[ad_1]
eearlier this year, cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted to 25 years in prison on seven counts of wire fraud. It’s safe to say that his life isn’t going according to plan. But was the plan itself immoral?
By her own account, Bankman-Fried aimed to amass wealth for charitable causes: “earning to give”, in the idiom of the effective altruistic movement of which he was a supporter. Billboards for his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, proclaimed: “I’m getting into crypto because I want to make the biggest global impact forever.” Effective altruists often defend utilitarianism, which says we should promote the greatest net balance of benefits versus harms. by any means necessary. In other words, we are justified in harming some—for example, through wire fraud—if the harms outweigh the benefits to others. According to the judge who sentenced Bankman-Fried, “He knew it was wrong; he knew it was criminal. But even if she knew the law, Bankman-Fried may not have believed she was doing anything wrong. Eventually, he plans to donate billions to help those in need. Perhaps he thought he had the answer to that age-old moral question: whether it is good to cause harm for the greater good.
Philosophical ideas often do not become mainstream. Effective altruism is one of them; another is the “trolley problem” – the source of countless memes on social media and an important plot device in The good place. What gets lost in the memes is why the trolley issue matters. The point is not to generate more and more confusing cases of moral uncertainty, but precisely to explore the Bankman-Fried predicament.
In the classic case devised by my late colleague Judy Thomson in 1976, you are a bystander to an arrow about to veer a trolleybus off the track it’s on – flying towards five victims who will surely die when it hits them – aside tracking with one victim to be killed instead. Pop culture presentations suggest that the problem is knowing what to do: Should you flip the switch or not? But the problem with the trolley begins with the fact that most of us hardly doubt: you have to turn the trolley on the side track, taking one life to save five. This decision puts pressure on those who answer no to the Bankman-Fried dilemma—who believe that it is not good to harm some just because those harms will be offset by the benefits to others.
But why then, if we have the right to turn the key, is it not wrong to push a bystander in front of the speeding trolley, stopping it? Or for a transplant doctor to kill an innocent patient and use his organs to save five lives—both of which seem to most of us grossly immoral? For decades ethicists, including Thomson, have struggled to reconcile our conflicting judgments when it comes to flipping the switch versus pushing the bystander or killing the patient: in each case, we take one life to save five. If we cannot identify a meaningful moral difference, we must conclude that since it is OK to flip the switch, it is OK to push the bystander or ultimately kill the patient. This conclusion leads inexorably to a more utilitarian moral view, according to which it is perfectly normal to cause harm in the service of the greater good. And allows Bankman-Fried moral protection. He may have misjudged harms and benefits, risks and benefits, but he had a respectable philosophical argument on his side.
The twist in this story is that Judy Thomson eventually changed her mind. In an article published in 2008, she questioned the idea that it was right to flip that switch, taking one life to save five. Her argument involves a variant of the classic case where you have an additional option: in addition to switching the trolley on a single-victim track, you can turn it on you. Thomson’s point is that you are not required to sacrifice your life, but if you don’t, you can’t turn on someone else’s troll by sacrificing them instead. If you wouldn’t give your life to save the five, how can you justify the decision to take theirs? This question holds even when self-sacrifice is not an option, as in the case with which we began: the absence of an option that you would not take should not affect your choice among the options that remain.
The message of Thomson’s reversal is that rather than weakening our reluctance to do harm, careful consideration of the trolley problem should strengthen it. There is no moral difference between flipping the switch in the original box of the cart and pushing a bystander in front of the cart, not because both actions are right, but because—despite common intuition—both actions are wrong. We shouldn’t flip that switch, because in most cases we wouldn’t be willing to make the sacrifice.
There may be situations where it is okay to harm some for the benefit of others: acting in self-defense, for example. But it is not allowed to do so whenever the benefits outweigh the harms. We must not allow any future Bankman-Fried to justify his actions by invoking the better.
Kiran Setia is a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (Penguin).
More information
Would you kill Fat? The trolley problem and what your answer tells us about right and wrong by David Edmonds (Princeton, £12.99)
Justice: What is the right thing to do? by Michael J Sandel (Penguin, £10.95)
Rights, Restitution and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory by Judith Jarvis Thomson (Harvard, £37.95)
[ad_2]
