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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Replying to @BootlegGirl
What I've always found interesting about the trolley problem IS the arbitrariness. I initially saw it framed two ways: 1) throw a switch to move the trolley, kill 1 save 5. 2) push someone in front of the trolley to stop it. Kill 1, save 5. In 1, people will switch. in 2, not...
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Replying to @Czhorat @BootlegGirl
...it's the same result. One person dies to save five. The instinctive answer is different based on how "personal" it feels. It really seems to me to be a critique of a simplistic kind of pure utilitarianism. Using it for more misses the point.
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Replying to @Czhorat @BootlegGirl
The original idea of the trolley problem was that in its "classic" form everyone says yes but as you reformulate it to feel more and more extreme people start to balk, even though from a naive utilitarian standpoint it's the same thing
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Most people do, in fact, say that murdering one healthy person to harvest their organs to save five people is bad, even though the math is exactly the same
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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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No, that's only if the one person on the other track is the one pulling the switch In the classic trolley problem nobody actually consents to die
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Tuplet and
The "pull the switch" vs "push them onto the tracks" version is about *how responsible you are* for the person's death, which seems to me to be a lot less compelling than the question of consent
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If you want to get into it, "switch vs push" is like the difference between the organ donor coming into my ER and me letting them die on the table, vs them being perfectly healthy and me strangling them in an alley One feels worse but it's really the same thing
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