 Hey everyone it's MJ and welcome to the actuarial podcast. In this episode we are discussing ethics and uncertainty. So I'm going to be talking about a classic thought experiment and then give it a little bit of a twist by introducing uncertainty and I want to see if this introduction of chance changes our moral decisions. Now ethics is an actuarial subject but we only cover it much later in the studies and no exam is based on it but this doesn't mean it's not important. Look once again death is mentioned in this podcast and it is meant for a mature audience although I'm hoping it's going to be fun as we will be considering the ethics of Captain America and Thanos. But let's start with the classic thought experiment that my lecturer asked us in our honours year. He said that we are on a train and we're about to ride over and kill five people stuck on the track. I know it's horrible it's horrible but there is a lever. If you pull it the train will move onto another track where only one person is stuck and the train will kill them. I know also a bad situation but time is running out. Do you pull the lever? Now to my shock and horror I was the only student who didn't want to pull the lever. Everyone had a simple reason they said five lives are worth more than one and at the surface this sounds rational and I was mocked for not pulling the lever and I've spoken to other friends about this thought experiment and some have even suggested that I'm a psychopath. So for this reason I thought I should defend my position and try to show that everybody else is wrong. I mean for one thing I reject the statement that five lives are worth more than one. To me life is non-fungible meaning each life is unique and so multi-dimensional that it's impossible to consistently compare them. And I illustrate this point by flavouring that thought experiment. What if the five people were notorious pedophiles and the one person on the other side was your mother? Would you still pull the lever? No one does and they don't enjoy it when I point out the inconsistencies in their morality. No longer are they being utilitarian. Instead they are being biased and judgmental and so they have to give up their argument that five lives are worth more than one. But I can also break their utilitarian view when I frame the thought experiment from a different perspective. What if you are at a hospital and you see five people dying from various organ failure? A healthy person walks in and you know that you can harvest that person's organs and save the other five. Do you kill him? Not many of my friends want to now sacrifice the one life for the other five. The reasons they give me are interesting because of their variety but the point stands that their utilitarian position changes and they change to the Kantian deontological position. Kant believed to some extent that every human being isn't ending themselves. A basic moral unit due to basic moral considerations not a means to the others ends. Kant said that you should act towards others only in a way that you would be willing to make a universal principle for all moral beings. Look Jesus says it more eloquently, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. So you don't want to make sacrifice others for the greater good a universal principle as someone might want to sacrifice you for some greater good. Now the movie Hot Fuzz shows how absurd utilitarian view is. In this movie a little village in England justifies their killing of beggars and vandals because by doing so they can win best village of the year. So their sins are justified because of the greater good. But now speaking about movies and spoiler alert for those of you who haven't watched Infinity War because I want to talk about it because in this movie we see Captain America, the good guy take up a Kantian position and Thanos the bad guy take up a utilitarian position. So Thanos wants to kill half the population to save the other half. He wants to restore balance. So in order to kill half the world he needs some of these things called infinity stones and the one infinity stone is inside the head of this red guy called vision. So some of the Avengers say that they should quickly destroy the stone even if it means killing vision so that Thanos can't carry out his plan. Captain America famously says we don't trade lives and refuses to kill one person to save half the world. Like this is where spoiler alert comes in Thanos gets the stones kills half the world including the red guy called vision. Now did Captain America make the right ethical decision? If you were Captain America what would you have done? Because people saw the devastation of Thanos and they saw their favorite heroes die they cursed Captain America and my friends say that they would have killed vision to save half the world from the horrible Thanos. But this is ironic if Thanos is wrong for killing the world or half the world to save the other half why are you right for killing one to save the half that Thanos wanted to kill? Yes the numbers are different but both are utilitarian positions both think it's right to kill innocent in order to save others in which case you shouldn't kill vision because you either agree with Thanos's plan or you agree that or you disagree and say that killing is wrong. So either way killing vision is morally inconsistent but let me illustrate this by asking another question and I pose this to my friends I say suppose you are Elon Musk okay Elon Musk and you've got a space shuttle returning from Mars on board you have two astronauts but because you've been so busy building Tesla you forgot to pack enough food for both astronauts do you give the order to give all the food to one astronaut and starve the other or do you let them share but then according to your calculations they both die most of my friends say you choose to save one astronaut after all one survivor is better than two dead well this is the same thinking of Thanos you can't starve the one astronaut but then say Thanos is wrong if you're doing that you're morally inconsistent and that means you aren't thinking properly now people don't like it when I tell them this and they protest and say Thanos is wrong because there must be another way I tell them that Thanos has all the infinity stones so he knows everything and this is the only way to save humanity again they say no there must be another way now this starts standing out to me there must be another way because this is how I would respond on the thought experiment train it's not that I would do nothing and just let five people die I'd look for a break or some other way to save the people but I would never consider the trading lives option Captain America probably had the same mindset there must be another way in fact we see most superheroes take this approach and down to sheer luck they're able to save the day without having to sacrifice anybody else but maybe this is what's happening with other thought experiments like for instance that that one in the hospital do you kill the healthy person to save the other five people say no and I've realized that it's not the same as the train you know with the train experiment people indirectly assumed a deterministic outcome yet with the hospital experiment people don't make this assumption they are thinking there must be another way remember I said they were giving me a variety of different reasons well they were saying maybe we can give the sick people medication or maybe we can harvest organs from someone else who is already dead and I'm thinking could this assumption around probability and uncertainty be the key to our morality I decided to test this on a new group of friends so once again I presented them with the classic thought experiment and once again they all want to pull the lever to save the five at the expense of the one this time however I take a different approach to show them that the utilitarian position is on shaky grounds I say what if there is a break on the train but it only has a 50% chance of stopping the train before it kills the five people I provided them with another way do you pull the break or do you pull the lever most of them pull the break and I asked them why they say because there is a chance of the best case scenario where no one dies but I challenge them and I say 50 times five is 2.5 therefore there's an expected value of 2.5 people dying by pulling the break and only an expected value of one person dying by pulling the lever so based on the utilitarian principle you should pull the lever and not the break yet even when I point this out to them they still choose to pull the break what we are seeing is that in a deterministic reality people tend to be utilitarian as soon as we add uncertainty people tend towards can's position but why is it because uncertainty introduces hope and we are naturally optimistic is it because uncertainty removes responsibility and the guilt that comes from a negative experiment it's the breaks fault those people were unlucky I'm not to blame captain America believed he had a chance of saving everyone and therefore chose not to sacrifice vision Thanos believed there was no other way the infinity stones had given him deterministic slight and therefore he act in the utilitarian way but how much uncertainty is needed to change us from utilitarian to cantian if the break only has a 1% chance of saving the five lives would you still pull it what if the chance of the break working is unknown and that's what we see in life in life we don't know probabilities we can only estimate them there is always room for error actuarial science has taught me that nothing is certain not even that very statement yes some things are very likely to occur like the sun rising tomorrow and some things are very unlikely to occur we all get hit by some strange gamma rays and wake up as magical unicorns but nothing is impossible not even the magical unicorn thing and this this view is in direct contrast to determinism which says everything has a set path and if you know everything uncertainty would cease to exist as chance is an illusion caused by ignorance but could it be that ethics under the same set of assumptions always converges could it be that ethical differences is down to different views on reality determinism versus uncertainty i googled ethics uncertainty and came across a paper called the ethics of uncertainty by christoph tannett and it's been cited 130 times yet i started reading it and i disagreed with the opening sentence tannett says uncertainty touches most aspects of life rubbish uncertainty touches all aspects of life but uncertainty is a difficult concept to comprehend and so we simplify life by pretending it's not there for instance many of you still think that the time it takes for the earth to rotate is a constant variable we say differences from the rules are observation errors but variation exists everywhere yes it is sometimes small and insignificant but don't pretend it's not there the time it takes for the earth to rotate is a random variable but you have to go into the milliseconds to see that but let's take a step back and ask ourselves why is it important that we understand the differences between a deterministic view and a view that incorporates uncertainty well maybe debates can be resolved quicker if people just took a step back and stated their assumptions that's quite a quite a tricky word to say sometimes if people took a step back and stated their assumptions upfront you know the issue might be a simple discrepancy there that has caused people to diverge into such different positions that they can no longer see eye to eye and we can see this in politics and even in actual science i mean actually is contrary to many beliefs we use more than just statistics and financial maths to get our job done we need discernment and judgment when it comes to designing medical aids pension schemes insurance products and investment funds and we don't design these things alone we're interacting with many different stakeholders and understanding people's different views on uncertainty and the assumptions that they use to base their arguments could go a long way in reducing conflict and help everyone get on the same page but let me end this podcast off with a very difficult ethical dilemma for you to think about okay hopefully none of you are in this situation but let's pretend that you are a natural consultant and you're called in to assist a large pharmaceutical company with their risk management they ask you to sign a non-disclosure agreement and they tell you that all the information you're about to see is highly confidential they tell you that they have a big problem and they will be releasing an official statement to the public tomorrow they've asked you to help mitigate the impact and estimate the damages because their problem is that one of their weight loss drugs is contaminated with poison this is bad this is bad but you go to the bathroom when your mother calls you she tells you that her and her friends are going to start taking the same weight loss drug tonight before they start book club you know your mom cannot keep a secret and that her best friend is a hedge fund manager who is famous for shorting shares what do you do if you know for certain that the poison pool is guaranteed to kill her and all her friends as soon as they take it what do you do if you know that there's just a tiny chance that the poison pool will kill her and all her friends the night that they take it remember if you say something you can lose your professional status be sued by the pharmaceutical company for every cent you own and go to prison for inside of trading let me know what you would do in the comment section below good luck