Trolley problems are exceedingly uncommon in the wild. If someone is going out of their way to use them to justify something, and everyone on the track you pull the lever to hit happens to be a minority, that person is just being a bigot & using "pragmatism" or whatever as cover
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Exactly. It's a critique/discussion of pure naive utilitarianism, not a real debate on who to kill to save who?
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Imo the other thing is that most cases of trolley problem aren't actually calculated decisions. In real life they're usually snap judgments (often by the one person who's gonna be sacrificed) or calculated military decisions where it's a choice of evils rather than ideals
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There is a utilitarian value to consistent principles though, which complicates things
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Yeah its an interesting tool for establishing what the limits of a person’s ethics are, but trying to use it to make real world ethical arguments quickly falls into the empty white room issue.
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Of course the usual argument I see in response to *that* is that it's outweighed by the harm done by discouraging people from going into hospitals in case they get murdered for their organs, but doesn't that just mean to avoid publicity, or just take people off the street?
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one particularly ridiculous one that made the rounds on the "rationalist" sites a while back was: a choice between torturing someone for 50 years, vs having an extremely large number of people get a speck of dust in their eye [guaranteed no secondary effects].
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The difference I see is that the original trolley problem seems like some fluke occurrence that wouldn't happen again, whereas the organ harvesting case sounds like it could become a general policy of killing millions of people to harvest organs, with all sorts of effects.
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The illustration of the trolly problem always involves the switch version, not the push a person onto the tracks version. The switch version seems equivalent to organ donation by choice and the push version equivalent to organ donation by force.
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Not really; in either the switch or push version the actor is causing one person to die to save five. The only difference is if the actor directly acts on the victim or indirectly via a switch.
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