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If you included "the trolley actually exists in a realistic world and is part of a public transport network" then sure, I won't decommission it, but trolley pro
by strken 4y ago
If you included "the trolley actually exists in a realistic world and is part of a public transport network" then sure, I won't decommission it, but trolley problems are weird zero-context questions about trade-offs and I assume they fully describe the consequences of choosing each leg when answering.
It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live, so I think of trolleys as philosophical constructs that don't have a real existence.
- maest 4y agoBut it's problematic to assume these problems are in a 0-context vacuum because that would mean your actions don't actually have consequences. If the world ends immediately at the end of the experiment, then your choices in the experiment don't have any meaning, imo.
- akvadrako 4y agoThat is an extreme consequentialist view. Something I can relate to, but not how most people consider moral issues. If you are in a burning, sinking ship and all going to die for sure, it's still immoral to rape someone.
- Etherlord87 4y agoHowever if you're in a plane nose-diving vertically, shooting someone a second before the plane hits the ground (in a way that obviously is going to kill everyone), hardly has any moral relevancy. It's taking 1s of life from someone, probably comparable to smoking a cig near someone. More so, this is a low-quality second of life, with all the stress coming from the awareness of imminent death. So the argument still stands, the difference in the consequences, when considered outside of any context, is simply not worth the mental effort to figure out if the lever should be pulled. The exercise is only interesting because it provokes to think about real life scenarios.
- Spivak 4y agoRight but if you ask someone whether that situation is murder I bet most people would say yes. And I bet they would apply the same logic to someone on death row or with a terminal illness.
- egeozcan 4y agoWell, there's always the heat death of the universe, rendering everything meaningless.
- toyg 4y ago> It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live Yeah, when I clicked on the link I was hoping that finally someone had solved the problem of never having a pound coin to unlock trolleys at the supermarket.
- fendy3002 4y agoAnd some people just want to watch the trolley crash.
- HenriTEL 4y agoEven if it's in a realistic world no one said the trolley actually transported people and led to less CO2 emissions than other transports. Edit: On the other side, if you really decide to not take more context, you just destroyed the only existing trolley of the universe.
- rootusrootus 4y ago> It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live Does anyone really still call them that? A trolley is not a tram, it's a trolley, and harkens back from last century. In the US, some people call them trams, most of us call them trains. Portland does have a special version they like to call a streetcar, though. Functionally a light rail train, but runs in normal lanes of traffic.
- jeremyjh 4y agoThey aren't zero-context; all the value that you attach to a human life is context. If you don't grant anything else, you are just choosing one cartoon line-drawing over another. Certainly you are free to look at it this way, but it isn't really a useful point of view in a discussion about the hypothetical consequences.
- colechristensen 4y agoBut they're not... real. What someone says they might do in a trolley problem situation vs what a person would actually do I would assume basically have nothing to do with each other. Actively making a real life or death decision is quite a lot different than reasoning though a game.
- kukx 4y agoCertainly the simulation and the action in the real life has some connection. It just a matter how strong the connection is. I guess no one will test it though, at least that is what I hope.