Thursday, April 2, 2009
Are Mathematics and Ethics Related???
I can't help but wonder if mathematics and ethics are interrelated. For example when leaders have to make decisions about certain life or death situations, if the death toll is about three people, it is "more moral" than say, a death toll of 1000 people. To me this is trying to quantify morality. So does ethics depend on mathematics? I personally don't have a stance on this issue but it just popped into my head and I wanted to get other opinions.
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2 comments:
Gartaa,
Sometimes statistics need to be used to evaluate ethical questions. For instance, how many road deaths are "acceptable" over a year? On the one hand, we are tempted to say that no death is acceptable, but in order to achieve this we would need infinite resources in order to improve the quality of the roads and vehicles, the training of the drivers, etc. So we are forced to accept some sort of compromise, trading death against cost.
It is a common saying that "you can't put a price on a human life", but that is precisely what economists do! Take this scenario for example. If pollution is measured in terms of lost wages due to the mortality and morbidity that it causes, then it makes sound economic sense to transfer the pollution to the country with the lowest wages. Let's dump all our toxic waste in the poorest country! The resultant clash of ethical and (crude) economic values is one of the sources of discord in the world (a link to the G20 in London, perhaps?). This scenario was actually outlined in a memo from the then president of the World Bank that was leaked to the press some years ago, so it's not entirely hypothetical.
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To get back to your post, I wonder if we can blame mathematics for these sorts of things, or whether it is we who are to blame for employing mathematical and quantitative techniques where they are not appropriate...
Just a postscript - we will also discuss a few well-known attempts to "tidy up" moral judgements when we come to focus on ethics as an area of knowledge. For example, utilititarian ideas about making and justifying judgements on the basis of the greatest happiness for the greatest number can result in trade-offs that involve numbers of deaths, etc. You could research this in advance of the lessons...
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