Trolley Problem.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:A runaway trolley is speeding down the tracks. If you do nothing, it will kill five workers. You the option to pull a lever, diverting the trolley onto another track where it will kill one person instead. Do you pull the lever ?
Why or why not ?

I turn around and walk away. I am not responsible for the 5 people's death. If I pull the lever, I am responsible for causing a person's death. I could live with the choice to do nothing and comfort myself by saying there was nothing I could do. I couldn't live with pulling the lever.

You absolutely are responsible for killing the 5 people.

In the immortal words of Neal Peart,

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice . . . I will choose a path that's clear, I will choose Freewill.

- "Freewill" by Rush

What kind of logic are you using?
Doing nothing in this case is not killing.
Death happened by accident not by pp.

Neither pulling the lever nor not pulling the lever is "killing," in the moral sense. All the deaths are by accident - there's a runaway trolley. None of it is on you. But absent any knowledge about the six people involved, choosing to let 5 people die instead of one is, in my mind, unquestionably evil.

Think of this variation. You have the same lever, and the same 6 people tied to the track. But there's a third position in the lever - the center position. If you push the lever to the left, the trolley kills 5 people. If you push it to the right, it kills one person. You HAVE to push it one way or the other. You have no choice. (If you prefer, assume that the entire earth would cease to exist, or explode, if you don't push the lever in one direction.) You don't know anything about any of the people.

You have to choose - does one person die, or do five people die? Unless you are a sociopath, you choose the one person. But that is exactly the same thing - you made the choice. Th is the part of this to which morality applies. Moving the lever is just implementation.

It’s not the same thing.
On the first case I am passive onlooker.
So, I let it happen.
On the second case I am driving the trolley so I will pick for less damage and go to the one person.
I make distinctions between active and passive participation.

As I said above, that is a distinction without a difference (an extraordinarily facile one at that), and one that is used solely to make yourself feel better. If your chief concern here is your own conscience, and not the four lives you have decided to sacrifice to assuage it, that says something about you. And it ain't good.

Put another way, since this is the Religion forum, if you are standing at the pearly gates with someone who did pull the lever, the Almighty is going to view them a lot more favorably than you. The person who was willing to make a very hard choice to save four lives, versus the person who was willing to - decided to - sacrifice four lives just so she could hang her hat on the "I am just a passive onlooker" facade. What a crock.

That’s why this isn’t a religion question. What would be your argument if the person is an atheist?

Have you not been paying attention? It's better for one person to die than 5.

You missed the point. If the argument above relies on standing before your God and being judged for what you do in the given scenario, how does that work for an atheist? On what would an atheist base their decision?

Religion can be part of someone’s answer but atheists can answer it as well. Philosophy Q, not religion.

DP
Most Atheists are playing the numbers game.
Yeah, kill one innocent person and save five.

[Anonymous]

It would depend who the 5 and the 1 are. If it is 5 old people and 1 young, I would save the young one.

If the 1 person was a family member or friend, I would save the 1 and let the 5 die.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It would depend who the 5 and the 1 are. If it is 5 old people and 1 young, I would save the young one.

If the 1 person was a family member or friend, I would save the 1 and let the 5 die.

What is this, Death Race 2000?

This age old philosophical question is nonsense and a false dichotomy at best. To quote a great movie, War Games, “The only way to win is not to play”.

(Yes 2 film references in one post!)

[Anonymous]

I find this thread intriguing. Now I understand why my freshman year ethics prof liked the class so much.

[Anonymous]

I have had this presented in ethics classes in HS, college, business school and law school. Really interesting how those different groups came down and why.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have had this presented in ethics classes in HS, college, business school and law school. Really interesting how those different groups came down and why.

tell us more. What exactly made it so interesting?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:A runaway trolley is speeding down the tracks. If you do nothing, it will kill five workers. You the option to pull a lever, diverting the trolley onto another track where it will kill one person instead. Do you pull the lever ?
Why or why not ?

Not my trolly, not my tracks.

I'd walk away.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The sitcom "The Good Place" had this as a plot point. Worth watching. Real life is always messier than hypothetical.

Be prepared to make quick decisions. Know your own values in advance.

I assumed OP had just saw it!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Five people will die without organ transplants. Do you kill one and harvest their organs so the five can live?

Someone saw the episode!

[Anonymous]

Judging from this thread, we are in the bad place.

[Anonymous]

It depends on whether people take the question literally or transpose it to real life.

People who take things literally always pull the lever.

People who transpose this to read life will not, because anything might happen. They will argue that they cannot act, and risk killing someone, because in that case they would be directly responsible for the death. They might prefer not to act, in the hope that some twist of fate will save the 5 people; in which case the one death would not have been necessary. And if the 5 people die, it will be a result of inaction, not action, which is psychologically less damaging to the bystander.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The sitcom "The Good Place" had this as a plot point. Worth watching. Real life is always messier than hypothetical.

Be prepared to make quick decisions. Know your own values in advance.

I assumed OP had just saw it!

I just watched it after you mentioned it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It depends on whether people take the question literally or transpose it to real life.

People who take things literally always pull the lever.

People who transpose this to read life will not, because anything might happen. They will argue that they cannot act, and risk killing someone, because in that case they would be directly responsible for the death. They might prefer not to act, in the hope that some twist of fate will save the 5 people; in which case the one death would not have been necessary. And if the 5 people die, it will be a result of inaction, not action, which is psychologically less damaging to the bystander.

This illustrates the false dichotomy of the question.

[Anonymous]

The reality is that it is always possible to create moral edge cases in hypothetical scenarios where whatever moral principles you hold break down. To those who think the trolley problem has an easy answer, it is mathematically identical to a scenario where one person might be killed to supply organs for five transplant recipients who would then live, but not otherwise. We’ve already rejected the act/omission distinction earlier in this thread, and it should be an easy bullet to bite for those of you who think the trolley problem is easy because 5>1.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The reality is that it is always possible to create moral edge cases in hypothetical scenarios where whatever moral principles you hold break down. To those who think the trolley problem has an easy answer, it is mathematically identical to a scenario where one person might be killed to supply organs for five transplant recipients who would then live, but not otherwise. We’ve already rejected the act/omission distinction earlier in this thread, and it should be an easy bullet to bite for those of you who think the trolley problem is easy because 5>1.

it's not a matter of it being "an easy bullet to bite" it's a matter of personal feelings.