daughter was led away, screaming.
Sometimes the state, in the form of the courts, has mandated a killing in a Pareto-esque scenario. In 2000, a Catholic woman, Rina Attard, from the Maltese island of Gozo, gave birth in Britain to conjoined twins—the courts called themMary and Jodie. Doctors said the twins would both die unless they underwent surgery; but even if this operation went ahead only one of the babies, Jodie, would survive. The parents, both committed Roman Catholics, refused to allow this operation. Their written evidence included this:
We cannot begin to accept or to contemplate that one of our children should die to enable the other one to survive. That is not God’s will. Everyone has the right to life, so why should we kill one of our daughters to enable the other one to survive? 12
The doctors challenged their decision. The argument went all the way to the high court where, in reaching their decision, the judges referred to works of philosophy, drew trolley-type analogies, quoted Hobbes, and cited Regina v. Dudley and Stephens and the Zeebrugge disaster, to determine, for example, whether carrying out the operation would be an example of an intentional killing.
In the end the court ruled that the operation should go ahead. It took place on November 7, 2000. Mary died, as the doctors had foreseen. Jodie survived, as predicted.
The Nazi Thought Experiment
Most people will be influenced by Pareto-type reasoning, just one feature of what some people call our moral grammar. The data bank of global moral instincts collated at Harvard’s Moral Sense Test is revealing an intricate lattice-like moral edifice. At Harvard, I watched a researcher question a subject on a harrowing dilemma with a parallel structure to the cases described. The subject was asked to imagine that she was among a groupof people hiding from the Nazis: her child was whimpering. Unless she smothered the child, the entire group would be discovered and murdered. The MST has presented this and similar scenarios on the Internet: for example, one case imagines a lifeboat that will sink and all its occupants die unless one person is jettisoned, so lightening the load.
One unusual feature of these cases is that they have revealed a big gender gap. Roughly 50 percent believe that it is acceptable to throw someone overboard in the lifeboat case, or for the mother to kill her child, but many fewer women than men think this. Nonetheless, Marc Hauser states, “When it comes to our evolved moral faculty—our moral competence—it looks like we speak in one voice: the voice of our species.” 13
The moral taxonomer, John Mikhail, has deconstructed actions in terms of their means (throwing the switch in Spur), ends (preventing the five men from being killed), and side effects (killing the man on the main track). Battery—unwanted bodily contact when this entails harm—is usually impermissible. In Fat Man, the side effects include killing with battery, which is why the fat man’s killing is so obviously (to most people at least) ruled out.
A successful capturing of the principles that govern our ethical responses to the world holds out the prospect that, in theory, computers could be programmed to react like humans. In other words, if we could reduce moral considerations to algorithms, robots could be built to behave as we would like humans to behave.
This would have radical implications, such as in warfare. The future of warfare is robotic warfare, in which machines will have growing “autonomy” to make decisions without direct human oversight. 14 It would be naive to believe that machine “agents,” such as those in the novels of Isaac Asimov or in movies like Blade Runner , are any longer confined to the realm of fiction.
The Google Driverless Car is in an advanced stage of development. In cities around the world, driverless trains, already a feature at numerous airports, are now being introduced. In Co-penhagen, for example,
Sometimes the state, in the form of the courts, has mandated a killing in a Pareto-esque scenario. In 2000, a Catholic woman, Rina Attard, from the Maltese island of Gozo, gave birth in Britain to conjoined twins—the courts called themMary and Jodie. Doctors said the twins would both die unless they underwent surgery; but even if this operation went ahead only one of the babies, Jodie, would survive. The parents, both committed Roman Catholics, refused to allow this operation. Their written evidence included this:
We cannot begin to accept or to contemplate that one of our children should die to enable the other one to survive. That is not God’s will. Everyone has the right to life, so why should we kill one of our daughters to enable the other one to survive? 12
The doctors challenged their decision. The argument went all the way to the high court where, in reaching their decision, the judges referred to works of philosophy, drew trolley-type analogies, quoted Hobbes, and cited Regina v. Dudley and Stephens and the Zeebrugge disaster, to determine, for example, whether carrying out the operation would be an example of an intentional killing.
In the end the court ruled that the operation should go ahead. It took place on November 7, 2000. Mary died, as the doctors had foreseen. Jodie survived, as predicted.
The Nazi Thought Experiment
Most people will be influenced by Pareto-type reasoning, just one feature of what some people call our moral grammar. The data bank of global moral instincts collated at Harvard’s Moral Sense Test is revealing an intricate lattice-like moral edifice. At Harvard, I watched a researcher question a subject on a harrowing dilemma with a parallel structure to the cases described. The subject was asked to imagine that she was among a groupof people hiding from the Nazis: her child was whimpering. Unless she smothered the child, the entire group would be discovered and murdered. The MST has presented this and similar scenarios on the Internet: for example, one case imagines a lifeboat that will sink and all its occupants die unless one person is jettisoned, so lightening the load.
One unusual feature of these cases is that they have revealed a big gender gap. Roughly 50 percent believe that it is acceptable to throw someone overboard in the lifeboat case, or for the mother to kill her child, but many fewer women than men think this. Nonetheless, Marc Hauser states, “When it comes to our evolved moral faculty—our moral competence—it looks like we speak in one voice: the voice of our species.” 13
The moral taxonomer, John Mikhail, has deconstructed actions in terms of their means (throwing the switch in Spur), ends (preventing the five men from being killed), and side effects (killing the man on the main track). Battery—unwanted bodily contact when this entails harm—is usually impermissible. In Fat Man, the side effects include killing with battery, which is why the fat man’s killing is so obviously (to most people at least) ruled out.
A successful capturing of the principles that govern our ethical responses to the world holds out the prospect that, in theory, computers could be programmed to react like humans. In other words, if we could reduce moral considerations to algorithms, robots could be built to behave as we would like humans to behave.
This would have radical implications, such as in warfare. The future of warfare is robotic warfare, in which machines will have growing “autonomy” to make decisions without direct human oversight. 14 It would be naive to believe that machine “agents,” such as those in the novels of Isaac Asimov or in movies like Blade Runner , are any longer confined to the realm of fiction.
The Google Driverless Car is in an advanced stage of development. In cities around the world, driverless trains, already a feature at numerous airports, are now being introduced. In Co-penhagen, for example,
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