Ends or Means?

Ray, when you say that true end is the overall sum of all results, you talk about some kind of hegelian totality that always seemed to me like a fiction.
End is a concept we make by selecting some aspects of our experience and neglecting others. The pollution of your factory can affect the health of people living near it. The ethical decision is made considering that the end - to prevent the disease caused by the pollution- justifies the means. One of those means can be to shut the factory down.

There is not, in my opinion, "a true end". Any action generates effects, those effects can generate other effects - or not - but there is no moment when we can say the process has reach an end. The world is a continuous interaction between events.

So, an ethical decision based on "ends" means that you define a goal and then you see if the steps you must take in order to reach it are justified or not.

Of course the consequences of our actions are more than we know. But we are in a situation on this earth where we are encouraged to act as opposed to staying still. So how do we act? We act according to what we think is best. This does not include the future we cannot see. It only includes the future we think we are correctly predicting. The actions we choose (though I think choice is a more complicated matter that I won't go into here) are going to have effects. That's a well, duh kind of a statement. So clearly the ones to choose are the ones with the most favorable results. You have suggested that saving the four guys is worse than saving the one guy, because your inaction is what causes their death rather than your action. But the result is, you have made a choice on how to act, and the 1 or the 4 lives depend on you. And you have chosen to endorse the future with 4 dead rather than 1 dead, so you have chosen the less favorable future to your knowledge. Because you don't know a dern thing about the future in this situation. You just know youre saving 4 guys. If there is more to this situation, take that into account. Bring in all the info you know, evaluate, and decide on what's best (by which I mean, what you want to be the case). The morals just get in the way.

"The morals just get in the way".
Then, why choose to save 4 lifes is better than to choose not to save them? What is your criteria?

honestly I might pick the one. If I dont think the 4 ought to live it would be simple. I get to kill 4 that are sucky people. But if one was a swell guy the others would have to be really sucky to make me sacrifice the one for the others. But the alone guy comes into play too. It really just boils down to who supports the future that seems best to me at the time. And this future presently includes me as a cyborg. So I follow some social contract ideology currently, because if I didn't, I would be endorsing anarchy. And that is likely not going to result in me being a cyborg.

Binnyboy

The question is not if you let die 1 or 4 or 1.000. Is the why. What criteria do you have - please not the cyborg thing - to make a choice?

Let me clarify. When someone is talking about an "end" they are talking about what they are pursuing which would be the result of their action. Now, in reality, if there is a true "end", all results must be taken into account, which is as you have noted, impossible. Therefore, "the end justify the means" is not true, or you know I might have mixed up the definition of ends. Results and actions must both be taken into account.



Sacrificing a person's life when he is not responsible for the death of the four person is to me unreasonable. The action I have chosen is to not sacrifice the one person. The four person's lives are out of my control. I would be in sorrow for not being able to help the four person, and I did not sacrifice them for the one person's life.



Of what? I don't see morals getting in the way. The morals are part of my choices.

If you have no morals, then you can not possibly argue that my choices are "wrong", you can only argue that you would not do the same thing I'd do.

The morals get in the way of the preferable outcome.

Val, honestly. Truly. I don't believe in any form or fuction whatsoever. I think it is all pointless chaos. But I could be wrong. My entire life is based on the assumption that I am wrong. My goal truly is to reach an enlightened state, so that I can be sure I'm right that it is all BS. But I don't want to be enlightened through meditation or by some imaginary god. I truly believe the only way I can make big strides toward the truth is to become a cyborg. I think the whole world will one day only have one organism living upon its surface. So I truly can't give you something besides the cyborg thing. A form of social contract will surely be necessary to achieve advanced robotics and brain technology. This social contract is the root of my decision to prefer the life (or death) of four over the life (or death) of one. This social contract is a way of assigning value of one person over another based on their importance to society.
But the key is to have a society where everyone is important. Classes are a bad thing. With everyone important, all lives will be valuable. Of course short of uniformity of thought, this will not be the case. Some people will suck, whether they are criminals or are stuck up or whatever. These differences are going to be the basis of who gets the shaft in the 1-guy 4-guy shootout. But so long as we are constantly trying to get closer to an everyone-important situation, this is the basis of a good social contract.

Sometimes ?

binnyboy

Good luck to your "cyborg quest". "De gustibus non disputatur".

Meanwhile, I wish you a very nice Christmas.

U2 and thanx
and merry solstice