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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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 ?[/quote]
I turn around and walk away. [b]I am not responsible for the 5 people's death.[/b] 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. [/quote]

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 [/quote]

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

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.  [/quote]

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.[/quote]

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.  [/quote]

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

[/quote]

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

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.
[/quote]

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

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