tortured or killed solely because the person was Muslim? HH> I already answered your trolley questions in previous messages, but I will do it again, here. <HH False. I ask you for the sixth time: "So the hand of a bystander pushing the fat man's chest and thus causing him to die is strictly forbidden, but the hand of a bystander pushing a switch and thus causing him to die might be allowed, even though in both cases the bystander knows that the push will cause the fat man's death?" I challenge you to either give a yes or no answer, or to identify some beating-your-wife premise that you think the question is smuggling. HH> A man owns his own life - never push him in front of a trolley. When you operate a trolley, run over as few people as possible - throw the switch if that is your job. <HH It's fascinating how your opinion of whether the one innocent should end up dead and the other innocents should be saved depends so heavily on whether the savior is wearing the uniform of a trolley operator or soldier or whatever. The point of such thought experiments is to help us decide whether anybody, uniformed or not, should ever be permitted to commit aggression in order to minimize it. HH> Passengers do not have to steer the trolley - yes, throw the switch only if you want; the decision is between you and god <HH If your god doesn't mind you watching four (or 298 million) innocents die just so you can keep your hands clean, I would recommend shopping for a god with better ethics. BH> is there any number of innocents -- e.g. five billion -- that would change your answer to the Trolley Problem? <BH HH> What I would do depends on the circumstances. As an American Libertarian, I think the limit should be at least 298,000,000 people for anyone I want in office. <HH BH> when I asked you: "is there any number of innocents -- e.g. five billion -- that would change your answer to the Trolley Problem?", you mumbled something about "298,000,000". <BH HH> Since I only answered you in writing, I could not possibly have "mumbled" anything. <HH I asked you whether there were any number of innocents that would make you switch your answer to be that the bystander is morally obligated to sacrifice the one innocent to save the many. You didn't answer the question, but instead just said that if the number exists it's higher than 298M. I call that evasiveness "mumbling". HH> But I will tell you again: the answers do not change no matter how many people get tied to the track. <HH I could find no record you ever telling me that no number of innocents could change your answer. I challenge you to quote yourself doing so. HH> If you think the defense of 298,000,000 people can justify even one murder, I do not trust you in Federal office. <HH I never talked about "defense" of innocents justifying just any murder. The TP is instead about saving multiple innocents from certain death by sacrificing one innocent who was singled out by circumstances beyond our control. HH> Most people actually live by a non-aggression principle. They give the same answers as I do. <HH Wrong. Most people would be willing to sacrifice one innocent to save 298M innocents. HH> They will not push a man in front of a trolley, no matter what. The philosophers argued over why people would not push him, not whether people should murder him. <HH I asked you before to quote a philosopher "saying she thought nobody would ever opt for pushing the fat man". You still haven't supplied such a quote. HH> The Trolley Problem actually proves the validity of a zero aggression principle; it does not refute it. <HH "A" zero aggression principle? Sorry, but there's only one ZAP, and the TP shows that most people would disagree that it is inviolable. HH> If one of us gets elected, he will have a duty under the Constitution to protect the country from invasion no matter how many people get killed (Art IV Section 4) . <HH BH> Please don't invoke the Constitution or our status as candidates to dodge the question. Or are you saying that "duty under the Constitution" would trump your principle to never choose a course of action that you know will cause the death of an innocent? <BH HH> I would take the Federal Oath of Office, to uphold the Constitution, very seriously. Brian Holtz previously wrote that the oath does not trump personal beliefs, (as I understood him.) <HH I didn't write that; context restored above. I take the principle of rule of law very seriously indeed. But I would not agree that one's personal sense of principle and morality should never trump one's belief in the rule of law. HH> Even if you did want to kill somebody to save other lives, you still could not argue that is was "justified." <HH Not only have I so argued, but I think my argument carries much force. You seem to be using some non-standard sense of "justified", with connotations of not being regrettable or unfortunate in any way. Your usage makes sense if having clean hands is your highest value. HH> If you kill some innocent person to save yourself or your family or your beloved country or even all of them, you do it out of selfishness. The innocent victim you kill is not selfish as Brian claimed; the killer and the survivors are the selfish ones. <HH In the standard TP there is absolutely no implication that you the bystander have any special attachment to the five innocents. You seem to have just made up this attachment in a desperate bid to deflect my observation about the self-interestedness of the one innocent. HH> As for me personally, I do not promise to save your life by killing somebody else. I might do it, but I might not. I don't make any promises. <HH You are a beacon of moral clarity. HH> this is a religious kind of value. It is completely wrong for politicians to criticize anybody for believing differently. <HH Like when you criticize Tom Lantos for believing that attacking the leadership of Hamas will save innocent lives? HH> We politicians have no right attempting to "slam-dunk refute" a ZAP principle. Would we attack Islam next? Judaism after that? <HH I reject this PC notion that to disagree with someone is to "attack" him. I have the right to offer reasoned criticism of any belief I want, and my running for office does not diminish that right one iota. As for Islam and Judaism, they (like Christianity) are false worldviews because they involve worship of a being for which there is no credible evidence of its existence.
