Moral Dilemna - how to solve it

[sauronsfinger]

True story ... when I was in college, money was really tight. I had to pay my own way through and worked midnights to do it doing the night audit and desk clerking at a large motel. I fashioned myself as a tough rebel who did not take any guff from anybody.

So about 6 AM one Sunday morning, the bellman comes in to the back office where I was working at a desk with his hands raised high in the air. The owners son had just arrived and is working across from me at another desk with eight or nine cash drawers stacked on it. This guy has a gun and tells us all to get over on the far side of the office. I thought it was a joke so I did not move. He puts his army duffel bag on top of the stack of cash drawers, goes to the safe and puts some cash in his bag. He tells us to empty our pockets and he picks up my car keys and says he is taking my car.

Then he tells the other two guys to lie face down on the floor and put their hands behind them tucked in their belts. I just about flooded my pants right there because a week before somebody in Phoenix Arizona (I think) a robber did something like that during a robbery and went down the line blowing each persons brains out. And I figure that if he kills these two, I am sure to go. He puts the gun to the back of one guys head and gives them order not to move for 20 minutes. He says he may go out and return just to test them. I am glad I am not on the floor with them.

Then he walks me out to my car, I get in and start it up, he tells me to walk to the back of the motel and drives away.

When you are facing a gun and possible death you will do anything to live. I would have licked the bottom of that guys shoe and only asked "right or left" if he asked me to.

All this talk about preparing for situations like that is meaningless. Facing grim death inches away from you has a way of getting rid of all the idealogy and philosophy and reducing you life to a crystal clear clarity where all you want to do is live.

[MithLuin]

Well then here's another take on a life-or-death scenario (without the moral dilemma).

You are with someone who has a heart attack. You dial 911 and wait for the EMTs to get there. What now?

Hopefully, someone present has some CPR training and can do something to actually help the guy rather than stand around and watch him die. The only way that is going to happen, though, is if someone has CPR training in advance. Saying that you might freeze up and forget how to do it or not have the stamina to continue is fair enough, but you certainly aren't going to be able to do it if you have never been trained.

Is it possible that you can be trained to react with something other than stark fear and adrenaline when someone is waving a gun around? I think it is.... (though most training is going to presume you have a gun of your own available). But sitting around and talking about it is not adequate preparation (any more than you are going to be able to do CPR after reading a pamphlet on it). You have to practice scenarios where you do get a gun shoved in your face and orders shouted at you, I think.


(I have no cool stories from personal experience, sorry)

My sister and I both started dating guys when they were 18 years old. Now, your average 18 year old guy doesn't have much training or experience when it comes to dealing w/ life-or-death situations. If I had to choose which of them I would have wanted to be driving the car when a deer jumped out in front of us, I would have chosen my bf (the safer driver, who I think would keep his head, more or less). If I wanted to pick one of them to escort me through a lousy area at night...definitely hers. And if I needed CPR - well, I'd just hope my sister was around, because she had to renew her certification with lifeguarding constantly.


Neither of these guys is 18 any more, so situations have come up over the years. My ex went out to lunch with some guys from work, and played basketball. One of them started experiencing some chest pain, and then (after he got back in his car) collapsed from a heart attack. They called 911...but none of the guys knew CPR, so all my ex could do was hold up the guy's head a bit while they waited for the ambulance. The crew worked on him for awhile, and then the ambulance drove away...with its lights off. The guy didn't make it. I'm not saying he could have been saved if they'd started CPR sooner - maybe he was a goner no matter what. But...it would have been nice if someone could have at least tried until the ambulance got there, and my sister was horrified when she heard this story...because it seemed unconsciousable to her that no one would know enough to even try.

Her husband has spent the last 8 years in the US Marines, done 3 tours of duty in Iraq as an enlisted man, and currently trains lieutenants at Quantico. Would I trust this guy to mess someone up, armed or not? Sure. He told stories about how the injured US soldiers would go out drinking in Germany, and even full of shrapnel and liquored up, they won the bar fights they got into. (Not that this is something to be proud of, of course - just reality). He has been well trained in how to deal with certain situations. This does not make him SWAT and he wouldn't necessarily know how to talk down someone bent on killing hostages. But he'd know more about that than I would. He's been shot at while sitting on a bench eating his lunch; I have not seen guns used as weapons, only recreationally (true, the bench was in Baghdad, but....) If someone broke into his house...the intruder would be killed, I have no doubt. My brother-in-law has the training, skills, and experience to be a deadly shot.

Having a gun means the gunman has more firepower, but it doesn't mean he is necessarily in charge. If you know how to evaluate the situation, you may be able to use his mistakes against him. Or you might be really unlucky, and he doesn't make any mistakes. There is not always a sure-fire way to get out of these situations alive. The passengers on flight 93 decided to fight back after they realized it was not only their lives on the line. By that time, they'd heard about the twin towers, and could guess how this would end. Fighting off the hijackers resulted in a plane crash, which is why everyone was probably hesitant to do anything about it ahead of time. But they crashed into an open field.


The answer to the moral dilemma *IS* do what you can to stop the terrorist. Do not kill your fellow prisoners. Try to get out alive. Your ability to do any of those things is going to depend on the actual situation, the circumstances, etc. But your training (if you have any) assumes you have the ethical background to try to save the good guys and yes, if you have to, waste the bad guys. Can you really picture a US soldier, after being trained for warfare, deciding it would be okay to comply with such a request from the terrorist? No - the goal of getting everybody out alive (or at least those you can save) would be paramount. So, yes, you have to deal with questions of morality (though not necessarily in the form of cutesy hypothetical situations) ahead of time.

[axordil]

The passengers on flight 93 decided to fight back after they realized it was not only their lives on the line.

And, perhaps just as importantly, that they were going to die regardless. If you have nothing to lose, the dynamics--and ethics--of the situation change. If it had been a pre-9/11 hijacking, trying to take the plane back would have been viewed as needlessly endangering a lot of innocent passengers. Now, things are different.

Again, it is certainly possible to be trained to respond quickly and decisively to a variety of emergency situations. That's not the question at hand. The question posed remains a moral and ethical one, not a "worst-case scenario" one.

[Impenitent]

The question was, 'what is the morally correct course of action', not 'what would you do?'

Those are not equivalent questions and moreover, one must make certain assumptions in answering both of them.

In working out which is the morally correct course of action one assumes one has full knowledge of all the parameters - the state of mind and body and future actions of terrorists and fellow captives, for one.

But we don't know these things; we don't know if the terrorist is being tricksy or will follow through on his word; we don't know if our fellow captives will have a sudden fit of hysteria, or heroism, in the very next moment and attack the terrorists en masse and miraculously overpower them, thereby rendering our moral pontifications null.

In predicting what one would actually do, the assumption is that one 'knows ones self' and that the trajectory of behaviour will follow logically.

But we don't know that either; because we don't know if our fight or flight instinct will take over, or whether we'll have a sudden fit of altruism or resort of dog eat dog. We don't know. We'd like to think we know ourselves, but we don't.

And even in the case of those trained to respond in emergency situations... people have done the unpredictable and unlikely and cannot explain why afterwards.

Moral dilemmas are grist for the philosophical mill but I don't think our musings have much weight in the real world of action because people, as individuals, are so complex.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The Impish one is wise.

[Folca]

I guess I didn't do well at making my point. My primary point is I where I stand morally on the scenario presented. I am cognizant of the fallibility of people in general, so I made a concious decision very early on in life to develop a mindset and skill set to improve my chances of taking the moral path I choose. I don't want to live with myself having faltered, to the sorrow of innocents who needed help. Each to their own, but I know from experience a person can train themselves to overcome the unknown instead of just hoping they might come up with the right solution at the moment of truth.

And that is the point. If you choose to do nothing or something based on your own personal morality, fine. But, don't sell yourselves short by believing there isn't something that could be done previous to the event to prepare, should you choose to put forth the effort.

[ArathornJax]

Interesting discussion. In some ways you could connect it to Frodo's choice at Sammath Naur. Here he is faced with the moral dilemna to cast the ring into Mt. Doom and destroy it, or to claim it for his own. He was the "best" of the hobbits of the Shire according to Bilbo and Gandalf and yet he "failed" in his quest to destroy the ring. This moral failure (which we have discussed before in another thread I believe) is in the end, one of the very issues that caused Frodo to decide to leave the Shire and sail into the West to be healed. In my mind Frodo, after bearing a horrible burden over time, gave in to the burden, the temptation, the evil of the ring even though no other could have gone so far. In the end though he failed in the quest and only through the intervention of Gollum did the quest succeed.

So in the end, I think it is very hard to determine what one would do in the given situation. In the end, I think we do the best we can do regardless of what our personal beliefs and morals are in any given situation. I think we see that in combat where soldiers have to react in order to survive. When we react I don't think we always make a decision that is always what we would want. For me, I don't think I know what I would do until in the situation. I know what I would want to do. I'm not sure what I would do in the actual situation though.

[Impenitent]

In the end though he failed in the quest and only through the intervention of Gollum did the quest succeed.

At the risk of osgiliating just a little (although the theme remains moral choice ), Frodo did succeed, if we come at it from a different direction. In direct consequence of Frodo's mercy, Gollum was alive at the end and therefore was able to act as the instrument which destroyed the Ring. Gollum's intervention was possible only because of Frodo's earlier mercy; through Frodo's own merit was the task completed.

Frodo failed in the narrow definition of the task, but succeeded nonetheless.

[Primula Baggins]

Folca, what I would say is that many people live lives that demand to be spent in other ways than preparing for something that might well never happen. It is not a choice to be lazy, it is a choice to, say, have a marriage, three children, a house, and two businesses. Twenty or thirty years of that has not allowed time or energy for me to become a finely honed responder to all sorts of emergencies, and I refuse to feel guilty if disaster strikes and I haven't taken the right class to deal with it.

It's not a matter of "choosing to put forth the effort," it's deciding what would not get done instead. When in fact it all has to get done. It has all always had to get done.

That's the way it is for most people.

[Frelga]

I think there are several different levels of readiness.

Moral dilemmas - not this one especially, because it presents a highly specific and not very likely situation and so is mostly useful in exploring our own beliefs rather than real-world preparation - help us decide what we would like to do.

Mental training helps us figure out how we would like to do it.

Actual drills help us build reflexes that we hope will kick in under stress.

For instance, Impish, if your class didn't drill you in kicks and punches, you probably would not be able to flatten your instructor so thoroughly.

After that, it is all up to circumstances and luck.

Bottom line is, we all do it. With "stop, drop, roll," fire drills, rehearsing for job interview, whatever. We may not choose to be trained to set broken bones but that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least read up on how to immobilize a broken leg if necessary, and doesn't that ultimately stem from the decision that helping an injured person is a moral thing to do?

[Folca]

Prim-Didn't intend to imply it was laziness if someone didn't choose to prepare for some of the things I work towards, so I apologize if that is how it came across. I was referencing situational conditioning in general, not just specific to the proposed scenario.

I have no nuclear family and doubt I ever will, so the way I prioritize time and tasks would be quite different. In all honesty, I will take working holidays, getting called in for overtime routinely, drug out of bed on occasion for an extra assignment, risk injury and live under the scrutiny of courts and superiors any day over the daunting responsibilities a parent has. Hats off to any of you willing to be one.

Frelga-I certainly hope someone knows how to immobilize a broken leg should I ever be in that circumstance!

[Primula Baggins]

Rereading my response I see it was a bit prickly, Folca, and I apologize. I've been rather tired lately. I am grateful for people who are prepared for emergencies; I have no doubt that at some point many of us will owe our lives to people who were willing to haul out of bed in the middle of the night and come put a fire out, or look for a prowler, or check out our sudden breathing problems; or to the person who thinks faster than we do in a sudden emergency.

And I have had the experience of running toward a truck flipped upside-down on the median strip of the freeway, wondering what the hell I was going to do if the person was seriously hurt. (The driver was hanging upside down, still in her seatbelt, conscious and uninjured; she turned off the ignition and we helped her crawl out through the window. The EMTs were there within five minutes after that.)

[vison]

I think that practice in doing "the moral thing" every day is about all we can do to prepare ourselves for some as-yet-unseen eventuality.

A good person, one who consciously lives a decent life, will probably "do better" in any situation. We are all presented with moral dilemmas all the time. We see a $20 bill drop from someone's purse. Do we pick it up and run after her? Or do we pick it up and slide it into our pocket? We dent someone's fender in a parking lot. Do we sneak away hoping no one saw?

Who can possibly know what they might do in a case like the OP? I would like to think I would just refuse to cooperate, because I think that's the "moral" thing to do. I hope I never have to be put to the test.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

When you are facing a gun and possible death you will do anything to live.

Actually, that's not a universal truth but an individual truth. History is filled with martyrs who refused to give up their convictions in the face of death. People who are given the choice "convert to our religion or die" are a classic example, and people who consider death to be the better choice to make. Some would say "sure I'll convert just spare my life." Some would lie and promise to convert and then intentionally break their promise. Others don't make the promise at all. Some people choose death before dishonor.

[Maria]

Sometimes it's not preparation or practice or luck that allows you to make the right choice in an emergency. Sometimes time slows and you have plenty of time to choose the right thing to do and act on it. This has happened twice to me- once as a child on a bicycle, and once as a young adult in a car crash.

The bicycle incident happened when we lived in the city and my friends were riding bikes down a sloped, paved parking lot onto a wooden ramp we'd built and jumping the ramp. This was a lot of fun, and I decided to do this while standing on my bike seat and letting go of the handle bars. (I was in 3rd grade, probably about 10 years old?) In the middle of the jump I lost my balance and parted company with the bike. Time slowed. I was in trouble, about to meet the pavement at a fairly high rate of speed. I remembered seeing Kirk on Star Trek doing a roll, and decided that was my best bet. I'd never done such a thing before, but I managed to tuck into a ball and hit the pavement rolling. I escaped without injury.

The car crash was when I was in the Army Reserve and I was riding in the back of a Jeep without a seat belt on. The driver went around a corner too fast, and the Jeep rolled. I was in midair. Time slowed. I saw that if I twisted around just so, I'd hit the other wall of the jeep on my side and would be OK. I did so, and was OK. The other passenger broke her wrist.

Anyway, either time slowed or my perception of it speeded up and I was able to choose the best course of action to save myself.

As far as preplanned things go, I once took some Kung Fu classes. We were drilled and drilled on self defense, and I had a whole routine I was supposed to go through if grabbed from behind. I was trained. I was ready. Once, years later, a guy asking for money kept following me after I left a store and I found myself rehearsing those moves. If he touched me, I was going to drop to a crouch, slam my elbow into his solar plexus, smash my fist into his crotch and then gouge his eyes out with my fingers over my shoulder. I was trained. I was ready. This was it. I was actually going to have to use what I'd learned so long ago.

I got to my car without incident, and realized that if the harmless old man had merely touched my shoulder to try to get my attention, I'd have proabably maimed him for life. I was surprisingly *not* OK with that. I decided then and there I needed some less lethal alternatives to what I'd been taught. Fortunately, I signed my kids up for Judo not long after that, (because they'd been falling and getting hurt too much) and soon joined them in classes, so now I have some non-maiming moves in my repertoire.

Preprogrammed responses without moral consideration are not necessarily a good thing. Maiming someone for scaring me is not a good tradeoff. Throwing them to the ground and knocking the wind out of them is acceptable, however.

[Folca]

Prim-No apologies necessary. I have a pointed way of writing/presentation sometimes, but when I am talking in my head as it goes to text it is almost always in a conversational tone that text cannot convey.

Maria-It is always good to have a variety of responses depending on the circumstances, which is a good point you have made. Judo is good stuff for a lot of reasons. I trained in jujitsu for ten years, and it does alot to help you learn to fall and move in ways that don't hurt you.

Cenedril-You are exactly right, it is an individual response, as history has shown.

[sauronsfinger]

One reason certain martyr types make history is that they are the exception to the norm. The will to live is a basic part of the instinct for self preservation. I can think of very little more foolish than for a person to select the option of death when a few words which are relatively meaningless would spare them or their loved ones.

Some in our society love to glorify abstract terms like honor, ideals and the purity of your beliefs but at the end of the day if you do not have your life you do not have any of that either.

[Pearly Di]

One reason certain martyr types make history is that they are the exception to the norm. The will to live is a basic part of the instinct for self preservation.

I can think of very little more foolish than for a person to select the option of death when a few words which are relatively meaningless would spare them or their loved ones.

I don't think it is simple as that.

Some in our society love to glorify abstract terms like honor, ideals and the purity of your beliefs but at the end of the day if you do not have your life you do not have any of that either.

When people of a particular religious faith, or people who oppose the politics of their government, are deliberately targeted and persecuted, with the 'convert or die' option, it is an attack on their very integrity and their souls.

Even if they capitulated and gave in, to save themselves from being burned as a heretic, or whatever, the powers-that-be would still be determined to stamp them out.

That is precisely the situation that many Protestant martyrs found themselves in during the ugly religious wars of the 16th century (and Catholic martyrs too, of course.)

So they might as well die with honour.

That is how I assess Christian martyrs past and present, and also those with the courage to defy oppressive and unjust governments. These people are prepared to lay their lives on the line for a cause greater than themselves, and I admire them for it.

A person who is deliberately targeted because of their beliefs is in a different situation to someone who just happens to be in the wrong time and place. Like you, I was the victim of a crime some years ago when I was attacked by a guy with a knife in my own street. 7pm at night in a quiet surbuban road, walking home from walk and minding my own business!

He was a poor, pathetic druggie. He didn't hurt or harm me. But he could have done, because he had a knife, and there was no way I wanted to antagonise him. He wanted money and all the jewellery I was wearing. I handed over my bag, my watch and my ear-rings. You don't argue with someone carrying a knife. I was very calm and spoke to him in a soft voice. And all the time wanted him to get the hell away. Eventually he did.

A very scary experience and you're quite right: one will do ANYTHING in that situation to live, to survive.

But I do see that as somewhat different from the situation I was describing above. One does need a good reason to be a martyr, IMO.

[sauronsfinger]

Pearly Di
I agree with much of what you say. And I certainly admire someone who gives thier life in what they believe to be a noble or great cause that is larger than themself.

Sorry to hear that you too were the victim of a crime. I am glad you did the right thing and are here to tell us about it.

One thing I will never forget is after my episode at the motel, the owner shows up an hour or so later and tells his own son, the bellboy and myself that since there were three of us and only one robber we should have overpowered him. Some people are just beyond reason.

[axordil]

I propose repackaging the scenario to isolate variables, since "solving" what we're looking at is problematic.

Something like this:

You're sitting at work/home/Starbucks when you get an IM from a well-known terrorist with curiously pedagogical ethics. The terrorist says he has ten hostages, and that you have been randomly chosen to determine which one of them will be killed; the other nine will be released. If you do not choose, or otherwise refuse to cooperate, ALL will be killed. You've just read at your favorite news site that this thing has been going on and is quite real, and you have no reason to believe you're being lied to.

This version removes any personal involvement, questions of resistance, and other purely pragmatic issues, returning it to the realm of out-of-control trains and switches where it belongs.

Now: would your answer be different if all but one would be killed? All but two? All but three et al?

What if the IM stated that you had to choose a victim whose legs would be cut off, instead of killed, to spare the others?

What if the IM stated that you had to choose a victim whose legs would be broken, to spare the others not death but removal of their legs?

It is possible to build a truth table out of the responses that gives you an idea of how ethical decisions are constructed. But you first have to focus in on the core issues, I think.