The Social Aspect Of The Moral Decision Making
According to Goodall (2014), even though are expected to drastically reduce traffic accidents, it is unavoidable that there will occur some. In some of these cases, cars will have to choose between harming one party or the other. In the last few years, it often has been discussed what would be the best ethical approach to those dilemmas. Within this discussion, there is a debate about the part that ordinary people play in the discussion. In this project, I plan to investigate their role further with the research question “What is the role of ordinary people in the discussion about the moral decision making of? ”. This research paper describes six surveys about the ethical decisions of, with respondents amassed from Amazon Mechanical Turk.
The research shows that people generally think that should always try to make the least amount of victims, even if this means sacrificing the people inside the car. Also, most respondents like the idea of other people purchasing such “utilitarian” cars, but contradictory, they would rather not purchase one themselves. Moreover, the research describes that most respondents do not wish the government to establish a fixed, “utilitarian” ethical setting for all cars and would rather purchase a car without one. Finally, the authors stress the importance of discussing if the ethical setting should be fixed, because according to them, if people initially do not buy cars with a fixed setting, this will lead to deferral of the life-saving ability of the cars. This research paper looks like a core piece in the debate about the ethics of, since it has been cited a lot since its appearance in 2016 in Science, an overall well-cited journal. It is one of the first studies in the field that considered the preferences of ordinary people in the ethical decisions of. On top of this, the authors argue why ordinary people should be involved in the debate. Therefore, this article is highly relevant for my research, as I intend to shed more light on the aspects named above. In addition, the authors make a statement by stressing the importance of discussing the ethical setting of, a point which I plan on investigating further with the articles from Contissa, Lagioia, and Sartor (2017), and from Gogoll and Müller (2017). Nevertheless, the article doesn’t go into more complex dilemmas, so that I will need other sources, such as the article of Lin (2016), to argue about the importance and complexity of the moral dilemmas.
This research investigated through a VR study which aspects people take into account when facing ethical dilemmas with. Moreover, they compared the empirical findings with norms devised by philosophical and political authorities. The research shows that a high number of respondents looked at the number of people that could be saved, when choosing where to crash, even if this meant they themselves would be harmed or killed. The study also shows that people are likely to take the age of the potential victims into account, as well as the degree of injury that could be caused. Finally, most respondents disregarded traffic rules by driving onto the sidewalk if this meant saving more people. Some points did not align with the philosophical and political norms, causing the authors to suggest that this matter should be discussed and investigated into further extent, so that there can be a balance between those three factors. Like the article of Bonnefon et al. , this study investigated what ordinary people think about the moral dilemmas of. However, in this study, the authors emphasized on the aspects of ethical dilemmas that people take into consideration. In their article, the authors argue about the importance of people having a say in the discussion, as the authors call for a balance between social, philosophical and political norms. Because I intend to research the aspects mentioned above, I believe that this article is helpful for this project.
However, like the study of Bonnefon et al. , this research only covers certain moral dilemmas. On top of this, the dilemmas considered in this research were only about the respondents themselves, whereas the study of Bonnefon et al. showed that people were less likely to want a “utilitarian” car when they imagined being in a car with others. This causes me to believe that the research does not provide finite answers to what ordinary people prefer. Thus, more sources are needed to cover this aspect of my project. In this chapter, the author explains the importance of discussing the ethical dilemmas of. According to him, there should be “crash-optimization” instead of only “crash-avoidance”, because there will be occasions in which cars will have to choose between crashing into the one or the other, which could have severe consequences. To do so, he suggests to think about crash dilemmas in advance. He illustrates his point with a number of potential future dilemmas. Moreover, he shows the complexity and difficulty of the dilemmas by highlighting various individual aspects and considerations that come into play when making such decisions. Further, he talks about other ethical issues around that do not have to do with decision making. Overall, he calls for more debate and stresses that it is important to communicate clearly with the public in order to set realistic anticipations.
On the one hand, this article will be very useful for my article, along with the article of Goodall, because it argues about the importance of looking at the ethics of, and it goes deeper into the various potential dilemmas that could face. Therefore, I think that I can use this article to communicate the importance and complexity of the subject with the reader. On the other hand, the article will only be useful to a certain extent, as it lacks often elaboration on the authors claims. He often states an proposition, but does not explain why he thinks so. Therefore, I will need other sources to further investigate the core points that he makes.
