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The Trolley Problem


cp1213

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I'm sure most of you guys have heard of the trolley problem before, but for those who don't know, I'll just summarize.

You are in a trolley that is about to run over five people, but you can switch to the other track that only has one person there.  Would you push the lever to kill one person but save five?

To make things more interesting, let's alter the question a bit:

If the person on the other track is your loved one, would you still push the lever?

How about if there is a guy standing near the train track and you could push him off to stop the train? 

Lastly (this is my personal favorite question by the way), if you sacrifice your life to save six people from the trolley, would you do it? 

I would love to see your comments on this below. 

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FindingTheta

Definitely the self-sacrifice option. We don't always get to choose how we die, and we know it's inevitable. I think if my death meant doing the greatest amount of good for the most amount of people in that given moment I'd take it.

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RakshaTheCat

Will they try to socialize with me? If that's the case, I'll pick the option that kills the most 😸

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I’d tell them all to get off the track. No I wouldn’t sacrifice my life or the life of someone I loved just because a few dumbasses won’t get out of the way.

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RakshaTheCat

Could also go capitalist way, and save those who pay the most?

 

Or modern way, take out phone and film whole thing, then try to monetize it by posting somewhere?

 

Or startup/entrepreneur way, make an app where people will vote online who should die, and become rich when facebook or google buys it?
 

So many possibilities, I begin to like this trolley problem 😸

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I’ve thinking about how honest I should be on and I decided to be completely truthful.

 

 I would sacrifice the one life for the other five, the loved one part doesn’t really apply to me since there isn’t anyone I feel particularly close to, I’d push the guy off without hesitation and I would totally sacrifice myself to stop the train it be my first choice between these options.

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4 hours ago, cp1213 said:

If the person on the other track is your loved one, would you still push the lever?

Nope. Would save the loved one,  and call paramedics in attempt to save the other 5 decapitated victims in vain. 

 

I'd then file a class action lawsuit for the trauma suffered and give all the money to the victims families due to the train operator's negligence. 

 

I'm not at fault for the deaths (since am not the one who put that death trap on tracks) and would absolve myself of any guilt as a result. 

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I wonder how many innocent people were executed after taking the Voight-Kampff test

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I wonder if you’d actually get in legal trouble for either pulling the lever or pushing the guy on the tracks, since at that point you’d be directly responsible for the resulting deaths. I’m not about to go to prison just to save more people.

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I personally won't care about anyone.

I mean hey in the time it'll take for the tram to run over 5 people, 15 more people will be made.

Also why aren't the emergency brakes working either?

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Ethics!!! This will be fun!

19 hours ago, cp1213 said:

Would you push the lever to kill one person but save five?

Yes, 5 > 1. I would really set the lever halfway so the train will derail at the turnout frog but whoever thought up the trolley problem in the first place didn't understand railway mechanics well.

19 hours ago, cp1213 said:

If the person on the other track is your loved one, would you still push the lever?

Why did you have to bring up this one? I would theoretically say yes, but in the middle of the practical scenario I probably would not. Again, if it was practical though I would set the lever halfway and make it derail at the frog.

19 hours ago, cp1213 said:

How about if there is a guy standing near the train track and you could push him off to stop the train? 

Yes, I would push him. I don't really subscribe to this notion of "fate was going to have those people die, you are not at fault if they die but you are at fault if you knowingly condemn someone to death by pushing them to stop the train". The fact is those people were going to die, one may say that I murdered one person, but I prevented five from dying. According to my basic knowledge of math 5 > 1, especially since there is no emotion involved in this scenario to make the calculation emotionally difficult. One human died instead of five died, seems like a positive. Sure, someone's life is cut tragically short, but they died (with a little help from me) to allow five others to not face the same tragic death.

19 hours ago, cp1213 said:

if you sacrifice your life to save six people from the trolley, would you do it? 

Yes, I would feel really bad if I did not. Unless there was something that made my life more valuable than those 6, which I cannot think of any reason for it to, 6 > 1. I would want someone to push me if they were there to.

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On 8/20/2019 at 10:45 PM, cp1213 said:

How about if there is a guy standing near the train track and you could push him off to stop the train

If this guy is big enough to stop a whole train with just his body, I highly doubt I could push him very far.

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Personally i would let fate decide, and leave me out of it, that way, you played no role in it.

 

This way you have a clear mind, and you played no role in choosing who should die. Someone you imply will die, but for me, just leave it down to fate.

 

This would be my answer.

 

Everyone dies, and you playing god, will not stop, the 5 dying, or that 1 dying, its only a question of when they die.

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17 minutes ago, CJN said:

Five isn't greater than one when it comes to human lives: every life is uniquely valuable in its own way and incommensurable.

 

As a moral agent no-one should ever attempt to place a value on a life.

You are correct that life is hard or impossible to value, hence why there is no equation of life to money, but although each life is different there is equality. If humans are equal or even just roughly equal we can equate life to life. We must value life like this because there are decisions when people must die, if we said there is no way to equate life to life then not only are we unable to respond when push comes to shove, we will have also thrown the ideal of human equality under the bus in favor of this idea that all are different to the extent that each human must be judged differently. People, including yourself, might claim this is a manifestation of diversity, but it kills equality. Such ideas could have far-reaching consequences since philosophical theories need to be free of hypocrisy or conflicting ideas to be stable theories, meaning any idea of equality is either removed or severely limited.

 

Yes we are all different, but we are more the same than we are different. When equality is slaughtered, be it for personal gain or because of misguided claims of diversity, inequality and injustice will reign.

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Would you sacrifice a child to save the harvest? Preventing a famine may save many lives, but there will still be innocent blood on your hands. Actively interfering in the fates is, in my opinion, only acceptable if no innocents suffer from your choice. So no, I wouldn't push the lever. Would I sacrifice my own life? I would like to think yes. My courage has not been tested to that extent, however, so I wouldn't know.

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2 hours ago, CJN said:

You have misunderstood me. Lives are incommensurable, which is not to say that equal consideration (human, political and legal rights for example) for each life is not morally and ethically desirable.

I apologize for any misunderstanding on my part. I am curious though, if you say lives are incommensurable, which means they have, "no common standard of measurement." (the definition of incommensurable) then by definition is it not impossible for one to also hold, at the same time, equal consideration? Equality is by its nature a common measurement.

 

Like I said before, I agree that one should not value lives based solely off numbers since then there are those who will attempt to value human lives in terms of money which is ethically perverse. But if lives deserve equal consideration as lives, which you agree too, then wouldn't that indicate you can value a life in terms of another life given the lack of direct knowledge of the people involved?

 

Certainly I do not want people to die in the Trolley Problem, but the fact is either 5 die or 1 die, since there is a measure of equality between humans it seems logical to me to pick the least-bad option. There is no good option in the Trolley Problem, only degrees of badness.

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InDefenseOfPOMO
On 8/20/2019 at 10:45 PM, cp1213 said:

I'm sure most of you guys have heard of the trolley problem before, but for those who don't know, I'll just summarize.

You are in a trolley that is about to run over five people, but you can switch to the other track that only has one person there.  Would you push the lever to kill one person but save five?

To make things more interesting, let's alter the question a bit:

If the person on the other track is your loved one, would you still push the lever?

How about if there is a guy standing near the train track and you could push him off to stop the train? 

Lastly (this is my personal favorite question by the way), if you sacrifice your life to save six people from the trolley, would you do it? 

I would love to see your comments on this below. 

 

Is the question what would I do or what should I do?

 

I do not know what I would do. I am not a billiard ball in a physics lab. We do not yet have the ability to reliably predict human behavior in general, let alone the behavior of a unique individual, under conditions as specific as the ones you give.

 

It is not worth trying to answer what I should do in a fictional scenario. Prescriptive ethics should be constructed with real life in mind, not fictional scenarios. Maybe the only thing more annoying than the problems made up for math textbooks are the fictional scenarios people come up with in ethical theory.

 

If you are a utilitarian how do you know in advance what you should do anyway? These fictional scenarios assume that one will only have certain information, but what is the probability that he/she will end up with exactly that information--and only that information--under those exact conditions/circumstances?

 

How about we decide what to do with the information we actually have under the conditions/circumstances we actually find ourselves in rather than trying to follow a script? Trying to follow a script will most likely be disastrous. Even when doing things like providing first aid to someone who has been injured or who suddenly has a life-threatening condition one must think and react on his/her feet. The script may say to first call 911, but that does not mean you should spend 5 minutes looking for a phone! If you spend 5 minutes looking for a phone rather than go ahead and perform CPR because the script says first call 911, the person you are trying to save will likely die. Trying to script what one ought to do with the "Trolley Problem" is no less absurd.

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One of the basic problems with the trolley problem is that it assumes prefect knowledge that doesn't exist in real life.  Too often the "greater good" is used to justify evil actions, when "greater good" was not actually defined.

 

I also think its difficult to know how anyone would actually react when it came down to it. We imagine ourselves doing the noble thing - easy to say when sitting in front of a computer, less easy when trying to get out of a burning airplane. 

 

 

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Thanks for all the responses so far! I can't believe that so many of you post on here. 

 

Here's my take on the trolley problem:

You are in a trolley that is about to run over five people, but you can switch to the other track that only has one person there.  Would you push the lever to kill one person but save five?

I would, but I might freeze if the situation actually happens. 

 

If the person on the other track is your loved one, would you still push the lever?

I would still do it. If I saved them, they won't be happy with me that I indirectly killed five people and I would live with that guilt for the rest of my life.

 

How about if there is a guy standing near the train track and you could push him off to stop the train? 

I would ask the person first if they are ok with sacrificing themselves to save six people. If they aren't, I won't push them because it's a major decision to sacrifice your life and I don't want to interfere. 

 

Lastly (this is my personal favorite question by the way), if you sacrifice your life to save six people from the trolley, would you do it? 

I would, but I don't really know if I'm brave enough to do it. It's definitely better than pushing someone to stop the train. 

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On 8/22/2019 at 5:23 PM, InDefenseOfPOMO said:

 

Is the question what would I do or what should I do?

 

I do not know what I would do. I am not a billiard ball in a physics lab. We do not yet have the ability to reliably predict human behavior in general, let alone the behavior of a unique individual, under conditions as specific as the ones you give.

 

It is not worth trying to answer what I should do in a fictional scenario. Prescriptive ethics should be constructed with real life in mind, not fictional scenarios. Maybe the only thing more annoying than the problems made up for math textbooks are the fictional scenarios people come up with in ethical theory.

 

If you are a utilitarian how do you know in advance what you should do anyway? These fictional scenarios assume that one will only have certain information, but what is the probability that he/she will end up with exactly that information--and only that information--under those exact conditions/circumstances?

 

How about we decide what to do with the information we actually have under the conditions/circumstances we actually find ourselves in rather than trying to follow a script? Trying to follow a script will most likely be disastrous. Even when doing things like providing first aid to someone who has been injured or who suddenly has a life-threatening condition one must think and react on his/her feet. The script may say to first call 911, but that does not mean you should spend 5 minutes looking for a phone! If you spend 5 minutes looking for a phone rather than go ahead and perform CPR because the script says first call 911, the person you are trying to save will likely die. Trying to script what one ought to do with the "Trolley Problem" is no less absurd.

You are right that the trolley problem wouldn't happen in real life because there are too many variables  that there couldn't be the exact circumstances happening; the train would probably have emergency breaks or the workers would hear the train coming. If it does happen, there are probably more options than choosing to switch the lever to kill one or five people. However, I think the trolley problem would be useful for program self-driving cars to decide if the breaks unexpectedly stopped working to decide, as a last resort, to whether hit 5 people in front of it or swerving to hit another person instead. 

Also, for your information, people had already recreated the trolley problem in real life as an experiment to see how people would react to the situation. Here's the link to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA. The results were certainly interesting. 

 

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First off, is there some reason they and I can't get off the train? Because if not, im jumping off the train, and yelling at the people down the way. 

 

However assuming we are all chained in place and there are no emergency brakes here are my answers. Full honesty.

On 8/20/2019 at 10:45 PM, cp1213 said:

You are in a trolley that is about to run over five people, but you can switch to the other track that only has one person there.  Would you push the lever to kill one person but save five?

Yes, killing one person is better than killing five.

On 8/20/2019 at 10:45 PM, cp1213 said:

If the person on the other track is your loved one, would you still push the lever?

No way, I don't kill the people I love. Those five people are going to die.

 

On 8/20/2019 at 10:45 PM, cp1213 said:

How about if there is a guy standing near the train track and you could push him off to stop the train? 

If there was time I would probably ask their opinion, but if not then yes I would push them. Killing one person is better than five, once again. 

On 8/20/2019 at 10:45 PM, cp1213 said:

Lastly (this is my personal favorite question by the way), if you sacrifice your life to save six people from the trolley, would you do it? 

(Full Honesty) No, I wouldn't kill myself for 6 other people, also this is the weirdest one. How does killing yourself stop the train? Also how would you kill yourself. If your on a train overpass you can jump, but that shouldn't stop the train. The only way this works is if someone in the back has access to the emergency break and promises to stop the train if you jump off. Which I wouldn't do because I have no way of knowing if this person will actually stop the train or if they are just saying they will for kicks. 

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Star trek had a thing kind of like this. Tarsus IV. A fungus broke out in the grain and killed off a lot of it. Instead of calling for help or increasing hunting parties or anything, the bat-shit insane govoner decided the only way to survive was to kill off half of the people in the colony. He choose 4000 people to die, based on their "worth." In the end most of the colony died, because it fell to in fighting and destroyed itself. 

 

The problem with the trolley problem is it will always be affected by personal feelings. If its a racist on the train and its one white person vs five black people then they are going to kill the five people. Even in the case of someone with no biases, it will still be changed by things like loving someone or self-preservation or willingness to personally kill someone.  

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