[Guest]

Setting:

Earth has recently had an outbreak where people seem fine, but die within the day they catch it. Half of the population are shown to have it - the other half are immune.

Story:

After several billion deaths, it is shown that in the final hour the victim becomes hungry and searches for human brains. The victim must consume half a brain of another human in order to live.

This therapy will stave off the disease for one year.

The cure will take nearly a year to make.

Conundrum:

Do you let the victims die, or do you kill others to let two live? What do you do for the year it takes to create the cure? How does your answer change with and without spoiler knowledge?

Notes:

1. I have no good answer for this, since morally there appears to be no good solution to the mess.

2. I tweaked the values more and more, to where it became hard to answer for myself. You may need to adjust the values depending on how you feel about the victims.

Edited August 8, 2009 by ybom

[bushindo]

Interesting problem. Here are some approaches. The approach is simple. Define a quantity that we want to maximize, let's call it the old-fashioned `utility' from economics. The trick is in how you define utility.

Lets say we weight all human lives equally. The obvious solution is to let all the zombies (1/2 of population) eat half of the humans (1/4 of population). That will make sure that one year later, 3/4 of the population are saved. If you wanna be darwinian and all that stuff, let the zombies eat up the old people and non-healthy human first.

Another more realistic way is to weight all human lives differently. That brings me to a comprehensive solution to this problem. Give a value for the life of each and every person on earth (zombies and human alike) according to the decision maker. In the case of zombies, give them the values that their lives would have if they were healed. Sort the list of values. The ranking process is highly dependent on the decision maker, and probably include factors like geopolitical motivations, religion, personal connections, and so on. Consideration might also include age and health, for instance. Now, we want to maximize the cumulative values, so we proceed in the following manner

1) Find the two zombies with the largest total value, (call it Z)

2) Find the human with the lowest value, call it H

3) Let the two zombies eat the human if and only if Z/2 > H

4) Repeat step 1-3 until there are no Z and H such that Z/2 > H

I'll leave it to someone else to elaborate on the part about what to do about the year intervening the disease and the cure (i.e. suppressing anarchy, rebellion, revenge, and maintaining civilization infrastructure)

Edited August 8, 2009 by bushindo

[bushindo]

Interesting problem. Here are some approaches. The approach is simple. Define a quantity that we want to maximize, let's call it the old-fashioned `utility' from economics. The trick is in how you define utility.

Lets say we weight all human lives equally. The obvious solution is to let all the zombies (1/2 of population) eat half of the humans (1/4 of population). That will make sure that one year later, 3/4 of the population are saved. If you wanna be darwinian and all that stuff, let the zombies eat up the old people and non-healthy human first.

Another more realistic way is to weight all human lives differently. That brings me to a comprehensive solution to this problem. Give a value for the life of each and every person on earth (zombies and human alike) according to the decision maker. In the case of zombies, give them the values that their lives would have if they were healed. Sort the list of values. The ranking process is highly dependent on the decision maker, and probably include factors like geopolitical motivations, religion, personal connections, and so on. Consideration might also include age and health, for instance. Now, we want to maximize the cumulative values, so we proceed in the following manner

1) Find the two zombies with the largest total value, (call it Z)

2) Find the human with the lowest value, call it H

3) Let the two zombies eat the human if and only if Z/2 > H

4) Repeat step 1-3 until there are no Z and H such that Z/2 > H

I'll leave it to someone else to elaborate on the part about what to do about the year intervening the disease and the cure (i.e. suppressing anarchy, rebellion, revenge, and maintaining civilization infrastructure)

I made a mistake with the algorithm.

Given a sorted list of values for all human and zombies,

1) Find the two zombies with the largest total value, call the two values Z₁ and Z₂.

2) Find the human with the lowest value, call it H

3) Let the two zombies eat the human if and only if Z₁ + Z₂ > H

4) Repeat step 1-3 until there are no Z₁, Z₂ and H such that Z₁ + Z₂ > H

Edited August 8, 2009 by bushindo

[Guest]

Interesting problem. Here are some approaches. The approach is simple. Define a quantity that we want to maximize, let's call it the old-fashioned `utility' from economics. The trick is in how you define utility.

Lets say we weight all human lives equally. The obvious solution is to let all the zombies (1/2 of population) eat half of the humans (1/4 of population). That will make sure that one year later, 3/4 of the population are saved. If you wanna be darwinian and all that stuff, let the zombies eat up the old people and non-healthy human first.

Another more realistic way is to weight all human lives differently. That brings me to a comprehensive solution to this problem. Give a value for the life of each and every person on earth (zombies and human alike) according to the decision maker. In the case of zombies, give them the values that their lives would have if they were healed. Sort the list of values. The ranking process is highly dependent on the decision maker, and probably include factors like geopolitical motivations, religion, personal connections, and so on. Consideration might also include age and health, for instance. Now, we want to maximize the cumulative values, so we proceed in the following manner

1) Find the two zombies with the largest total value, (call it Z)

2) Find the human with the lowest value, call it H

3) Let the two zombies eat the human if and only if Z/2 > H

4) Repeat step 1-3 until there are no Z and H such that Z/2 > H

I'll leave it to someone else to elaborate on the part about what to do about the year intervening the disease and the cure (i.e. suppressing anarchy, rebellion, revenge, and maintaining civilization infrastructure)

Thanks! No one ever tackled it with a utilitarian aspect before (I keep avoiding it myself)! What I like about the more in depth (logical) solution of yours is that even considering conception works, however extra effort needs to go towards how to handle the eventual birth of the first child in these dire circumstances at month 10 (given no preemies).

Anyways, I refuse that method for my own means. I intend to find a solution to save everyone. This really does help to cover those bases. Thanks!

[Guest]

let's take two scenarios and see if you can find a difference between them.

scenario 1: a train is heading toward a crossing at too high a speed to stop, and its heading for a group of 5 people. there is a switch however available that will change the course of the train such that it will only kill 1 person. should you flip the switch?

most people agree that yes, you should flip the switch.

scenario 2: five people are in need of transplants in order to live. there is a perfectly healthy person in the waiting room. should we let the doctor kill the healthy person in order that the 5 may live?

here, near everyone agrees the answer should be no.

so the question is, what's fundamentally different about the two scenarios?

to me it boils down to how you value life and what you would want to choose for yourself in the scenario. in the first scenario, people picture themselves as the lone person, and see the necessity of choosing to kill them over killing the 5. however, in the second scenario. there is no good reason to pick them over someone else. the result is that people feel that when you can pick the sole person to be killed, you should probably let the 5 die. however when you have no choice other than 1 particular person or 5 people, the 5 should live.

[Guest]

let's take two scenarios and see if you can find a difference between them.

scenario 1: a train is heading toward a crossing at too high a speed to stop, and its heading for a group of 5 people. there is a switch however available that will change the course of the train such that it will only kill 1 person. should you flip the switch?

most people agree that yes, you should flip the switch.

scenario 2: five people are in need of transplants in order to live. there is a perfectly healthy person in the waiting room. should we let the doctor kill the healthy person in order that the 5 may live?

here, near everyone agrees the answer should be no.

so the question is, what's fundamentally different about the two scenarios?

to me it boils down to how you value life and what you would want to choose for yourself in the scenario. in the first scenario, people picture themselves as the lone person, and see the necessity of choosing to kill them over killing the 5. however, in the second scenario. there is no good reason to pick them over someone else. the result is that people feel that when you can pick the sole person to be killed, you should probably let the 5 die. however when you have no choice other than 1 particular person or 5 people, the 5 should live.

agency. In the case of the train there is only one agent. That agent has the power to minimize the loss of human life. In the case of the transplants the doctor would be removing or denying the agency of the healthy person. Taking someone's agency is considered to be more repugnant by many than allowing multiple people to die.

Point of clarification:

Does the brain eaten need to be from a living uninfected human?

Edited August 11, 2009 by Semper Rideo