The solution is easy. Through a simple exercise of wu wei, I have saved all the lives by not opening the link.
Absurd Trolley Problems
711–720 of 951 posts
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference. By pulling the level, one is intentionally killing a person, to save five. In more general terms, a life is taken away for the greater good of society. A foundation of societies (modern ones, and I guess, some more than others) is that taking a life away has highly specific restrictions, which are us…
Wasn't the contract already broken when six people ended up tied to train tracks?
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#713Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is the responsibility. If you aren't willing to take over responsibility, it's better not to do anything. If you already have responsibility then it's a different matter.
The problem I have with the premise, is that as soon as you're standing next to the level, you're responsible. You had the opportunity to pull the lever, but didn't, which makes you responsible. Similarly, if you're diving a car and someone walks across the road in front of you, are you not responsible for their death if you choose not to step on the brakes? Does inaction relieve you of any responsibility?
> if you're diving a car
... then you accepted responsibility by getting in the driver's seat and taking control of the vehicle. In the case of the trolley, you are an onlooker.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did notice that. I'd pull the lever if I was the one on the tracks, since in that case I am not robbing someone else of their life through my decision - my life is my own to sacrifice. At that point it's best to save five. Then again, a sizeable minority wouldn't sacrifice their life savings for lives either, which means this portion of the respondents does not think the lives of strangers have value at all, or at…
Right now, non-hypothetically, would you be willing to donate your internal organs to those who will die without them, even if it meant you will not survive yourself?
Not right now, no. That would be terribly inconvenient.
Jokes aside, I'm aware of my own moral weakness in this regard. The religion I was raised in - and I'm still a spiritual person - holds that suicide is the gravest of sins, but I don't have that high an opinion of my own life and its potential. The closer I am to the situation, and the more urgent it is, the more tempted I am. So I try to stay aloof, for the sake of those who love me, and out of my own instinct of self-preservation, which is a powerful force in most human beings.
If your mind was exactly like mine, and you were close enough to the situation to make the decision to sacrifice someone else for a group of strangers - and being tied to the tracks is pretty damn close - you would likely be willing to sacrifice yourself. But remember, someone must have tied me to the tracks in the first place for my life to be in danger. As I said in previous comments, in most cases I am, though inaction or stalling, attempting to save the life of the single person in the tracks - the person in the same position. I will not kill to save others, and attempting to not kill myself to save others is consistent with this position.
I would be useless as a soldier!
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#715Earlier quoted context omitted.
What PII
Whenever you visit a web site, that's tied back to your device and your name / identity. Data brokers have browser fingerprints. You have lots of CDNs hosting content and third party cookies. You're not anonymous online anymore. Many "fun" surveys are built to help collect data to better profile you. There are many techniques here, from asking a mixture of innocuous and profiling questions, to looking for correlation…
Or people just didn't take the quiz seriously and clicked the joke options every time.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#716Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In real life scenarios there is a built in uncertainty with doing an action. Imagine a scenario where you redirect the trolley to kill someone but the people you wanted to save would have survived anyway.
You could imply that this uncertainty also exists in the trolly problem or you could imply that it does not exist there.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#717Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's interesting. I didn't consider any legal liabilities at all, and would easily break the law in order to sacrifice one person in trade for five people. I also didn't consider doing "nothing", not pulling the lever was also an act, and I didn't "see" any options doing nothing. Fun to see how differently people approach these ones :)
> [I] would easily break the law in order to sacrifice one person in trade for five people. This is a quite disturbing statement. So many psychopathic examples; If you were a doctor would you randomly kill healthy people with compatible organs to multiple patients? Or a researcher inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people to save millions later... In fact we could simplify your statement furt…
>In fact we could simplify your statement further; The ends always justify the means., and so endorsing all terrorism and war, even genocide; whenever the ends is enough peace to make a net positive
On the other hand, you seem to be arguing that the means justify the end. So you'd let all the terrorism and war, even genocide, go ahead if it took not having to stain your hands to stop it
On the killing 1 person to save 5 lives example, it seems like your answer is "I wouldn't do it", which for the people actually being killed is equivalent to killing 5 people to save 1 person ( but what really matters is that you weren't the one personally killing the 5 people )
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#718I think if you choose the option to kill 5 people 100 years from now, that 5 should not be part of your total kill count, because those people won't be dead for 100 years. In fact, it is possible you could commission a brick wall to be built somehow in front of the portal opening at the other end to divert the trolley in time, sparing those people, since the future (in my opinion) is not certain.
But what if in 100 years most of humanity dies, all that's left is a group of 5 survivors that took shelter in a trolley station. Then all of the sudden a trolley appears out of thin air and kills all 5 of them? You would be the man/woman that ended human race :)
Ya lays down yer money and ya takes yer chances.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#719Level 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…
> For some reason more people picked the latter. So, they just dislike public transit? I mean, it seems like it's the same trolley that have run over a lot of people for the previous 19 levels, why wouldn't I want to decommission such bloodthirsty trolley?
LMAO. That's a very simple and senseful answer I missed to think of.
Re: Absurd Trolley Problems
#720Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think like you until I learned about how ethical frameworks are different when you are being extorted. This trolley problem is a class of extortion because your choices are very limited and out of your control. For example, it wouldn’t be wrong if someone forced you to steal a package of bubblegum or else they would kill your family and you decided to steal the bubblegum instead of inaction. In this case, i…
That seems to assume that the action to save the mother is the assumed preferred outcome, and the one that would be chosen? I am saying that it isn't wrong to choose inaction, either.
It’s true it’s context dependent. E.g. the mother may only have 1 day of life remaining for other reasons, in which case saving the child might be preferred.