TIME Magazine: Morality Quiz
TIME Magazine has an online morality quiz, which presents a number of scenarios to which the quiz-taker responds with either “I could” or “I could not.” Even the phrasing lends itself to Emotivism.
The questions all engage the same principle (one may not do evil to bring about good) except for one, which deals with double effect. The trouble is that the questions betray a clear Consequentialist bent in the way that they’re phrased.
For example, the first question:
It’s war time, and you’re hiding in a basement with a group of other people. Enemy soldiers are approaching outside and will be drawn to any sound. If you’re found, you’ll all be killed immediately. A baby hiding with you starts to cry loudly and cannot be stopped. Smothering it to death is the only way to silence it, saving the lives of everyone in the room. Assume that the parents of the baby are unknown and not present and there will be no penalty for killing the child. Could you be the one who smothered it if no one else would?
Note, of course, that the question is not about the moral status of the action but only about whether the quiz-taker could be the one to do it, which points toward Emotivism. This question, like almost all the others boils down to “do something evil in order to achieve a good effect?”
The question which engages the principle of double effect:
An out of control trolley is heading down a track toward five unsuspecting people and will surely kill them all. You could throw a switch diverting it to a siding, but an equally unsuspecting man is standing there and the train will kill him instead. Could you throw the switch, killing one to save five?
Of course, the question at the end of the scenario, “Could you throw the switch, killing one to save five?” is not accurate since it does not distinguish the death of the one as only indirectly voluntary. You can see the Consequentialism at work: “1 dead vs. 5 dead.” No consideration about what the object of the action is, about what is actually being chosen. In this case, the correct moral evaluation is: throwing the switch to save five people is good. The death of the one person is an unintended secondary effect of the action, not a means to saving the five people. It is foreseen but not intended, and since there is no other way to save the five which would not result in the death of the one and since life is proportional to life, double effect applies to this scenario.
