On Subjective Morality Part III

I often have conversations of a philosophical nature with my friend Stone Taggart. I find his musings so entertaining and thought-provoking that I wanted to share them with you. Our last conversation turned into an candid interview and the results of that are below.

Due to the length, I have broken this into three posts. The views expressed below are the sole property of Mr. Taggart and are not necessarily shared or endorsed by myself. This is the third and final installment.

Part I
Part II

Palaverer: So social law is what the focus is here? It's only immoral if it's breaking the law?

Stone Taggart: Morality is defined by society. It's just that, if it's not my society, then obviously I'm going to interpret it as morally wrong. If I suddenly went to a society where the moral option is to make sure that one person dies instead of the five, I'm probably still going to disagree, because I grew up in a different society. I've had a long time to think about this. That society may kill me for it, because I'm not adhering to their principles, I'm not meshing with their system, but that is just simply who and what I am.

P: So when you disagree with society on a point of morality, which one of you is immoral?

ST: Neither one. It's because it's the same problem as the physics problem. You've got two objects in space, and they're moving away from each other, and the only thing you can determine is that they're moving away from each other, you can't really say which one is stationary or not. There is no such thing as an objective morality, unfortunately. I wish it were that simple.

P: So when it comes to the five lives from the original trolley problem, the fact that you have saved five lives that otherwise would have died is not a counterweight to the responsibility for ending a life that wouldn't have otherwise died?

ST: Right. I hate to say it, but yeah. I am not in a position where I can decide what one man's life is worth in reference to the lives of several other people.

P: So you believe that morality has more to do with not hurting, than it does with helping.

ST: It will have as much to do with helping as long as your helping doesn't involve hurting. Or if there is hurting, it has to be to someone who deserves it. But how do you determine if they deserve it? It depends on if they are part of how you've been programmed to perceive morality. It doesn't sound very good to say, but it's kind of how we've been operating all along. I'm hoping that someday we might be able to evolve past it but we haven't yet. To give a more direct answer to your question, yeah. It is about first not doing any direct harm.

Honestly, if I switched that trolley track to kill the one instead of the five in the first place, it would be my moral imperative to switch it back to where it was at the one. However, if the trolley was, if I had, accidentally for instance to the one instead of the five, then I wouldn't be able to switch it back to the five, because I'm already culpable, my hands are already dirty. If I'm already guilty of something, then I'm going to aim for the least guilty, doing the least harm. If I've already done something that is going to harm, then yes, it is a focus on doing the least harm first, and then seeing how you can help.

P: What if there's a sort of Schrödinger's cat of harm, where your action could result in benefit or harm and you don't know which way it's going to go? Say for instance, you see someone that needs CPR and you think you sort of half remember it. And if you try it you could save their life or you could also end up breaking their neck or somehow making the situation worse.

ST: All right. To answer in reference of the context of my philosophy here, don't touch him. Do not touch him. If someone breaks their leg, don't move them. Wait for a medical professional. Even if it's going to kill them. Even if they're going to die from blood loss, don't touch them. Because chances are you are going to make it worse. It is going to be a make-it-worse situation and that's written down in first-aid manuals everywhere.

But in my case? Personally because I've been studying this for a very long time, I would say that I have an affinity toward chance. That isn't to say that I'm treated better by chance. I don't think that chance plays favorites. But if I can inject chance into a situation, usually I will choose to. If it is a Schrödinger's cat where it's as likely as not that I'll be able to help or harm, I personally, I would jump at that chance and I would go and do it. But that's only me. I can't speak for a group. And that is actually converse to where I think humanity's headed. So I don't belong in my own future.

P: Speaking of the present, you say that in order for morals to change, people who believe something different from the main society have to come together and form a new society. Now, modern day, present America, how would you say, that should happen in a society like ours? How would we affect moral change like that?

ST: Well, it's already kind of happening. The current generation that we have has been uniting through the Internet in droves. Our mutual friend Diven calls us Generation M, the Media Generation, because in 24 hours we can actually absorb, process and actually extract meaningful data from about five days worth of data. Five days worth of input in the period of one day. That's pretty amazing.

Right now, though, it seems like all we're waiting for is for everybody who isn't part of that generation to die. All the people who are immoral and close-minded and trying to hamper progress, they're all just getting old and dropping dead. It's just part of nature. It's already happening. In fact, I'm pretty sure I heard a song about it, not too long ago—it was a few years ago—where the singer was explaining that a lot of today's elders perceive that our generation is lazy and that we don't care, but the truth is we do care, we care very much, but we know that there isn't a damn thing we can do, until all the people who are holding us back simply die of old age. Or just otherwise become too obsolete to handle the offices that they're in and make way for newer people with more integrated ideas to come into the picture.

I mean, look at our president. No one has utilized the Internet to the capacity that Barack Obama has. And I'm not really trying to say this as a kind of praise of the man. Right now my only appreciation of him is mostly in that he—like I normally prefer to do—has injected a bunch of chaos into a stale system. Not as much chaos as I would have preferred, but he sure has done it. And he did it through communication and bringing all of these disparate groups together, or all of these individuals who couldn't find their society, to a place where they could find it, through the Internet.

I think that's really the key to it. We already have—to reiterate in my personal philosophy—we have the pressures built up in various areas and suddenly the Internet appears and it provides a channel for those pressures to balance and come into contact with each other. That is where I think everything is going to come from.