Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The five people are regular folks, but the obese person on the bridge is a con-
victed murderer? Do you now feel better about using him as a trolley-stopper?
The person on the siding is a prodigious and talented artist—Mozart, for example.
Do you now feel worse about silencing him forever?
By personalizing the potential victims somewhat, we have made the decision
more complicated. We are now including factors that aren't as simple as raw math-
ematics (e.g., five is greater than one) and further distorting the already confusing
issues of morality (e.g., a intentional victim vs. an unfortunate bystander). Yet, to
make a decision, these are factors that we must consider, and to consider these fac-
tors, we need to quantify them in some way.
Bentham's hedonic calculus can provide some support in this effort. However,
it can only go so far as to identify that we
should
consider certain factors. It doesn't
offer guidelines as to the exact weight that we should put on those factors. For
example, citing the “duration� rule, Bentham may have suggested that the life of a
healthy young person is more valuable than the lives of five people who are likely
to die soon. One method of scoring this factor would be to count the years. If the
one person likely has 50 more years of life left and the five people likely have only
one year each, then we would be more inclined to save the young person. Although
saving five lives is greater than saving one, saving 50 years of life is greater than
saving only five. Of course, there is the possibility that the young person may
not
live for 50 years. But that is how actuaries make their money.
And what about the lives that would be touched indirectly? Assume that each
person has the same number of family members who would grieve their loss.
Assume as well that grief lasts for one year. If we let the one person die, a small
circle of people will grieve. By letting five people die, we would be causing great
emotional trauma to
five times
as many people for a year each.
As we have discussed numerous times in the past few chapters, there are factors
that aren't quite as comparable. How much pleasure would the artist bring to how
many people? If the artist (such as Mozart) has the capacity to “touch� millions of
lives for hundreds of years, is that worth sacrificing five otherwise nondescript
people? Certainly, purveyors of eugenics would claim that the artist's long-term
benefit to society outweighs the loss of the five “normal� people that the decision
would incur. Of course, extreme genius and talent often come packaged together
with mental illness. Does
that
change our position on saving the artist?
As we have suggested numerous times throughout this topic, deciding how to
assign utilities to all of these disparate factors is more art than science. More specif-
ically, it is an art that is often driven by the game scenario that we are trying to fill
out. Some aspects of decision making are more relevant in certain game genres or
