Another "Divert the Train" Moral Philosophy Question

[devonin]

Originally Posted by archbishopjabber

1 The little girl will give when she grows up. 2 Also, I never said how far the HIV had progressed. 3 They could lead several years of healthy life, that does not necessarily mean they will. They just aren't going to die 24 hours after you pulling the lever. While with the information it is impossible to truly gauge which is going to be more economically beneficial, 4 we can say the girl will put less strain on the health care system.

1/ You don't know that
2/ If you give us incorrect or insufficient information you cannot expect us to make an informed decision.
3/ It doesn't necessarily mean they won't either
4/ No you can't, she could go into a coma tomorrow and spend the rest of her days in the hospital.

It is common knowledge that AIDS lowers your life expectancy considerably.

Then its a good thing that you specified that the men were all HIV positive, not that they all had AIDS.

I think your numbers are a bit low there, but even if that is not true, it does not change the fact that there is a net loss in fitness if you don't pull the lever. I mean fitness in the biological/ecological sense.

Do you mean economical or actually ecological? I'm not sure the effect those men living or dying will have on the environment. Also...The girl could grow up and decide to not have kids. If she works a random unskilled labour job in a department store, never marries or procreates, her contributions aren't exactly -guarenteed- to be substantial. 200 men, even if they have low levels of education and not many skills, can still between the 200 of them generate more man-hours of labour than the girl could in her entire life.

What I am saying is a woman's life is more important than a mans because a mans reproductive role can be easily replaced or overlapped by another mans responsibility while a woman's cannot.

You cannot seriously be trying to contend that a man's life is WORTH LESS than a woman's just because it is what...easier to find a replacement man than a replacement woman for the purposes of procreation? I don't even buy that as a statement, let alone as reasoning for your conclusion. With no men, the species dies out, with no women the species dies out. And yes, while you -can- propogate a species with fewer men provided there are enough women than you can with lots of men but few women, the entirety of existence does not in fact boil down to procreation -only- and so the "superior importance" of women in that one thing does not make them intrinsically more valuable than "some number" of men.

They could contribute much more than they would take away, but they could also do the opposite.

The exact same can be said of the girl, so either it is totally irellevant to the situation, or you have to acknowledge that even with a 1% chance that any of the men could contribute as much as the girl, that's still 2 of the men compared to the one gorl.

It is impossible to know for sure, so that would just need to be an instinctive judgment call. Either way, society won't fall no matter which group you picked.

If you always picked 200 men over 1 girl, and did this several hundred thousand times, I bet it would stop being the "correct" decision sooner rather than later.

Also, basically, being a male I instinctively feel that the lives of females are more valuable than the lives of males.

While that statement might impress the ladies into swooning, you cannot possibly state that any man's life is universally, automatically worth less than the life of any woman. I'm quite sure you can think of no shortage at all of cases where one specific man is more valuable than one specific woman, so...universal statements don't avail you here.