Can You Answer These Tricky Moral Dilemmas?

hey guys it's cosmic skeptic and statistically speaking you're probably not subscribed so well subscribe and if you really like my videos don't forget to hit the notification bell as well which does what the subscribe button was supposed to do in the first place which is let you know when i release new videos but anyway today i thought we'd try something a little bit different a friend of mine recently introduced me to a website called philosophy experiments which is a website that has on it a bunch of quizzes and tests and things to do with philosophy and one of the quizzes is a quiz on ethics it essentially puts forward a bunch of quite difficult ethical dilemmas and asks you to say what you think about them so i thought it might be interesting to essentially go through the quiz and talk you through my thinking on these particular ethical dilemmas to give you a better idea of how i think about ethics but also so that you can play along and see what you think about these two now bear in mind these ethical dilemmas are supposed to be very difficult so if you disagree with me i'd love to know why if you can let me know in the comments down below and do bear in mind that i'm doing this off the cuff so take everything i say with a pinch of salt but i'll try and be as accurate and thorough as i possibly can so the first question is one that i think will be quite familiar to viewers of this channel you pass someone in the street who is in severe need and you are able to help them at little cost to yourself are you morally obliged to do so you might be surprised at how i answered this question i've spoken a lot about the ethics of charity and the ethics of reducing suffering where we can especially with relation to veganism and so you might think that i can quite simply answer this question by saying yes if you're in a circumstance where you can help someone who's severely in need at a comparatively low cost to yourself you should always be obligated to do so but we must consider the implication of the word obligated or obliged here to say that you're obliged to do something is to say that it is wrong of you not to do it in any circumstance like this where someone's suffering severely and you can help them at little cost yourself it is always wrong of you not to do so now you may think this is true you might think of course it would be wrong of me not to help someone in severe need right in front of me at little cost to myself but we must consider the implications of this the fact is that since we live in a world that is infused with incalculable amounts of suffering all over the globe and we also live in a world where it's incredibly easy for us to help these people due to the existence of charities which now given the internet you can donate to these charities simply by logging on on your computer whatever device you're currently watching this video on you could just open a tab go to a charity like oxfam donate some money and have a very real effect on people whose lives are severely in need of help but here's the problem if we say that if you find yourself in a situation where you can help someone who is severely in need at a comparatively lower cost to yourself it is wrong for you every time that situation comes about you are obliged to help them it is wrong for you not to help them then we have to consider that there is never a time that you are not in that situation right because of the fact that charities exist and they operate 24 7 you can always be donating money and the fact that there is an endless supply of suffering people on planet earth you are never not in this situation you are always in the situation where you can help somebody by a significantly less cost to yourself by donating some money to these charities if we say that you're morally obligated morally obligated in any situation where someone is suffering severely and you can help them at comparatively little cost to yourself to help them if you say that that is a moral obligation then that means whenever you find yourself in that circumstance that's what you have to do but we're always in that circumstance because we can always help somebody by donating to charity what that means is that you know you shouldn't be watching this video right now you should be opening another tab and donating to charity and doing that practically all the time because you're never not in the situation where someone's suffering severely somewhere in the world and you can help them simply by pressing a button and sending them over a bit of money now the problem with saying that this is an obligation that we all have is that it will completely upend the way that we all live our lives for instance it becomes obligatory that you never never again eat out at a restaurant or never ever again buy a new book that you don't really need to read things like this because that money that you spent could have gone towards helping somebody who is severely suffering and so it would be quite a little cost to you comparatively to give up that meal or not read that book if you can buy a malaria net which may actually save someone's life somewhere else in the world but because we live in a world where this is always a possibility there's always more money that could be given it means that you essentially would commit yourself to selling all of your non-essential possessions so maybe you'd be allowed to keep your house you might need to downsize it though because you don't need that big of a house you probably wouldn't need to buy a car because you can probably get by by getting the bus or cycling or something like this you can never really buy books you can never buy a tv you've got to cancel your netflix subscription you have to get rid of everything that is strictly not essential to your life because somebody else suffering and genuinely severely suffering and possibly on the brink of death surely that suffering is going to be far more important than the suffering that you'll receive from you know not watching netflix but i think our intuitions tell us that this isn't a fair thing to ask of somebody it may be virtuous for somebody to sell all of their non-essential possessions and give the money to charity but i don't think it would be fair to say that they're obligated to do so right clearly it can't be an obligation in my view because otherwise there would be no books behind me i'd have sold them all and given the money to charity so how do we kind of square these intuitions that we feel well i think this all has to do with the wording of the question right the question asks you pass someone in the street who is in severe need and you are able to help them at little cost to yourself are you morally obliged to do so now i would say that although we have an obligation to kind of as much as we practically can help those who are suffering at little cost to ourself we can't say that in any given situation you will have a moral obligation to help them in that situation i think we have a moral obligation overall to help a significant number of people in this kind of situation but you can't say that in every instance of that situation you're morally obliged to help because if you do you're led to this conclusion where you can basically never do anything ever again because you're spending your entire life giving money to charity so we can say that you have a general moral obligation to sufficiently help the suffering but it doesn't follow that in literally every situation where you have that opportunity you have to do so now some of you out there might be thinking well hold on if you don't think it's an obligation to you know try and prevent this person's suffering in every circumstance what about the implications for veganism right does that mean that every so often i can have a bit of steak or you know have some eggs or something because you know i have a general obligation not to cause suffering but i don't have to do it in every given situation no these are different and the difference here is that in one case you are committing harm and in the other case you're allowing harm to continue or to happen so when you pass someone in the street and they're severely suffering and you can help them but you don't you allow them to suffer you don't cause them to suffer whereas when you buy an animal product you are literally the reason why animals will be being killed and tortured and harmed because by paying for this stuff you're demanding that it continue it's not the same as allowing these animals to suffer you're actually causing it and i think this is a relevant distinction i do think that in all circumstances where you can avoid causing suffering you should do so but i don't think that it's an obligation that in all circumstances where you can prevent someone from suffering you have an obligation to do so i think there are some circumstances in which you do have an obligation to prevent someone from suffering but i just don't think that we can say it as a general rule that any time you find yourself in this situation you're obligated to help sometimes you might be obligated to help depending on the specifics of the circumstance but i don't think we can extract from this a general broad principle as someone like peter singer does that this means that any time we're in that situation we must be similarly obligated to help and thereby because we are always in that situation given that there are always people suffering who we can always help at considerably less cost to ourselves we must always do so i think that would destroy our lives and i think we would all agree that it would be too much to ask of a person so with those caveats in place i think i have to go with not obliged question number two you have a brother you know that someone has been seriously injured as a result of criminal activity undertaken by him you live in a country where the police and legal system are generally trustworthy are you morally obliged to inform them about your brother's crime my intuition here says yes of course one can psychologically understand why it would be more difficult for someone to turn in their brother or a family member that they care about but i think the question is getting at this idea that you know considering that generally speaking if we know someone has committed a serious crime that is worthy of being punished we should turn them in can we allow ourselves to make an exception because if it's our family member it's so difficult for us to turn them in um no i don't buy this for a second i don't think it matters if this person is your brother or your mother or just a stranger on the street if they've committed a crime that genuinely deserves punishment then i think you do have a moral obligation to report that now i think of course there are exceptions to this for unjust laws the question makes this very clear you live in a country where the police and legal system are generally trustworthy but it doesn't specify that the the legal system is kind of accurate and properly tracks morality for instance you know if in the united kingdom the police and legal system were generally trustworthy but they had a terrible law that said that you know if you read a particular book you should be thrown in jail then no i don't think i'd have an obligation to turn that person in so i think we also have to assume that the laws adjust and i think that in this instance if somebody's been severely injured as a result of criminal activity we'd probably agree that that activity was unjust because it caused this suffering in which case i think you have as much obligation to turn your brother in as you do a stranger i think that's what the question's getting at i think by specifying it's your brother i think it's trying to get at this idea that is there some difference between turning in a stranger and turning in your brother and i have to say that no there isn't in my view question four you are able to help some people but unfortunately you can only do so by harming other people the number of people harmed will always be 10 of those helped when considering whether it is morally justified to help does the actual number of people involved make any difference for example does it make a difference if you're helping 10 people by harming one person rather than helping a hundred thousand people by harming 10 000 people this question is absolutely fascinating you may have thought as i thought when i first read this that the question was about to ask whether it's permissible to harm some people to help a larger number of people but that's not what it's asking it's saying does it make a difference if you're harming one person to save 10 people or harming 10 000 people to save a hundred thousand people right the proportions are the same you're helping ten times as many people but does the actual number of people involved make a difference to how we should morally judge this situation i think the answer to this question is going to depend on your views about rights for example if you're a utilitarian and utilitarians famously have trouble grounding rights because they only care about the consequence they have a much less strong view of rights than a deontologist might right a deontologist might say that you have particular rights like a right to life a right to liberty that cannot be infringed upon right no matter the circumstances you have rights that cannot be violated whereas a utilitarian might say that what we care about is not the protection of people's rights but the maximization of pleasure right and so if you're a utilitarian all that really matters is the calculus it's the calculation of balancing pleasure over pain and so if both situations in terms of their calculation are the same it's like you harm 10 of the people to help 90 of the people i don't think it matters how much you scale this up all down for the utilitarian they run the calculation they find out that the proportion is going to be the same the proportion of people helped to harmed and because it's just about the consequence for the utilitarian i don't think it would make a difference if you harm one person to save 10 people you're equally justified to harm 10 000 people to save a hundred thousand people it's the same thing but if you believe that there do exist such things as rights i think this complicates matters because a right by definition in my view is inviolable right to have a right to something means that it cannot be taken away from you it means that that thing is yours and nobody can infringe upon it nobody can violate it that's what a right is now rights always have correlative duties if one person has a right to something it means that other people have a duty to respect that right if i have a right to life it means other people have a duty not to kill me for example what this means is that if i have a right for instance to not be harmed without my consent then if somebody else does harm me without my consent they're failing to discharge a duty right they're violating my right and they're violating their own duties if you think that rights are genuinely inviolable in this way then what that means is it doesn't matter how many people you're saving you cannot harm somebody without their consent if they genuinely have a right not to be harmed in such a manner it does there's no consequence that could possibly justify violating that right because by virtue of it being a right there is nothing that can justify that kind of violation now people who think this way do run into problems for instance the ticking time bomb case right if there's one person on planet earth who knows the location of a bomb that's about to explode in manhattan and kill thousands of people and the only way to extract the information of where that bomb is from them is to torture them if somebody thinks that that person has a right not to be tortured it means that there's no circumstance in which we can absolve ourselves of our duty not to torture them and so by torturing them we're doing something wrong what this means is that in the situation where the only way to find out the location of the bomb is by violating someone's rights we can't violate that person's rights and we need to allow the bomb to go off for a utilitarian this is an incredibly troubling prospect right it's like we're really going to allow thousands of people to die not to mention all of the property damage just to kind of protect this one person's rights well for the person who believes in rights and thinks they're genuinely inviolable yes and the way that someone who thinks this way would characterize the situation is they would simply say that the person whose job it is to extract the information is not responsible for the deaths of the thousands of people when the bomb finally goes off right the person who is responsible for those deaths is the terrorists who planted the bomb right the person who refuses to torture the man with that information is not responsible for those deaths he's only responsible for whether or not he tortures the man with the information the blame that is to say for the bomb going off lies solely with the person who planted the bomb with malicious intent the person who refuses to violate someone's rights to stop that bomb from going off isn't responsible for the bomb going off now of course those thousands of people who will die in the bomb blast also have a right to life and so you might ask well doesn't the person by refusing to torture this one person violate the rights of those people by allowing them to die well no when the bomb goes off and thousands of people die those thousands of people have had their rights violated their right to life has been violated but who's it been violated by has been violated by the terrorists who planted the bomb the person who refuses to torture the man with the information may have allowed those rights to be violated by the terrorists but he does not himself violate those rights he simply allows the situation to obtain in which somebody else violates their right by setting off that bomb but by allowing that situation to obtain he has not himself violated those rights so although we may think that from a neutral perspective so to speak the situation in which the bomb goes off and thousands of people die is much worse than the situation in which a single person is tortured we're interested here in moral obligation and if rights exist and cannot be violated ethically in any circumstance then the person who is tasked with getting the information from the man who knows where the bomb is and the only way they can do that is by violating his right not to be tortured they cannot torture that man now okay let me link this back to the question at hand what i'm trying to get across is that in such a situation where you know thousands of people are going to die if i don't torture this one individual if we believe in rights and we believe that rights are inviolable we would say that it's wrong for me to violate that person's rights regardless of the circumstances it doesn't matter if a bomb's about to go off or a bomb's not about to go off or thousands of people are going to die or one person's going to die whatever that's irrelevant because rights mean that they cannot be violated so it doesn't matter what the consequence is what matters is if i violate someone's rights in any circumstance i've done something wrong now presumably it's worse for me to violate two people's rights than to violate one person's right and this is where i think we can get some clarity on this question because if this right space perspective really does take no account of the consequence of violating or respecting people's rights it just says that whatever the circumstance you need to respect this person's rights because that's what a right is then presumably the more people's rights are violated the worse the situation so in the question we're asked about the difference between harming one person and thereby probably violating some kind of right that they have to help 10 people and violating 10 000 people's rights to help 100 000 people now in the second case you know the the number of people helped has increased but on this right space perspective we're not taking account of the consequence we're just taking account of our obligation not to violate the rights of innocent people so what we essentially have is the difference between violating one person's right and violating ten thousand people's rights and clearly the situation in which we violate ten thousand people's rights is much worse so if you're a utilitarian i think that the calculation comes out the same right if you harm one person to save 10 people or you harm 10 000 people to save a hundred thousand people because the proportions are the same the calculation comes out the same right the balance of pleasure and pain is the same and so these situations are morally identical but that's because the utilitarian takes into account the consequences but if you believe in rights and the way that i've characterized them that is that they are inviolable no matter the circumstances then i do think it would be worse to harm 10 000 people to save a hundred thousand people than it would be to harm one person to save ten people because all we really need to take into account um insofar as someone's moral obligations are concerned is if they violate someone's rights and if so how many rights do they violate and in the smaller case they only violate one person's right in the larger case they violate 10 000 people's rights and we don't take the consequences into account we just say that you've done something much worse by violating more people's rights than just by violating one person's right so if you believe in rights in this way i think that there would be an ethical difference between these two circumstances anyway you know there are 19 questions on this particular quiz and i've managed to answer four of them in an amount of time that i'm pretty sure has amounted to a pretty long video already so i think i'm going to leave it there hopefully you don't feel kind of cheated that i only answered four of the questions because i think we delved into a great variety of moral concepts but if you want to see me answer more of these questions let me know if you enjoyed this video and i can do some more there are more questions more quizzes that we can go through i think this is quite an interesting and fun exploration of morality in a far more casual format than i'm usually used to so yeah i think i'm going to end it there but if you're interested in looking at all the questions for yourself and looking at some of the other quizzes that are available on this website i'll leave a link in the description and as i say if you want to see me do more of this kind of thing or answer the rest of the questions on this particular quiz let me know in the comments down below but i hope you found this video useful or at least interesting i realized that i haven't actually always answered the question directly in terms of telling you what i actually think in the final analysis but a lot of the time that's just because i haven't actually made up my mind these are purposefully difficult questions as i said in the introduction to this video so don't worry if like me you're not actually able even after thinking about this for a long time to give definite and final answers to these questions as robert nozick famously said in anarchy state and utopia there is room for words other than final words so i hope that even if you're a bit frustrated that i haven't given straight answers to these questions you still found this video useful but just in case you are feeling a little bit unsatisfied i want to tell you about something that's definitely going to be useful to you and that's internet security that's right i want to take a moment to thank expressvpn for sponsoring today's video your freedom to browse the internet safely and securely is at risk if you don't use a vpn and with so many of us working from home at the moment without the usual support of an office i.t department you really don't want any sensitive or confidential information getting into the wrong hands without a vpn misconfigured apps or malware infected routers can put your data at an increased risk of being stolen by hackers not only this but when you don't use a vpn your internet service provider like chrome or safari can see every website you visit it can also see how much time you spent on those websites how much data was transmitted and more in my country internet service providers are required by law to keep logs of this information for a year which is troubling to say the least expressvpn encrypts my data by re-routing it through a different server and stops all of this from happening expressvpn also hides your location so if you're like me and live in a particular country like the uk but are kind of jealous of the shows available on say us netflix we've got you covered you can watch these shows that are restricted by region by simply activating the vpn choosing whichever country you want and enjoying your show so if you want a whole three months of all of this completely for free then click the link in the description expressvpn.com forward slash cosmic skeptic and start enjoying all of this today i also want to take a moment as always to thank my supporters on patreon for helping to keep this channel afloat especially my top tier supporters on patreon without whom i simply couldn't be doing what i'm doing if you like the content that i'm putting out please do consider becoming a supporter at patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic or by using the link in the description but with that said i've been alex o'connor or cosmic skeptic you can follow me on social media here thank you for watching don't forget to subscribe and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: CosmicSkeptic

Views: 165,060

Rating: 4.8764749 out of 5

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, vegan, veganism, ethics, morality, dilemmas

Id: ULN1PfvG3GE

Length: 22min 33sec (1353 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021