Here's a quasi-philosophical question for your weekend amusement that's probably been studied but is just obscure enough that I can't find anything relevant when I search for it.
Most philosophical systems assume that a life is a life, all equally valuable. This makes sense for any moral system that has to be universal, but in practice it's obviously not true. Every one of us systematically values some lives more than others.
What I'm curious about is whether anyone has done empirical research to find out just how much we tend to value different lives based on their relationship to us. Put differently, how much time/effort/money would we expend to save the life of, say, our mother vs. the life of an unknown Vietnamese peasant?
As an example of what I'm talking about, here are various categories of people with scores attached to them:
This suggests that, in practice, you'd spend a lot of effort to save the life of your mother, but still only about half of what you'd do to save your own life. For a random person with whom you have no plausible connection, you'd be willing to expend about a millionth the effort you'd expend to save yourself.
Obviously there are lots of possible systematic categories: kinship, nationality, geographic proximity, fame, etc. And the values would likely depend on your own culture, religion, etc.
Has anyone ever done empirical work of this sort? It seems like it might be useful to incorporate it in some way into a system of real-world ethics.
The question is unanswerable as asked. The problem lies in the word “empirical.”
If you want to know what voters will do in an election, asking them in advance of the election is a reasonable method. The choices are relatively simple and non-ambiguous, and voters have the free will to cast their votes as they choose without the threat of an immediate and potentially disastrous personal consequence.
Postulate a life-and-death situation. Ask a hundred individuals what they would do. Then call the results “empirical?” If the individuals are Navy Seals, maybe so. Most likely, they know, and they’ll follow through.
As for the rest—what, are you kidding? They don't have the faintest idea.
I'm not exactly sure why Navy Seals would be better at evaluating how much effort they'd expend to save somebody else versus themselves than the rest of us would be. In fact, I'd imagine that the data from hopped up military types would be pretty useless since they have professionally expected responses that may or may not have any real linkage to actual behavior.
Why aren't there negative values? I could think of a couple of people who (hypothetically, of course) could attract some pretty high negative numbers.
Not exactly the same, but Kevin may find this sequence of posts interesting, polling people about the same question wrt different species of animal lives:
We start with
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/26/cortical-neuron-number-matches-intuitive-perceptions-of-moral-value-across-animals/
updated to
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/01/update-to-partial-retraction-of-animal-value-and-neuron-number/
culminating in
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/
There is a general principle in evolutionary biology that the degree of altruism is related to the fraction of genes shared. The ultimate objective of all instinctive behavior is to transmit genes into succeeding generations, and this can be done even if the genes are in someone else's body. Siblings share more genes than cousins and so on. Aunts and uncles have an interest in helping children, but less than parents. Of course parents are likely to be more altruistic toward children than the other way around, since the children represent an actual transfer of genes into the next generation.
Presumably you share more genes with the members of your (small) tribe than with those of other tribes. As the units get bigger things may get mysterious: why do young men sacrifice their lives for the good a country when they give up their own reproductive potential? This may be a case of a true meme, that is a social behavior benefiting the group which is not genetic.
While the degree of gene-sharing is quantifiable, altruism is not, so many studies of this are qualitative, but lots has been published on this.
A lot of that is nurture.
Sounds like The Third Man Ferris wheel scene.
“Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?”
https://youtu.be/21h0G_gU9Tw
A great scene all the way.
The Third Man, you say? "They found Harbin? Pity."
When I first saw the movie 35+ years ago, I thought Harry Lime was the epitome of evil. Seductive, but as rotten a character any depicted in film. Today, his crime seems more ordinary. In fact, his calculations are not that different from those made by politicians and corporate heads. Lime was just more overtly callous about it. The idea the some people should die so that others are spared the inconvenience of wearing a mask is not even controversial today. It's considered a legitimate position for one side of our political debate. How petty can people be? At least in Lime's case, he was getting rich.
The Third Man conversation is a variation on the Mandarin paradox .
Back in the 80’s during the height of the Cold War I asked people what was, I guess, a variation of the Mandarin paradox. “You are President of the United States. Your generals inform you of a window of opportunity in which you could surprise attack the USSR and destroy them completely with no fear of retaliation and no other ill effects from fallout. No Americans will die, save a few diplomats and other American visitors. But a minimum of 100 million Russians will die. If you choose to attack you must do it within the next 24 hours after which this window will close. What do you do?”
I was shocked that most people took my question seriously and indicated they would attack. I would remind them of the 100 million deaths and that such an attack would make them the greatest monster in history. They would say they understood this, but they would still do it.
Of course, removing Russia from the board would make the world a much better place. That remains true then as now. Nuclear planet killing exchange perma-avoided.
The real question is what the int'l relations would look like after. THAT might be worse.
People have done quantitative work on this. Not sure how many, but I did go to a talk covering this and similar topics about 5 years ago. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the speaker, but the methodology was mainly surveys/games using variants of the trolley problem, varying the agency of the actor and the nature of the prospective victims. As it turns out, the level of agency people feel they have makes a huge difference, a variable basically orthogonal to the closeness of relationship.
This is the content of social psychology. Of course there is research on it.
This is Dunbar's Number
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
As other commenters have pointed out, there's also piles of research on how human altruism is strongly tied to in-group and out-group membership, and the strength of one's relationship to the target of the altruism.
In practical terms, you can't tell how kind or generous or philanthropic someone is in general, looking at how they treat their own family. That's basically useless information.
A bit off topic--how much will we spend to kill people? Not on an individual level....so stop that now...
There was talk of just bribing the Russian soldiers, $10K to defect--so about as much as we spent on arms to kill them.
As a country, compare military expenses vs. aid, ca. $690 vs $40 billion. We are spending ca. 15+x more to kill people than to help them. Yes, that's disingenuous--our military is used to help in humanitarian crises across the world--but still that's only a small fraction of what they do.
We have to be arsenal of democracy, but we need to do better:
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/07/26/aircraft-mission-capable-rates-hit-new-low-in-air-force-despite-efforts-to-improve/
We also have examine what is effective for today's missions.
If the $10k is as much as we'd spent on arms to kill them, perhaps we should actually offer more, as their absence from the war would as well preserve the lives of those they'd have otherwise killed.
You;re assuming that the US would only need to pay the $10 K (or whatever) only one time per bribee.
This question of the relative value of life is poignant particularly with the ongoing war in Ukraine. There have been many articles - not just in progressive media but also for example CNN - criticizing the West for caring so much more about that conflict than about those in other parts of the world, and Europe in particular for being harsh on most immigrants and throwing open the doors for Ukrainians. They have a point. But also irritate me at times. As a European, yes, I care more about Ukraine than about Venezuela. But doesn't everyone have a continental bias? I read two articles by Arab writers complaining that refugees for named Arab countries weren't treated like Ukrainians and wondered: if they have no neighborly bias themselves, why don't they write about (black) Mediterranean boat refugees, about Congo, about Myanmar? That doesn't go for all such articles. But it can be annoying to be held to a standard that applies to absolutely no other continent.
Anyway, yes it would be useful to have a metric for relative empathy. But I would include neighbors on the list or, when it comes to countries, neighboring countries.
Also in Ukraine 1 side is largely good. In Yemen you can side with the Saudis or the Iranians. If it's shit all the way down what is the point of helping?
#1: That's a very Germanic question....as in, everything should be measurable and quantifiable.
#2: It's also a question that only God can answer....or someone who wants to wear the mantle of omni-everything.
We're getting in the area of distinguishing between true righteousness and its polar opposite, self-righteousness.
We are creatures of imperfect knowledge and imperfect reason, and, as such, we are incapable of the answer of a question that requires such perfection in both.
There are so many variables it is impossible to come up with a definitive answer. For example, since my father is 91 I think his life is less valuable than that of mine or my children. I would put my children at #1 with my wife second. I'm way down the list. Sure, if caught in some accident I will try very hard to save myself, but if I can only save me or someone else I'm not so sure. I'd like to think that if that other person was a young child I would choose to save them, even if unrelated or a poor Vietnamese peasant. The disaster scenarios that have to be dreamed up to ask these questions are usually so far fetched that they don't elicit good answers. But, after your blood relatives it drops off very quickly with geography. There are too many people in the world anyway.
Wow, you get what you pay for,
Seized Russian oligarchs' yachts 'could deteriorate in a matter of weeks',
https://www.rawstory.com/russian-oligarchs-2656992597/
Those millions used to maintain these things could be used for anything else.
How many lives are thrown away to keep things like this afloat?
The variability of human reactions to the question - all the way from "I couldn't care less about Ukraine" to "I stopped aging when the hearts of a hundred children stopped beating" - makes the question effectively meaningless.
> [president of Marine Boat Works in California] Todd Roberts: “I don't think any of us fully understand what it will mean for the industry.”
Maybe you could all find something actually useful to do?
Was in reply to cld’s superyachts link
Just a wonderful illustration of why the very wealthy should be taxed into being the merely wealthy.
Heck, I’d be satisfied if the extremely wealthy were taxed into being very wealthy.
Well, it would be a start …
Absolutely!
How is this affected by Heinlein's "tramp and bystander killed trying to save strangers even though they could have gotten away"?
Covid, and the conversations related to Covid have inured me to the deaths of strangers in a way that troubles me. Hurricane in a midwestern state? 100 dead! Oh well, more people in that area die of Covid each day. And your chances of dying because of a hurricane and pretty minuscule. So no big deal.
Again, a bit off topic...
Apparently the Russians are conscripting young men from Crimea and the Donbas region and sending them out with little/no training to the front lines. The definition of cannon fodder. Who will their parents blame, the Ukranians or the Russians for their deaths?
I believe that quite a lot of work has been done on this sort of question, though not including the "fine-tuning" suggested by Kevin (e.g. there was a recent NPR discussion that appears high in a search). It basically amounts to doing regressions of pay scales against probability of death (e.g., tree-toppers and fishermen have among the highest risks). The estimated value of an anonymous individual was about $3 million when this work was first done almost 40 years ago (unadjusted for inflation). Additional explanatory variables could be introduced into the estimation model, but the database would probably have to be enormous.
When you reduce a life to a quantity...what are you?
Paul Bloom has a whole book about why our natural empathy is a horrible guide to morality. I don't think he's quantified any of it, but at least he's a researcher interested in the topic. Nickel version here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si1YSUAEH4w
Are you talking about what people would say they would do or what they would actually do?
Although it doesn't get at the relative value of a life, this recent paper looks at moral cosmopolitanism from an empirical point of view, 8 countries, n=9871
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2100991118