Ethics of Collateral Damage | Philosophy Tube

1. 

   @rekall76

   October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

   well well well… it's the trolley problem all the way down, innit?

2. 

   @Ulitemyfyre

   October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

   The DDE is against sadism

3. 

   @theraylee4936

   October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

   This feels like we need to know the difference between manslaughter and murder

4. 

   @elisecode2212

   October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

   i'm the least sophisticated pacifist–this is my statement: i don't think war is ok.

5. 

   @elisecode2212

   October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

   "[dying is] an unfortunate side effect of having all your organs removed" lmao

6. 

   @goshohgosh4568

   October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

   I expected more antivaxers kn the comments

7. 

   @arthur-wf7mu

   October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

   my reason for self defence would be staying alive

8. 

   @alessandrogiovannone3742

   October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

   My god, do people actually think like this?

9. 

   @visamap

   October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

   Thank u all .

10. 

    @darenallisonyoung8568

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    I hear Jainism perking up and saying, "What's that? Is someone playing in our playground?"

11. 

    @trishtrash9339

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    Consent

12. 

    @phantomblot6072

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    This DDE seems like bs, because it could justify anything. Effects are equally bad or good whether they are intended or not. Good outcomes don't neutralize bad outcomes and the ends don't justify the means.

13. 

    @Djegosandra

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    In the case of the doctor it is not intent what counts but consent. Forced vaccination or treatment of any kind is morally inacceptable. In Germany a patient can refuse blood transfer or artificial nutrition (an elderly neighbour did both just recently which was fatal due to gastric cancer) and anything else would be wrong. It is even heavily debated if unvaccinated children can be leagally barred from public services like kindergarten. November 2019 the vaccination against measles became mandatory for childcare and schools and in combination with compulsory school attendance for all children Germany has de facto compulsory vaccination which is made possible by the Infection Protection Act which explicitly makes exemptions to the constitutional right of physical integrity. I read that as "all unconsented damage is bad". I'm uncertain if there is passive consent, e. g. if I attack someone with the intent to cause damage I consent to being damaged myself because I have to acknowledge their right of physical integrity and expect them to protect this right by the use of appropriate force. In Gemrany you can't use just any means to defend yourself. Stabbing someone who attacked you with bare hands can bring you into trouble and continued violence against a repelled aggressor surely does. Regardless, it is questionable if self defence entails the intent to hurt. You shouldn't intent to damage someone when defending yourself, but to protect yourself from inflicted damage on your person. If you attended a course and could disarm and detend somebody with little to no injury you're obliged to do so. Somebody less proficient will be granted harsher means to achive this. Even as a police officer you can't just shoot at somebody as long as there are other means like a taser or mace to resort to first. German constitution is very strict when it comes to basic rights and grants them to everyone, even criminals and moral wrongdoers and limiting those rights is always a big deal, even when they intend to protect the population.

14. 

    @whoised603

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    It appears that the BLM protests may have failed to consider the DDE as well.

15. 

    @marko112kg

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    I smell a Star Trek TOS episode

16. 

    @some_url

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    I really enjoyed this episode, and I would love to see more examination of harm in the future if possible, especially because I think the question is at the core of the Libertarian/Ancap ideology.

17. 

    @firstlast-cs6eg

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    . This whole premise is super bad. You are knocking down a total strawman. Like let's say you want to demolish a building, there are lots of people in the building who will die if you do so. You don't intend to kill those people, you are fine if the building was empty too, but you want to blow it up now. So this DDE crap would postulate it's fine to blow up the building with people in it. It's all based on internal intent too, I want to do some target practice, on the middle of a busy street, I'm not intending to hit anyone, in fact the people are nice obstacles I got to carefully shoot around. So I'll start firing through a crowd without warning.

    Foreseen harm is the same as intended harm. Now there is a difference between certain harm and harm of different probability. Like driving is a potential harm, but even though that harm is way more than minimal, it's still significantly less than certain. Now say a blind elderly person with narcolepsy decides to drive fast through busy roads, that's different. The general degree of probability could be said to change it's general morale effect. So doing something that you believe has a 50% chance of killing someone has 50% of the morale weight compared to 99.9% chance like shooting someone three times in the head. If the risk is minimal enough, it is deemed inconsequential for purpose of morality, by many, depending on what we are talking about.
    And what you intend is irrelevant, you intend all effects you can reasonably predict. You throw a grenade, or say a firecracker, in a crowd, it doesn't matter if you never intended to hurt anyone, or claim to. You really intend to hurt people no matter what internal desires you have by knowing that harm is the likely outcome.

    A separate issue is are some harms worth the greater goal. How much are means worth the ends. But that is a completely different topic! So the answers to your BS questions wouldn't effect much of anything.

    Again, the premise as you stated is super bad. Who the hell thinks like this? No one I've heard of. Some of your philosophy is good but some of your videos just fail so bad. I get sick of the really crappy ones like this, I think I'll just tell Youtube stop recommending your channel. If you were to personally respond, I'd reconsider, but I doubt you would. You can only respond to so many, assuming you even read much of your comments. And a video like this is is especially unlikely being 4 years old. Besides I didn't get replies to my comments on your other bad philosophy videos either.

18. 

    @bennie_bee

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    Superhero movies are blatantly undemocratic and pro-inequality, I gotta say.

19. 

    @deadinside8584

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    It all comes down to intention! Doing bad shit on purpose is evil ! What the fuck is there to mull over??😘

20. 

    @MyMusics101

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    I think there are consequentialist differencea between the you-needlestab-me and the doctor-needlestabs-me scenario. Consider the effect of the vaccine, the pain caused by the needle, the slighy chance of the wound being infected etc. to be the consequences of the respective actions.
    If you stab me with a needle, the consequences will (likely) be different – I won't get the positive health effects (–> increased immunity), but the bad ones (–> pain, chance of infection). This is not even considering the fact that you're not a doctor (–> increased health risk of you performing the procedure), my unwillingness for you to perform it due to aforementioned reasons (–> psychological stress, violation of my rights since I didn't explicitly waive them).
    So, just from a consequentialist point of view, I wouldn't say these are morally equal situations, independent of the intent of the people performing the same actions.

    In fact, generally speaking – when you are in a situation where this distinction becomes relevant, the consequences probably differ quite a bit. When one of the intended effects is harm, then the action's sum of consequences will probably be worse than when the harm is a predictable side-effect. That's because we (generally) wouldn't do the harmful action if we didn't think situation we would arrive in would be likely more preferable than if we did nothing. However, when choosing to do a more or less equal action with the intent to harm, we willfully steer the future possible worlds in a direction that has a more negative value for the people we harm. This means that this situation would be, in general, less preferable (always considering all affected people's perspectives, of course. Something bad I do, but which I like doing doesn't make the action morally good).

21. 

    @entrainson7208

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    This depends on the ethics of knowing or predicting. Foreseen harm is an epistemic issue. Thus, whether or not foreseen harm is just as bad intended harm depends on whether there is a moral status on knowing or predicting things.

22. 

    @heinz091

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    Is the DDE a convoluted proof by negation? From this discussion of the DDE it seems clear that saying "this harm is a side effect of what I want to do and therefore better than if it was my sole goal" is insufficient. If so, is it really what's used in government or is there a different, maybe more nuanced form? If not, what am I missing?

    (Always fun checking out old Ollie videos)

23. 

    @chair547

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    I don't think it's self-defense problem for civically as a problem. I think that killing someone in self-defense is foreseeing rather than intended harm. Your goal when you kill someone in self-defense is not to kill them, your goal is to stay alive and them dying just happens to be an unfortunate side effect of that

24. 

    @icannotchoose

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    I'm not concerned with intentions or responsibility, merely actions and their consequences. The "Moral Goal" is merely an abstraction, something chosen by a society or an individual, similar to the words we use or the concept of value.

    My Moral Goal is to maximize cumulative happiness for those who are currently alive and aware, with weight given to an even distribution of joy. We could measure this in terms of years lived and also the quality of that life, compared to their baseline.

    Thus, if building the road made access to needs and opportunities easier and gave drivers more time to enjoy their day and reduced carbon emissions by shortening commute times, then it could be worth it in comparison to the number of car crashes directly caused by its making.

    By extension, if a bike lane had the same benefits as the road, but even lower emissions and fewer people died, then that would be a better alternative.

25. 

    @robertreibold9213

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    As a Guinea Pig Solution it's a Good Harm to Share with Other for Scientific Research Engineering

26. 

    @JudgeSabo

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    This misrepresents the Doctrine of Double Effect. The DDE was explicitly formulated originally to analyze things like self-defense (see Thomas Aquinas), nor does it say that all unintended harms are okay. Situations like the surgeon example or the trolley problem was literally first introduced in philosophical discussions in Phillipa Foot's analysis of how the DDE helps us in these situations.

27. 

    @diablominero

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    Some actions you do successfully by attempting to do them, barring some unusual situation where an external influence stops you. The most obvious is promising. If you try to promise something, then you have given your word unless something prevents you from speaking. I would argue that being immoral is one of those. Simply by attempting to behave in an immoral way, the actions you end up taking become immoral, even if they have cool consequences.

28. 

    @umpqua-4freedom436

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    To Politicians like Hitlery Clinton and John Brennan, 1000 people dying as collateral damage to kill one of their enemies who is going to expose them…that is ok. Planes and busses full of people…or whole towns of people…they could care less if it ENRICHES THEM.

29. 

    @jacobcrx

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    I liked that you quoted Kagan. He's my favorite read rn

30. 

    @grmpEqweer

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    Innocent people always die in war, this is how war works. Lots and lots of innocent people.

    This is what you order when you advocate for sending in the U.S. or U.K. military to "free" a country.

    You are advocating for the deaths of a multitude of citizens of some other country for a cause you have chosen…not leaving that choice up to them.

    And unless you're a military member, not putting your own life on the line.

31. 

    @finslimes

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    I think the lines between intended harms and foreseen harms are more blurred. Like your example with self defense being an intended harm, the intent of that action is not to harm another but to defend the self, therefore depending on how you view it this example could be a foreseen harm. I dont think the distinction between intended harms and foreseen harms is even necessarily useful and they could be regarded the same way.

32. 

    @comradegarrett1202

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    4:50 Olly called me clever 😀

33. 

    @palsinaaer

    October 31, 2025 at 10:30 am

    intended harm is worse because it violates the social contract. when a person drives a car, they accept that the may accidentally hit (and possibly) someone. when a pedestrian crosses the street, they accept a risk that they may accidentally be hit. what we don't accept is the idea that the people around us mean to deliberately hurt us- because that would make living together in society impossible. intended harm undermines the trust at the foundation of sociality.

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