Interesting moral dilemma

[Durandal]

So I'm watching Robot Chicken, and they've posited an interesting moral dilemma in one of their skits. The skit's plot is that a salesman is getting off a subway train, slips on a banana peel and falls halfway on the tracks. The train gets going again and runs over his lower half and then stops after the conductor realizes he's run the guy over.

Then a man comes along ans says that they can't move the train because it's keeping his organs from collapsing. So as long as the train doesn't move, this man can live. In the skit, the train stays in place for the rest of his life, and he keeps on working.

So what's the moral thing to do here? Forcing the train to remain in place for years allows this one man to live, but it represents a massive disruption in millions of lives. That entire line of the subway system would effectively have to shut down. People who took it to go to work would have to radically adjust their commuting habits. Some might have to pick up and move their families.

But at the end of the day, the effect of this man living would be a large number of inconveniences. So would the government have the moral authority to move the train in the name of restoring public transportation services to hundreds of thousands of citizens, even if it meant condemning this man to death? Assume that it's a certainty that he'll live as long as the train stays put.

[Junghalli]

Personally I'd say leave the train where it is.

Death >>> inconvenience. Even inconvenience for vast numbers of people.

Also, while the entire subway line has to be shut down, it won't be for the entire life of the man. They could build a new tunnel going around him. Granted that would cost a lot of money. Also, they have decades to figure out some way of getting him out.

[Darth Yoshi]

I disagree. The man may still be alive, but now he's effectively a prisoner for the rest of his life. And because he's pinned down, he can't even move around like actual prison inmates get to. He's less living and more existing. It would be more humane to anesthetize him and then let him bleed out.

[Samuel]

Personally I'd say leave the train where it is.

Death >>> inconvenience. Even inconvenience for vast numbers of people.

Also, while the entire subway line has to be shut down, it won't be for the entire life of the man. They could build a new tunnel going around him. Granted that would cost a lot of money. Also, they have decades to figure out some way of getting him out.

Keep the wheels that are on him and move the rest until you have one car. Than take the car apart with the wheel secured in place. Than move him.

[Junghalli]

I disagree. The man may still be alive, but now he's effectively a prisoner for the rest of his life. And because he's pinned down, he can't even move around like actual prison inmates get to. He's less living and more existing. It would be more humane to anesthetize him and then let him bleed out.

I understood the implication of the scenario to be that the man doesn't want to die. If he wishes to be permitted to die, then yeah I'd say let him have his wish.

[B5B7]

Actually it is not very realistic. There was a similar scenario on a recent episode of 'The Bill'. A bloke in a classic car had a pole dropped on him, that impaled him. They couldn't move him, so clamped the pole in place, gave him morphine, and he died within a couple of days. If the guy in the given scenario can't move without dying then he is going to die anyway within a short period of time.

Also as Darth Yoshi says, he's not living merely existing.
If they do wish to save him, then they could dig out a cube of matter around him and transport it. If the vibration from that is enough to kill him, then he was never going to survive the next minor earthquake or truck or train rumbling by anyway.

What sort of real society would go to the effort & cost in the OP to keep him alive? Any society so morally advanced would also have superior tech to save him.

[Patrick Degan]

This was also in a sixth season episode of Homicide: Life On The Street. Vincent D'nofrio was a stockbroker who got pushed off the platform at the Fell's Point station and wound up in that situation, with his torso corkscrewed and the pressure of the subway car being the only thing keeping his guts from falling out. In the episode, however, it was made clear that the poor bastard had no chance. The second the cars were moved out of position, he'd die. But he had only an hour at most anyway, so either way, he was a dead man. Det. Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) has the unpleasant task of "interviewing" the victim in the story.

They put pressure pants on him in aid of a million-to-one shot of saving him and had paramedics with him the whole time, but there was no question of simply leaving him there. The man will die if left there; it would just take a bit longer than trying to remove him. On the other hand, removing him constitutes the only chance of actually saving his life, no matter how slim a chance it was.

Removing him was the better option: it gave him his only chance, and at the least his suffering did not last more than 30 seconds.

[Singular Intellect]

Quite frankly, any situation where some guy is pinned but would survive and be stable for a ridiculously extended period of time sounds like a situation where they could just move him and a small portion of the surrounding area if need be.

[Patrick Degan]

Quite frankly, any situation where some guy is pinned but would survive and be stable for a ridiculously extended period of time sounds like a situation where they could just move him and a small portion of the surrounding area if need be.

And that would be a viable alternative if it weren't physically impossible.

[Shroom Man 777]

Those other people can ride a bus.

I mean, you can't kill the man if he doesn't want to die, can you? Unless if you do it in his sleep.

[Surlethe]

I think the people who are positing moving the subway car are missing the point of the moral dilemma. At its heart, it asks: is the life of one person worth the cost to society of inconveniencing hundreds of thousands or millions of people? The "stuck under a subway train" is just the way it's dressed up; with a bit of thought, I'm sure you could put the same dilemma into a different costume, and it would still be essentially the same.

[Turin]

I think the people who are positing moving the subway car are missing the point of the moral dilemma. At its heart, it asks: is the life of one person worth the cost to society of inconveniencing hundreds of thousands or millions of people? The "stuck under a subway train" is just the way it's dressed up; with a bit of thought, I'm sure you could put the same dilemma into a different costume, and it would still be essentially the same.

Yeah, the scenario itself is outlandish. But what I find more interesting is that society clearly does make the decision that one life is not worth serious inconvenience to others. If you scale up this scenario, you can look at automobiles in the US. The personal use of cars results in deaths of tens of thousands of people every year, but we have obviously already decided that the benefits of economy and convenience for the other ~300 million people are worth those deaths. Even our attempts to mitigate those deaths (through increased safety regulations, through traffic laws, etc) are reduced by concerns for economy and convenience. Certainly highways would be safer if everyone was forced to drive 40mph vs 65mph, but travel would be too inconvenient.

[Sriad]

This is clearly the case, but in traffic safety (as in other cases of lethal convenience) the risk is distributed across a large anonymous population, rather than one particular person dying every X seconds. The discrepancy in gut-response to the different situations is interesting.

[Turin]

This is clearly the case, but in traffic safety (as in other cases of lethal convenience) the risk is distributed across a large anonymous population, rather than one particular person dying every X seconds. The discrepancy in gut-response to the different situations is interesting.

The whole "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" phenomena. It makes sense from the perspective of our evolution-informed responses to these kinds of moral dilemmas, but even on this board where these sorts of things are discussed on a regular basis, we see people falling into the same response pattern. The difference here is "agency." In this particular example, it's directly your fault if the guy dies. (We can use the "trolley dilemma" as a better example, maybe -- the Hansen dilemma, I think it's called?) His death isn't the result of your inaction, which changes the "gut instincts" of the moral equation for most people.

I'd argue this is the wrong way to go about it, of course -- real world consequences are more important than abstracts values like agency. Which means that I'd be forced into a grim sort of math. That is, X amount of convenience = 1 life.

[Junghalli]

Also, people choose to drive vehicles. If you get in a car accident, you went into the car knowing there was a chance that you'd get in a fatal accident.

Arguably you could say the same isn't true for pedestrians, but most of them consciously take some risk of getting run over when they cross streets and such. If you desperately wish to avoid any chance of dying in a car accident it is possible (albeit monumentally inconvenient) to avoid cars.

Now that this guy's stuck under the subway car, there's nothing he can do to avoid dying save to not have it moved.

[Lusankya]

Clearly you need to kill the guy. Sure it sucks to be him, but just think of all the ramifications of the "inconvenience".

In this example, taking the trains offline, even if an alternate route is built will cause huge disruptions in traffic. Car usage will be increased, and travel times will also increase. Aside from the inconvenience to commuters, this will also have an effect on emergency services such as ambulances and so on. Not to mention the possibility that increased traffic could leave to increased car accidents. It would definitely lead to increased CO2 emissions and oil use, which also have social and environmental ramifications.

Then, if you decide to rebuild the subway to go around the guy, you have to factor in workplace accidents from the construction, as well as the effect of city funds being diverted from other projects which could provide more functionality to a lot more people. I'm certain that for the cost of diverting the subway around the man, you could build a few homeless shelters or soup kitchens and keep them flush with funds for a few years.

If the guy doesn't want to die, just lie and say that you think you'll be able to get him out alive before you try to move him. And pretend to be really surprised when he carks it.

[The Guid]

I guess the difference between the OP and the standard is that we also take part in the risk, whereas there is no risk to us in removing the man from the tunnel and letting him bleed to death.

[Darth Ruinus]

Isn't this what net worth is for? Simply check the man's net worth, and then his life is worth that. If his life causes his net worth to drop in the negative range, then he's not worth it.

[Broomstick]

I disagree. The man may still be alive, but now he's effectively a prisoner for the rest of his life. And because he's pinned down, he can't even move around like actual prison inmates get to. He's less living and more existing. It would be more humane to anesthetize him and then let him bleed out.

Um... shouldn't you ask the man's opinion about this? Maybe HE would prefer to live, even immobile. This would appear to be a situation where you can actually ask the person in question his preferences so I can't see how you can justify making this decision for him without consulting him first!

[Broomstick]

Quite frankly, any situation where some guy is pinned but would survive and be stable for a ridiculously extended period of time sounds like a situation where they could just move him and a small portion of the surrounding area if need be.

And that would be a viable alternative if it weren't physically impossible.

The whole scenario is physically impossible - if you get run over by a train in that manner you're going to either die if they don't get you to a hospital, or maybe die even if they do get you to a hospital.

[Broomstick]

Clearly you need to kill the guy. Sure it sucks to be him, but just think of all the ramifications of the "inconvenience".....

....If the guy doesn't want to die, just lie and say that you think you'll be able to get him out alive before you try to move him. And pretend to be really surprised when he carks it.

Frankly, I find your statements appalling on a gut level.

[Darth Ruinus]

Um... shouldn't you ask the man's opinion about this? Maybe HE would prefer to live, even immobile. This would appear to be a situation where you can actually ask the person in question his preferences so I can't see how you can justify making this decision for him without consulting him first!

? His decision to live would causes inconvinience to a whole city. His answer is worthless, unless he is worth more than the whole city.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I don't see how you can condone the death of a man if he has a viable future and even wishes to live out his life that way. This isn't euthanasia here, this is a situation where someone can live, albeit, not as they used to, and with the only downside from the perspective of everyone else being the inability to use that portion of the track.

But what if this happened again? You'd potentially have two stations made useless. Is there a cut-off point?

Well, no. It would still involve the taking away of a man's right to live, which being a supposed inalienable right, cannot be done. Economic and time based costs to commuters can be paid back. You can't compensate for a life. Ever.

For the trolley dilemma, there is a weighing of life taken on utilitarian grounds. Someone is going to die, regardless of actions, so it's either a group of people, or one person. When it comes to survival, these sorts of decisions can be reasoned as being for the greater good, because although we should not take a life, we are left with no choice in this matter, and what is worse than taking one life is taking a whole bunch of them.

? His decision to live would causes inconvinience to a whole city. His answer is worthless, unless he is worth more than the whole city.

So you would be happy with the city authorities basically telling this guy to fuck off and die because commuters will be inconvenienced? What are your criteria for determining the value of inconvenience that off-sets the sound viability of a person's life?

[Stark]

Amusingly, if the guy refuses to do the obvious thing and die, he'd become utterly reviled worldwide as a massively selfish person. Imagine all the extra security you'd have to put on the now-worthless transit system to prevent people just killing him? Install a panic button and keep security on call 24/7 in case some kids come along and want to put stones in his mouth again, build a big fence around it, etc. What a great guy!

Even more amusing is the collorary where this person is in your living room. Too bad, so sad - you even have to feed him because his death would be 'wrong'. Even if he sings loudly all night! Even if he farts! Hilarious. I demand a sitcom made on this theme immediately.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Give the guy a tripod mounted GPMG, and I'd commission that sitcom. It would be interesting to see how people would react to this kind of situation in the aftermath, assuming he wanted to stay and live a crappy life in a tunnel. You could actually watch people openly talk about this guy being a total bastard for wanting to live. I'd say it wouldn't parse too well in our society, but given that new torture study today, I'm not so sure.

If anything, he'd make a great talk show host.