@Foxi4 (Sorry, forgot to add your quote)
Wow, that's the first logical reply I've ever heard to that question, and made me think about my reply.
Let's try to address the first part of your comment talking about the embryos needing to be implanted first. All we'd have to do is adapt the hypothetical slightly to say that all the embryos were on a waiting list to be implanted that week. The hypothetical is there to say that the embryos are planned to be humans eventually. But in their current state, they are not.
And I agree, the decision would be emotional. You would see what you believe to be a human being, and choose it since you have that level of empathy for other human beings. The calculation of time lost doesn't really matter since it wouldn't be your own kid that you were saving, just some strangers kid. Similarly, instead of a child, if it were a dying man on the other end of the hallway, we would STILL go after the old man instead of taking the briefcase. Even if we were fairly certain he would still die by the time we got outside, he would be the priority.
You got a bit mixed up in that second part - I was contrasting two different problems, rather than providing an analogy. You’d go after the child or the old man in the fire scenario, yes - they’re fully grown human beings. They’re not potentially viable - they’re fully grown. You empathise with them more strongly because they’re human-shaped, they have a face, you identify them as kin. You don’t immediately identify vials as kin - that’s an intellectual determination, not an instinctive one. The point I was making with the trolley was that despite *generally* treating the value of life equally, there are other factors which affect our instinctive decision-making when under pressure. Some of them are reasonable and can be explained after the fact, others are unreasonable and entirely emotional. It’s just a hypothetical, a thought experiment. We can modify it further - what if this burning clinic exists in isolation, and there are no other humans alive? From the perspective of species preservation, the reasonable decision would be to save the genetically diverse embryos - saving the child would mean the death of the species in short order. This fact doesn’t change that instinctively you’d save the child - it’s a human child. It would take reason, and a dose of emotional detachment, to not save it. You can even do some role reversal - in that same isolated scenario, are you going to save a small, male child or a grown woman? Logically it should be the woman, for the same reason, but your heart will still lean towards the child because the child can’t help itself. You’d be compelled to leave the last viable woman on the planet to die, thus dooming the species to certain extinction. Does that make the value of the child’s life greater than the lives of anybody else in the example? Presumably not, so can we really argue that the decision is dictated by logic? It patently isn’t.
EDIT: I didn’t really mean “time lost” in the sense of time you lost raising the child - that’s personal, we’re approaching the problem with an impersonal lens. The child may very well be a stranger to us. When calculating damage of a given tragic event, statisticians sometimes deploy a special tool to calculate the negative effect. Let’s say you compare two diseases, and both killed an equal amount of people, let’s say 100. Looking at the death toll, the damage done is the same, but that’s not necessarily true. What you use to make this calculation is counting years of productivity lost - that gives you a better picture.
If one disease kills exclusively the elderly and the other kills exclusively young people, the one that kills young people is significantly more damaging, by the virtue of higher loss of productive years. An elderly person has very few or no productive years remaining - they do not contribute economically to society. Young people, say, 20-somethings, have a good 40-50 years of productivity to contribute. If a disease killed 100 80-year-olds then the productivity lost is zero and damage is negligible, besides obvious grief for the families. If 100 20-year-olds have died, you collectively lost 4000 productive years at minimum - that’s noticeable impact on society. I say it’s noticeable because those 100 20-somethings will not enter the workforce, will not procreate, will not contribute in taxation, so on and so forth. You can even extrapolate further - you can put a dollar amount to this figure. Let’s assume those 100 20-somethings worked minimum wage jobs ($7.25) and an average amount of hours (37.5, statistically). That’s 4000 years times 52 weeks a year times 37.5 hours a week times $7.25, equals $56,550,000 lost over lifetimes. That’s a chunk of change gone from the economy, permanently and irreversibly, and we’re not even accounting for their potential offspring.
I hope that clears up the “time lost” term. It’s not exactly a very “humane” way to look at things, but it demonstrates that despite killing the same amount of people, the loss isn’t equivalent due to other factors.
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