Nick Josh Karean move now! Unfortunately, your car can only fit one passenger. So... who's gonna be the lucky one?
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To avoid hypothetical outcomes, you should just say that if you don't help the lady, she dies, if you don't help the friend, he's late, and if you don't pick up this girl (or guy), you'll never get the date, and it's only possible to do one. So no crazy stuff about handling all three...
In that case, preventing death seems like the apparent answer, to me, and probably to most people. But, whether or not that is based on some objective standard of truth or not is a hot topic of debate in moral philosophy.
Hume's Treatise on Human Nature gives a treatment of this question. He concludes that moral choices are NOT based on reason, but 'passions', or, like you put it here, 'emotion.' Even though it seems to be some form of proto-moral-relativism, he does say that some matters of value, which are subjective, (in contrast to matters of fact, which are objective) are universal to all humans.
These moral dilemmas/trilemmas get interesting when someone MUST die as a result.
E.G.: Is it moral to divert a train onto a side track to save 3 people, if the diversion causes the train to kill only 1 person on the side track? What if that person is your mother? What if you had to push a person in front of the train to stop it? What if you could stop it by throwing yourself in front?
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Well said, James. And a page out of Dawkins no less.
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Thanks. I have read a bit of Dawkins, but wasn't aware that I was lifting his ideas. I am sure this was not a new idea for long after biological determinism arrived on the scene. Proper credit to him is due if he's discussed this, and I trust that he has. I thought about this after reading a few things: John Searle's papers on 'Biological-Naturalism' (theory of mind), and the intro to an ethics text complied by James Sterba which criticizes moral relativism yet admits to having no clearly determined basis for moral absolutism or even a universal human morality. The text then offers a variety of samplings from philosophical works, attempting to find common threads in them.
He said something in the intro that affected me. It was something along the lines of saying that people who make different moral judgments don't necessarily disagree on what's generally right or wrong, but that their background beliefs about the nature of reality lead them to different conclusions in different situations. If those background beliefs were to be altered, the moral judgment would be altered. He gives the example of the Nuer people placing deformed infants in a nearby. Most people would call this immoral, but do so because they lack the background belief that these children are actually baby hippos, which is typical of the Nuer, and if they did, they would be inclined to make the same moral judgment, barring the interference of any other background beliefs.
So, while I think biology provides the basic instincts, I believe that reasoning from these instincts, which are subconscious, results in elegant structures of belief, with basic conclusions becoming premises for new ideas, the conclusions of which become premises for new ideas, etcetera. An error/false premise for a background beliefs then could lead to a mountain of 'false' or erroneous moral judgments.
I guess this is not too far removed from Hume, but I think explains it quite a bit more in detail. Of course, more detail is necessary to explain how exactly biological structures and functions provide a basis for thought and instinct before we can even hope to explain exactly how it provides a basis for human morality. I was thinking about using this idea for some papers, so, if you have a reference for Dawkins' work on it, it would be helpful. Cheers.
