if a locomotive is hurtling towards a trio of men tied to the track and you have the ability to divert it onto a section of track upon which a single man is bound should you do it
Really it depends on the complexity of the action. If diverging the train takes a lot of effort, the inaction is less unethical then if it's the easiest thing in the world to do.
I think human beings have the potential to be both angels and demons, it's all a matter of choice or choices. Since i'm the guy with the quotes, i'll just leave this here: "It is humility that makes men as angels. It was pride that changed angels into devils."
well, if you want to be absolutely logical, you're entirely capable of curing cancer or any other deadly disease, and capable to an even greater extent to save lives in many other ways if you bothered to go out and do it. you don't really have a good excuse not to besides that it might distract you from your shallow and meaningless desires like calling people idiots on an internet mafia forum. that time could've been better spent, as could the time you're wasting reading this and the time i wasted typing it.
you must be a highly immoral individual unless you follow an extremely relativistic morality in which case the moral difference between these two choices is so marginally significant it's almost invisible behind those little inescapable conditions of subjective morality
Everything is logical. It's just that people are idiots.
I'm not necessarily saying it's better in effect to change the train's course because the problem with death is the pain it causes to oneself and those close to them, not the lack of a life, and we have no idea if these people would do anything special with their lives or die more grisly deaths otherwise. Even so, the consensus IRL would surely be that you should have diverted the track if you didn't, because you are letting three people die or letting one person die.
I guess the third option is going in to try and untie the one person after diverting the track. No one can blame you then ahaha you dead, meaningless, foolish cadaver (assuming success in such an action was in no way feasible)
Actually, the real reason is that the survery was surveying Americans, and they were more likely to sympathize with the fat man because he reminded them of themselves. They didn't want it to be morally acceptable to have themselves die.
Because people in general don't think its ok to use the 1 person to save 3. When you switch the train away from the 3 people and it hits 1, hitting the 1 person is not required to save the 3, its just incidental. If that person wasn't there, the 3 would still be saved. When you push the fat man, you are killing him to save the 3. The fat man is required.
thing with morality is it isn't logical nor mathematical
a "moral" person would typically let the 3 die because it wouldn't involve killing anyone, whereas you would be the cause of death if you intervened. from a real perspective, not a hypothetical one, it's the difference between killing 0 people and killing 1 person, not saving 3 or saving 1.
Not especially, because people are dying all the time, and the world is overcrowded, and human beings are monstrosities anyway.
That doesn't mean you aren't bringing more grief into the world by killing three people with potential families than by killing one person. I understand where you're coming from now that you put it that way, though.
There's also another version of this dilemma where you have the option of pushing a large person over a bridge onto the track which would stop the trolley but would kill that person. According to one survey, people are more likely to divert the train but less likely to push the person because they'd be... more responsible?
This occured to me when I saw the dilemma for the first time. Someone's life will end nonetheless; does the fact that it's only one person's life over three make it any better? I feel like it doesn't...
Of course, in the actual situation I would divert it because in shortage of time to think it would seem like a rational decision.
How many minutes is it before 12 noon if 40 minutes ago it was four times as many minutes past 10 am?
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i change my answer to match josh's because i'm his itch
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I do nothing because I don't care about any of them.
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You killed millions of people.
I should have went with my original setup. Your loved ones and stranger together then hitler by himself. Even if you choose to kill hitler it'd make your life and your loved ones life meaningless because you probably wouldn't exist. And then if you saved hitler you'd be responsible for your loved ones deaths and millions of others because you wanted to exist
itch
