The Kill Whitey Problem

My friend Matt, in his blog, posted a link to an interest article about the Trolley Problem.  Simply put, the experiment shows that we like to think of ourselves as having absolute morals, but, in practice, we have social biases and different value sets that cause us to be more consequentialist that we would like to believe.  In other words, though we may like to think the end does not justify the means--we often, even without thinking, will behave as if it does.

For those of us who like Battlestar Galactica, we may recognize the Trolley Problem as similar to the scenario with Lee "Apollo" Adama and the Olympic Carrier in the first episode of the first season, "33".  In order to save the fleet (tens of thousands), he is ordered to destroy a ship containing hundreds.  The decision is a hard one, but it has to be made and in a very short amount of time (a similar situation occurs in the Pilot Episode with Colonel Tigh and an engineering deck that has to be shut down).  Decide: you have to quickly choose between killing group X or group Y!  Mind you, in each of these situations in Battlestar Galactica, it's a more obvious choice because group X is a subset of group Y--kill a few, or everybody dies.

One interesting objection to the Trolley Experiment is that the obligation to participate.  Forcing someone to make the choice (a "mad philosopher" as the experiment likes to use) is the real immorality, not the actual choice.  When we are forced to choose, however, the way we make those decisions can be interesting.  The Kill Whitey experiment shows that our biases come into play whether we are liberals or conservatives (Chip Ellsworth III--what an asshole!)--in the case of the former, guilt, and in the case of the latter, fear of a black planet.

No surprise, we make choices according to our value systems--and this is abundantly clear when especially pressured to make a choice.  The greater the pressure, the more we will flock to the polar extremes.

I'd like to hope that the Gort project could yield some successful fruit.  If we could, say, successfully model our ethical systems and run them through different experiments.  People who live in war zones, areas of famine or corruption, or under great authoritarian pressure or stress, may have to live through iterative Trolley Experiments each and every day.  For those of us in the privileged world, we don't have to even think about it until a September 11 happens--and when it does, we tend to be less prepared to make good decisions as a result.  When is war "the right thing to do"?  To what extent can you hold people accountable for making bad decisions?  To what degree can you blame anyone for having "blind spots" in their thinking if they are in the throes of a Trolley Experiment?