1. What is the source of the contradiction in the paradox?
In the tram question, more people tend to regard "sacrificing one person for the best benefit" as a standard answer. The choice of inaction may be dismissed as hypocrisy. But in the movie, the director takes the audience to observe and participate in the daily life of the little girl. This side of the scale is no longer a cold number like "a person", but has to face a second that is still in front of your eyes. The cruel reality that the lively and cute little girl playing will die in your hands next second. The impact on people’s hearts is far greater than that of a hundred people dying in the news. Not to mention that the chooser has to face self-blame due to moral and public opinion pressure. Can you easily make a rational choice in this situation? Therefore, the contradiction of this moral paradox is not to choose the objectively best answer, but that even if we have the best answer, we may not choose it out of sensibility.
2. When an individual is in an ethical dilemma, is there a way to make a decision?
From the answer to the previous question, it is easy to draw a conclusion: we should overcome sensibility and do the right thing rationally for the well-being of most people. The British military in the movie is basically the representative of this kind of thinking. They tolerated the sacrifice of the little girl and tried to promote the proposal to strike through the missile, because they knew that letting go of the terrorists would inevitably lead to more casualties. General Benson and Colonel Powell are not cold-blooded people. The former is still buying toys for his daughter before receiving the task, and the latter is a kind grandma who wakes up the puppy and wants to say sorry. But for those who were thrown into the "battlefield", one was to hand the doll to the assistant before entering the meeting room, and the other was to change from nightgown to uniform. The director deliberately emphasized these ritual details in order to explain: in order to persuade themselves to be calm and objective, soldiers can only put humanity aside, which is determined by the nature of their work. As General Benson said, it was not that the soldier had not considered the cost of war, but made a helpless choice after considering it.
Compared with rational soldiers and female officials as emotional representatives (she always insists that she would rather risk large-scale terrorist attacks to let terrorists go than kill little girls directly), most of us are at the mercy of both sentiment and rationality. . This makes us more difficult in the ethical dilemma. So we will first subconsciously choose to shirk responsibility and push the ethical dilemma to others to liberate ourselves, just like most government officials in the film do. Maybe we in front of the screen can arbitrarily tell these big people what choice should be made, but when the responsibility really falls on the shoulders of individuals, we may also choose to give the decision to others.
And when the problem cannot be pushed away, our only choice is to find a reason to persuade ourselves, pretending to be sensible and rational. Only in this way can we whitewash and tide over this unsolvable problem. When the probability of the missile injuring the little girl was estimated to be 65%, everyone was still playing the ball; but when the situation became urgent and an answer was urgently needed and the ball could no longer be kicked, how did everyone do it? They hardly reduced the chance of injury to 45% through layer-by-layer lamination. How did you get this 45%? I think it's not only the fake by Major Powell and her men on the surface, but everyone knows it secretly. Everyone must be clear: If there is a plan that can reduce the harm to civilians, it must have been proposed long ago. Why did it suddenly appear until now. Everyone didn't dare to question it carefully, because everyone had been waiting for this self-deception figure for too long, but in the end someone had to do the dirty work. So in the face of moral paradoxes, we often just need a reason to deceive ourselves. Even going back to the simple tram model. Think about it carefully: five people are still one person, do we really care more about the life and death of five people? Or do we just need a reason to do what we think is right?
3. Should rationalists be given absolute authority in decision-making?
According to the above hypothesis, if an individual is only for his own inner life, it is very likely that only the rationalists can make objective choices that have practical significance for the well-being of the general public. So should we give decision-making power to such an ideal group (assuming they are trustworthy)? I think it still can't. Blindly sacrificing the minority and pursuing the best interests of the group will eventually lead to totalitarianism that ignores human nature. This has changed from a helpless choice under a dilemma to an extreme.
In the first half of the film, the cumbersome procedures in the operation of public affairs and the political correctness of pleasing and propaganda war seem to be very redundant and cumbersome, causing too much trouble for military operations. But in the second half of the film, think about it, in fact, it is under the auspices of these redundant procedures that humanity care has won a moment of respite. It is the decision makers' fear of public opinion (the "a YouTube movie can lead to a revolution" mentioned in the film) that prevents the lives of a few people from being directly regarded as a waste in the interests of the majority.
So for the moral paradox, the answer is still-no solution. At the beginning of watching a movie, we may think that the actions of some people in the movie are quite condemned, but as we watch and think, we will feel that in fact, there is no step in the whole process that is not carried out in a reasonable and orderly manner. NS. We have this experience on many issues: At the beginning, we always thought that the suffering in this world came from the wrong choices of people, so we tried to explore where we went wrong and find ways to correct it. However, the results of the exploration often come to the conclusion that all the original choices are not wrong, and the ugliness that we deeply hate is the most reasonable existence under all helplessness. Compared with all the unreasonable phenomena at the beginning, this kind of helplessness really brought me deep despair. At the end of the film, as my thoughts fell into such despair, the drone flew into an endless cloud.
The biggest advantage of this film is that the characters are rendered very three-dimensional through details. Each character is not only a symbol of a different idea, but also a person of flesh and blood. In addition to directly describing the nervousness of everyone on the "battlefield," the director puts more effort in portraying their normal life. The aforementioned General Benson and Colonel Powell are no longer mentioned. On the US military's side, the two drone pilots also talked easily about life topics before entering the command cabin. In the face of life and death, several small characters showed great humanity: the Kenyan local detective who escaped from the dead first thought that his mission might not be completed, and he asked someone to continue to save the little girl. Even the soldiers of the terrorist organization who had already settled the villain in the first half of the film, after hesitating for a while, actually put down their machine guns and decided to send the little girl to the hospital. Taking on the previous topic, let me think further: Maybe the decision-making level can finally throw out a universal policy to solve all moral paradoxes, but the specific implementation of them is still a living person. Take the Kenyan agent as an example. Among all the military personnel involved in the mission, he has no right to participate in the discussion of the paradoxes, but he will do his best to do good and save lives while completing the mission. It is this kind of spiritual power that even if we know that the rational choice is the best, we do not have to choose it without hesitation. Perhaps this is the ideal answer to the moral paradox.
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