Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Perspective. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Perspective. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Psychiatry wars: the lawsuit that put psychoanalysis on trial

Rachel Aviv
The Guardian
Originally posted 11 OCT 22

Here is an excerpt:

In the lawsuit, the 20th century’s two dominant explanations for mental distress collided. No psychiatric malpractice lawsuit has attracted more prominent expert witnesses than Ray’s, according to Alan Stone, the former president of the APA. The case became “the organising nidus” around which leading biological psychiatrists “pushed their agenda”, he told me.

At a hearing before an arbitration panel, which would determine whether the case could proceed to trial, the Lodge presented Ray’s attempt to medicalise his depression as an abdication of responsibility. In a written report, one of the Lodge’s expert witnesses, Thomas Gutheil, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, observed that the language of the lawsuit, much of which Ray had drafted himself, exemplified Ray’s struggle with “‘externalisation’ – that is, the tendency to blame one’s problems on others”. Gutheil concluded that Ray’s “insistence on the biological nature of his problem is not only disproportionate but seems to me to be yet another attempt to move the problem away from himself: it is not I, it’s my biology.”

The Lodge’s experts attributed Ray’s recovery at Silver Hill at least in part to his romantic entanglement with a female patient, which gave him a jolt of self-esteem.

“It’s a demeaning comment,” Ray responded when he testified. “And it just speaks to the whole total disbelief in the legitimacy of the symptomatology and the disease.”

The Lodge lawyers tried to chip away at Ray’s description of depression, arguing that he had shown moments of pleasure at the Lodge, such as when he had played piano.

“The sheer mechanical banging of ragtime rhythms on that dilapidated old piano on the ward was almost an act of agitation rather than a creative pleasurable act,” Ray responded. “Just because I played ping-pong, or had a piece of pizza, or smiled, or may have made a joke, or made googly eyes at a good-looking girl, it did not mean that I was capable of truly sustaining pleasurable feelings.” He went on, “I would say to myself: ‘I am living, but I am not alive.’”

Manuel Ross, Ray’s analyst from the Lodge, testified for more than eight hours. He had read a draft of Ray’s memoir and he rejected the possibility that Ray had been cured by antidepressants. He was not a recovered man, because he was still holding on to the past. (“That’s what I call melancholia as used in the 1917 article,” he said, referring to Freud’s essay Mourning and Melancholia.)

Ross said that he had hoped Ray would develop insight at the Lodge. “That’s the true support,” he said, “if one understands what is going on in one’s life.” He wanted Ray to let go of his need to be a star doctor, the richest and most powerful in his field, and to accept a life in which he was one of the “ordinary mortals who labour in the medical vineyard”.

Ray’s lawyer, Philip Hirschkop, one of the most prominent civil rights attorneys in the country, asked Ross: “As an analyst, do you have to sometimes look inside yourself to make sure you’re not reacting to your own feelings about someone?”

“Oh yes,” Ross said. “Oh yes.”

“You who’ve locked yourself into one position for 19 years with no advancement in position other than salary, might you be a little resentful of this man who makes so much more money, and now he’s here as your patient?” Hirschkop asked.

Friday, April 22, 2022

Generous with individuals and selfish to the masses

Alós-Ferrer, C.; García-Segarra, J.; Ritschel, A.
(2022). Nature Human Behaviour, 6(1):88-96.

Abstract

The seemingly rampant economic selfishness suggested by many recent corporate scandals is at odds with empirical results from behavioural economics, which demonstrate high levels of prosocial behaviour in bilateral interactions and low levels of dishonest behaviour. We design an experimental setting, the ‘Big Robber’ game, where a ‘robber’ can obtain a large personal gain by appropriating the earnings of a large group of ‘victims’. In a large laboratory experiment (N = 640), more than half of all robbers took as much as possible and almost nobody declined to rob. However, the same participants simultaneously displayed standard, predominantly prosocial behaviour in Dictator, Ultimatum and Trust games. Thus, we provide direct empirical evidence showing that individual selfishness in high-impact decisions affecting a large group is compatible with prosociality in bilateral low-stakes interactions. That is, human beings can simultaneously be generous with others and selfish with large groups.

From the Discussion

Our results demonstrate that socially-relevant selfishness in the large is fully compatible with evidence from experimental economics on bilateral, low-stake games at the individual level, without requiring arguments relying on population differences (in fact, we found no statistically significant differences in the behavior of participants with or without an economics background). The same individuals can behave selfishly when interacting with a large group of other people while, at the same time, displaying standard levels of prosocial behavior in commonly-used laboratory tasks where only one other individual is involved. Additionally, however, individual differences in behavior in the Big Robber Game correlate with individual selfishness in the DG/UG/TG, i.e., Extreme Robbers gave less in the DG, offered less in the UG, and transferred less in the TG than Moderate Robbers.

The finding that people behave selfishly toward a large group while being generous toward individuals suggests that harming many individuals might be easier than harming just one, in line with received evidence that people are more willing to help one individual than many. It also reflects the tradeoff between personal gain and other-regarding concerns encompassed in standard models of social preferences, although this particular implication had not been demonstrated so far. When facing a single opponent in a bilateral game, appropriating a given monetary amount can result in a large interpersonal difference. When appropriating income from a large group of people, the same personal gain involves a smaller percentual difference. Correspondingly, creating a given level of inequality with respect to others results in a much larger personal gain when income is taken from a group than when it is taken from just another person, and hence it is much more likely to offset the disutility from inequality aversion in the former case.

Friday, December 31, 2021

Dear White People: Here Are 5 Uncomfortable Truths Black Colleagues Need You To Know

Dana Brownlee
Forbes.com
Originally posted 16 June 2020

While no one has a precise prescription for how to eradicate racial injustice in the workplace, I firmly believe that a critical first step is embracing the difficult conversations and uncomfortable truths that we’ve become too accustomed to avoiding. The baseline uncomfortable truth is that blacks and whites in corporate America often maintain their own subcultures – including very different informal conversations in the workplace - with surprisingly little overlap at times. To be perfectly honest, as a black woman who has worked in and around corporate America for nearly 30 years, I’ve typically only been privy to the black side of the conversation, but I think in this moment where everyone is looking for opportunities to either teach, learn or grow, it’s instructive if not necessary to break down the traditional siloes and speak the unspeakable. So in this vein I’m sharing five critical “truths” that I feel many black people in corporate settings would vehemently discuss in “private” but not necessarily assert in “public.”

Here are the 5, plus a bonus.

Truth #1 - Racism doesn’t just show up in its most extreme form. There is indeed a continuum (of racist thoughts and behaviors), and you may be on it.

Truth #2 – Even if you personally haven’t offended anyone (that you know of), you may indeed be part of the problem.

Truth #3 – Every black person on your team is not your “friend.”

Truth #4 – Gender and race discrimination are not “essentially the same.”

Truth #5 – Even though there may be one or two black faces in leadership, your organization may indeed have a rampant racial injustice problem.

Bonus Truth #6: You can absolutely be part of the solution.

As workplaces tackle racism with a renewed sense of urgency amidst the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, it’s imperative that they approach the problem of racism as they would any other serious business problem – methodically, intensely and with a sense of urgency and conviction.

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Do We Listen to Advice Just Because We Paid for It? The Impact of Cost of Advice on Its Use

Gino, F. (2008). 
Organizational Behavior and Human 
Decision Processes, 107(2), 234–245. 

Abstract

When facing a decision, people often rely on advice received from others. Previous studies have shown that people tend to discount others' opinions. Yet, such discounting varies according to several factors. This paper isolates one of these factors: the cost of advice. Specifically, three experiments investigate whether the cost of advice, independent of its quality, affects how people use advice. The studies use the Judge-Advisor System (JAS) to investigate whether people value advice from others more when it costs money than when it is free, and examine the psychological processes that could account for this effect. The results show that people use paid advice significantly more than free advice and suggest that this effect is due to the same forces that have been documented in the literature to explain the sunk costs fallacy. Implications for circumstances under which people value others' opinions are discussed.

From the Discussion

Many of the decisions people make on a daily basis result from weighing their own opinions with advice from other sources. The present work explored one factor that might affect the use of advice: advice cost. In particular, the initial hypothesis was that, independent of its quality, people would weigh advice significantly more when it costs money than when it is free. This hypothesis was tested in three experiments requiring participants to answer questions about US history with or without advice from others.  The results of the studies show that participants relied more heavily on advice when it cost money than when it was free. The results also suggest that this paid-advice effect is due to the same forces that have been documented in the literature to explain prior instances of the sunk costs fallacy.  

The cost of advice affected the degree to which participants used advice but did not affect the value gained by following advice. In the studies, advice came from another participant who was randomly chosen on a question-by-question basis. On average, advisors were as equally informed or knowledgeable as judges. In fact, individuals who were history experts could not participate in the studies. Moreover, participants had no opportunity to assess the accuracy of advisors’ estimates. Nor had they the opportunity to assess the accuracy of their own estimates, as no performance feedback was provided. When advice cost money, participants weighed their personal opinions less than others’. When advice was free, they instead weighed their personal opinions more than others’.

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Why It’s Easier to Make Decisions for Someone Else

Evan Polman
Harvard Business Review
Originally posted November 13, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

What we found was two-fold: Not only did participants choose differently when it was for themselves rather than for someone else, but the way they chose was different. When choosing for themselves, participants focused more on a granular level, zeroing in on the minutiae, something we described in our research as a cautious mindset. Employing a cautious mindset when making a choice means being more reserved, deliberate, and risk averse. Rather than exploring and collecting a plethora of options, the cautious mindset prefers to consider a few at a time on a deeper level, examining a cross-section of the larger whole.

But when it came to deciding for others, study participants looked more at the array of options and focused on their overall impression. They were bolder, operating from what we called an adventurous mindset. An adventurous mindset prioritizes novelty over a deeper dive into what those options actually consist of; the availability of numerous choices is more appealing than their viability. Simply put, they preferred and examined more information before making a choice, and as my previous research has shown, they recommended their choice to others with more gusto.

These findings align with my earlier work with Kyle Emich of University of Delaware on how people are more creative on behalf of others. When we are brainstorming ideas to other people’s problems, we’re inspired; we have a free flow of ideas to spread out on the table without judgment, second-guessing, or overthinking.

The info is here.

Monday, June 18, 2018

Sam Harris and the Myth of Perfectly Rational Thought

Robert Wright
www.wired.com
Originally posted March 17, 2018

Here are several excerpts:

This is attribution error working as designed. It sustains your conviction that, though your team may do bad things, it’s only the other team that’s actually bad. Your badness is “situational,” theirs is “dispositional.”

(cut)

Another cognitive bias—probably the most famous—is confirmation bias, the tendency to embrace, perhaps uncritically, evidence that supports your side of an argument and to either not notice, reject, or forget evidence that undermines it. This bias can assume various forms, and one was exhibited by Harris in his exchange with Ezra Klein over political scientist Charles Murray’s controversial views on race and IQ.

(cut)

Most of these examples of tribal thinking are pretty pedestrian—the kinds of biases we all exhibit, usually with less than catastrophic results. Still, it is these and other such pedestrian distortions of thought and perception that drive America’s political polarization today.

For example: How different is what Harris said about Buzzfeed from Donald Trump talking about “fake news CNN”? It’s certainly different in degree. But is it different in kind? I would submit that it’s not.

When a society is healthy, it is saved from all this by robust communication. Individual people still embrace or reject evidence too hastily, still apportion blame tribally, but civil contact with people of different perspectives can keep the resulting distortions within bounds. There is enough constructive cross-tribal communication—and enough agreement on what the credible sources of information are—to preserve some overlap of, and some fruitful interaction between, world views.

The article is here.

Thursday, May 31, 2018

What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil?

Thomas White
Aeon.co
Originally published April 23, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted into the Nazi Party, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. In Arendt’s telling, Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’.

This wasn’t Arendt’s first, somewhat superficial impression of Eichmann. Even 10 years after his trial in Israel, she wrote in 1971:
I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.
The banality-of-evil thesis was a flashpoint for controversy. To Arendt’s critics, it seemed absolutely inexplicable that Eichmann could have played a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil intentions. Gershom Scholem, a fellow philosopher (and theologian), wrote to Arendt in 1963 that her banality-of-evil thesis was merely a slogan that ‘does not impress me, certainly, as the product of profound analysis’. Mary McCarthy, a novelist and good friend of Arendt, voiced sheer incomprehension: ‘[I]t seems to me that what you are saying is that Eichmann lacks an inherent human quality: the capacity for thought, consciousness – conscience. But then isn’t he a monster simply?’

The information is here.

Monday, December 5, 2016

Why Some People Get Burned Out and Others Don't

Kandi Wiens and Annie McKee
Harvard Business Review
Originally posted November 23, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

What You Can Do to Manage Stress and Avoid Burnout

People do all kinds of destructive things to deal with stress—they overeat, abuse drugs and alcohol, and push harder rather than slowing down. What we learned from our study of chief medical officers is that people can leverage their emotional intelligence to deal with stress and ward off burnout. You, too, might want to try the following:

Don’t be the source of your stress. Too many of us create our own stress, with its full bodily response, merely by thinking about or anticipating future episodes or encounters that might be stressful. People who have a high need to achieve or perfectionist tendencies may be more prone to creating their own stress. We learned from our study that leaders who are attuned to the pressures they put on themselves are better able to control their stress level. As one CMO described, “I’ve realized that much of my stress is self-inflicted from years of being hard on myself. Now that I know the problems it causes for me, I can talk myself out of the non-stop pressure.”

Recognize your limitations. Becoming more aware of your strengths and weaknesses will clue you in to where you need help. In our study, CMOs described the transition from a clinician to leadership role as being a major source of their stress. Those who recognized when the demands were outweighing their abilities, didn’t go it alone—they surrounded themselves with trusted advisors and asked for help.

The article is here.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Who Blames the Victim?

Laura Niemi and Liane Young
Gray Matter - The New York Times
Originally published June 24, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Victim blaming appears to be deep-seated, rooted in core moral values, but also somewhat malleable, susceptible to subtle changes in language. For those looking to increase sympathy for victims, a practical first step may be to change how we talk: Focusing less on victims and more on perpetrators — “Why did he think he had license to rape?” rather than “Imagine what she must be going through” — may be a more effective way of serving justice.

The article is here.

Friday, May 22, 2015

The Perspective Gap Is Killing Your Business. Here’s How to Fix It

Empathy is a basic quality that we all crave. So why is it so difficult to demonstrate ourselves?

By Justin Bariso
Inc.com
Originally published April 29, 2015

Getting designers to show consideration for those taking care of warranty problems proved difficult. Initially, the company attempted a process-based solution, designing 26 new KPIs (including a 'repairability' scorecard and incentive), along with variable compensation.

The result? In the end, the process had almost zero impact. So the company decided to try something different.

The next time around, design engineers were informed that in three years (once the car was launched on the market) they would move to the after sales network and take charge of the warranty budget. In essence, they would deal with any problems caused by their own design.

This inspired what I like to call 'self-empathy'--empathy for your future self. The designers were moved to invest extra effort now to promote easy repairability later, since they were the ones who would have to deal with negative consequences.

Although very different in concept, the goal of these two methods is the same: See things from another perspective.

The entire article is here.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Can Adversity Make Us Good?

By Eranda Jayawickreme
Big Ideas at Slate.com

Here is an excerpt:

Nevertheless, we know that adversity can help answer the question, “Why be good?” Psychologist Johanna Ray Vollhardt at Clark University has claimed that traumatic life events may in fact enhance the motivation to help other disadvantaged members of society, including people outside the groups with which you identify. One possible explanation for this “altruism born of suffering” is that trauma often forces people to recognize how limited their time on Earth is, which in turn clarifies their values and promotes moral behavior. Blackie found this to be the case in a study she published in Psychological Science, where experimentally manipulating thoughts about death—in this case, asking participants to imagine dying in an apartment fire—predicted increased charitable giving behavior (in this case, the intention to donate blood).

In other words, as the philosopher Valerie Tiberius at the University of Minnesota has argued, we want to be good because we care about having good lives, and adversity can help provide the necessary knowledge and perspective. I would call this knowledge and perspective wisdom.

The entire article is here.

Monday, January 5, 2015

Ethics is for human subjects too: Participant perspectives on responsibility in health research

By Susan Cox and Michael McDonald
Social Science & Medicine
Volume 98, December 2013, Pages 224–231

Abstract

Despite the significant literature as well as energy devoted to ethical review of research involving human subjects, little attention has been given to understanding the experiences of those who volunteer as human subjects. Why and how do they decide to participate in research? Is research participation viewed as a form of social responsibility or as a way of obtaining individual benefits? What if anything do research subjects feel they are owed for participation? And what do they feel that they owe the researcher? Drawing on in-depth individual interviews conducted in 2006 and 2007 with 41 subjects who participated in a variety of types of health research in Canada, this paper focuses on subject perspectives on responsibility in research. Highlighting the range of ways that subjects describe their involvement in research and commitments to being a ‘good’ subject, we present a typology of narratives that sheds new light on the diverse meanings of research participation. These narratives are not mutually exclusive or prescriptive but are presented as ideal types typifying a set of circumstances and values. As such, they collectively illuminate a range of motivations expressed by human subjects as well as potential sources of vulnerability. The typology adds a new dimension to the literature in this area and has significant implications for researchers seeking more human-subject centred approaches to research recruitment and retention, as well as research ethics boards trying to better anticipate the perspectives of prospective participants.

Highlights

• Participant responsibility is a neglected aspect of research ethics.
• Responsibility can be conceptualized according to degree of agency and altruism.
• Participants' narrative accounts yield four main orientations to responsibility.
• These reveal differing motivations and sources of vulnerability.

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

The Shrinking World of Ideas

By Arthur Krystal
The Chronicle Review
Originally posted November 21, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

For instance, psychologists and legal scholars, spurred by brain research and sophisticated brain-scanning techniques, have begun to reconsider ideas about volition. If all behavior has an electrochemical component, then in what sense—psychological, legal, moral—is a person responsible for his actions? Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen in a famous 2004 paper contend that neuroscience has put a new spin on free will and culpability: It "can help us see that all behavior is mechanical, that all behavior is produced by chains of physical events that ultimately reach back to forces beyond the agent’s control." Their hope is that the courts will ultimately discard blame-based punishment in favor of more "consequentialist approaches."

All this emphasis on the biological basis of human behavior is not to everyone’s liking. The British philosopher Roger Scruton, for one, takes exception to the notion that neuroscience can explain us to ourselves. He rejects the thought that the structure of the brain also structures the person, since an important distinction exists between an event in the brain and the behavior that follows. And, by the same token, the firing of neurons does not in a strictly causal sense account for identity, since a "person" is not identical to his or her physiological components.

The entire article is here.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Fast, Frugal, and (Sometimes) Wrong

Cass R. Sunstein
University of Chicago Law School and Department of Political Science
Originally published in 2005

Abstract

Do moral heuristics operate in the moral domain? If so, do they lead to moral errors? This brief essay offers an affirmative answer to both questions. In so doing, it responds to an essay by Gerd Gigerenzer on the nature of heuristics, moral and otherwise. While focused on morality, the discussion bears on the general debate between those who emphasize cognitive errors, sometimes produced by heuristics, and those who emphasize the frequent success of heuristics in producing sensible judgments in the real world. General claims are that it is contentious to see moral problems as ones of arithmetic, and that arguments about moral heuristics will often do well to steer clear of contentious arguments about what morality requires.

(cut)

But no one should deny that in many contexts, moral and other heuristics, in the form of simple rules of thumb, lead to moral error on any plausible view of morality. Consider, for example, the idea, emphasized by Gigerenzer, that one ought to do as the majority does, a source of massive moral blunders (see Sunstein, 2003). Or consider the fast and frugal idea that one ought not to distort the truth—a heuristic that generally works well, but that also leads (in my view) to moral error when, for example, the distortion is necessary to avoid significant numbers of deaths. Or consider the act- omission distinction, which makes moral sense in many domains, but which can lead to unsupportable moral judgments as well (Baron, 2004).

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Can a Jury Believe What It Sees?

Videotaped Confessions Can Be Misleading

By Jennifer L. Mnookin
The New York Times
Originally published July 13, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

The short answer is that, according to recent research, interrogation recording may in fact be too vivid and persuasive. Even seemingly neutral recordings still require interpretation. As advertisers and Hollywood directors know well, camera angles, close-ups, lenses and dozens of other techniques shape our perception of what we see without our being aware of it.

In a series of experiments led by the psychologist G. Daniel Lassiter of Ohio University, mock juries were shown exactly the same interrogation, but some saw only the defendant, while others had a wider-angle view that included the interrogator. When the interrogator isn’t shown on camera, jurors are significantly less likely to find an interrogation coercive, and more likely to believe in the truth and accuracy of the confession that they hear — even when the interrogator explicitly threatens the defendant.

The entire article is here.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Should teachers of controversial issues disclose their opinions?

By Harry
Crookedtimber.org
Originally posted March 3, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

For some of the issues I teach, it is not that hard to find out my views, if you really want to, and are a minimally competent googler. But I take a pretty hard line on the disclosure question. I don’t disclose my views about the issues I teach. Here’s why.

First, all of the issues I teach are issues on which there are powerful arguments on more than one side. I do not see my job as presenting technical scholarly applied ethics so that they will become interested in the major, but in introducing them to a particular practice that requires certain intellectual resources that my discipline has developed: the practice of moral reason giving and taking. So it makes no sense to teach issues about which, though there is a public debate, the reasons are one-sided. This is why, for example, I do not teach same-sex marriage (I tried, it didn’t work) or gun rights and why, if I lived in the UK, I would not teach about the legitimacy of the monarchy. I want students really to understand that there are reasons on both sides, and worry that disclosing would give them the impression that, contrary to fact, I regard the issues as settled. (I should add: it might make complete sense to teach such issues in a social studies high school class, especially if the focus is on getting the students to articulate and defend their own positions; the aims of such a class might be different from mine).

The entire blog post is here.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Can We Resolve Quantum Paradoxes by Stepping Out of Space and Time?

By George Musser
Scientific American Blog
Originally posted June 21, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

As is evident from von Baeyer’s article, quantum theory truly challenges us to think outside the box—and, in this case, I submit that the box is spacetime itself. If this seems farfetched, consider the eloquent point made by physicist and philosopher Ernan McMullin:

“Imaginability must not be made the test for ontology. The realist claim is that the scientist is discovering the structures of the world; it is not required in addition that these structures be imaginable in the categories of the macroworld.”

Only if we face the strange non-classical features of the physical world head-on can we have a physical, non-observer-dependent account of our reality that solves longstanding puzzles such as the problem of Schrödinger’s Cat.

The entire blog post is here.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Vantage Points and The Trolley Problem

By Thomas Nadelhoffer
Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog
Originally posted November 10, 2013

Here is an excerpt:

The standard debates about scenarios like BAS (Bystander at the Switch) typically focus on what it is permissible for the bystander to do given the rights of the few who have to be sacrificed involuntarily in order to save the many. In a paper I have been working on in fits and starts for too damn long now, I try to shift the vantage point from which we view cases like BAS and I suggest doing so yields some interesting results.  Rather than looking at BAS from the perspective of the bystanders—and what it is permissible (or impermissible) for them to do—I examine BAS instead from the point of view of the individuals whose lives hang in the balance. This change of vantage points highlights some possible tensions that may exist in our ever shifting intuitions.

For instance, let’s reexamine BAS from the point of view of the five people who will be killed if the bystander perhaps understandably cannot bring herself to hit the switch. Imagine that one of the five workmen has a gun and it becomes clear that the bystander is not going to be able to bring herself to divert the trolley.  Would it be permissible for the workman with the gun to shoot and kill the bystander if doing so was the only way of getting her to fall onto the switch?

The entire blog post is here.