This is a thought experiment I wrote to encourage discussion of ethical issues in medical science, particularly in the field of psychiatry in the treatment of personality disorders. I have worked in this field in different capacities of direct patient care for years now, and will for the rest of my life, so I feel my development of this thought experiment is based on genuine ethical issues I have observed.

The 9 analysis questions following the thought experiment relate to Ethics of Medicine, as well as Philosophy of Science topics such as theories of mind.

This thought experiment intends to argue that novel conceptual frameworks in the theory of mind are needed to understand the experience of mental illness, before sound ethical decisions can be made.

I hope this is appropriate for submission to this sub, but if not, please let me know, and I'll remove it.

Great comment! Thanks for the thorough explanation.

> different, more then one

Did you mean to say "more than"?
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I suppose it's fine to call such a shift a movement in one's morality.

How is changing your answer to a moral question distinct from your morality changing? Per your own definition, your sense of right and wrong has shifted to give you a different answer.

I used to believe making others happy as a priority was the moral choice, now I think people should generally be more self centered. I used to oppose any sort of violence; now I believe it is sometimes necessary or justified. By what definition are these not a change in morality?

but its not the problem of the logic/rationalism, its the problem of the missing goal! the missing nature of things, such as humankind.

so the game theory is misleading because not all possible golas are included. so the logic must fail, becasue we miss a goal to attend.

So, yes and no, you cant work it out without logic, but the logic itself is not everything you need, you need also a reason where you can use your logic. many forget about the actual (and possible) goals that are relevant for the analytic/statistic.

This is redundant!

Nothing can be solved WITHOUT logic and probability!

logic and probability are basic elements of all actions and all analytics (of action).

So every method-goal relationship, every ethic problem and every goal atainment needs logic and probability to measure success.

Kants Imperatives gives you everything you need. The hypothetic gives you the logic and the categoric gives you the clear goal you need to attend.

Of course, if you use different, more then one catgegorys, you need more hypotheses. But the hypotheses are only able to do with logic and probability.

The problem if we safe one or 100 people is not a problem of not using mathmatics or using them wrong, its a problem of our moral categorys/not existing goals which are not set with alternatives and our wrong understanding of logic/rationalism.

its a failure to see moral as a right of nature. there are no rights of nature or mankind, there are only rights that we establish and take care of! goals and no goals that can be reached or not - function or not!

So its up to us and our "actual goals and logics" to set the moral standards. and so its up to us how many we safe or if we dont safe anybody and how we safe them. we dont have the the duty, only if we give us the duty!

SOCIAL Utilitarism, also called TECHNOCRACY is about the goal, to make everybody as happy as it gets. This is totally a logical and also quantifiable system. so for me, its not working to divide moral and logic. as you cant divide action and logic.

every moral action underlies the laws of logic and rational goal attainment. and every moral standard you set should better be analyzed correctly, which means you better use A GOOD SYSTEM of logic and other quantifiabe systems. or your truth and (social/moral) efficiency will be inprecise - not good ;)

as subjective and unscientific "logics" are mostly incomplete ;) specially when it comes to social structures ... lol

so the real problem here is imho the question, why we have specific moral standards (which some think falsly are not logic or under the laws of probability) and the other question would be about the precision of our action analytics (and why we think it is not logic or ...).

Alright then it seems we're in agreement. "less death is better" is the moral position that doesn't yield to mathematics. Only the application of that position to particular situations can.

Well, there are actually objective mathematical answers to what is “safe enough" being used in safety engineering (at least in theory... see my remarks at the end)

On academic level there are basically two generally referred methods to determine what is "safe enough":

(Remark: To handle this question, the concept of risk is used. In this terminology risk is basically the combination of the magnitude of a potential harm and the probability of that harm happening. So if there is 1% probability that 1000 people will die, the risk is 10, and also if there is 10% chance that 100 people will die the risk is again 10.)

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1. One is the ALARP principle ("as low as reasonably practicable"). This is basically a cost-benefit analysis. In a very simplified way, what you do is that you determine the current risk of the system (e.g. let's say there is 10% probability that a tank will explode in a chemical plant (e.g. till the planned closure date of the plant) and if this happens, on average 100 people would die in the huge explosion and in the resulting fire, then the risk is 0.1*100=10 ) Then you assign a monetary value to this, so let's say you assume that one human life worths 10 million € (this is just a random number, see the end of my post) then the risk*human_life_cost=100 million €. Now let's say you can decrease the risk to 5 (e.g. instead of 10%, there will be only a 5% probability that 100 people will die) by implementing a technical measure, e.g you install automatic fire extinguishers everywhere in the chemical plant, or something like that. If you do this, you reduce the risk*human_life_cost to 50 million € so you will have a 50 million € benefit. So how to decide if you should do this according to the ALARP principle? Easy, you consider the cost of implementing this technical measure (buying, installing, maintaining etc. all the automatic fire extinguishers) and if it costs less than the benefit (50 million € ) you should do this, if it would cost more than the benefit, then this would not be "reasonably practicable" and therefore you should no do this.
2. The other approach is basically to use the concept of acceptable risk. In this case you first determine the acceptable risk (e.g. a worker in a chemical plant shall have a lower probability of dying in an accident per year than 1 in a million. i.e. out of one million workers only one shall die each year) and then you reduce the risk posed by the system till you reach this level. In this model the cost of reducing the risk is irrelevant, you must do whatever is necessary to reach the level of acceptable risk.

I am a functional safety engineer working in the automotive industry, so I don't claim to have a general overview of every domain of safety engineering, but let me add some remarks to these academic models based on the literature and discussion with other experts on my field:

• ALARP: sounds very nice in theory, but I think the main problem is that pretty much no regulatory body or company would publish (or even write down! too much risk of leaking documents) their assumption on the worth of human life expressed in money or otherwise the witch hunt would immediately start...
• Concept of acceptable risk:
  • Here it is important to highlight that what can be considered as an acceptable risk is decided by the society, and it can significantly change depending on the system in question. This also pretty much means that this decision is not necessarily rational. E.g. people accept higher risk while driving a car than when they fly as a passenger. (My understanding is that this is because people feel "in control" while driving, but they feel helpless controlling the situation while on the board of a plane. So this is not a rational decision)
  • Perhaps this acceptable risk concept looks strange, but it really makes sense. Consider car driving. Every year over 1 million people die in traffic related accidents worldwide, and people are fully aware that the same can happen to them on any day they drive a car. Still they choose to take the risk, and they sit in their car every morning. Society basically decided that 1 million people dying every year in car accidents is an acceptable risk.
  • Publishing acceptable risk values has similar challenges like publishing the worth of human life expressed in money, but the situation is a bit better, there are actually some numbers available in the literature for certain cases (but not everywhere, e.g. in my domain, in the automotive industry, we kinda go around of writing down a number)
• On my field of expertise (developing safety critical systems including complex electronics and software), estimating the probability that the system will fail resulting in an accident is just impossible (describing the reasons would take too much time here), therefore there exists no really reliable way to estimate the probability of an accident and therefore it is not possible to quantify the risk with reasonable precision. Therefore neither of the above two methods are really applicable in practice in their "pure" form. (and I am quite sure that the situation is pretty similar on many other fields of safety engineering)

So my summary is that there exist generally accepted academic models to answer the question of what is “safe enough". These models are in theory the basis of the safety engineering methods followed in the industries everywhere, so applying mathematics to make moral decisions (so to determine e.g. what is an acceptable probability for somebody dying in an accident) is kinda happening all the time. In practice this whole story is much more complicated. e.g. because of the above mentioned reasons, so what is really happening is that we are using these models as "guidance" and we basically try to figure out what is safe enough based on mostly experience. I would be very surprised if these academic models would be used anywhere in significant number in a "clear" and "direct" way.

The "less death is better" part refers to the blog primarily with the trolley problem. It's a naive and utilitarian way to quantify those problems and disregards a lot of the why behind the taken decision. My point is that those alternative decisions can still be expressed with logic because they just has different premises.

"Is killing animals for food ok?" has plenty of different premises for both sides, and both sides can be expressed in a logically sound way.

E.g. it's not ok to kill sentient beings, animals are sentient, eating animals kills them etc. end up with a hard no. Those premises aren't universally agreed upon, so even using the tools logic provides us won't give us a clear universal answer on if killing animals for food is ok.

Your phrasing seems to be implying that Game Theory is a school of thought, as oppose to a branch of mathematics (one has adherents, the other doesn't). You also seem to be assuming a very limited frame of reference ("our national policy," "foreign governments") for an international field. Might you be confusing "Game Theory as a field is not designed as a predictive model for individual actions" with "certain governments believed Game Theory was something it wasn't?"

Ah, wait, just in case... when I say "stability" it has nothing to do with stability of government and things like that. I meant it in more of the physics sense, that small perturbations wouldn't cause a large effect.

I think I disagree. I feel our moral disagreements aren't around ideas such as "less death is better", but around the details of "how", not "what". For example is it OK to kill animals for food? We can argue over when it's OK and when it's not, but I can't think of an example where someone came to the decision that less death is better or gave up such a belief.

> You might look to numbers not to justify your morality, which is a precise form of argument, but to investigate it.

Certainly, math is very useful in lots of moral situations, but I'm making a different claim which is that it can't be used to decide your moral foundation. If you feel that you've done that, then please tell me how it happened.

For example, in iterated prisoner's dilemma "always cooperate with your opponent" is not stable, because your opponent's optimal strategy against that is to defect every turn. The simulation I linked in my original comment shows a ton of strategies that are not stable and shows quite directly how they would quickly get eliminated by evolution.

For a simple example in evolution, most mutations harm the organism and are unstable. If most organism in a population had a very harmful mutation and a small population didn't, that small population would quickly take over the larger population. Hence, that mutation is unstable.

A slightly nontrivial example would be blind altruism in a situation where your species is severely starved of resources. If most animals were blindly altruistic and a small number of animals were not and would take advantage of the altruistic animals, then again, that small number would outcompete the larger population. So blind altruism isn't stable.

Of course we can't find many real-life examples; that is because they tend to be quickly eliminated by evolution. If they exist, it's usually only temporary.

Can you give me an example of how you've changed your mind and adopted a different morality, or convinced someone else to change theirs? For example I see plenty of arguments of the form "If you believe killing is wrong, then..." I've never seen someone decide "Yes, I suppose killing is fine". I've only seen them decide that it's OK or not OK to kill in some specific situation.

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The oxygen catastrophe is possibly the worst possible counterexample you could pick here. The oxygen catastrophe happened slowly enough for all forms of life to settle in niches, enough for game theory to direct evolution, and for a stability condition to apply. Those niches were approximately stable while they existed.

That's all that the stability condition needs to be applied. It's not some complicated concept.

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The moral position involved in your example is that it's wrong to harm fetuses. If you learn that drinking harms fetuses, then you haven't changed your position by then concluding that's wrong behavior. You started off believing it was wrong to harm fetuses, and you ended up still believing that. You've just updated your opinion based on new information.

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Absolutely stability is difficult since the world is constantly changing, but the change is slow enough that evolution does tend to produce approximately stable systems. That's a straightforward result of the math; less stable states change quickly and therefore your system spends less time in them.

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I've had new situations come to light that cause me to rethink my proper responses to moral questions, but I can't think of anything that changed my morality. For example I still think that it should be a woman's right to choose abortion, but I've come to believe that pro-life people have a point.

How have you changed your morality?

The stability condition itself is an independent concept from "ideal" morality. I was using the idea of an "ideal" system of morality for reference because it's what people seem to be most familiar with, even if most people here probably don't believe in the existence of an ideal set of moral rules themselves.

As I said, the stability condition doesn't uniquely define a set of moral rules, it's possible that multiple different sets of moral rules can satisfy it at the same time. Different people with different values will still arrive at different sets of moral rules that all satisfy the stability condition.

A rationale behind caring about the stability condition in a system of morality is that actual systems of morality and ethics all tend to approximately follow the stability condition, due to evolutionary pressures. A moral system that is not (approximately) stable in practice won't persist very long and will be replaced by a different system. So the stability condition is "natural" and not arbitrarily decided by some individual values. Few conditions like that exist, so it's a valuable tool for analyzing problems of morality.