A variant on the trolley problem and babies as unit of currency

Reversal test: If this miracle of people dying and corresponding sums of money magically appearing in charity funds was commonplace, what debate would follow a hypothetical technology that terminates the miracle?

I can't hear about pushing buttons for money without thinking of this funny video.

I will willingly admit that I would press the shit out of that button.

As with most trolley problems, I have to separate out "what's the right thing to do?" from "what would I do?"

In the situation as you described it, with the added proviso that there is no other unstated-but-relevant gotcha, the right thing to do is press the button. (By "gotcha" here I mean, for example, it doesn't turn out that by pressing the button I also cause milions of other people to suffer, and you just didn't mention that part.)

Were I in that situation, of course, I would be solving an entirely different problem, roughly statable as "I am given a box with a button on it and am told, by a not-particularly-reliable source, that these various conditions apply, yadda yadda." I would probably conclude that I'm in some kind of an ethical research lab, and try to decide how likely it was that the researchers would actually kill someone, and how likely it was that they would actually give me money, and how likely it was that video of me pressing the "kill a random person" button would appear on YouTube, etc. Not really sure what I would ultimately conclude.

If I were in the situation and somehow convinced the situation was as you described it and no gotchas existed, I probably wouldn't press the button (despite believing that pressing the button was the right thing to do) because I'd fear the discomfort caused by my irrational conscience, especially if the person who died turned out to be someone I cared about. But it's hard to say; my actual response to emotional blackmail of this sort is historically very unpredictable, and I might just say "fuck it" and press the button and take the money.

As for the actual question: not all lives are equal, and the sort of life you can extend for $2,000 (or your old $800 figure) is probably not worth .2-.5 times as much as a life chosen at random across the Earth, and the difference is probably larger than the few thousand dollars you pick up.

Where'd you get the $800 per life saved figure? GiveWell.org says of their top charity:

We estimate that just under $2,000 spent on LLIN distributions saves a life. This does not include other benefits of ITNs. And this doesn't count donated money that is not spent on LLIN distributions.

I think you have the 4,000 and 6,000 numbers swapped, or your description later is mistaken.

You are offered a magical box. If you press the button on the box, one person somewhere in the world will die, you get $4000, and $6,000 is donated to one of the top rated charities on GiveWell.org. According to the $800 per life saved figure, this charity gift would save five lives, which is a net gain of four lives and $6,000 to you. Is it moral to press the button?

Yes. Sure, it increases the population, which is a shame, but I can do plenty of good with that $6k (including buying delicious cookies and or donating to the SIAI.)

If you press the button on the box, one person somewhere in the world will die, you get $6000, and $4,000 is donated to one of the top rated charities on GiveWell.org.

Remove the randomisation of the victim and you have the perfect artefact for a Death Note rewrite.

I would have problems pushing the button just because of popular culture cached thoughts) about what would happen after I pushed the button.

I think the problem here is that our intuitive moral judgement decides to deny the premise. How do you make a magic box with the properties you state without being inherently amoral? How would you practically arrange for someone, somewhere to die when a button is pressed unless you were someone who inherently either liked killing people, or didn't care about it? Our intuition is that there has to be a better way to save lives than making a deal with the devil.....

Our moral sense reacts to the social situation. You all know the fat man variation, where you are offered the option of pushing a fat man off a bridge. This seems morally repellent to most people. Make one small change - ask the fat man to jump off the bridge instead of pushing him off - and the whole dilemma changes dramatically in its moral nature.

I got some results I didn't quite expect while thinking about this.

I assumed that if it was good to press the button once, it would be good to consider the effects of pressing the button a lot, and so I tried considering what came up with a scenario that was equivalent on a larger scale:

You're being given an opportunity to break a regulatory tie to approve a massive new mosquito net factory in China.

The mosquito net factory is equal to pressing the button 100,000 times a year. Assume you personally couldn't do that, without getting carpal tunnel.

So it will stop 500,000 Malaria deaths a year, (There are actually more than that many: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs094/en/) and not only that, but if you approve it, You'll receive a lucrative stock gift, which will pay you 600 MILLION dollars a year. You'll have a golden parachute for the rest of your life! For the purposes of this scenario, that's legal, according to new stock regulations.

Okay, yes, it is VERY polluting. But China doesn't have any air quality standards for these pollutants, so again, it's all legal, and the projected deaths are only 100,000 people a year, mostly in China.

But still, we're saving 400,000 people's lives every year! And we know it's going to be at least one year for the circumstances to change.

And hey, if you want to use your money to invest in better air pollution scrubbers for the plant, go right ahead! I don't have the cost benefit ratios on that right now, since I just had all of my analytics people generate the numbers for the factory.

It seems like the right answer to the scaled up problem is "Shouldn't I either run or have run for me the cost benefits ratio on the air pollution scrubbers BEFORE making a decision which costs at least 100,000 deaths?" It would also seem likely that the result would be that I could install scrubbers at some price below 600,000,000 dollars a year, and then I go home happy with no deaths and the remaining money.

But if I attempt to run the cost benefits on the magic box, it occurs to me that the default assumption is that there IS no cost benefit ratio which applies to saving those people. It feels like the implied result is that they're just magically executed with no protection. Even if they're a billionaire who has invested in cryonics, is in perfect health, and is waiting in a hospital with doctors and cryonicists, they're just permanently dead and can't be saved.

However, that assumption isn't necessarily TRUE. There's no evidence that those people are unsavable in the small scale, just that they likely are in an isomorphic large scale where the deaths actually have a non magical cause.

So if the first thing I would probably have to do is attempt to figure out "What is the cause of the mystery deaths from the box, is it mitigatable, and at what price other than not pressing the button?

Assuming the likely answer "The world is inconvenient, Omega will execute those people and Omega can't be stopped." Then I have a feeling I would end up paralyzed by "But isn't there a way to save everyone?" Except, I'm not paralyzed by that, because if I was, then I would already be paralyzed by that, because I'm faced with those decisions, and I don't feel paralyzed by that. But then again, I don't usually face Omega either.

So in the large scale, build the mosquito net factory, build the air scrubbers with my personal money, save everyone, make money. In the small scale, "Building the scrubbers" is essentially "Kill Omega, and use his box without him going around executing people." But killing Omega is assumed impossible (A potential further complication, Omega may need to be alive for the box to work.)

This makes it seem like my actual answer is "Shove your box Omega, I'm going to make money off of an environmentally safe for profit mosquito net factory using your technology and save everyone." I'm not sure if I should change that answer or not, or if it even makes sense. But it appears to be my current answer.

I'll try to think about this and see if I come up with a better answer.

Considering that the people GiveWell saves have a life expectancy greater than 1/4 that of the average person, and that they are also probably younger than the average person, and that the theory of happiness set points predicts that they aren't significantly less happy, I would press the button. But only if I was sure nobody would find out, and that the person killed wouldn't be anybody I cared about, and that the situation was what it looked like (see TheOtherDave's comment). Also I might be too scared to do so based on cultural norms, but I hope not.

If I were to assume that all human lives had equal utility, I'd press the button, many times. But I don't think that lives-saved is a very good utility metric. If a person is saved from, say, malaria and malnutrition, and then grows up poor and uneducated and becomes a subsistence farmer, contracts HIV and dies, leaving behind several starving children, I am completely unabashed about assigning a lower utility to their life than someone living in healthier circumstances.

As the scenario is formulated, I don't think there's enough money to make me confident that the scales tip in favor of pressing it. But I'd do it for more money, or a guarantee that the person dying would be in similarly poor circumstances to the people being helped by the charities.

As posed, I'm not sure what I would do, or whether pressing the button is moral.

"You are offered a magical box. If you press the button on the box, one person somewhere in the world will die.."

Well I don't believe in real magic ( I do believe in magicians who do clever tricks ), so the question is immediately hypothetical.

But leaving that aside, there is the question of the mechanism by which the person dies. If it was simply that aid was diverted from that person to another person, then I would probably have no problem pressing the button ( I might question whether I deserve the cash for myself and refuse it ).

If instead the person is to be executed, then I would have a problem.

If the person is to die by means of magic, well, I don't believe the person who is telling me this, so it gets complicated.

Two things.

First, it is worth having the distinction between what is permissible to do and what is obligatory to do. One might plausibly think that in this case, it is permissible to push the button but not obligatory to do so.

Second, an interesting follow-up question, I think, is the point at which people tip. If you are like me, then you might balk at pressing the button for such small dollar amounts, but also, if you are like me, you probably have a dollar value at which you would flip to thinking that pressing the button is permissible. I actually think that at some value, pressing the button becomes obligatory. But what are those values? Can rational agents with the same evidence disagree about them?

The life expectancy of those 'saved lives' is fairly low though (the quality of life often too) .

edit: to make a practical example, if you are saving 1 life by giving out a lot of mosquito nets, the life you saved is still usually a malnourished child who's dying of hunger (and is going to die of something else if malaria doesn't get him first). It's not as easy to save a life as you would think. Or rather, it is easy to "save a life" in the very specific abstract sense. One glucose injection "saves a life" of starving child - for a day.