mcjob you're a bundle of fun
It's 2-loving-AM, I'm on 3 coffees and I've given up on my drawing class assessment. I just want to type as much as loving possible, so of course I'm gonna forgetin' rip into a philosophy debate where I see one.
holy richards you don't need an essay to ask a moral question
the entirety of the trolley dilemma is a hypothetical
how you get into this mess is irrelevant the only thing that matters is what you do
I think that's an extremely narrow-sighted way of looking at it though. The way I respond to a situation is going to entirely depend on the context of the situation. How I'm feeling, thinking and what I know is going to change my answer. I might be really angry at the world on the day and choose the 100 people to die, or I might know the people involved and that could swing my decision. I really don't know how I'd react in that situation.
My point is that this isn't some simple choice like switching a light on or off. There's so many variables involved that the only way to know what you'd do is basically be in that situation, and the closest I can get to that is by having some context so I can imagine the situation as if it were real.
When I had philosophy classes, my friends and I would always end up debating the nature of the questions rather than the question itself, and that was exactly what the teacher wanted, because it helped us come to understand a lot about how morals are formed and how they can be manipulated and changed.
You also have to remember; these are just statistics; 100 people is nothing compared to ONE person. We see individuals and we can connect with them, but when it comes to large groups, we just kind of glaze over the details. This is why the murder of one person gets a whole segment in a news show, but many people dying in a war zone will get lightly skipped over; people don't emphasise with statistics.
The whole question is not hinging on the 100 people (it could be 10,000 people or 10 people and we'd still feel the exact same about the group), it's all about how we feel about the single person.
Quick question though, why can't they just open the door at the far end of the Trolley themselve's and then quickly jump off the Trolley, one by one?
Because logic and context has apparently been abandoned so we can rip at each other for having different morals.
its locked
Not to be a continued killjoy, but modern trains have systems to allow passengers to override the locks and escape (at least on Australian trains). That's why they have giant "PENALTIES APPLY" signs all over the train, since anybody could shut the train down at any point.
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