Comment by throw9393u300
4 days ago
Just standing by makes total sense. By participating you become part of the problem.
If you pull the lever, your direct action kills a person. Legally saving 5 people does not offset the murder of a single person. This is no special case like self defense. Congrats for saving 5 people, you still go to prison as a murderer! Train company has responsibility to save those 5 people, not some random stranger.
The person at lever would became active participant on that train disaster. All we know the train could go too fast, apderail and kill 100 people.
> Just standing by makes total sense. By participating you become part of the problem.
Consider also the variation of the problem where you're a surgeon, you have 5 patients, and one healthy person whose organs/blood/... could save all 5 if only you murdered the one... (but none by simply maiming them, i.e. one needs a heart, one a stomach, one a liver, one so much of this particular kind of blood that you'd have to kill the donor, etc).
> The person at lever would became active participant on that train disaster. All we know the train could go too fast, apderail and kill 100 people.
Standard philosophical interpretations would reject this possibility as impossible (the purpose of the question is to have a simplified environment to probe ethical beliefs - not to reflect reality). I'd also say even outside of that this is like saying you have to consider the possibility that by wearing a green sweater you might distract a driver and cause an accident - you might - but so might doing literally anything else - it's not a foreseeable outcome and has no ethical weight as a result.
Consider also the variation of the problem where you're a surgeon, you have 5 patients, and one healthy person whose organs/blood/... could save all 5 if only you murdered the one
I have the book where that idea originated and the author is very proud of the additional ethical complexities he exposed with this example. But for some reason he never considered the possibility of kill (or allowing the natural death of) one of the 5 terminally ill patients and sharing out their otherwise undamaged organs to the other 4.
I'd say for the sake of argument we're assuming that's not possible. Perhaps the blood types are incompatible in any direction but killing the healthy person [1]... the point isn't why these are the only options but assuming these are the only options what would be more ethical. Same way the point of the trolley problem isn't to say "derail the trolley" but to probe at which of two options is ethical in the nice simple world where those are the only two options - because if you can't say what's ethical in a simple world you certainly can't in a complicated one.
[1] do you need blood type compatibility for organ transplants? I really don't know... But I'm certain there are some compatibility constraints to ground the example in the real world...
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This outcome is highly unlikely. The difficulty with trolley problems is that you rarely have such such perfect insight into real world problems such that you can make definitive statements about what # of people will be saved vs the impossibility of finding some other way to help the strangers on the tracks. Indeed the kind of people who make up new parts of the problem statement to avoid making a difficult moral decision are in my view most likely to freeze up and do nothing in a dangerous situation.
Being able to mess with the frame is important, maybe not always in the lever position, but certainly before/after.
You might be interested in this related artwork: https://pigsfly.skinnyjames.net/rescue-mission/trolley-probl... which explores the kind of paralysis you are speaking to.
Most people aren't railway engineers and don't spend their days being comfortable around train switches. That aspect alone would scare off a large amount of people because pulling a train switch is very outside their normal every day experience.
I'd probably just watch it all unfold like an idiot.