What makes a happy society?

Many of you may have heard of a classic ethical dilemma: You are standing at the switch for a train which cannot be stopped and on whose tracks lay 5 people on the right switch, and 1 person on the left switch. The switch is currently set on the right, and the train will kill 5 people if you do nothing. The train cannot be stopped, and no outside-the-box tricks can be used. You either throw the switch or you don't. Easy... you throw the switch and let a single person die instead of many.

Now the dilemma is altered: You are on a bridge above the tracks and the train is still heading towards the 5 people. You can however throw a passerby off the bridge onto the tracks and derail the train, saving the five people. (Once again, you cannot jump off the bridge yourself or use any other tricks of logic... either you throw a passerby off and save the people—and that will work every time guaranteed—or you do nothing and the five people die.)

The second dilemma, when asked to groups of people, gave far more varied answers. Whereas the first situation was very clear, many people seem to have reservations about the second situation because we are involving a person who was not involved in the situation to begin with. What this means is that any rational discussion of ethics must concede that the optimization of the utility of an individual or group does not necessarily create the happiest society.

(It should now be noted that I consider the field of ethics to be the study of how to promote happiness or unhappiness among creatures that are capable of feeling it to any degree. Thus, ethics does not concern rocks, highly concerns humans, and to a very tiny degree concerns individual flies and bees.)

You often see in movies stories about a squadron of soldiers going into enemy territory to rescue one man, killing many in the squadron in the effort, because “we don't leave anybody behind.” In sheer numbers and utility of soldiers, this is a terrible idea. But do the soldiers perform better because they know that their buddies truly have their back when it counts? Are they more willing to die in the field knowing they were helping to save another person? Are we as a society actually better off with a mentality like this? Can we and should we be proud that damn the numbers we will do the right thing?

It may be so that society as a whole is better off (in terms of overall happiness) if we allow people to harm themselves and do things which look in theory to be awful.

But there are certainly gray areas and considerations. Take the second example of the train and standing on the bridge. How many people would have to be on the tracks for you to consider it ethical to throw an innocent passerby off the bridge? What about in the first example if the one person on the left tracks was a baby, and the five people on the right tracks were the baby's parents and grandparents begging you to let them die so that their child may live? Are we better off, happier people, if we live in a society that saves babies in that situation? I don't know, but I certainly think it's possible. And it makes for an interesting discussion.

This was sparked by none other (and really, what better source is there for ethical dilemmas...) than Star Trek. The situation proposed in the show was somewhat different, but an interesting dilemma nonetheless. Our part of the galaxy is at war with another part of the galaxy. Projections which are deemed to be 99.9% accurate state that no matter what we do, we will lose the war and be enslaved for approximately 150-200 years (before we revolt and reclaim our portion of the galaxy).

The war just cannot be won—we don't have the man power or resources. Furthermore, the projections say that if we continue fighting the war, approximately 900 billion people will die in battle. (Also, it should be noted that the enslavement will not be concentration camp type enslavement—the conquered peoples will still have a decent amount of freedom of action and not entirely unhappy lives. The conquerers really just want claim over the territory and will not interfere with day-to-day life except as it pertains to larger territorial politics.) However, there is a small group of people who can give over our battle plans to the bad guys in order to force us to lose the war sooner rather than later, at a cost of only a few billions lives (as opposed to the almost trillion lives that would be lost in a long drawn-out battle). Many high ranking people were asked about this, and they all unanimously said something along the lines of “damn the numbers, we're not going to lose this war!” indicating that they would prefer to go down fighting. One man was left to decide whether or not to stop the “traitors” from giving up our battle plans... he was left to decide whether a long war or a short war was best.

In the end he decided that part of being in a free society is the freedom of action, the freedom to fight, and that it was wrong to hand over his people to the bad guys without a fight. I think he was wrong, but only because of the size of the difference in numbers. So many hundreds of billions of people, many of them innocent civilians on other planets, are going to die just because he feels that the society is better off if people are allowed to fight.

I can see his point, but not to the tune of 898 billion extra people that are going to die. Surely at least a few billion of them would rather surrender. Who's right? (Obviously, I think I am.) It's at the very least, worth pondering how many people this situation would need to involve before the scale tips one way or the other on how much the freedom to fight and die in a lost cause is worth. And it's worth noting (and the point of this whole thing) that letting people destroy themselves can in fact make a better and happier society because it makes them feel so much better off to know that they have such freedom of action. (I'm still against hard drugs, since I feel that their addictiveness takes away that freedom, but that's a whole other blog post...)