Are we moral?
We all want to think that we are. It is very difficult to give an answer to this question. In order to find out if we are moral, we must expose ourselves into a moral dilemma.
What is moral dilemma? Well it is a situation with a problem we must solve by picking one out of two possible choices but the beliefs we hold, regarding the choices, contradict each other. Needless to say by picking one of the possible outcomes the other one is discarded.
An example of a moral dilemma is the one of the Trolley Problem, which was first introduced way back in 1967.
Hypothetically speaking, you are railroad worker and you know that the track is being maintained at the moment. All of a sudden you see a train coming down the tracks while further down the rail way are workers performing maintenance on both of the two possible train tracks the train can follow. On one of the tracks 5 workers are on it, on the second one its is only 1 worker. There is no way to stop the train nor to somehow inform the workers. The only way to interact with the situation is by turning a leaver to change the pathway of the train. At the moment the train is heading towards the 5 people.
We all would say, with no second thought, that we would turn the leaver, sacrificing the one person for the greater good of 5 people. In fact 90% would pick saving the 5 people. In fact this is far from the truth. In 2017 an experiment was conducted testing this exact scenario most of the people who took part in the experiment during the crisis, of the oncoming train did not act, they just froze or let the train follow the track it was in, the one with the 5 people on top. Very few acted turning the leaver changing the direction of the train. Of course all of them in a hypothetical scenario had said that they would choose to save the group of people.
Personally i find these type of dilemmas very interesting not only because they require a lot of thinking but also they say a lot about human behavior. It is very hard to give an answer and as we saw the answer we give might be far from the actual truth. By looking more into it i found that these type of dilemmas have applications to a lot of things, such as autonomous driving. Also testing dilemmas like that is a moral dilemma, do we experiment on these few people risking psychological damages for information that might be useful for the greater good, or not?
Hope you enjoyed!
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