Yes. In your example, pull the lever.

However, utilitarianism leads to atrocious outcomes. Much of the horror in adopting an ethical view of utilitarianism is lost on those that have not studied it deeply IMO.

Props for indulging in an experiment though.

luckily, i'm not taking any moral stance on this. I'm more interested in the idea of intuitive morality.

See Natural Law:
http://jim.com/spooner.htm

James even gives a very accurate modern account:
http://jim.com/rights.html

We have intuitions about what is right and wrong because it was necessary for us to have those intuitions in order to survive.

Sadly, these simple and powerful "laws of nature" are hardly taught, anywhere...

Though I suspect this isn't exactly what you're looking for.

Very interesting! But it's focus seems to be largely on legislation which yeah, isn't really what i'm studying :)

What i'm more focused on is the cognitive psychological approach. There's neuroscientific research that also supports that morality exists from an evolutionary perspective. For instance, evidence suggests that when we process a decision that is based from our intuitive feeling (which activates inner areas of our brain) about the situation, then that decision is made quickly, with little input from the frontal lobes (which evolved later).

Props for reading!

no matter what you decide it will be wrong :-)


thats why morality sucks

Being less wrong has value.

i dont belive in "less wrong" :-)

I don't believe in you.

don't worry, it isn't about what is 'right' or 'wrong'. I'll leave that to the philosophers ;D

The most economically efficient outcome surprisingly is the correct one - even in morality.

Of course this is merely my opinion.

Read some Kant nerd and be amazed

Brah?! Really?! Whoa! You got plusses for that ghey azz comment lol

if I know I'm going to kill the bystander, that means my voice can reach him, why not tell him to move out of the way ? is he deaf ? can I throw my shoes at him to get his attention ?

I'm not accepting this

I don't believe human life is equal, so unless I knew everyone involved, or was in a position of power where I had to make these calls, I would let fate deal with its original plan.

If I had done something to invoke this situation, then I could be persuaded to deal with the moral dilema of killing 1 to save 5.

Otherwise, its not my duty to play god.

what about all the flys dying on your windscreen when you take your car to drive in the town to buy some new shoes?

I always use my windscreen wipers to remove 'em.
I really love my new shoes btw.

Personally, I'm not smart enough to make difficult choices.
So, mostly, I let the person next to me decide.

How long have you been married? :p

Haha!
Come to think of it, maybe I should, eh...
Naaah, I still love her.

what if you're not the trolley driver but rather a bystander on a bridge overlooking the incident taking place. However, you notice a very fat man leaning over looking. You realise that you could push him over the edge and onto the track to stop the runaway trolley, saving the five but killing the fat man. would you push him or not? (yup stolen from that harvard video but oh well)

jamerio already said he doesn't want to get involved

Wait for it

he won't answer because he actually is fat.

God you're still sounding so unsatisfied and stuck in the past with your petty put downs.

I'm just happy I bothered you enough to make you feel the need to keep bitching with your list of top ten put downs on the net!

There's no escape for you now.

don't mad

When I start bitching at you for no reason like you did me, then you can call me mad.

Until then, I'll laugh at your attempts at trying to unload your feelings onto me.

You're not smart enough to do what I did to you :)

pls, don't mad

I'm not.

I'm delighted I got to you enough for you to try and invoke an unprovoked scenario where you can tell me how i genuinely made you feel.

You're angry and me and want to vent!

Squeal little piggy!

Eeeee!

stop mad pls

Autistic loop time already?

Ok then.

pls

could still improve that version :-)
there is a bystander and there is you standing on that bridge, you realize that one human sacrifizing himself falling onto the track can stop the runaway trolley amd save 5 human lifes, the other person stranding there however doesn't realize that, you have to act fast, what do you do, sacrifize yourself or push him over the edge?

The reality is though, most people won't lift a thinger and just watch the massacre :-) ... you also save yourself from punishment, if you push someone over the bridge saving 5 lifes, you are still subject to the crime of murder getting lifetime imprisonmen (although in europe it's different, with good behavior you are out in less than 3 years here, in those 3 years you can make a degree, go playing football or swimming, have an apartment with t.v., etc., concerinign punishment I would really like to copy the islam model)

The question implies the five people are guilty of something. If you remove the word "innocent" and you assume that not pulling the lever will kill and not hurt the five people it's just a numbers game. But if that's the case why not ask "would you kill one person to save five"?

True, but there are different versions which produce different answers. For instance, physical proximity to someone you intend to harm (such as, to push the fat guy in front of the rails vs pulling a lever from a distance) makes a difference in what people are willing to accept.

Been doing some more thinking on this difficult thesis...
Mostly it all comes down to simple mathematics.
The ability to solve math problems decreases significantly when being drunk, like the ability to play Quake.
So you should never drink while being on a runaway trolley.

Alcohol could make the decision a bit easier however.
But always remember, alcohol does not solve problems.
On the other hand, neither does milk.
Alcohol or milk.
Milk or alcohol...
Difficult choice here...

Must think more.

Why not both? White russians?

Tautology.

I took your survey; now give me all your money. ò 3 ó
jk

Been thinking even more.
Milk comes from cows.
Alcohol doesn't.
Therefore, I hate cows.
And cows don't drink alcohol, which makes me hate 'em even more.
Also, à priori, cows don't travel in trolleys.
So they never have to make difficult moral choices.
So, as much as I don't wanna be a cow, maybe we'd all be better off being cows.

To the anonymous poster above me, I took the survey too.
Didn't boost MY greed tho.
I understand not.

Fuck people.

Has this "experiment" passed an ethics committee review? If so, why are we not given more information like the full scope of the experiment? My guess is your thesis is how gamers in particular answer this old moral question.

That doesn't exist here in NL :) My supervisor has approved it and if you'd like more information than what was provided, just ask.

A committee? You fuckin' high? Get real brah! Science requires not a single committee nor a single "peer reviewed paper".

Would you rather status replace truth; politics replace science; and more?

haha searching for answers about morality on esr is like searching for vegan specimens in a shark colony.

Don't be an asshole.

(poland brah!)

what's assholish about that?

At the time I found your comment flippant and unnecessarily cynical.

Not a big deal brah!


JEAH!

without any prior information on the people involved it's a numbers game for me. 5 lives versus 1. if i knew more before hand, the people on the trolley were rapist pedophiles for example, then I may even celebrate the crash. life is only as important as the way people choose to live it. my morality would lead me to help an innocent bystander at a cost to myself but if it would hurt someone close to me at the same time then I would leave them and not be overwhelmed by guilt. so my selfish reasons (my love for others) could lead me to an incorrect moral choice. usually though, if on the balance of probabilities, I made the best decision in an almost impossible situation for the sake of those who are deserving of it... then I will do it. so in assuming all of the people in your situation are innocent, involved or not, the bystander takes an early exit.

Yep you're right. I just put a tl;dr version of the dilemma on the post, because I figured most people wouldn't bother to read it if there was too much info :) The dilemmas in the experiment give you more background information tho.

that 1 person is einstein, and the other 5 couldnt even tie their shoelaces? :>

THIS!

how many retards does it take to save 1 genius? einstein vs 1, 000, 000 people who can't tie their shoelaces for example. when does quality cease to take precedence over quantity.

Right around the "why the fuck is there nobody behind the cash register?" mark. :j

I'm thinking velcro shoes.

Velcro brah!

Das where it's at. Midget.

ez no for all

Hmm? A thesis? Oh, the moral dilemma of wasting other people's money and diluting academic titles further...

Yet another wondrous Master or Bachelor in the making.

BANGS HEAD ON DESK!

I wouldn't lift a finger if it meant risk to my own personal safety.

Done.

Do you mind sharing results? I'm quite curious about the outcome.

Okay: http://www.helloliefje.com/gamer-morality-the-initial-results/

this reminds me of the The Box movie.

Awesome movie, based on an awesome Twilight Zone episode, based on an awesome short story!

Just btw, I don't know about the "smother guy's dad with a pillow for dosh" question. Someone randomly dying, who just happens to have an expiring life insurance of considerable worth, would immediately raise red flags with the police. The beneficiary would be the first and primary suspect, and the person that did the deed would be the first thing he'd point his finger at when under pressure. I'd probably have to kill the guy next. That's no longer a job, it's a spree.

Plus, killing someone in a hospital seems extremely risky in on itself, even if the reward would be half a mil of $. What if I'm caught red handed, then have to take a nurse hostage, then drag her halfway across the town, then kill her and dump her body, ditch the stolen car, hike for a couple of miles, stow myself on a train then start my life from scratch in a country I'm unfamiliar with. Eh.

ever thought about scriptwriting? :)

you wouldn't rape the nurse?

No time for fun when you're on the run!

There is always.

Time.

For Fun.

i'm sorry, but i couldn't even complete the first question. you don't have to push people to die in the water to keep the boat from sinking. you can have people float along with the boat in shifts. it's a false dilemma.

you should really evaluate your questions, or i suspect the information will be useless.

Also, it could be that people are injured and may die anyway. The dilemmas weren't written by me but instead taken from those that have been used in previous research.

Women talking about moral? You don't know there is difference btw man and woman don't you?

Having done this survey, I noticed myself hoping for other solutions like patients asking me to inject them with 50/50 chance of dying or ppl jumping of th boat themselves.

As this is all not clear, I'm prone to choosing the safer options: do nothing. If those "options" would be excluded, it could be different I guess.

Curious about the results though :)

Thanks for taking the time to do it :) Yeah, the point is to get you thinking, and even if you ended up choosing "no", if you considered it for a while, it'll show in the time statistics, compared with those who just rejected it outright. So while it's interesting to hear what people would do, it isn't the focus.

I'll ask my supervisor about being able to upload the results :)

I'm also really curious about the results.

If you can't u/l the results then give us a link to the finished project when done or w/e. It would be a fascinating read.

Agree.

did the survey.

the original question made me post this though:

funfunfun

Do I have the right to consider demographics in the process? Just Joking.
I guess that reducing complex situations to simple ones is the main point of psychology. This is why this is a very dangerous path, not enough mocked in Good Will Hunting (unfortunately), thanks to the Fantastic Four In One gamer the lamer Robin Williams who had to spoil the day with another stupid pseudo psycho dilemma that proved that intelligence < the smell of the Sistine Chapel. And this is why the psychology of a killer is never going to work. Sorry to say for your interest on this matter, but this is a dead end.
Which is in the need for a much more serious question: guess what I was thinking about? http://www.holytaco.com/stephen-hawking-spend...out-boobs/

Robin Williams did NOT attack Matt Damon for his intelligence, but for him assuming to know about Williams troubled past based on nothing more than a picture he had painted while going through a tough time with his wife.

It was a fair point, you only learn certain things by experiencing them.

The chapel was one of many points he made to emphasise to him that intelligence gained in theory is only half of the package. He was right.

You got it, do you?

That movie was incredible.

Be that as it may, MD is a retard, but an incredible talent. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Of course that's your contention you're a first year grad student.

B O O B S
O
O
B
S

I think the definition of intelligence is quite contested, so there are a variety of measures one can use. I don't know the specific situation you're talking about though.

Anyway, yes, I recognize the pitfalls, but I still believe that I have a good method of 'scratching the surface' for differences in moral cognition, since i'm really only interested in the time it took to respond, rather than the response itself. I'm not trying to uncover any 'psychology of a killer' or something, rather I'm taking the approach to examine if people are able to have their moral intuitions become more pronounced through playing games.

Research suggests that playing games fosters neural plasticity for learning. In other words, certain types of games (note; "action" games - FPS) have been found to make people able to process information quicker, as well as an increased ability to accumulate information over time in decision making. So I want to know, if you're essentially primed to "learn better" through playing, do you also develop morality in the virtual arena?

Neuroscience of moral decision making has only been around for like the last decade or so, but basically it shows that when people reject dilemmas that don't really engage their frontal lobes (associated with critical thinking), they do so quickly. Thus, they make intuitive judgements. While of course I can't do anything with an fMRI, the time responses indicate if one made an intuitive judgement, or engaged their critical thinking. Most of the dilemmas are supposed to be hard, because they were the ones that were noted to induce the most cognitive conflict in previous fMRI studies. Therefore, if there -is- a difference between those who are exposed to certain game content, (when compared with a non-gaming control) in answering certain dilemmas, then perhaps there is something to cumulative media exposure.

That said, most research in this area is really contested, so I also wouldn't be surprised if there weren't differences.

"I'm not trying to uncover any 'psychology of a killer' "
This is in general connection with psychology and the best example of its limits, it has not direct connection with your thesis.

"do you also develop morality in the virtual arena?"
My dear, with all the respect but psychology is not the strongest weapon of morality in the sense that it narrows the psychic of a man to its limits. Look what happened here. The two questions are both immoral at their core. You have to be immoral to propose the sacrifice of human beings in term of numbers.

If I'd be interested in such things then I'd say that my point of choice would for sure be philosophy, as philosophy has a much wider aspect and it quite contains human emotions, feelings and a much wider array of the whole that makes the human beings what they are. Where philosophy invites people to ask questions psychology ask questions and people respond, which is a form of control derived from doctor's need to control his patient, it gives no liberty, only the appearance that you have a choice, it is a dead end. Maybe one day the discipline will evolve, but only when it will stop to give so eager diagnostics for every specific case that the doctor don't understand, as for now I consider psychology pseudo-science, because its narrow approach.

fair enough :)

A few notes:

For example, completion of high school would be 13 years spent in school.

12 in Lithuania and many other countries. I reckon it's 11 in some countries too.

You are a waiter. You overhear one of your customers say that he is about to go to jail and that in his last forty-eight hours of freedom he plans to infect as many people as possible with HIV. You know him well enough to know that he is telling the truth and that he has access to many potential victims.

You happen to know that he has a very strong allergy to poppy seeds. If he eats even one he will go into convulsions and have to be hospitalized for at least forty-eight hours.

I assume you implied that there was no other way to stop him, so I answered yes. However, maybe police could have stopped him. Furthermore, if I tried to bring in police and then it didn't work, that would make plan A much more risky to myself, so this question becomes increasingly more complicated.

I hate utilitarianism btw. The only way I can make sense of ethics is to assume that human life and ethical choices both have intrinsic value. I kind of hate the fact that I have to accept utilitarianism in larger scales, such as the governmental example, but there you are not just evading the psychological effect, which would be no excuse, but the fact that all the personal details and responsibilities that could lead to deaths / accidents are removed from the people once you move up the scale to hundreds. There, you have to realize that it's just you looking from the bird's view and deciding what you have to do. Goddamn the unintentional rhyme.

Hey, in your survey, there's this question:

A viral epidemic has spread across the globe killing millions of people. You have developed two substances in your home laboratory. You know that one of them is a vaccine, but you don’t know which one. You also know that the other one is deadly.

Once you figure out which substance is the vaccine you can use it to save millions of lives. You have with you two people who are under your care, and the only way to identify the vaccine is to inject each of these people with one of the two substances. One person will live, the other will die, and you will be able to start saving lives with your vaccine.

Would you kill one of these people with a deadly injection in order to identify a vaccine that will save millions of lives?

Actually, you need just one person, and the chance that he dies is 50%. So what the fuck do I answer if the question doesn't make logical sense?

haha, I thought the same thing. But I didn't design the dilemmas :(

Women talking about morality is always a problem nowadays. You could make your thesis on the moral force difference between man and woman, and between different civilisations/systems of beliefs.

I'm sure the result would be much more interresting raher than taking this subject in such a 'light' but nowady normal and bad maner. Like trying to see the univers with one eye and broken glass.

Good luck woman.

Hello again (86.217.64.134), this is your second post stalking liefje and posting misogynistic shit.

I know dealing with ladies is sometimes tough and requires some patience, but proving your manhood on gaming forums won't make you any less of a faggot.

I could. But why would I? These topics are quite well covered already. So for me, a new topic with a fresh result is interesting. Surely, it'd be cool with some actual neuroscientific data but hey, it's only BSc level. I guess for you, this study is 'light', but the academics who read and marked it thought differently. For some weird reason, I'm gonna trust their judgement, rather than some random French troll. It feels like it should be me wishing you luck, man.

"I could. But why would I? These topics are quite well covered already."
- Topic well covered?
"Surely, it'd be cool with some actual neuroscientific data"
- Trying to justify philosophy with science?

Solid argumentation, still you are doing mediocre studies. Just like most of the world.

To some extend you could use something that is particular to you Livia to make this studie more interresting but you never will. I don't think you even understand what i am trying to tell you.

Good luck in Swede or anywhere else for that mater.

I understand, I just don't agree. Thanks for giving me excuses to bump my thread though!