Okay, this is getting annoying. I've mostly ignored "near vs. far" topics because I don't know what the metaphorical meaning of the two is. Then, when I went to the LW wiki to be enlightened so I can understand these topics, what do I get?
NEAR: All of these bring each other more to mind: here, now, me, us; trend-deviating likely real local events; concrete, context-dependent, unstructured, detailed, goal-irrelevant incidental features; feasible safe acts; secondary local concerns; socially close folks with unstable traits. FAR: Conversely, all these bring each other more to mind: there, then, them; trend-following unlikely hypothetical global events; abstract, schematic, context-freer, core, coarse, goal-related features; desirable risk-taking acts, central global symbolic concerns, confident predictions, polarized evaluations, socially distant people with stable traits.
So ... one of them goes with a bunch terms that have some vague relationship to each other, and the other one ... um, does the same with different terms. Was that supposed to somehow be helpful?
Anyway, I don't know how to translate this into near and far, but here's my answer to the trolley problem:
Workers on the track consented to the risks associated with being on a trolley track, such as errant trolleys. (This does NOT mean they deserved to die, of course.) Someone standing above the track on a bridge only consented to the risks associated with being on a bridge above a trolley trolley track, NOT to the risk that someone would draft him for sacrificial lamb duty on a moment's notice.
By intervening to push someone onto the track, you suddenly and unpredictably shift around the causal structure associated with danger in the world, on top of saving a few lives. Now, people have to worry about more heros drafting sacrificial lambs "like that one guy did a few months ago" and have to go to greater lengths to get the same level of risk.
In other words, all the "prediction difficulty" costs associated with randomly changing the "rules of the game" apply. Just as it's costly to make people keep updating their knowledge of what's okay and what isn't, it's costly to make people update their knowledge of what's risky and what isn't (and to less efficient regimes, no less).
That is what differentiates pushing a fat guy off, from diverting one track to another. I don't pretend that that is what most people are thinking when they encounter the problem, but the "unusualness" of pushing someone off a bridge is certainly affecting their intuition, and so concerns about stability probably play a role. And of course, you have to factor in the fact that most people are responding on the fly, while the creator of the dilemma had all the time in the world to trip up people's intuitions.
This is not to say there aren't real moral dilemmas with the intended tradeoff. It's just that, like with the Prisoner's Dilemma, you need a more convoluted scenario to get the payoff matrix to work out as intended, at which point the situation is a lot less intuitive.
I don't pretend that that is what most people are thinking when they encounter the problem, but the "unusualness" of pushing someone off a bridge is certainly affecting their intuition, and so concerns about stability probably play a role.
I don't know, lot of people talk about how he's "not involved" or "innocent" or how you should involve people who aren't already part of the problem - it's the same as the one with the guy with healthy organs and the dying transplant patients.
I went to the Royal Institute last week to hear the laconic and dismissive Dr Guy Kahane on whether we are 'Biologically Moral'
[His message: Neurological evidence suggests - somewhat alarmingly - that our moral and ethical decisions may be no more than post-hoc rationalisations of purely emotional, instinctive reactions. However, we should not panic because this is early days in neuroscience, and the correct interpretation of brain-scans is uncertain: scientist find the pattern, and the explanation, they expect to find]
To illustrate his talk Kahane used one of those moral dilemmas which are rarely encountered in real life but which are fascinating to philosophers: the familiar Trolley Problem
- the first shows the anxious philosophical protagonist at the railway junction, runaway trolley approaching, pondering the lever that moves the points
- the second shows our hapless philosopher now on a bridge poised behind an unsuspecting fat stranger who is neither alert enough for his attention to have been caught by the runaway trolley bearing down on the small party of railway workers, nor sufficiently familiar with the philosophical domain to appreciate the mortal danger that he is in himself. Irony, oh Irony: Philosophy, thy name is Drama.
So far so humdrum; but... surprise! : in the front row of the audience that evening, wedged into the seat next to me, and the seat next to that, only a couple of metres from Dr Kahane and dressed in identical clothes as when the cartoon was made was the fat stranger himself.
You had to feel for Dr Kahane, but with no evident embarrassment he declined to acknowledge the unexpected attendee and ploughed gamely on with an earnest discussion of the morals, ethics and practicalities of heaving the poor man off a bridge and under the wheels of an oncoming philosophical trope. I had to smile
And the Trolley Problem is always good for a lively debate so, inevitably, in the Q&A, we came back to it all over again, I felt more uncomfortable by now as members of the audience discussed at length the pros and cons of the fat man's sorry and undeserved demise, none of them acknowledging his presence amongst us.
The fat man was, you might say, the elephant in the room.
My discovery
The reason the Trolley Problem is so intriguing and enduring is that it appears to neatly demonstrate Far and Near thinking : Although the two scenarios are logically identical, shifting a lever to divert a trolley down a track is Far, so most people will do it, but giving a fat man a shove is Near and this is why most people will decline.
What I discovered that evening is: that the bridge scenario is not, in fact, Near at all.
Having the fat stranger sitting right next to you is Near !
You see, as an avowed nationalist and utilitarian, I have never before found the Trolley Problem to be any kind of dilemma: I am a slayer of the obese onlooker every time. But that particular evening when it came to the vote I found that simple embarrassment, and the trivial desire not to appear insensitive was enough to stay my rational hand and I sat on it, guiltily despatching five poor, hypothetical railway workers to their deaths, merely to avoid a momentary unkindness.
My Conclusions
- It seems there is Far Near and Near Near, and if you ever again find yourself with time to meta-think that you are operating in Near mode.... then you're actually in Far mode.
- and so I will be more suspicious of the hypothetical thought experiments from now on.
Epilogue
But, you are asking, how did the Fat Man himself vote?
He declined to push, remarking drily that the fattest person on the bridge was very likely to be himself. He would, he said, jump.
He was most definitely thinking in Far mode.