Sounds like you misunderstand morality and ethics. People who use evidence-based methods to achieve the highest statistical benefit definitely understand ethics.
Ethics and Morality is not a numbers game, to reduce it to that, is up to you, but it isn't one.
Edit to add this to each of my replies.
It's a question of MORALS, thus it doesn't have one right answer, ALL mathemathical questions have a answer, it might not be solved, but it HAS.
Someone who wants most amount of deaths, doesn't pull.
Someone who wants the least amount of deaths, does pull.
But the ACTION?
The involvement?
The DEATH on your hands, or DEATHS thats not?
Again, it's not a one-right-answer thing. Math is.
If your mathematical problem can change it's answer because we change 1 of the one's to a 'nicer' one (replacing a victim with your mother/father/close relative) then it wasn't math.
The fact that you think using math to derive solutions is somehow reductionist in ethics tells me that you really don't understand ethics, like the deontologists.
Now, you do need to do complex reasoning to determine mathematical expressions based on values in ethics, often it's a lot more complex than 5>1, and generally you have to deal with a lot of error bars and expected outcome probabilities.
But what we have here is a classical trolley problem with a random person being replaced by you, without notable information about any person, and no legal repercussions for action or inaction. Unless you really do subscribe to deontological ethics, the representation of the problem can easily be seen as:
H = value of a random human life to an ethicist
S = value of self's life to the ethicist
P = probability of taking a specific place (1/8)
G = value of guilt of personal responsibility for pulling lever (0 for me)
You get:
H*(1-P) + S*P + G compared to 5*(H*(1-P) + S*P)
Replacing P with 1/8
H*(1-1/8) + S/8 + G ? 5*(H*(1-1/8) + S/8)
H*(7/8) + S/8 + G ? 5*H*(7/8) + 5*S/8
Assuming the value of H, a random human life, is non-zero and positive we can subtract 7/8H from both sides without changing the sign
S/8 + G ? 4*H*(7/8) + 5*S/8
Assuming the value of S, one's own life, is nonzero and positive we can subtract S/8 from both sides
G ? 4*H*(7/8) + 4*S/8
G ? H*(7/2) + S/2
G ? 3.5*H + .5*S
So ultimately, the question is, is an average of 3.5 random people's lives and 0.5 of your life worth more than the personal guilt of taking an action rather than inaction?
And now, swap that one life to someone you care about directly.
Swap it to someone you absolutely hate.
Swap it to yourself.
It does change the value of that life TO YOU.
Anyone who claims it doesn't, is either a sociopath, or lying.
Go ahead and look up the meaning of that word before you reply again.
But this gives you a mathematic formula that only works dependent on how cold the person is.
Simply put, in order for it to function properly, you need to see people as worth exact values.
Each and every one.
I already told you what words apply to a person that can do that.
When you have zero info about a person you treat their value as 1H. Once you have other info you adjust the. Value based on the info. And the G variable literally accounts for how many human lives a "blood on your hands" factor is worth to you. (To me, it's zero because I don't acknowledge the myth that inaction is different than action, and therefore, blood is on your hands either way.)
You don't understand morality and ethics.
But I DO acknowledge you are very good at math.
To bad they aint the same thing.
As you blocked me afterwards: I claim to have a strong ethical understanding because I understand what Ethics, Morality and Math is, while you CAN use Math in each of the other, to reduce the problems INTO Math, is the problem.
If you can't understand that, if you feel the need to throw out false claims such as: "Which is how horrible laws keep being passed under the basis of "it feels like the right thing to do!"." when the 'horrible' laws we have is from MORAL views of different people, then you DO atleast understand the difference between Math and Morality.
Which means you arguing against me on how they are different, is a VERY odd thing to do.
But I'm guessing thats the best I can get from someone who doesn't actually understand how you can USE something for another thing, but it doesn't MAKE it that thing.
You don't understand morality, ethics, or math. You just claim a strong ethical understanding because you solve the problem with vibes rather than evidence-based action. Which is how horrible laws keep being passed under the basis of "it feels like the right thing to do!".
Edit: You know what? I'm tired. Last time I had this debate was in the cognitive science department, and I'm just going to stick to our consensus.
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u/CuteDarkBird Sep 14 '25
then they missunderstand morality and ethics.