Or you could let the Vulcan throw himself under the trolley – needs of the many, you know. It’s all wide open.
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Back when I was in college majoring in philosophy, I was forced to take several Ethics courses as part of the curriculum. By far, the Utilitarian method seemed to produce the scariest results despite how beautifully the internal logic worked. I came to pretty much hate Ethics, which, IMHO, was a field where one applied logic against a gut-check and whenever the logic came close to the gut-check it was deemed the better result. I felt that Religion and Spirituality provided more genuine ethical guidance than Philosophy as they seemed to have a system that relied on more than just calculation. Not that they are perfect but Utilitarianism creeped me out and seemed like a great way to justify all kinds of horrors.
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OKAY FINE:
Choose between doing nothing and letting an out-of-control trolley crash into a schoolbus, or pushing a tiny fist-sized premature-baby into the trolley’s path, saving the kids but killing the premature bystander, who was toddling about sans incubator…
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Is the bus from a school for the gifted?
I choose to do nothing and let it appear that my apathy is really an ethical stance.
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The test, as stated, has but two choices.
You can choose Choice A, or you can choose Choice B.
Choice C does not exist.
Choice D does not exist.
&c
As all other choices do not exist, they are not rational choices.
What if it was raining that day?
Who’s setting up this test? How is it that we know that there are two and only two choices, there’s no time to stop or divert the bus and the trolley is guaranteed to hit it? How do we know that it’s full of kids and that a collision will kill them all? How about that the only possible solution is the conveniently placed fat guy hanging around about 0.5 m from the trolley’s tracks, who will not be spooked by the guy running up with ethically justified murder in his eyes?
No set of choices exist in a vacuum and it is not rational to believe they do. For a rational decision to be made, there are follow-on consequences that must be taken into account, regardless of whether they’re given to you in the test or not.
In fact, asking someone to make a choice without allowing them to factor in the potential ramifications of their choice is not rational in the slightest.
Your teachers must have delighted in your approach to word problems.
“How is it that we know that there is one and only one train traveling east, and one and only one train traveling west, and they are guaranteed to maintain a constant (or at least precisely average) speed throughout their journeys? How do we know they won’t slow down or speed up? How do we know the town drunk won’t unexpectedly drive onto the tracks and derail one of the trains? How do we know the tracks have been well-maintained allowing for such a journey? How do we know some madman won’t push a fat man onto the tracks?”
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I suspect the correct answer is…
Take a video of the accident on your phone and post it on YouTube with a clickbait title.
Sue the transport system that owns the trolley and the estates of the victims for an eight digit sum for mental trauma from having to witness the accident.
Worry about being the fat man next time. Buy goji berries from a website, but think they taste gross. Go to the gym once or twice. Decide instead to avoid public transport and trolleys, and go everywhere by car.
Post on Facebook that more liberal gun laws would have stopped this from happening, as you could have shot the wheels off the trolley with the assault rifle in your handbag.
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If I had to answer, I’d go with letting the trolley hit the bus - as other people have mentioned, there’s no plausible way that you could know that killing the fat guy would change anything to an extent greater than using another inanimate object. The similar puzzle where the fat guy is on a different line and you can change the points to avoid hitting the bus that’s broken down on the tracks is better (there’s no need for the person to be fat, they could just be a workman and you’re not using them as a tool, just causing fewer deaths). I doubt that answering these questions will help to make someone a more ethical person though.
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Not if you’re trying to identify autism.
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Clearly the fat guy was sleeping with the wife of the guy proposing the dilemma, and it’s really just a way to get away with murdering him.
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Shades of the Stanford Prison Experiment? I’m glad to know I’d be one of the few to tell the experimenters to go f**k themselves. Turn the fricken’ knob yourself.
OtherMichael, word problems are a mathematical equation with set given parameters and a correct answer. The fat guy/trolley car isn’t a math problem and it doesn’t have a “right” answer.
If it’s that kind of a trolley, all you need is a piece of string or a penny in front of one of the wheels to stop it.
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Why doesn’t anyone ever think to save the trolley? That’s someone’s property!
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Everything is.
Huh. I always thought the thought experiment went something like, you can switch the tracks so the trolley kills one guy but saves the passengers. Avoids the whole magical fat guy issue. He can live on, and use his incredible ability to absorb kinetic energy to help a lot more people.
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Yes.
Or what if you can switch it so it hits one old person instead of one young person?
Or one terminally ill young person vs. another young person?
Or one mildly ill young person routinely denied medical care and other supports due to prejudice vs. another young person?
Or what if we’re talking about organ transplant or medical triage priorities?
At what point does trying to save the most lives, or the most remaining years of life, go so very very wrong…?
