881–890 of 951 posts
Level 20 was weird. It was a choice between letting a trolley run as normal ("emits CO2, kills 3 people in accidents over 30 years") or running it into a brick wall and decommissioning it. For some reason more people picked the latter. So, they just dislike public transit? What about the emissions and death rate when everyone switches to cars instead? Goes to show how easily the context and exact wording of a questio…
Whether it's public or private property, the trolley is really not mine alone to destroy. We need to decide, together what to do with it. Maybe we could stop it, and put it in a museum. Maybe we could change its source of power and make it a green trolley. My feeling was, if I let the trolley go, it can be destroyed later. It will be harder to undo the decision to destroy it. Who knows, maybe the transportation capab…
If pulling the lever is going to kill someone, I never pull it. The only hard one is if pulling it will save my own life, I probably would in that case but it would be wrong. Pulling the lever makes you a murderer instead of a bystander.
> Pulling the lever makes you a murderer instead of a bystander. Ah that, I'm not too sure about. If you have the means to avert a disaster and divert the trolley but consciously choose not to do so, you'd be a murderer either way right? The baby question really hammered it home for me, most respondents chose to have the trolley kill the elderly people instead of diverting it to the baby. Sure, you stood by and did n…
1. The trolly problem, 5 v 1 with a lever.
2. The roller skater:
There's a trolly that's going to run over 5 people. Someone is skating next to the train tracks in enough pads that they would stop the trolly if they were on the tracks, do you push them into the trolly's way? Saving 5?
3. The brilliant doctor:
A brilliant doctor, on the cusp of a discovery that will save the lives of millions has a heart attack in the OR one night and needs an immediate heart transplant. Due to a contrived morality problem, you are locked in the hospital with no way to get a fresh heart delivered. In the room with you is a stranger who has the right blood type. Do you cut their throat and take their heart to save the doctor's life, guaranteeing that a million people will get life saving treatment over the next five years?
For me, once you get there to the end, it's obvious that it's not right for me to choose to end one person's life for the potential of saving others. Trying to add up lives on the balance of a scale is an impossible effort. Better not to kill anyone. I didn't tie anyone up on the tracks.
(I'm not a philosopher but I think that this is a Kant vs. Utilitarianism kind of argument, in the end.)
P.S. A friend of mine poses a different moral puzzle: You are walking by a pond and see a child starting to drown, do you jump in and save them?
There are people metaphorically drowning all around us and yet usually I do nothing. Maybe morality puzzles aren't that useful for navigating the real world.
I found myself following a heuristic that is basically Asimov's laws: - whenever possible, do no harm - do not let harm occur due to inaction - when given a choice, preserve the most amount of healthy lifespan in aggregate - higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters) - deferred consequence is better than immediate (since it opens the door to other later interventions) It kind of really bring…
> - higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters) Choosing between preserving the life of one cat vs one lobster seems straightforward enough. But the trolley problem was asking whether one cat was more valuable than five lobsters. According to the stats, many people agreed, but how about one cat vs a million lobsters? Or one cat vs all the lobsters on earth? Most people would think that making…
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Interestingly, I had almost the opposite reaction. In the absence of information, I don't know how these people got here or why. Maybe they're being executed as criminals, maybe they are suicide attempts, maybe they are truly heinous people in the hands of a Just God. But, I do know, if it's me on the track, I don't want to die. It's almost the only truly inarguable choice. With everything else, you think you know be…
I think you're mixing up two things: willingness to die, and the morality of the sacrifice. Most of us will be scared shitless if we were in that situation, and I'm pretty sure the majority (me included) will act as a coward. But nobody would blame them, because we all know we would likely have done the same. But on the other hand, we praise the heroes who sacrifice themselves because we recognize that they did the r…
From an ethical point of view, the biggest problem for me was when there were two bad choices to be weighted against each other, e.g. 1 person on a track dies against 5 persons on the other track. In most of these cases, I "did nothing" - because I don't want to play god and I knew where this leads: There are ethical edge cases that I definitly do not want to think about. I am not super convinced about this in hindsi…
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I did the problems under the assumption that "pulling the lever" was an act, while doing nothing was not acting. Implied legal (and moral) liabilities made a difference in my choices.
Legally perhaps, but morally, I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference. It's a binary decision with two outcomes, in my personal view it is irrelevant which of the outcomes is caused by physical action and which by inaction (at least, supposing that you have enough time to think about what to do - obviously, if you have to react in a split sec…
True. Yet some large subset of people seem to highly value plausible deniability in their own head - they fear more having to think about the one person they kill by pulling the lever vs. just feeling like they can ignore the 5 dead because they did nothing, expecting that they can say that they had nothing to do with it.
Also seems like they can't recognize the inherent limitations of the situation -someone's already dead,you're just trying to make a least-worst choice,and I've seen many who fail to recognize such situations and just think that a good option must be available when it isn't, and that delusion ends up causing the worst outcome.
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You're probably doing the local fauna a favour by eliminating the cat. The cat will kill other animals purely for amusement (by killing it and not eating it). It enjoys a longer lifespan than most local predators due to their proximity to humans that care about their well-fare, enabling them to kill more and for longer than any local predator. Stray cats are estimated to be the largest contributor to declining bird a…
> You're probably doing the local fauna a favour by eliminating the cat. One could have said the same thing when mammals appeared. Not to mention humans: "These human species will ruin the ecosystem. We better eliminate it now before it spreads". Said otherwise, you are thinking about the narrow interest of the day, without considering if the ideology makes sense in itself. > Nativism is the political policy of promo…
You're mistaking natural movements of species into new ecological systems with humans literally transplanting cats across the globe.
It's a fact that on some islands we settled, when we brought cats with us, those cats literally drove entire species of birds native to that island into extinction. The cats didn't walk across water or build ships to get there. They were brought there by humans and did what cats do.
This conversation is starting to get a bit absurd.
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There's a version of the problem that tries to highlight this: A runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workers who will all be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. Next to you is a stranger who happens to be very large. The only way to save the lives of the five workers is to push this stranger onto the tracks where his large body will stop the trolley. The stranger will die if you d…
To me, that version just highlights how far-fetched it is to actually find yourself in this situation with all the provided knowledge about the situation and confidence that you're not mistaken about or missing any important details.