Love (brain teaser)

[Mithrae]

I assume we're all familiar with the trolley problem and variations on the theme. Now imagine two chaps whose daughters lives are at stake, needing transplants or on the tracks or whatever: Aaron loves his daughter very much, so much that he would sacrifice two or five or even ten people's lives depending on circumstances to save hers. Brandon also loves his daughter very much, but there's no circumstance in which he would sacrifice even two unwilling or unknowing people's lives to save hers.

Which if either of these guys loves his daughter more, and why?

[Purple Knight]

I'm not sure you're still talking about love here? Who cares whether I love a mango?

Nobody in their right mind would love a mango, not like that. They might love a parrot, though, because the parrot is a sentient higher animal capable of returning affection. In this case, the initial love has spilled over into, and in fact become morality. We ought to sacrifice the mango for the parrot. That is a good thing to do.

The point of the brain teaser and my answer to it is that 'love' even for those closest to you isn't an excuse for making moral exceptions, because making those exceptions really suggests the opposite, suggests a shallower and more selfish kind of love conditional on that relationship. But it doesn't follow from that that throwing your evil daughter in front of a train is equally or more loving; I think you're asking a purely moral question there. If anything, Darren has simply added other conditions to his love or his valuation of his daughter's life. You could say by comparison to a mango that humanity is a condition we all place on love, sure, but that's okay; I deliberately avoided the suggestion that love can be truly unconditional.

I love my cats. And I think you'd posit your identical riddle, transposed onto me and my cats, versus sacrificing some strange cat to save my own, and I think the correct answer would be the same: That if I sacrifice some street cat for my cat, that's valuing the thing's relationship to myself over that thing. I agree with that answer and I think you're right that someone who would not make that sacrifice has a shallow sort of love. We could call it a high degree of affection though.

When you said we should value the person, not our relationship to that person, I'm simply wondering how we do that. If everyone has the same value or if they might have different values. Darren does love his daughter, but, you could say, he loves his morality more. He's always itching for the chance to flush what he loves most down the toilet so he can become even more moral than he already is. Or, thinks he is. He's even cultivated a lot of affection with his daughter so that he will be very, very greatly harmed when and if he finds a chance to sacrifice her for someone else, so that the sacrifice really will be selfless.

Morally of course we obviously do value some things more than others even within the realm of humanity; that's the whole point of morals. I think that two of the things we do or should value most are personhood (often assumed to be but not strictly synonymous with humanity) and sentience (in particular the capacity to suffer adverse effects from others' decisions). If a mango has no sentience, no suffering or adverse feeling from our decisions, it doesn't really figure into our moral calculations; whereas the same doesn't necessarily apply to someone in a coma, say, because they are still a person.

This speaks to why I answered with something you see as purely moral. It's because your question was mixed: It was about love and morality. And I think your answer is only so good because it shows not only how morality has emerged from love, but has blossomed into something that is superior on every front to love. In other words, you could think of it this way: The small love, the one which Aaron has for his daughter, serves no purpose anymore, does nothing but hinder morality, and if Aaron wants to be a good person he would be better off not loving his daughter at all. He would be best off loving as Brandon does, but if he can't do that, better not to love at all.

As for killing baby Hitler (or even 1910s Hitler for that matter, when he's presumably evil but not yet a clear and present danger) and similar questions, I wonder if any action can be moral if it's not merely illegal, but violates their fundamental/human rights? I imagine these as three tiers, with moral principles providing normative guidelines for (mostly) individual behaviour, fundamental rights providing normative rules for (mostly) societies and institutions, and between the two laws providing more formal and enforceable constraints, hopefully, on the most egregious violations by either societies or individuals, among other functions. People's fundamental rights - most notably to equal dignity, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and security of person, as in the US DoI and UN UDHR - are the closest to universal, objective normative principles we've got. So I'm not sure how it could be valid under a lesser/more subjective framework of morals to violate those more universal and objective rules.

These guidelines do value people equally so I suppose that answers my question, at least for people. Hitler has human rights and so does Darren's evil daughter, meaning they can be punished for what they do, but not eliminated because of what they are. But this is because they're human and have the highest value locked in, whether or not they deserve it.

From the perspective of what I'm trying to get at, human rights are simply a cop-out, telling us that humans simply have more value by virtue of being humans and that's the end of it, don't ask questions, rip the organs out of the 85IQ gorilla to save the 20IQ profoundly impaired barely conscious human, the latter has rights. We can make this value judgment but no others, and someone would have to be crazy to fail to switch the tracks if the one about to be hit was a human and the one you're sacrificing is a mango. And I'd have to be crazy to be upset at the person who switched the tracks, crying and yelling at them, "How dare you?! You squished my mango! I put my mango where it wouldn't be hit! Keep your dirty little brat off the tracks!"

The original question combines value judgment with love. If we value judge correctly, and stick to those principles, then our love is greater than someone who violates the principles. So far I agree. The only follow-up questions I have are:

1. What if we value-judge incorrectly and stick to those principles? What is the degree of love then? and
2. How do we know which value judgments are correct?

[Mithrae]

I'm not sure you're still talking about love here? Who cares whether I love a mango?

Nobody in their right mind would love a mango, not like that. They might love a parrot, though, because the parrot is a sentient higher animal capable of returning affection. In this case, the initial love has spilled over into, and in fact become morality. We ought to sacrifice the mango for the parrot. That is a good thing to do.

The point of the brain teaser and my answer to it is that 'love' even for those closest to you isn't an excuse for making moral exceptions, because making those exceptions really suggests the opposite, suggests a shallower and more selfish kind of love conditional on that relationship. But it doesn't follow from that that throwing your evil daughter in front of a train is equally or more loving; I think you're asking a purely moral question there. If anything, Darren has simply added other conditions to his love or his valuation of his daughter's life. You could say by comparison to a mango that humanity is a condition we all place on love, sure, but that's okay; I deliberately avoided the suggestion that love can be truly unconditional.

I love my cats. And I think you'd posit your identical riddle, transposed onto me and my cats, versus sacrificing some strange cat to save my own, and I think the correct answer would be the same: That if I sacrifice some street cat for my cat, that's valuing the thing's relationship to myself over that thing. I agree with that answer and I think you're right that someone who would not make that sacrifice has a shallow sort of love. We could call it a high degree of affection though.

When you said we should value the person, not our relationship to that person, I'm simply wondering how we do that. If everyone has the same value or if they might have different values. Darren does love his daughter, but, you could say, he loves his morality more. He's always itching for the chance to flush what he loves most down the toilet so he can become even more moral than he already is. Or, thinks he is. He's even cultivated a lot of affection with his daughter so that he will be very, very greatly harmed when and if he finds a chance to sacrifice her for someone else, so that the sacrifice really will be selfless.

Darren sounds like a bit of a self-righteous douche, to be honest, but maybe I'm not understanding what you're getting at? The point of the brain teaser is just that love even for those close to you isn't an excuse for making moral exceptions, and only that. Inasmuch as we give weight to moral questions about animals (which is somewhat less than for humans) and inasmuch as we give weight to love for animals (which is considerably less than for humans) then sure, I guess the same reasoning would apply to cats, and maybe there's people out there who'd really be stung by the accusation "You don't really love your cat as much as I love mine!" It just doesn't seem to matter as much.

I suppose I'd say pretty much the same thing about morality; who cares if someone like Darren professes or believes themselves to be more devoted to their idea of morality than me? Who cares if they profess themselves to be more devoted to truth, or more devoted to money-making, or more devoted to love? Those are all more or less real things which we can learn about, with real effects which in different cases may be helpful or harmful, but how highly individuals value each of them is only significant to the extent that it affects them and other people. Answers to hypothetical scenarios notwithstanding, if Aaron and Darren's differing devotion to morality ends up having little or no real-world consequence in their lives, or Aaron and Brandon's differing love for their daughters, then they don't actually matter.

Morally of course we obviously do value some things more than others even within the realm of humanity; that's the whole point of morals. I think that two of the things we do or should value most are personhood (often assumed to be but not strictly synonymous with humanity) and sentience (in particular the capacity to suffer adverse effects from others' decisions). If a mango has no sentience, no suffering or adverse feeling from our decisions, it doesn't really figure into our moral calculations; whereas the same doesn't necessarily apply to someone in a coma, say, because they are still a person.

This speaks to why I answered with something you see as purely moral. It's because your question was mixed: It was about love and morality. And I think your answer is only so good because it shows not only how morality has emerged from love, but has blossomed into something that is superior on every front to love. In other words, you could think of it this way: The small love, the one which Aaron has for his daughter, serves no purpose anymore, does nothing but hinder morality, and if Aaron wants to be a good person he would be better off not loving his daughter at all. He would be best off loving as Brandon does, but if he can't do that, better not to love at all.

Love means different thing to different people, but morality is even more varied; to some people, morality means burning old women at the stake for witchcraft, or even slaughtering every man, woman and child in the lebensraum God told you to claim as your own. They're different things - morality aims to regulate behaviour, whereas love describes interpersonal connections - so it's like comparing apples to some other fruit, but if I had to pick a world with more of one and none of the other, no question that I'd pick the world with more love and no formal morals. (Which is why the retort on another forum that "You value your morality more than your daughter" originally got me thinking on this brain teaser.) Can you imagine what behaviour-regulating rules would look like without love? Even the ancient Hebrews and medieval Christians and so on loved their families at least, even if it was often a small and shallow kind of love; I wonder how much nastier their moral systems would have been if they'd lacked even that grounding for empathy and compassion. You're assuming that if Aaron didn't have that shallow love for his daughter he would therefore default to a utilitarian or otherwise 'better' system of morality, which doesn't make sense to me: If he lacked those connections to other people, he would have no emotional or instinctive basis to value anyone besides himself at all, whereas at least now he appreciates how they make him feel and how much they mean to him. Without that, if he had any formal moral ideas at all he'd likely be drawn to the self-oriented ones, something like Nietzche's 'master morality' for example. As things stand though at least he's halfway there, so to speak, he does deeply value some other people... just not everyone and not purely for their own sake.

As for killing baby Hitler (or even 1910s Hitler for that matter, when he's presumably evil but not yet a clear and present danger) and similar questions, I wonder if any action can be moral if it's not merely illegal, but violates their fundamental/human rights? I imagine these as three tiers, with moral principles providing normative guidelines for (mostly) individual behaviour, fundamental rights providing normative rules for (mostly) societies and institutions, and between the two laws providing more formal and enforceable constraints, hopefully, on the most egregious violations by either societies or individuals, among other functions. People's fundamental rights - most notably to equal dignity, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and security of person, as in the US DoI and UN UDHR - are the closest to universal, objective normative principles we've got. So I'm not sure how it could be valid under a lesser/more subjective framework of morals to violate those more universal and objective rules.

These guidelines do value people equally so I suppose that answers my question, at least for people. Hitler has human rights and so does Darren's evil daughter, meaning they can be punished for what they do, but not eliminated because of what they are. But this is because they're human and have the highest value locked in, whether or not they deserve it.

From the perspective of what I'm trying to get at, human rights are simply a cop-out, telling us that humans simply have more value by virtue of being humans and that's the end of it, don't ask questions, rip the organs out of the 85IQ gorilla to save the 20IQ profoundly impaired barely conscious human, the latter has rights.

My thinking is pretty similar, which I kind of hinted at above. What's important is personhood and to a lesser extent sentience, not humanity, and in practice that is how we tend to actually behave: We say that life and liberty are universal 'human rights,' but a human adolescent has pretty major restrictions on her liberty and a twenty-week-old human foetus doesn't even have a right to life. IMO it's not because they're not human (obviously), but because they are not yet fully developed people, though I'm not sure whether that rationale has ever been formally expressed. It's not even a matter of age, since some developmentally-challenged people also have similar restrictions placed on their liberty as children do. This is also why equal dignity and respect comes even before life and liberty as the most fundamental and important of all rights.

The implication of that - if and when it becomes more widely recognized that humanity and personhood are not identical terms and that it's the latter rather than the former that is in practice how we distribute rights - would obviously be that animal rights have already had a functioning and legitimate basis in established practice and need only be formally recognized and applied in a more consistent fashion, based on the extent to which they exhibit 'personhood,' beginning with basic sentience. Not that that will be an easy or clear-cut process, by any means, particularly given deeply-ingrained cultural and powerful institutional resistance, but I reckon that's the direction humanity is likely to and logically should go, in the long run. Animals obviously aren't as highly developed people as most humans are, but I imagine it will be viewed by future generations as a total travesty how utterly we've deprived even our fellow mammals of their dignity, liberty and lives by factory-farming them for meat, for example. There'll be vast grey areas trying to work our way through all that, but some problems with our most egregious behaviour are already starting to become pretty obvious to most people.

The original question combines value judgment with love. If we value judge correctly, and stick to those principles, then our love is greater than someone who violates the principles. So far I agree. The only follow-up questions I have are:

1. What if we value-judge incorrectly and stick to those principles? What is the degree of love then? and
2. How do we know which value judgments are correct?

No, again, it's just that love isn't an excuse for making moral exceptions; it's in no way noble to say I'd sacrifice two lives to save my daughter, because making those exceptions really suggests the opposite, suggests a shallower and more selfish kind of love conditional on that relationship. I don't think you can infer anything about love from morality/principles; in fact as I suggested in originally answering my question, there are undoubtedly moral frameworks in which the decision to let her die has nothing to do with love for either his daughter or the strangers, as you further illustrated with Darren. I make the inference about Brandon's (possible/likely) love only by comparison to Aaron's love; one is subject to certain conditions and the other is greater than those conditions, so logically the latter must be greater than the former. The moral dilemma just happens to be one of the few circumstances in which that difference in love would have obvious consequence; mostly in the real world, whether or not Aaron loves his daughter less would likely have only subtle if any major consequences for the two of them.

[Purple Knight]

Darren sounds like a bit of a self-righteous douche, to be honest, but maybe I'm not understanding what you're getting at?

That is what I'm getting at. Darren loves morality more than his daughter, and he ought to, since love for morality ought to be absolute. He's just a very extreme (and ultimately hypocritical) version of that.

My first instinct upon reading the whole topic until I posted was that equating love and morality missed the mark. But I think it hits it dead-on, actually. Sometimes rules are bad and that pullback where we say, hold on, I'm not tossing these hundred Jews in that hole and burying them alive... that comes from the emotion of love, from empathy, from the thing I wrote Darren to have absolutely none of. Darren doesn't have any pullback. If it's the righteous, moral thing to do, he'll throw his daughter in front of a train. All he cares about is the best, most moral rule and how he can follow it.

That's why I see your question as being missing an answer. And you sort of admit this later on about choosing a loving world over a moral one, if it was one or the other. But it can't be one or the other. We need both.

Aaron is the hedonic prince, emotion only, no tempering reason. He overeats and gets sick.

Darren is the ascetic. He eats nothing. No emotion. None but the gratification that comes from being enlightened, anyway. He undereats and gets sick.

Brandon is Buddha. But it's because he's in the middle.

My thinking is pretty similar, which I kind of hinted at above. What's important is personhood and to a lesser extent sentience, not humanity, and in practice that is how we tend to actually behave: We say that life and liberty are universal 'human rights,' but a human adolescent has pretty major restrictions on her liberty and a twenty-week-old human foetus doesn't even have a right to life. IMO it's not because they're not human (obviously), but because they are not yet fully developed people, though I'm not sure whether that rationale has ever been formally expressed. It's not even a matter of age, since some developmentally-challenged people also have similar restrictions placed on their liberty as children do. This is also why equal dignity and respect comes even before life and liberty as the most fundamental and important of all rights.

The implication of that - if and when it becomes more widely recognized that humanity and personhood are not identical terms and that it's the latter rather than the former that is in practice how we distribute rights - would obviously be that animal rights have already had a functioning and legitimate basis in established practice and need only be formally recognized and applied in a more consistent fashion, based on the extent to which they exhibit 'personhood,' beginning with basic sentience. Not that that will be an easy or clear-cut process, by any means, particularly given deeply-ingrained cultural and powerful institutional resistance, but I reckon that's the direction humanity is likely to and logically should go, in the long run. Animals obviously aren't as highly developed people as most humans are, but I imagine it will be viewed by future generations as a total travesty how utterly we've deprived even our fellow mammals of their dignity, liberty and lives by factory-farming them for meat, for example. There'll be vast grey areas trying to work our way through all that, but some problems with our most egregious behaviour are already starting to become pretty obvious to most people.

I often think that morality only expands when it can. People not only like meat, but in my case I seem to be biologically hooked. I have B12 issues and I get really scary visual weirdness if I go off meat completely. I lose portions of my field of view that get blotted over with colourful pulsating hallucinations. Now, I can take B12 as a vitamin, buuuut... guess where it comes from. Plus it doesn't work as well. That's not saying I eat exactly as little meat as I need, and additionally I breed cats and feed them a bunch of meat in place of dry food which is even worse (for the unlucky animals that were not born as my pampered, spoilt furbabies, obviously).

I often think of things live slavery ending and females getting rights as happening only when society became prosperous enough to achieve these things. Maybe when we don't need to treat animals as objects containing meat for us to eat, we'll stop doing it. I know I will stop as soon as there's an alternative. Personally I think stopping genetically engineering the food better and better and better to feed into our spoilt, weak, inefficient bodies and starting on addressing making our bodies better is going to be the cure, long-term.

No, again, it's just that love isn't an excuse for making moral exceptions; it's in no way noble to say I'd sacrifice two lives to save my daughter, because making those exceptions really suggests the opposite, suggests a shallower and more selfish kind of love conditional on that relationship. I don't think you can infer anything about love from morality/principles; in fact as I suggested in originally answering my question, there are undoubtedly moral frameworks in which the decision to let her die has nothing to do with love for either his daughter or the strangers, as you further illustrated with Darren. I make the inference about Brandon's (possible/likely) love only by comparison to Aaron's love; one is subject to certain conditions and the other is greater than those conditions, so logically the latter must be greater than the former. The moral dilemma just happens to be one of the few circumstances in which that difference in love would have obvious consequence; mostly in the real world, whether or not Aaron loves his daughter less would likely have only subtle if any major consequences for the two of them.

Right. That's my point. Ultimately, to compare Brandon and Aaron, you have to assume they both have equal moral values and Aaron is simply breaking them.

But we do need that emotional pullback against pure morality, we do need that smell test. Now, some accuser would be wrong if he thought Brandon was Darren, but I think that's what he's accusing Brandon of, when he says, "love morality more than your daughter," - he's accusing Brandon of not having that pullback.

The accuser is wrong though, and the reason he's wrong is because 1) there are only three possible positions here and 2) there's nobody more emotional than Aaron, 3) there's nobody more coldly moral than Darren, so that puts Brandon in the right place. He does have a heart, but he's able to let it guide him to the place where he understands it all, that the other person is somebody's kid too, but pull that emotional response back before it gets him and everybody else into a world where every last set of two people is sacrificed because somebody loved somebody else more.

It is worth noting, though, that more people would be on the accuser's side and against Brandon, if instead of actively doing something to save his daughter that he refused to do because it would break his morality, you had Brandon actively doing something that his morality compelled him to do that would sacrifice his daughter, and he actually did it. For example, if Brandon gave a kidney to the next person on the list instead of his daughter, and let her die. Something similar to that.

[AgnosticBoy]

I assume we're all familiar with the trolley problem and variations on the theme. Now imagine two chaps whose daughters lives are at stake, needing transplants or on the tracks or whatever: Aaron loves his daughter very much, so much that he would sacrifice two or five or even ten people's lives depending on circumstances to save hers. Brandon also loves his daughter very much, but there's no circumstance in which he would sacrifice even two unwilling or unknowing people's lives to save hers.

Which if either of these guys loves his daughter more, and why?

Alright, it's been more than a week and I have to ask this...

Is there a right answer to your scenario?

I actually wanted to ask you this from the start but I didn't want to spoil the fun in debating each other's views.

So what's the verdict here?