The Joker's Little Social Experiment: Cast Your Vote
In the new Batman movie, "The Dark Knight," Batman's nemesis is The Joker. Among the many jokes that he plays on the people of Gotham, the police and Batman is the wiring of two packed ferries with explosives. In one ferry are prisoners from the penitentiary, men who have been convicted of crimes and are doing time. In the other are citizens of Gotham, including the usual array of women, children, the elderly as well as men. As The Joker is not only fond of pranks, he also seems to be trying to show Batman that at the end of the day, people will choose survival at all costs, when faced with a choice of killing others or facing certain death themselves.
So, the ferry experiment of The Joker in the movie sets up this choice, as announced by The Joker to both groups on the ferries: each has the ability to blow up the other ferry, and the group that decides to do blow the other up first, will be spared. Of course, The Joker gives them a deadline.
Perhaps The Joker had read about the famous prisoner's dilemma game, and changed it (significantly, except for the association with prisoners) to suit his own purposes. Nevertheless, it poses a quandary, and ethics is famous for its quandaries. So let's have some fun at The Joker's expense.
You are on the citizen (and not the prisoner) ferry. How would you vote?
1. Blow up the ferry full of prisoners, because they are convicted criminals and thus less worthy.
2. Don't blow up the ferry full of prisoners, because there may be guards and others on the ferry who are not convicted criminals.
3. Blow up the ferry full of prisoners. Why do we need a reason? We don't have much time.
4. Don't blow up the ferry full of prisoners, because it is wrong to take the lives of others.
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Vote Count on The Joker's Little Social Experiment and More
The Joker's Little Social Experiment 'quiz' has been an exceptionally popular read on a2ethics.org. The invitation to cast a vote, given some choices about what should be done when faced with the prospect that you will die a certain death if you don't first kill other human beings faced with the same dilemma, has been well below any quorum for any meeting you can think of.
First, here are the straight results. Eleven readers thought it was simply wrong to kill another human being (even prisoners) and so opted to sit it out, sweating on the ferry until the midnight deadline The Joker gave was to run out. (They thought The Joker would keep his word I guess and not kill them regardless of what they did. Not The Joker's way.) Six people thought the ferry of prisoners should be blown up, because for them presumably the prisoners' lives didn't count as equally as the people in the other ferry, who presumably were 'innocents.' One person found the distinction between the prisoners and the guards on the ferry most important; so important that he or she chose to not blow up the prisoner ferry. And finally, three readers thought that the rush and urgency of time made it rather futile to come up with any reason at all for not choosing to blow up, again in this case, the prisoners' ferry. Thanks for voting. And for reading.
Ok, so let's continue what The Joker began. In the introduction to the quiz, I mentioned The Prisoner's Dilemma game, and perhaps The Joker's vague knowledge of it. I suspect The Joker was not thinking about this thought experiment and game at all...instead it may have been the moviemakers' inspiration. No matter.
What does matter is that we consider the ethics questions The Joker's experiment poses. One will do for now. To me, the experiment asks us to think about the comparative strengths of moral obligations.
So...do we have an obligation not to kill other human beings... "unless we have an even stronger obligation to do something that can't be done without killing other human beings?"
And does The Joker's experiment help us to respond to this question?
In the meantime, while you are thinking about your vote on this little question, consider checking out a very good introduction about the experiment that The Joker did not really use: The Prisoner's Dilemma. It is on the very useful website published in conjunction with the BBC News and the Open University in Britain: www.open2.net/historyandthearts/philosophy/prisoners-dilemma.html.
You can also play a simple version of The Prisoner's Dilemma Game by going to: www.open2.net/download/reith/playprisondilema.html
As you can imagine, there are many variations and twists we can take on The Joker's social experiment. And many philosophers before The Joker have. In the future, we plan to consider some of them. Two that come to mind are: "The Spelunkers and the Fat Man" and "The Girl Strapped to the Terrorist Tank." Both are my titles. (If you want to get the original sources go to the fun book, What If...Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy by Peg Tittle. That is where I first read them.)
Or for a preview on many of these variations and twists, you could just watch a season of the TV show..."24."