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The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)

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Re: The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)

#41

Post by mikecmpbll »

There are two reasons someone would make the non-utilitarian answer to the questions:

- They wouldn't feel that they could bring them self to cause someone's death (but they could still be utilitarian in principle)

- They feel that it's not the right ethical choice

A well known consequence of consuming alcohol is "dutch courage", becoming bolder and more risk-taking. I suspect the differences seen are actually just the utilitarian-in-principle folk being a bit braver.

Rather than asking:

"people must choose whether they would flip a switch to divert a runaway trolley, killing one person but sparing five others"

They could've asked what they think the correct thing for someone else to do would be.

Re: The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)

#42

Post by yason »

Putting philosophical approaches on the scale of drunkenness allows me to consider possibly the most fascinating corollary I can think of this whole experiment, which is to try to deduce the general level of intoxication of the original philosophers while working on their most notable publications.

Re: The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)

#43

Post by jmnicolas »

Const-me wrote: post #30
jmnicolas wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, French don't obsess as much as the Americans about the legality of their actions, so I don't think the participants were influenced by the (virtual) likelihood of going to court for their decision.

You don't need to be obsessed about legality of your actions. Not wanting to go to jail is good motivation, at least for sober people. French penal code 221-1 says “wilful causing of the death of another person is murder. It is punished with thirty years' criminal imprisonment.” 30 years for touching that railway switch is a lot…

There's the theory (you googling the French penal code and its scary max sentences) and practice (me a French guy with 37 years of seeing (as an outsider) what really happens in French courts). In France you don't go in prison, or not that long, when you were faced with an impossible choice.

If the trolley problem happened for real here, whatever your choice, I'm willing to bet you wouldn't go in prison. It's not a 100% bet (I estimate it at 80%), of course I could loose but you wouldn't do more than 5 years. I can't find anything about it in English but if you're willing to Google translate it, look for "Vincent Humbert" for a perfect example of what I'm talking about.

There's a real cultural difference between how the French and the Americans think about the law.

I'd wager that more than 95% of the French population will never see a lawyer through their life.

Re: The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)

#44

Post by eivarv »

mamon wrote: post #25
mgraczyk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think alcohol shuts down emotions. Anecdotally speaking, alcohol seems to enhance feelings of anger and happiness in certain individuals.

Isn't shutting down emotions the main reason why people drink alcohol in the first place? You get dumped by a girl - you drink. You get fired from the job - you go to a bar for a few shots. Your favorite basketball team loses the match - you get a beer or two. That's why the main part of rehab for alcoholics is learning how to deal with emotions without drinking.

I think it's fair to say that many people with emotional problems or mental illness try to use alcohol (or another substance) as a coping mechanism – which is not a good idea.

Most people don't drink to shut down emotions, however.

Re: The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)

#45

Post by jasonkostempski »

nickodell wrote: post #19
mgraczyk wrote: post #2

I doubt that people became more utilitarian as they became more drunk. A simpler explanation is the participants answered the questions using the same altered thinking drunk people use to choose their own behavior; They think far less than normal about the social consequences of their actions. You don't want to flip the trolley switch in part because you feel more likely to be blamed for the outcome, or to be held ac…

You can slightly change the context of the problem, and it entirely changes the character of responses: Imagine you're an accountant working for the government. You choose how medical research funds are spent. One day, you notice that there are two equally expensive programs: Program A, which will save one life next year, and Program B, which could save five lives next year. Program A is being funded, but Program B i…

But there are 2 parts to the thought experiment. This seems just like the "flip the switch" scenario, which most people say they would do.

Re: The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)

#46

Post by sophacles »

mgraczyk wrote: post #2

I doubt that people became more utilitarian as they became more drunk. A simpler explanation is the participants answered the questions using the same altered thinking drunk people use to choose their own behavior; They think far less than normal about the social consequences of their actions. You don't want to flip the trolley switch in part because you feel more likely to be blamed for the outcome, or to be held ac…

This explanation doesn't seem to fit the drunk driving problem though - it seems that with the level of "drunk driving causes a lot of fatal accidents" knowledge in the world, there would be much less of it, if the above explanation was true.

Re: The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)

#47

Post by Lawtonfogle »

gajomi wrote: post #7
mgraczyk wrote: post #2

I doubt that people became more utilitarian as they became more drunk. A simpler explanation is the participants answered the questions using the same altered thinking drunk people use to choose their own behavior; They think far less than normal about the social consequences of their actions. You don't want to flip the trolley switch in part because you feel more likely to be blamed for the outcome, or to be held ac…

This is, of course, exactly correct and gets at the essence of what always bothered me about the trolley problem. The problem is usually presented with the idea that it offers some insight into how typical human behavior is seemingly at odds with utilitarian concept of the "value" of an individual or groups of human lives. The fact that the switch puller might be subject to some kind of judgement for their actions is…

You'll see this behavior in government with far less drastic results. A lot of bureaucratic cruff that builds up is recognized by workers as being such. The government workers do realize just how silly and time consuming the policies are. And many have ideas on how to improve them and speed things up.

But no one wants to do anything because any wrong that happens will then be blamed on them. So if there are 10 issues a day caused by bad policy, and you can change it to only be 5 incidents a day, no one is going to push for changing it because then they would be viewed as responsible for the 5 incidents instead of being viewed as reducing the incident count by 5.

You pull the switch to kill one to save 5, you have now directly acted to kill a person. You are a killer, and while perhaps not legally a murderer, some will still view you as such. That you save 5 is irrelevant.

To see an even strong example of this behavior, consider some action that is even more offensive to the common sensibilities that killing someone, such as certain forms of child abuse. Now imagine a situation where by doing that to one child, you can stop it being done to N others. (Worry not about the details of how such a situations could occur, I'm sure some creative individual could find a back story.)

Now imagine how someone who chooses the utilitarian choice is going to be viewed. Perhaps we should be doing tests not about what the subject would choose, but about how the subject would view another's choices.

Re: The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)

#48

Post by VLM »

ant6n wrote: post #34
hugh4 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just the social judgment, but also the judgment of your own conscience. Whether it's rational or not, I'm going to spend less time awake at night for the rest of my life worrying about the multiple people I allowed to get run over by a train than I'm gonna spend worrying about the one person I actively caused to get run over by a train. Come to think of it, I suppose that heavily discounting the possibility of fu…

This problem is kinda contrived anyway. Why would I be sitting in front of that switch? Do I actually know for sure that flipping that switch will have the described outcome? If I'm some sort of passerby who happens to be there, then I certainly wouldn't know that for sure, and I would just be futzing around with railway operations I'm not trained to engage in. I could make matters worse! So it's probably better to l…

>So it's probably better to leave the switch alone rather than potentially causing even more harm.

More formally there's two cultural issues that the philosophers more or less refuse to deal with and instead claim inherent biological instinct or whatever.

One is we've been indoctrinated for better or worse with a deference toward specialists via all kinds of morality tales and drama. You shouldn't tell a doctor how to doctor, or a laborer how to labor, according to a zillion dramatic morality tales. Its deeply hardwired into the culture itself. Therefore its culturally wrong to mess with a railway workers switchgear unless you're a railway worker, which you probably are not. You can daydream all you want about possibly knowing how to operate railroad gear, but according to doctrine if you were a railworker, you're supposed to be pretty pissed off if some random member of the general public disrespects your entire field of employment by flipping switches. No matter your real or theoretical employment, we're indoctrinated to leave those switches alone.

The next deeply indoctrinated belief is people are conservative about what they know best. Obviously you know nothing about railway operations, or at least less than the guy assigned to operate that switch. Clearly someone who knows what they're doing set the switch that way for a reason, so if I operate that switch I'm almost certain to be doing something wrong because the guy assigned to it felt he was doing right. In part two of the classic telling, clearly the fat guy knows he's not fat enough to stop the train by lying on the tracks so he didn't jump on them by himself therefore pushing him on the tracks is just going to increase the death toll. The only people who want to upend the cart are actual experts, arrogant, or insane, at least according to cultural myth.

Its possibly in a different culture we'd get totally different results. Maybe in a video game where its "make believe" and not in our culture, you'd get different results. Someone should try these scenarios in minecraft and then compare/contrast results.

Re: The Cold Logic of Drunk People (2014)

#49

Post by Lawtonfogle »

kristiandupont wrote: post #6

In addition to the points already made here, there is a difference between what people say they would do and what they would actually do. This difference may be bigger or smaller for drunk people but in any case, what we learn from a study like this is about how people present themselves, not how they act.

Good luck getting the IRB to approve an experiment where the participant thinks they either killed someone or watched 5 people die.

Also in reality, it would probably depend upon who those people are and factors such as their age, attractiveness, and even protected classes.

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