this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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It understands it just fine. Agency is not a factor in the decision. The choice between action and inaction doesn't matter. People think it matters because people are driven by shortsighted emotions.
I think the thing that people often don’t seem to understand about the trolley problem is that it doesn’t have a “single version”, it’s a framework for exploring human decision making. And the correct answer, it’s all a matter of perspective. For example, if all of drag’s friends were on one side of the track, and on the other side of the track, were a number of people who drag does not know, equal to the number of drag’s friends plus one, would drag kill their friends, or the innocent people?
Drag's friends. Drag has at least ten friends probably, and drag's friends are at least 10% better than the average rando. They're mostly communists and queers. The world is better off with them in it than with some random people who are probably capitalists.
Thank you so much for being honest about making that choice - almost everyone would choose their friends, but lots of people wouldn’t admit to that. Being honest myself, I’d make the same call - and if it came down to me picking between my friends and drag’s friends, I’d choose my friends. The whole “calculus” we run (comparing how good our friends are to average people) is a way we justify making our decisions, a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance of our values (save as many lives as possible) being in conflict with what we actually do (saving our friends rather than as many lives as possible). In reality you would have no way of knowing who those other 11 people would be - for example, if I said that one of them is a researcher on the brink of curing cancer, how would that change your decision? These are really tough questions to deal with, and that’s the point of the trolley problem - that people make different choices because they have different perspectives, and different values. There’s no objectively right and objectively wrong answer to any of the scenarios. Just different interpretations and ways to think about it.
Drag chooses to kill those people because drag knows nothing about them. Drag just assume they're randos. And on average, people suck. Drag's friends are great people.
If drag knew more about the people, the equation would change. Drag finds it difficult to reason seriously about a scientist discovering a cure for cancer, since there's no such thing. There are hundreds of cancers. There's no one solution for all of them and there never will be. We'll need hundreds of cures for cancer, many of which we already use today.
If we went with a more realistic scenario, like "one of those people will be the leader of the USA's communist revolution", drag would be much more willing to kill drag's friends. Drag might also commit suicide about it, though, so maybe the numbers aspect is equal anyway. Would drag give drag's life and all drag's friends' lives away for a communist America? Probably, but drag would sure like some assurance it's going to be proper anarchist communism, and drag wants to know if another leader could have taken that place. Does drag even believe in the "great man" approach to history, or is there no such thing as such a leader? Is there nobody that important?
That’s perfect, drag, I don’t think anyone could have put it better. The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment, yet so many people approach it like it’s some sort of engineering problem that has right and wrong answers, I think it’s probably a consequence of our sort of “tech bro” culture that everything needs to fit into this rational, quantitative framework - we have this drive to put numbers on things that just can’t be rationalised in that way.
People are funny, complicated things, and I love them all!
Yeah exactly, the trolley problem is just like a benchmark of moral and ethics, the outcome is irrelevant. The thought process is what is relevant.
Agency might matter depending on societal context. 5 hot guys might be worse than 1 hot guy in a world with limited resources, for example.
Everyone knows that 5 of something is usually better than 1. The dilemma comes from finding a situation where that might not be true, and therein exploring some quirks of our own humanity.
It goes too far when people interpret these quirks as fundamental human traits, but there is genuine merit in testing oneself with fun hypotheticals
you've got a peculiar taste for fun, I must admit
edit
to be fair, I don't disagree, and discussing things like that or pondering them can be fun, but I still wouldn't expect such a choice of words 😅Trolley problems can be directly mapped to those "would you rather" drinking games. e.g. Would you have sex with your dad to save your mum's life?
The question is meaningless in a normal context, the answer is meaningless in a normal context, but it's fun to explore your limits in strange circumstances, no?
That's true, there's even a party game that consists solely of controversial topics to talk about, not even this kind of weird ones
That's not a matter of agency, that's still a matter of the goodness of the action. You constructed a version where more of the magic hot guys is bad, and made the valence negative again. So now one is better, and agency still isn't a factor.
What's actually interesting is the doctor version. Kill one healthy person and harvest their organs to save five people from death? That, at first glance, puts agency back in the equation. But drag still thinks the key isn't agency. It's power. In the trolley version, you have no power over who's on the other track. You didn't choose that person in particular to die, they just happened to be in the way. In the doctor version, either you or the boss chose a healthy person to die. You got to pick. You cannot take responsibility for picking. And you cannot support a system in which another person picks either. But when random chance picks who has to die, that's fine. There's no abuse of power in that one. Killing who you need to kill in order to save others isn't abusive power. Picking who dies, when you could have picked someone else, that's abuse.
So philosophical debate on this topic is meaningless, because utilitarism is obviously correct?
Please take off your clothes and lay down here, I have five patients in desperate need of organ transplants.
Please see the other comment drag wrote in this thread in reply to the earlier comment replying to drag, which drag wrote before seeing yours.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/14997510
I, as the doctor, didn't pick you. Your organs happen to be compatible with all five recipients. It's still random chance, you're just unlucky because your organs work best.
So, we gonna chop you up, or not?
What a crock of shit. Living with the knowledge that you killed someone isn't shortsighted, it's tragic. You pulling the trigger to switch the trolley to kill only the 1 person can and will have consequences on your own mental health.
And the comic isn't even about the choice between action and inaction, it's about "Oh wow, 5>1, this dilemma is easy lol" - nah, even if you make it purely about the numbers - unless you're a fucking psychopath, you're not gonna kill your newborn to save 5 strangers.
Living with knowing you did nothing to save 4 people may affect you as badly. To be fair, the person doing the choice is fucked up both ways, if ey is not a sociopath.
That's called selfishness, and it's not generally considered a factor in ethics. At most, that changes the equation to 2 vs 5. Still easy.
Then psychopaths are right and neurotypical people are wrong. The world would be better off if it had more psychopaths, as you describe them.
But you're wrong about psychopaths. See, what you're describing is limited empathy. You have more empathy for your baby than for five strangers, because of your limited point of view and inability to abstract the situation and see the bigger picture. A psychopath, according to pop psychology (psychopathy doesn't actually exist in serious psychology, but let's pretend it does) has no empathy. A psychopath doesn't care who dies. They probably save the baby because it's more socially acceptable and will make them look good. That's selfishness again.
If you want to know who saves the strangers, well that's someone who has empathy for both the baby and the strangers, and the wisdom to empathise equally with both. That kind of wisdom is extremely rare because natural selection doesn't favour it. It doesn't offer any advantage over the rest of the species to be that selfless. So you'd be most likely to find it in an extremely rare combination of autistic traits, or in a very enlightened Buddhist monk.