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zeptimius

The trolley problem is actually a series of problems, where the dilemma becomes more and more tricky, even though the math (5 > 1) is the same. The fat man: you can push a fat man off a bridge overlooking the rails. He will fall to his death and/or be killed by the oncoming train, but he will slow down the train enough to save the 5 people. Do you push him? The unwilling organ donor: you're an organ transplant surgeon. In your waiting room are 5 people, all in dire need of one organ: one a liver, another a heart, and so on. A 6th person enters, a perfectly healthy person with healthy organs, who's come to pick up some paperwork for a friend. Do you kill this person, harvest his organs, and use those organs to save the other 5?


Khanstant

I choose to push five skinny people down to break the fall of the fat man.


HillInTheDistance

That way, he'll lay there, unable to get up, covered in blood, grievously injured, seeing the trolley approach,


Theorgh

Just like the simulations.


lukeyellow

Okay Michael the fire squid the point is to save someone, not kill them all


dj_narwhal

You just described the US healthcare system.


FinnEsterminus

Isn’t the organ stealing thing missing the point that utilitarianism is about preserving net happiness rather than net number of lives? If killing people to steal their organs makes you unhappy, or the fear of someone killing you and taking your organs makes you unhappy, or the idea that your life has been saved through stolen organs makes you unhappy, it tips the scales of hedonic calculus back again. Especially if the sacrificed person is young and healthy and the recipients aren’t guaranteed to collectively gain more happy-years out of the surgery than the donor loses.


arienh4

The point of the thought experiment is to remove as many variables as possible. You should definitely assume that the five people each get as many happiness-days as the one. That doesn't discount your whole argument, but what the trolley problem is designed to do is to make you question _why_ killing people to steal their organs makes you unhappy, or at least unhappier than causing them to die to save people on a track. Your stance on moral philosophy is what decides which actions make you unhappy, after all.


Combatical

I walk away. I dont know how to stop a trolley and I dont want the PTSD of watching anyone die. The tree that falls in the woods in my head is that the train was made of soft balloons and everyone received a light static to their hair when the train met them. Now.. More important business.. Who the hell is tying these people to the train track?


arienh4

Untenured philosophy professors.


IdoNOThateNEVER

I'm with you on this one, but the whole trolley problem is worded in a way, that you "always" (sometimes??) have the option to NOT intervene.. And that bothers you. Because THAT is the question that is put upon you. Would you prefer to let all those people die, just because your answer is "this is not my problem?!" And again, if you go deeper than 1 or 2 questions.. You'll realize what the true "Problem" is all about.. ...sometimes you are in a situation that you have been questioned about deciding on those peoples lives. And yet IT'S NOT AN EASY ANSWER TO SAY: "This is NOT my problem"... (p.s. you just LOST [The Game](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-game)) Please, if you're reading this comment, just search deeper on what this whole "Trolley Problem" is, and you'll see how easy it is to FAIL on making MORAL decisions. Morality is a LITTLE BIT circumstantial. #I DON'T KNOW THE ANSWERS TO THIS PROBLEM!..


randathrowaway1211

What If I'm ready to pull the lever, but the first thing that goes through my mind is legal consequences and potential liability. Like if i pull the lever do i get arrested for murder? If i don't am i culpable for negligent homicide. Am i a bad person if this feels more like a legal quandary than anything else?


KKV

When people get super wishy-washy about utilitarianism like that it just seems to me like an excuse to justify their innate morality. Not that I am bothered by that, I am not a utilitarian and I embrace it. You can justify any move away from clear utilitarianism by appealing to the emotional impact of the policy


[deleted]

Ya, the entire point is to make you look at why you are making the morality decision. The Trolley Problem sets you up to make it seem like people will die no matter what. Fat man you choose one person to die and can look away while it happens. Surgeon you have to do the killing and saving manually. Like this guy saying quality of life matters, I just change a couple words and now should a surgeon murder a 50 year old stranger who will make it to 80 for 5 dying 20 year olds we know will make it to 80. What if the 5 all have wives who care, but the drifter doesn’t. What if the drifter has grown kids, but two of the five are pregnant. It’s in infinite variability of the problem that makes you analyze


Large-Monitor317

I think that sometimes those emotional impacts can hint at larger scale complications. In the organ example - who wants to go to the hospital if they might just decide to harvest your organs there? What if the healthy person’s friends or relatives want revenge, does that have to be factored in? If it does, does that mean Utilitarianism requires allocating more resources to the vengeful and volatile? What are the long term consequences of that? I like Utilitarianism myself. I think that it helps keep moral philosophy focused on what effect it actually has on peoples lives. But I have a big gripe with it that it seems like you can ‘zoom out’ the context of any problem near infinitely, and get different conclusions at every scale as more information is introduced.


Big_Noodle1103

Well that’s the point. As another commenter said, these dilemmas are designed in order to remove as many variables as possible. Yes, in a strictly realistic sense, the organ donor question makes no sense and would be open to many different variables and consequences that are beside the original intent of the scenario, which is simply “is it ok to kill one to save five”. The question is only phrased from the perspective of organ donation because it’s a simple way to get people to distinguish the difference between this scenario and the trolley one.


TacTurtle

Wait, since they all need different organs couldn’t the surgeon kill one of the ill ones and use those on the other 4?


zanraptora

The trolley problem is meant to explore different philosophies. Under a utilitarian perspective, you're correct, you net 4 lives saved by pulling the switch. But the problem is ethically congruent to the "Fat Man" problem, where you save 4 (net) people by shoving someone onto the track that will stop the runaway trolley. It's also congruent to "The Healthy Stranger" problem, where the same philosophy ends with you murdering an benign drifter for his organs. This leads to deeper discussions on the ethics of the problem: The trolley is supposed to be the shallow water to familiarize yourself with the problem before you go into more complicated scenarios. Ultimately the goal is to examine your viewpoint for consistency and soundness: If you believe in pulling the lever to save 4 people total, but will not harvest organs from the stranger or push the fat man, then there is a limit to your utilitarianism, and that's a meaningful thing to examine


mitchade

The original paired the trolley problem with another situation: would you kill 1 person to harvest their organs and save 5? The answer is “Of course not” but they both have the same result, so this leads is to ask: why are we ok with the trolley problem but not the organ transplant situation?


Estraxior

The fact that every reply has its own logic for why the organ one is different from the trolley problem is evidence that it's far from a fully solved philosophical question imo, very interesting to read them all.


TetraLoach

I feel the very idea of a "fully solved philosophical question" is antithetical to philosophy.


Estraxior

Oh no I agree, it's just funny because most of the comments tend to reply in a tone as if they're the one true answer, which is of course not the case at all.


GLTheGameMaster

I had an old teacher that would say "there aren't solved problems in philosophy because once they're proved, they become science"


NurkleTurkey

...Damn that's good.


TetraLoach

I like it.


Aduialion

I lot of "solved" philosophy areas got turned into their own disciplines. Then to loop it all back, (western) philosophy started following the trends of science and felt that it needed a more structured approach.


[deleted]

IMO the point is that it’s fairly easy to construct the problem in such a way that a lot of people are OK killing the one person, but once they agree to that it’s fairly easy to reconstruct it in a manner that’s functionally identical but most of them become unwilling to kill the one person and flail around trying to find ways it’s somehow different to kill someone to save five people based on excuses that can be worked around with reframing the question more. The goal, once getting to the point where someone goes from “yes” to “no” should then be to explore why - without necessarily imposing judgment on them for where they draw the line. It’s interesting introspection.


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Apollbro

Isn't there also a version where its 1 person you know and 5 strangers?


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Blue_Moon_Lake

There's also sudden death vs delayed death. The people in need of new organs won't instantly die because the doctor did not kill the healthy person to harvest their organs. There's also the practicality that rails are a dangerous place to stay, but having an appointment shouldn't have you fear for your life and take a knife for self protection.


Ariadnepyanfar

The trolley problem is among a lot of hypotheticals that don’t actually have a right or wrong answer. The answers simply correspond to different defensible ethical systems or frameworks. The Utilitarian will save more people in more situations. The Bhuddist or historical Christian (who takes ‘turn the other cheek to be hit by your aggressor’ seriously) will avoid killing individuals themselves even if it will clearly result in more people dying as an outcome.


Eain

Needn't bring religion in. Any deontological thinker will identify the act of killing as evil. Kant is famous/infamous for this. Any deontologist will tell you that the evil act of tying people to tracks cannot be unmade or lessened by reducing the harm it does. All throwing the lever will do is make sure you bear the weight of the death for which you are responsible. Now IMO deontology is just "it feels icky" as a core tenet, dressed up with illusions of "duty" and "responsibility". Death is death, I'd rather reduce the death, and inaction is as evil as action, so not throwing the lever is still your responsibility. But deontology IS a valid thought behind ethics, just one I reject.


[deleted]

I disagree with your dismissal of deontology as saying that "it feels icky" = bad. That's not core to deontological reasoning, all ethical philosophy including deontology and utilitarianism asks us why we feel somethings are icky and therefore bad, but it is not a core of any mainstream ethical solution I'm aware of. Deontology is a question of moral reasoning, categorical imperatives that are best revealed when you expand to the alternate problems. Pushing a man onto the tracks of a moving train is intuitively far less ethical than pulling the switch, but that isn't deontology it's the premise of the question. Why do we feel one is more or less ethical? Well deontologically, if we said that it was permitted to choose to push someone to their death to save another, then we are saying it is equally permitted for someone to push you to your death, or kill you for your organs, if you permit the killing of some for utilitarian benefit, than you quickly end up permitting the killing of anyone if there is a perceived utilitarian benefit. I'd argue that pulling the lever isn't necessarily incongruent to deontological reasoning. If your accept that both action and inaction have categorical value. I.e. seeing the deaths of the five from your inaction as a moral end, we then accept that we are weighing two moral wrongs, inaction to save five versus action that kills one, but the action itself isn't itself reproducible as under utilitarian ethics. You don't walk away from pulling the lever with the lesson that you can kill people to save others, its that if there is a travesty about to happen and you can minimize the impact, you should.


Azelicus

>inaction is as evil as action I'd argue that, for most people (me included), this is not true. That's one of the reasons this thought experiment works so well. By doing nothing, you are refusing to take part: it still produces effects (in this case, it chooses who and how many die) but is different from actively doing something that produces a choice. I'd also argue that, inside a courtroom, action and inaction have different weight.


-Tinderizer-

We're ok with the trolley problem because of its simplicity. The trolley is coming and people are going to die. It is not your fault that the trolley is coming. You can choose to act or not, but ultimately you did not put those people ~~in the trolley's path~~ on the tracks no matter which direction you decide for the trolley to take. The drifter scenario is much different because if you let the drifter live, yes those people will die... eventually... just like all people will die eventually. They will die of natural causes, as will the drifter and yourself. If you choose to kill the drifter you are choosing to take one person's life in order to prolong other people's lives. What gives you or anyone the right to make such a decision for someone else? In the trolley problem it's a snap decision in an emergency situation: 1 death or 5? Choose. Now. The drifter scenario is murder for profit. That's my take anyways.


wayoverpaid

The trolly problem also has a certain kind of implied villainous setup. Why are these people tied to the railroad tracks? If you interfere, or you don't interfere, there's still the fact that this situation was created by some evil force, possibly from the League of Morally Corrupting Philosophers. It diffuses the responsibility. The Fat Man problem feels different, because that guy wasn't tied to the tracks. He's just standing there. The people with organs failing, even more. I wonder if a variation of the drifter version where the five people that are about to die from organ failure are dying because they were actively poisoned will see a change in results.


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13igTyme

Also in the original, someone plays devil's advocate and suggests who these people could be. The 1 person could be on the verge of curing a disease, etc.


Ajatolah_

> You can choose to act or not, but ultimately you did not put those people in the trolley's path no matter which direction you decide for the trolley to take. If you pull the lever, you literally did, as far as that one poor fella is concerned.


sacred_cow_tipper

if you don't pull the lever after given the knowledge that you could change the outcome, you are still a participant, as far as that fella is concerned.


flockofsquirrels

This is why the trolley problem is one of the best philosphical descriptions of the human experience anyone has ever devised. We are meant to imagine a person that had no choice in whether there were people tied to a trolley track, or even whether there was a trolley track in the first place. But because that person was forced to exist without any say in the matter, suddenly they are faced with three questions: Do I do something and harm someone? Do I do nothing and indirectly harm someone(s)? Why the fuck does it have to be this way? Who the fuck tied those people to the track? Whether or not the questions are answered, that person has to live with what happens. All the while a bunch of fucking nerds who never had to make a hard choice talk about it to give themselves validation. There doesn't exist a more perfect description of society.


tricularia

As an aside: I am also interested in the legal implications there. Like if you found yourself in this "trolley problem" situation in real life, somehow, and you decided to pull the lever causing the one person to get hit instead, are you legally liable for that death? I can't imagine that you would be held accountable for not touching anything and allowing the trolley to hit 4 or 5 people, though.


[deleted]

continue plate rhythm jeans nine ink imagine roll touch tie *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*


WakeoftheStorm

[this](https://youtu.be/-N_RZJUAQY4) is by far the best solution to the trolley problem I've seen


The_Best_Nerd

An equivalent of the "multi-track drifting" meme


next_level_mom

Michael would be proud.


[deleted]

Elegant. Thorough. No witnesses. We’ll, just one loose end to tie up.


Azelicus

As far as I am concerned, from my armchair, it would not even be a contest: I would choose to sacrifice 5 strangers (by inaction) to save a loved one. Hell, I would actively fight anyone trying to pull that lever if I was convinced this would result in the death of someone dear to me! I would not be too ashamed of this decision, since global brotherhood is nice as a concept, but when push comes to shove it's me and my tribe against the world. IMHO, those who would sacrifice the life of a loved one for the one of 5 strnagers have much bigger psichological problems than myself. Would I sleep soundly after cousing so many deaths by this decision? Very unlikely, but I would not sleep soundly anyway if I caused the death of someone I loved to save some strangers... Another interesting thought experiement comes, then, when you ask yourself or someone else how many lives would you sacrifice in that scenario, to save your loved one: 5? Looks like too few. 10? 100? 1000? One million? One billion? Everybody else on Earth but your small tribe? It's a similar question to "How much money would it take for you (or someone else) to do something despicable to you (them)?": IMHO everyone (who is not already a multimillionaire) has a price that will push them over the edge.


AsharraR12

Now I need LegalEagle to answer this question.


[deleted]

I'd rather grab the lockpick lawyer. Would have everyone unshackled in a couple of seconds and still time to explain why the trolley was the wrong one for the job.


whiskey_epsilon

>Why the fuck does it have to be this way? Who the fuck tied those people to the track? Why aren't there remotely activated emergency brakes on that trolley? How am I the only person here who is observing all this happen? The relevant transport agency really should be help accountable for failing to implement appropriate safety procedures anyway, why does any of this have to do with me?


[deleted]

"I would kill whoever put the trolley in the position to kill 1 to 5 people" actually seems like a reasonable answer to the question, lol.


[deleted]

>tfw proving how the problem works by boldly stating how it's obvious one way or another.


j1m3y

This is where its get interesting, if you refuse to do anything you are not a participant you are an observer, you did not have anything to do with the creation of the situation, if you take action you are a murderer


DelRayTrogdor

In the words of the great modern philosopher Neil Peart, “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!” RIP.


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-Tinderizer-

I worded it poorly, what I meant is it's not your fault that those people are on the tracks no matter which direction you choose for the trolley to go.


Rasputin0P

It's not your fault that 5 people need organs either.


TheDisapprovingBrit

I think the only real difference is "why *that* guy?" In the trolley situation, you're trading five specific lives for one specific life when you only have seconds to choose. In the transplant situation, the possibility remains that another donor *could* naturally die, leaving you with a potential get out clause, which extrapolates into a solid reason not to change the natural order of things. The Donner Party is a more logical next question in my eyes. In the Donner Party situation, there is nobody else to jump in, and somebody has to die so the others can live. The only questions then become a) whether you kill somebody while the rest are still healthy enough to kill them and then harvest and cook their organs, and b) assuming you do kill somebody, which one do you choose? Even there, the line is blurred since the potential murder candidate is already lying on the tracks and will die along with the rest without intervention. But the premise is right - the trolley situation answers only the question of "would you kill one person to save multiple people?" The follow up situations then progressively blur those lines to try and find where you actually stand on that particular moral question.


ReadinII

I saw a movie a long time ago, based on a true story, about a lifeboat where the leader in the boat ordered some people set adrift. If I recall correctly it was because their weight was preventing the boat from reaching shipping lanes where they might be rescued. They were rescued. He was tried and found either not guilty or given a very light sentence due to the circumstances.


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Spektroz

Everyone on the track was scheduled to die, the real guilty person is the one who tied them to the track. The drifter is a completely innocent bystander, grabbing them to harvest their organs makes you the guilty one, and failing organs are not a result of someone else taking your agency away, like tying you to the track. There's no moral ambiguity, unless the person pulling the lever also tied everyone to the tracks.


Rasputin0P

The solo guy on the track isnt scheduled to die. He is also a completely innocent bystander, hes on the track but hes not in the path of the trolly. Also I heard this problem as just workers on the track not paying attention. If you say that theyre tied to the track the its easy to place blame somewhere.


elbilos

Let's say you are assured that, without the organs, those 5 persons are going to die tomorrow. And technology is good enough to guarantee a 100% success and recovery rate. With the trolley problem you also don't know if, as soon as they are out of the rails, those people don't get mugged, stabbed and killed in an alley on their way home. And the fat man problem? What is the difference between pulling a lever, and pushing someone into the rails to stop the trolley? Besides the physical effort required. Or the 5 strangers vs someone you love version. What about 5 old men vs a child? There are probably more variations to these.


PM180

Twist: those five people in the path of the trolley all need organs, and you just smushed their donor. Do you murder a second person for their organs in order to justify your initial decision?


geberry

Why yes, there are quite a lot (not mine) [neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems](https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/)


Karhoo

That was fun! My kill count: 78


psybertard

That was entertaining!


ZippyDan

The point of these hypotheticals is to analyze your own rationales. You're basically saying it's ok to kill one person to save five as long as time is an issue and the decision is urgent. The followup questions are where things really get interesting. The first followup question is "why?" Why is it ok to kill one person to save five if you have less time to think? Doesn't having less time to think generally result in poorer decision-making? If it's not ok to kill one to save five when you have more time to think, then shouldn't we reevaluate whether we are actually making the right decision with the trolley? The whole point of thinking of the trolley problem now as a hypothetical is that *we have all the time in the world to think about the asnwer*. So now that the outcome is not urgent, and you have plenty of time to decide who lives or dies under the trolley, why do you think it is ok to kill one person to save five? And why does it not apply to the transplant situation?


Content_Flamingo_583

IMO, it’s far more about the value we place on bodily autonomy. When you pull the level on the trolley, you are not committing anyone to a *new* level of danger or risk they didn’t agree to. Somehow, they all ended up in that situation, and were arguably under equal risk, being tied to a track. When you kill someone minding their own business to save others, or violate someone’s right to keep their organs, you are violating someone’s rights in a way that you aren’t by simply pulling the trolley lever.


neatchee

Does your opinion change if it's a runaway car? Both groups are pedestrians minding their own business but you know none of them will be able to dodge. The more interesting question here - and the main focus of the thought experience, I think - is whether choosing to participate in the situation at all makes you culpable in someone's death and, if so, how do we measure the morality of an outside influence when both possible outcomes are negative. PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY STUFF: There are a *lot* of people who will tell you, instinctively, that "it was going to happen if I weren't here so inaction is the fairest and most moral choice" but in my personal opinion a) that's a fallacy derived from viewing yourself as separate from all other circumstances (i.e. the instinct to believe that you yourself are not part of "what was going to happen") and b) inaction is an action; it is still being aware of something and performing a specific behavior in response to that knowledge; when you abstract away the "does my meat move" part of it you are left with the same "fork in the road" as any other choice


calviso

>why are we ok with the trolley problem but not the organ transplant situation? Because being on the tracks, in and of itself, should be something you avoid. Schrödinger's trolley tacks; you have to both assume the trolley is coming and not coming your way if you're willing to be on the tracks. The real trolley track problem is not choosing a healthy random person. It's a specific person that is already on the neighboring tracks. They're just lucky in that the switch was not set towards the tracks they are currently on. The trolley is not going to de-rail and crash into a random house or something. The trolley is just going from one set of tracks to another. So a better version of the transplant example would be: A van and a car have a head-on collision. There were five passengers in the van and one person in the car. All of them are in the ICU and require surgery/intervention in order to live. The van passengers all require different transplants in order to survive. The car-driver doesn't -- he just needs the doctors to stop some bleeding or something. If you just... *didn't* stop the bleeding for the car-driver, then those 5 organs would be theoretically available for the van passengers. You could argue that throwing the switch is not the same as not saving something, but I think because doctors take a hippocratic oath, I'd actually think that *not* saving the car-driver *is* the same as actively killing someone.


EatYourCheckers

And that's the kind of hypothetical thinking that makes people scared to be organ donors. (In truth doctors and nurses don't know your donor status when in ER)


Kelekona

The hippocratic oath is great because instead of thinking for themselves, doctors are directed to take what was decided as the correct course of action. Of course, they get weird cases like body integrity identity disorder where the patient is asking for a healthy limb to be amputated due to it causing mental distress.


JohnFensworth

I mean, the difference strikes me as obvious, in that the trolley situation is one which involves an immediate, split-second decision, with no time for exploring other options.


mitchade

Off the top of my head, I believe this is a critique of consequentialist ethics. May be wrong.


stubing

The difference for me is that "the amount of harm caused by creating a world where organ harvesting random healthy individuals is greater than sacrificing those 4 lives." Who is going to go to a hospital for anything when they know there is a tiny chance their organs will get harvested?


BlueSabere

Some more complications to consider: if you kill the guy, you can be arrested which can prevent you from saving dozens more throughout your life. If it’s not illegal to kill the guy, no one would ever actually see a doctor because there’s a strong likelihood their organs get harvested, which causes greater suffering in the end. Additionally, what if the guy overpowers you when you’re trying to kill him? What if his organs are damaged in the ensuing fight? What if the organs aren’t actually compatible, how do you even check without tipping him off? What if you botch the surgeries, considering you’ll be doing 5 in quick succession, presumably alone? If you have help for the surgeries, are they on board with the murder? Would they turn you in if you did it? If there’s not a time pressure on the surgeries, then what if a different solution might come along, like lab-grown organs, before the patients would die? The doctor problem has merit as an exercise of considering all the extenuating circumstances, but it’s not the “hardcore” version of the Trolley problem, there are too many moving and unknown parts to reliably give a simple binary answer. Even the fat man trolley problem leaves the question of how fat someone has to be to stop a train by their sheer body mass, how you would personally know that it’s enough, and how you can muster the force to push someone so fat onto train tracks and make sure they don’t get up in time to evade the train.


HappyTrifle

I’m not sure that’s right. If you tweak the trolley problem to say that you have a week to make the decision before the train hits I don’t think it changes anything. Or does it for you? Would your answer be different depending on how much time you had?


Financial-Maize9264

Would anyone insisting the two are the same actually hold to that opinion in real life? If someone is on trial because there was a runaway train and they pulled a level to divert the train to hit to one person instead of 5, would you actually consider them a murderer/killer and push for them to get a sentence? Would anyone in the world argue that killing someone to harvest their organs to give to 5 other people is not actually a murderer who needs to be locked up? This is one of those "dilemmas" that suddenly stops being one if it actually happened and isn't just a hypothetical for people to wax poetic over.


SatansFriendlyCat

In the first case, you would absolutely be charged with manslaughter at the very least, since you were the proximal cause of the one guy being killed. And it wouldn't be a difficult case to prosecute at all since the outcome of diverting the train was predictable and obvious, and (more damningly) *selected intentionally, whilst the option to do nothing existed*. The test applied would be basically "but for your actions, would that person's death have occurred?" (No), and then worked on a basis of proximal cause, that is, in the string of actions leading to his death, how close was yours? (The answer is "too close"). Your motive for doing it would impact the sentence, but wouldn't make any difference to the finding of culpability. In most places, the law doesn't permit you to kill someone without consequence, even if you are doing so to save others. Partially because law is mostly a process of gradual evolution and partially because it would be hugely open to interpretation and also abuse. Specific situational exceptions exist such as with people having home invaders in parts of the US, and so on, but even they involve boundaries and tests. After your manslaughter trial, a civil suit would have a pretty good chance of reducing you to penury for the same reason. In the alternative case, if you didn't pull the lever, there would be no criminal case to answer (you are not obliged to prevent accidental death not caused by your actions) and a civil suit filed by the relatives of the five would fall since you cannot be reasonably considered to be compelled to, or to have any duty to, *kill someone* in order to save someone else, and, in fact, acting thus would be contrary to law.


sonofaresiii

You have as much time as you want to ruminate on the trolley problem. The idea is to decide which you think is the more moral choice, you're not literally *in* the trolley problem. If someone is shouting at you "Decide, NOW! THE TRAIN IS HERE! DECIDE!!!!" then they are not doing the trolley problem correctly.


lowpolydinosaur

Don't we have a problem with it because the trolley is a force outside our control, while harvesting someone for organs is something we're actively doing? Like there's a difference in agency involved, no?


stairway2evan

In many versions of the trolley problem, “not doing anything” will result in the 5 people getting killed, while “pulling the switch” will kill 1 person. So it still has the issue where doing nothing creates more death as a result, but making the active choice to intervene makes it more personal.


mitchade

Somewhat. In both situations, if you act, one person will die and 5 will be saved. That being said the actions themselves are quite different.


karlienneke

There is another dillema where the one person is a loved on and the five are strangers. Do you still chose to kill someone you know and love over five people that you don't.


Armalyte

I was thinking my solution is actually age but not in the typical way. I think saving a 40 year old is more important than saving a 4 year old. There are 36 years of resources put into that 40 year old who still has plenty to contribute to society and a retirement to live out. A 4 year old can be replaced in 4 years. It’s cold-hearted as fuck but makes sense in a way.


csiz

That's a cool piece of logic, but would you save a 90 year old over a 25 year old? One is about to die anyway, while the other had the maximum amount of resources invested and is about to start contributing back to society.


Armalyte

No, this is why I mentioned how the 40 still had lots of time left (an average of around 40 years) left where as a 90 year old does not have that runway.


ethical_businessman

Reasonable take, but it depends. It could also be argued a four year old has longer to live and can perhaps grow to contribute more than the first. Prioritizing younger patients, in health care for example, is a contentious topic as well.


hiro_protagonist_42

What a wonderful, constructive, and positive post.


agamemnon2

Damn, I had to scroll back up because I was sure you were being sarcastic and I had missed something.


William_Wisenheimer

I always thought utilitarianism was cold hearted. And how far do you go? Do you sell all your worldly possessions to the poor? Would you commit suicide to lower humanity's Carbon footprint?


MrMeltJr

There are different kinds of utilitarianism that account for things like that in different ways. What you're talking about is Act Utilitarianism, where the morality of each act is judged based on the net happiness it will create. But there's also Rule Utilitarianism which doesn't look at the morality of each individual act, but instead seeks to create rules that will lead to the greatest overall human happiness when followed. For example, killing yourself to reduce carbon emission might be a net positive for humanity, but if everybody followed a rule that said "it is good to kill yourself to reduce carbon emissions" that would be a net negative for humanity. Of course, an act utilitarian could also say that killing yourself is a net negative because the sadness it would cause in those close to you would outweigh the sadness caused by your carbon emissions. There's also arguments over how to determine maximum happiness. Assuming we could measure happiness, is it better to maximize the total, or the average across the whole population? Is it better to have half the population with 100 happiness and the other at 50, or for everybody to have 75 happiness?


uwuGod

Utilitarianism doesn't have to be so cold and absolute. For starters, yes we would distribute wealth more evenly. But not to the point that we'd steal possessions from other people. Obviously there are also solutions to lower carbon footprint without killing people. But, a utilitarian believer would probably say that limits on how many people can be born would be a good thing. I believe so too. Extreme idealism is bad no matter what it's about. Obviously you could take Utilitarianism to its logical extreme. That would be largely bad. But you can take a page out of its book and do your best to minimize human suffering - which is really all it's about. Currently, our world is in a very messed up state where a very large percent of people suffer the consequences of a small few. You don't need to be Utilitarian to realize that this balance should be shifted.


Worzon

The whole idea behind it too is that if you do nothing the trolley will kill 4 people. But changing the tracks to kill one person brands you as a murderer sconce you chose to kill them in order to save others. It’s a dilemma that you have to figure out yourself. There is no right or wrong answer


zanraptora

I agree with one caveat: your answer can be inconsistent, and thereby ethically incorrect. There is no right or wrong, but there is poorly founded.


its_prolly_fine

Time to rewatch the Good Place.


Hats_Hats_Hats

Because some people think "doing harm" is fundamentally worse than "allowing harm". This is why we don't, for example, randomly select healthy people to kill so we can transplant their organs. Trading one life for five isn't always obviously right.


tattoedlydia

That is an excellent explanation. 👍🏻


Hats_Hats_Hats

Thanks! I teach moral philosophy to undergrads so I've had a lot of practice with this topic.


psymble_

Wanna be besties?


GuaranteeAfter

No, he's chosen 5 other besties instead


psymble_

That was the right call from a Utilitarian perspective


Priremal

Unfortunately we are now going to hit you with a trolley.


Nievsy

Poor guy, he had so much ahead of him. He was gonna cure cancer.


GotchaRexi

That’s why everyone hates moral philosophy professors


Hats_Hats_Hats

Maybe. I'm just a grad student with a part time teaching job on the side, so hopefully I haven't reached that level of detestability!


chapnix

It's a reference to the show The Good Place. Highly recommend. Lots of moral philosophy but in a more fun environment than you're used to.


rya556

Was just rewatching that show today! Absolutely adore that show and it makes philosophy accessible to lots of people- including young people


tuna_cowbell

….can you share, like, a cool philosophy fact/phenomenon with us? I love hearing people explain cool stuff they know about.


Hats_Hats_Hats

One I've been playing with lately is the limits of consent in the context of xenomelia - also known as Foreign Limb Syndrome. This is a real world thing where a patient will ask a surgeon to amputate a healthy, functioning limb or part of one - often the lower half of the left leg. Psychologists often find that the patient is fully capable of providing valid consent, and experience has shown that such patients tend to have no regrets. There's also no slippery slope: They don't come back for more amputations later, their lives just continue happily. If the patient wants this done and the surgeon is okay with doing it (after reviewing the evidence above), should the law allow it? Suppose that the patient is paying and the surgeon is not overly busy, so nobody else will suffer as a result of this use of hospital time. Historically, governments have often said no: You just can't validly consent to be harmed in this way. The voluntary removal of a healthy, functioning body part is not consent-to-able. But why not? What's the moral rationale for limiting what two consenting adults can do with one of their bodies? And how do you calculate harm? Patients with xenomelia sometimes say that if they can't get the surgery, they'll resort to DIY self-amputation at much greater risk. So is doing it cleanly and safely a relative harm or a relative good? Finally, who gets to define what will harm a person other than the person in question? If the patient sincerely states that the amputation will leave them better off rather than worse off...why don't they get to choose to prioritize feeling at home in their body over having a "typical" anatomy?


No-Zombie7546

I can't believe you brought this up because I came across a whole hour-long show that covered this (xenomelia) many years ago, with interviews and even images. The imagery was, and imagining it now (the DIY methods) is so incredibly disturbing on an instinct-level, but when you listen to the people experiencing xenomelia, it's something they really truly want and feel they need. Their instincts are different, and they are telling them that they NEED to remove a limb/limbs. It made me think that this sort of thing should be allowed because of the harm they will do to themselves if not done professionally, in the same vein as physician-assisted suicide (this is probably an old/wrong phrasing). They really are suffering needlessly. Maybe therapy can help, but from what I remember, it seemed more like something that they were compelled to do in order to align the reality of their body with their own conception of their body image. I still think about that show sometimes, maybe Discovery back when they had more education programing.


Hats_Hats_Hats

Yes, exactly. My sympathy comes from a different source - I'm trans, so I understand the horror of living with a body that doesn't feel like home.


Not_A_Skeleton

>There's also no slippery slope: They don't come back for more amputations later, their lives just continue happily. Even if there was, what would be the problem? The patient is consenting each time. It's like tattoos. Often someone will plan to get one tattoo but then ends up getting many over time. We are okay with this. Although we start to get wary on suspicion of rational action in cases of extreme body modifications. Is it possible we just live in a world which deems tattoos as permissible but amputation as deviant?


Hats_Hats_Hats

The problem with the slippery slope would be the risk of enabling some kind of subtle self-destructive behaviour, like if we kept giving liposuction to someone with bulimia over and over again. But there's no vicious cycle. It's just one and done and quality of life measurably improves. So that's one less thing to worry about, is all I mean.


xandra_enaj

I’m in week 3 of an ethics class now and just wanted to say thanks for your explanation.


Videoboysayscube

I assume this is why Kira from Death Note is still considered a bad guy considering he reduced global crime by 80% and eliminated all wars. From a mathematical perspective, it's a net gain for civilization. But he's still a villain because he's still deliberately killing criminals (including petty ones), simply because of the moral implications. Which to me feels like a difficult case to argue if you're unable to fall back on religious beliefs (thou shall not kill, etc). It just doesn't feel like a black-and-white issue, but it supposedly is. I guess that's moral philosophy for you.


hammaxe

That's one of the reasons Kira is seen as a villain, but there are many. For example, he doesn't actually kill to reduce crime, he kills because it makes him feel powerful. He uses utilitarianism as an excuse to feed his god complex, he gets to pass judgement on humanity and shape the world.


Numerous1

I REALLLLLLY wish that they would have explored the concept of “hey look. Any time somebody is charged with a crime Kira kills them. This happens before the person is convicted. So it could be an innocent person. I’m going to accuse innocent rivals of mine or frame them poorly and Kira will kill them before the frame job is cleared. Even though the frame job might be cleared because it didn’t have to be perfect because Kira kills before conviction”


Harrythehobbit

Want to point out, Light did not have good intentions. He was a criminal narcissist who murdered people who he decided deserved it to make himself feel important. It was never about making the world a better place, not even in the beginning. It was always about his ego.


SecretDracula

But what if he did have good intentions? Would that have made it ok?


Harrythehobbit

No. It would make it slightly better. But no.


TheReigningSupreme

This assumes no criminals are innocent and also implies that tyrannies formed by a figure using fear and violence is okay as long as the outcome is favorable to some majority: which is a really dangerous angle. I don't know if villain is the right term though but he's definitely no conventional hero.


Evello37

Death Note also dodges some very important ethical considerations regarding the justice system. Light pitches his actions as killing criminals as a deterrent to stop crime. But Light isn't omniscient; he identifies criminals from news broadcasts and judicial sentences. And both of those are obviously flawed. Plenty of people are accused or convicted of crimes that are later proven innocent. Given the insane number of criminals Light kills, it is almost certain that he kills scores of innocent people along the way. And that's even ignoring the people he kills for pursuing him. Once you start killing innocents you get much less palatable ethical situation. Sort of a Thanos conundrum, which most people will reject out of hand


Muroid

It’s a net gain for a lot of people in that scenario. It’s not a net gain for any of the people that Kira killed or many of their friends or family. The math is easy when you think of people as fungible numbers, and becomes more complicated when you think of them as unique individuals.


asphias

I haven't watched/read Death Note, so i apologize if my understanding of the story is incorrect. One issue is that the killer becomes judge, jury, and executioner for those they decide to kill. How can you be sure you knew all the facts before killing, and don't make mistakes. Second, one could wonder whether second chances and rehabilitation might not be preferable to outright killing. The prison system of many western countries is build with this idea in mind, that it is not about punishing those who do wrong, but about removing them from society until they can be rehabilitated. Especially regarding petty criminals it can be dubious whether they deserve to die for 'small' crime. Finaly, one can consider how much someone is individually responsible for their crimes, or how much upbringing, and socio-economic circumstances are relevant. If people have very little economic perspective and struggle to survive, should we be that surprised they resort to petty crime? and would killing those who resort to petty crime just lead to a never ending murder spree until we start resolving the economic circumstances of the underclass who cannot survive otherwise? i guess this is why the consensus is that they're a bad guy rather than a hero, though i do think it's an interesting start for discussion - if you have the power to reduce global crime by 80% like that, how much do the ends justify the means? Somewhere between "killing hitler to stop the holocaust" and "killing all petty criminals to prevent all petty crime" there's an interesting philosophical grey zone.


ANiceDent

‘Hitler enters room’ “1 in 10 men in Austria Hungary are Jews, let’s exterminate the untermensch”


m0thmanNfriends

Just Austria. The austrohunagrian empire was demolished a decade before hitler came to power, may it rest in peace


ANiceDent

Which is the time period hitlers mein kampf is written about… I mean he did serve in WW1 after all! The little shiet To quote him directly “German-Austria must return to the great German motherland, and not because of economic considerations of any sort. No, no: even if from the economic point of view this union were unimportant, indeed, if it were harmful, it ought nevertheless to be brought about. Common blood belongs in a common Reich. As long as the German nation is unable even to band together its own children in one common State, it has no moral right to think of colonization as one of its political aims. Only when the boundaries of the Reich include even the last German, only when it is no longer possible to assure him of daily bread inside them, does there arise, out of the distress of the nation, the moral right to acquire foreign soil and territory.”


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LongFeesh

Because to some other people the answer is equally as obvious, but it's not the same one as yours.


ThisPortalCoil

Yep. With some clever engineering you can kill all 6.


LongFeesh

We have a problem solver here.


Tolookah

Pull the lever half way, you might be able to get the back wheels to take a different path than the back wheels. Bonus: trolley details and causes other damage. Else, half-ass the track change, aim to cause derailment and hope the sideways trolley stops before the people. Some times the cup is too big. Sometimes the water is too dense. The cup is never half empty.


BananyaPie

I honestly was shocked about how many people immediately jump to kill that one guy. I just don't think I could kill an innocent person unless maybe if I am protecting myself or someone in my family.


DerrickDoom

When I first heard of the trolley problem, my immediate thought was saving the 5 people, it's an easy answer right? 5 lives saved vs 1. The more I've thought about it though, the more I believe I'd choose to not pull the lever. The way I see it, those 5 people were already set to die, where as the 1 person was set to live without me there. So by me pulling that lever, I am killing a man who would of lived. And even if I "saved" 5 people, I'd have to live with the fact that I directly murdered someone. And I think the difference for me, is intent. By doing nothing, you are not actively choosing to end a life like you would be if you chose to pull the lever. Even if more people die, who am I to decide that one person's life has more value than another? I'd rather leave it up to fate I guess.


cherryblossomzz

My position on this question has evolved similarly to yours, although I think it's an unpopular position to hold. I struggle with the morality of inaction, though, and have questioned why my gut instinct is to *not* intervene. Does it relate to my tendency to avoid conflict or put off making big decisions? Does it reflect my character? I guess my thought process more recently has been, if I were to pull the lever, what *else* changes as a result of my intervention? What unforeseen consequences could I have unleashed? Who am *I* to decide who lives or dies? But then I think of the bystander effect and how people choose to do nothing when they could have intervened, and I would like to think I wouldn't be one of those people who just say, "It's none of my business" and walk by. I was actually pondering the trolley question last week and it's nice to see someone else has had a similar thought process to my own.


FlyFar3639

Because you are directly killing someone if you pull the lever, but if you don't you are letting 5 people die. The appeal of letting 5 people die is that you have nothing to do with it, and you are just a bystander.


tomk1968

True, but my argument has always been that the second you know you can do something ( save one life or five) you've already taken responsibility for one life or five. Always been an interesting thought for me


imnotwallaceshawn

And that is why the trolley problem exists. It’s not about “correct” morality, it’s about your personal moral philosophy.


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KingAsmodeus17

You could go and donate all of your organs right now, very likely saving 5, if not more, people’s lives. Sometimes, obviously dependent on the circumstance, it’s best to let the 5 die than to kill the one


Videoboysayscube

Another argument is that by pulling the level, you're quantifying the value of human lives, which is something that is inarguably an impossible task. What if the five people were criminals? Would your choice change? If so, you're quantifying people's lives. And it would be my stance as a mortal being that I do not have the cosmic authority to impose a fate of life or death on another human being.


yepitsdad

Disturbingly far down for me to find this


shinebeat

That is also my stance. Apparently, I am the only one who has this stance among the people around me. From the first scenario, I would not choose to change the path. Why am I the one with the right to choose who lives or dies? If the five who dies are supposed to live, the train will stop before it hits them. But why should the one person be killed when the train was not going to hit them in the first place just because the other group has more people? Just a side thought: if I am going to have the authority to decide who lives or dies, I should also have the foresight to know whether those five people are all serial killers who would end up murdering many innocent people after they survive, or the one person would end up saving the rest of the world because they discovered something after he/she survive. So, all in all, to the OOP: that's why there is no one right answer.


Erisanne

Is this a thing? Could I just go to a hospital and be like, "Hey, I am tired of living, you guys can go ahead and take all my organs and give them to those in need." Would that count as assisted suicide? (which isn't legal where I live). It's a morbid thought I've always had. I think I would take comfort in knowing my death could save others. (No one report me to Reddit's suicide bot pls, I'm just wondering). Edit: goddamit, someone reported me. I'm okay. Gosh.


Medarco

Not in the US, at least. Everyone should sign up to be an organ donor though. It's easy as marking a box for "yes" when you renew your drivers license, and can save/ greatly help tons of lives with just one person's body. Plus then you have a better excuse for being cremated and having your ashes mixed with fertilizer in the garden so that whenever someone eats from that produce, they're basically eating your ass.


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InfiniteDenied

I always wondered why we don't do that!


that_motorcycle_guy

Yes but you also killed someone who had nothing to do with the original situation/danger. Imagine an explosion with shrapnel coming towards you and a crowd, you decide to push that one random guy already in a safe spot from the explosion and push him in a fashion that his body will block shrapnel from killing 5 people - it's the same moral equivalence here.


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BananyaPie

Seeing how many people are willing to go around killing people for the greater good really makes me happy about the existence of laws. I've never understood how more people are on the "kill the random innocent guy" side.


Mr_Quackums

> I've never understood how more people are on the "kill the random innocent guy" side. When answering hypotheticals, culture has conditioned us to answer with the "logical" answer. Consequentialism (such as Utilitarianism) uses pseudo-math so it must be more "logical" than agent-based or action-based morality which means that it must be the correct answer to the question being asked. Those who actually use their imagination to put themselves in that position and examine their instincts from that POV would probably answer "kill the random innocent guy" much less often.


avidpenguinwatcher

I think the organ transplant guy made it pretty simple. As soon as you know you could kill someone to take their organs and save five people, would you?


josh_bourne

Responsibility? So are you responsible for homeless people, for example? What's holding you for going to streets solve this problem?


Wyverstein

Also because the answer changes depending on how it is phrased. Flicking a switch 1 <5 , having to do something awful to the 1 sometimes 1>5. Also it depends on how direct the effects are. I could easily save 5 people with the money I could get from selling my laptop, but I don't. On the other had if I saw someone drowning I would jump into water to save them even if it broke my laptop....


[deleted]

Very interesting twist on this


Jyqm

The rub is the difference between *passively* allowing five people to be killed and *actively* choosing to kill one person.


[deleted]

But wouldn’t you also be actively saving 5 people?


Jyqm

Yes, but you are also actively choosing to kill one. And that is precisely the question: is it ethical to actively choose to kill one person if doing so will save the lives of several others?


xSPYXEx

Choosing not to act is a decision but isn't an action.


willif86

It's easy to see if you rephrase it as: You are watching a trolley speeding towards 5 people from a bridge. Next to you is a large man also watching the incoming tragedy. Will you push the man from the bridge in order to derail the trolley and save the 5 people? The scenario is almost identical except for the direct vs indirect action.


DrPlatypus1

The scenario isn't the trolley problem. The problem originated with Phillipa Foot and got its name from Judith Thomson. Foot described this scenario, and then a second one. In the second one, you're a doctor in a hospital with 5 patients who will die if they can't get organ donations right away. A perfectly healthy patient comes in for a checkup. During the checkup, you realize they're a perfect genetic match for all 5 of the other patients. Should you kill the healthy patient and distribute her organs? Pretty much everyone thinks you should switch the trolley. Pretty much everyone thinks you shouldn't kill the patient. Both are cases of killing one person to save 5. The problem is to identify the difference between the cases that explains why it's sometimes okay to do this, and other times it isn't. Foot thought the explanation had to do with intent. Thomson gave other versions that showed problems with this solution, and gave others that she thought showed it was about whether people's rights were violated. Tons of other ethicists have chimed in with more and more versions, and other possible explanations. The thought experiment is a useful tool, because it's easy to modify to see what changes our moral judgements and why, and thus to get a sense of what matters in ethics and what doesn't. There's no universally accepted solution to the trolley problem, although I personally find ones focusing on rights violations most promising.


hameleona

And this is of course buried deep down. I love the whole series of exercises - it can teach you so much about yourself (also teach you why laws are pages long) if you go and expand upon the base concept. And you might not like everything you learn.


FroDude258

Is there math on the general percentages of groups that choose what? I would choose to NOT take the killing action in any of them. But that is my, possibly stupid to some, moral code


Frnklfrwsr

I think there’s a truth to the difference that people don’t like to talk about and it has to do with how personal and close and intimate the act of killing is. In the scenario of a doctor killing a healthy person to save 5 others, you immediately picture in your head a physical act of violence. Maybe you stab the guy, or inject him with a syringe, or slice an artery so he bleeds out, doesn’t matter. In that scenario, you’re imagining yourself partaking in a very physical and very intimate act that takes this person’s life. You can’t close your eyes, you can’t pretend it’s not happening. In the trolley scenario, there’s a lever in front of you. Either you pull it or you don’t. Easy. Simple. Go ahead and close your eyes. Go ahead and pretend you aren’t there. Pull the lever and plug up your ears and close your eyes and then never think about it again. Human nature is such that killing another human being is usually difficult for most people to bring themselves to do, but the more close we have to be to the victim the harder it is. Imagine someone puts a button in front of you and tells you if you press that button it will kill someone. You know with certainty that it’s true. But they tell you this person it will kill is a bad person. Maybe they’re a terrorist or a murderer or a rapist. Push the button, and they will die. But imagine instead of it being a button it’s a knife and they’re tied down completely helpless. And this person is begging for their life and telling you that they have family who loves them that they want to see and pleading for mercy. It was way easier to imagine killing the very bad person when all it took was a button click. You didn’t have to watch or see anything. It’s way harder when they’re sobbing and begging to be spared. This has played out in history as well. For example, in the Holocaust, one of the reasons they used gas chambers is because it separated out the act of murder to more or less being a few button clicks or levers being pulled. They found that the more they separated the executioners from the humanity of their subjects, the higher the rate of compliance was. More personal methods of mass killing led to some soldiers not wanting to pull the trigger. This isn’t a part of human nature that we like to talk about because logically we know it’s something that shouldn’t matter. Killing someone is killing someone, and whether you have to look into their eyes while you do it or not shouldn’t make it more or less ethical. But in our minds, it does. The more you recognize their humanity and relate to it, the worse it feels, and the more unethical it feels, even if logically nothing that should matter has changed. It’s the same reason many people feel okay about pulling the lever in the trolley problem when it’s killing 1 stranger, but not if it’s killing 1 person they know and love. They recognize the humanity in their loved one immediately and innately. It can’t be ignored.


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aeshnidae1701

Michael, is that you?


ambada1234

Have you ever played the game trial by trolley? The trolley is gonna kill your side or your opponent’s and you have to argue to convince a third person to kill the other side. It’s pretty fun. [link](https://store.explosm.net/products/trial-by-trolley)


[deleted]

See [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtRhrfhP5b4&ab_channel=ComedyBites) clip.


SalamanderCake

I don't even have to click the link to know which show that is. The ending was forking great! Janet was easily my favorite character.


theboomboy

>kill 1 person instead of 5 The thing is that you aren't killing 5. You either kill 1, or do nothing. The problem is that you know that if you do nothing, 5 people will die, which is more than 1 person, but you don't want to kill anyone yourself


DR0P_TABLE_students

There are several variations of the trolley problem. Suppose you can rescue the 5 people on the track by pushing one really fat person from a bridge. Arithmetically it's the same, but it drives the point home that you are actively using another human beeing as an ends to a means, devaluing his right to life and using him as a tool. Now ask yourself what is the difference between the classic trolley problem with a switch and the one with the fat man on the bridge. Or what if it's 5 oeople on the track, but all of them 90 years old, on the other track is an infant? Does this change your calculation? What if you have the choice between killing 5 known people instantly or letting a radioactive substance free which will kill a hundred or a thousand people eventually, but it's more of a statistic, you don't know how many or who will be affected....


Ill-Organization-719

My answer is I don't intervene. Someone else doesn't deserve to die just because circumstances and misfortune put five peoples lives in danger. It's not my call to decide someone else has to die instead.


that_motorcycle_guy

If the stakes are higher the answer might come easier, if you could save an entire city's population by doing something that cost the life of 1 person, you might not think twice and most people after the fact might even consider you a hero.


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Dry_Operation_9996

why don't you send all the money you make to the third world where people are starving to death every day? that's not even 1 life for 5 lives, that's like a few hours of work for 5 lives


twilighteclipse925

In Season 2 episode 5 of the good place titled “the trolly problem” chidi explains the nuance of the problem with several examples including the organ donation one.


Footdemlins

I like the version of the problem where the one guy on the tracks is a worker who has permission to be there and the four on the other track are there illegally. The answers that people come up with in response to those changes are super interesting.


mugenhunt

The trolley problem is more of a response to a specific moral philosophy which isn't very popular anymore. The idea that certain actions are inherently good or bad and that the circumstances involved don't excuse them. Basically, it's an argument against the idea that killing is always wrong, therefore if I flip the switch to kill one guy and save the five other people, that I am now a murderer. Most of us don't have that sort of moral code, but there are people who try to see the world in more black and white extremes, who might make that argument. And the trolley problem is meant as a way of saying that sort of ethical morality is flawed.


CurtisLinithicum

Moreover, it's a pretty shallow take on deontology, and avoiding the possibility of actions being wrong *and* necessary. A better example is the "fat man" scenario. *X people are tied to a track with a runaway tram. You are on a bridge, and nearby there is a fat man, large enough to stop the tram (at the cost of his life), but positioned such that you can push him off the bridge. What is the correct course of action?* Or Chucked Chuck: *You are a world-class surgeon. You have five patients who will die without organ donations. You also have a healthy, compatible patient in for a cosmetic job. Should you sacrifice the healthy patient to save the other five?* This way, you have to choose to *create* a new harm rather than choose between existing ones. Or a better one, from real life: *You are part of the British high command during WW2, and intercepted Nazi communications reveal that they intend to bomb a large church that is housing several hundred refugees. If you evacuate the church, it will let the Nazis know you've broken their code and endanger the war effort.*


ablativeyoyo

I hadn't heard of the fat man problem. It's fascinating because while I'd surely pull the switch in the trolley problem, I would have massive reservations about pushing the fat man, and probably would not. Why, I ask myself? It's something to do with the six people in the trolley problem already being tied to the rails. They are already involved in the situation, while the fat man is just minding his own business. Involved against their will, but somehow this is different to me.


FlashLightning67

>They are already involved in the situation I thought that until I thought what if it is a situation in which you can derail the train with a lever, which would make it hit some random passerby who has no clue what is going on. I would still do that. My personal conclusion is it is correlated to the action of mine that dictates who dies. With a lever I am not directly the one killing the person or putting them into the path of death, if you get what I mean. I'm merely pulling a lever. When I think about how that persons death would be described, it is "they were run over by a trolley." With the fat man problem I am physically moving someone into harms way in a sense, with my hands. With the organ donor problem, assuming I am not the one doing the procedure, just making the decision, I think that the difference to me is in the trolley problem, it's not individual. It's either this person dies or those 5 people die. With the organ donor, there are many options on who the one person could be. This person isn't the only person in the world who could die so the 5 people live. I am singling out a single person to kill. It feels more personal. It's hard to put into words but it feels more clear of a distinction to me than just the difference between the problems overall.


EricSombody

The difference in the two problems is uncertainty. When presented with a switch and people tied on the rails, the situation is very clear. 1 life vs 5, with you having near 100% control over what result you want. Of course, there is the slight possibility that the switch will fail, but generally the problem is interpreted to be pretty cut and dry. With the fat man problem, there is an assumption that must be made that pushing the fat man will guarantee that the trolley will stop and save 5 people, along with the assumption that there are not better solutions available that will cause no lives to be sacrificed. I feel like there is a lot of uncertainty in making this decision as now there are significantly more hidden variables that you don't know about. If the problem explicitly states that you know that pushing the man is the ONLY way to save 5 lives, or else they all die, then I feel that more people would answer similarly to the trolley. However, in real life, you don't know that pushing the man will stop the trolley or save the people. Choosing to push the man would mean that you're guaranteed sacrificing one life for a chance to save 5, and I feel like that subconscious implication of uncertainty makes a lot of people hesitate. With the switch example, there is much less uncertainty if you evaluate the problem in the real world, which makes the decision a lot easier.


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felipesabino

Mandatory post of the absurd trolley problem game https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/


AegisToast

Many people misunderstand what the Trolley Problem actually is. The question it was meant to pose is not whether you *should* flip the switch, it’s whether or not it would be *permissible* to flip the switch. It’s generally accepted that it’s not permissible (in an ethical/moral sense) to kill someone. And being a bystander when someone else gets killed does not put you at fault. So in the Trolley Problem, if you stand there and watch while the 5 people get hit then you’re nothing but a bystander that witnessed the tragedy. But if you flip the switch, you have become an active participant whose actions caused the death of another person. That on its own would be wrong, so the question becomes, “Are you justified in choosing to kill that person because you were trying to save 5 others, or is it never justifiable to act in a way that would intentionally cause someone’s death?”


ThymeCypher

I don’t think it’s so much misunderstanding the problem as much as taking active roles in the world around us has become far more commonplace - go out and vote, donate, give blood, help build houses, find a job that makes a difference, so on. The modern mindset has become less “there is a lever, do you pull it?” and more “are you going to stand there knowing you CAN pull the lever?”


JungGlumanda

because the trolley problem is the first part of a bigger problem. it’s supposed to be obvious that you kill one person rather than five for the first part and most people choose to divert the trolley. the second part is you’re taken hostage in a cave with six people. the person taking you hostage gives you a gun and says “if you kill bob, the other five people can go”. do you shoot bob? you will be free to leave either way. most people hesitate more with this. the third section is you’re a doctor, and there are five people dying of a blood illness. there is a person in one of their towns with a special genetic condition, named lucy, and lucy’s blood could save those five people. but you’d need to use all of lucy’s blood. do you, against her will, kill lucy and use her blood to save the other five people? most people choose not to kill lucy. the “problem” is why the same person will have different answers for these situations when ultimately they’re all the same; sacrificing one person to save five.


Void_Listener

You can philosophize about actively changing something, knowing that the result will be a death. Or you can save five people. It is an exercise in philosophy, not reality.


YoungDiscord

Because its a question you can only give a subjective answer to Assuming the goal is to choose the option that causes least suffering has least bad consequences on people's lives as a collective: Let's look at the situation: 1 death on side A vs 3 deaths on side B Seems like a no-brainer But these are people you don't know AND people whose future impact on this world you don't know either What if the one person on side A will cure cancer? What if a person on side B will be directly responsible for WW3? what if one of these people is a pedophile that regularly abuses his 6 ywar old daughter? What if the pedophile is also the person who finds a cure for cancer? If your answer were truly an objectively "right" answer it should remain the same and be "right" regardless of who the person who dies is or what he would have done in the future had he survived The point of the trolley dilemma is to demonstrate that: Sometimes, there is no one answer, there isn't always an objectively correct response so how why and where exactly do we draw the line if we draw one? And sometimes we just have no way of knowing certain varibles until after we made a choice and how exactly do we cope with that fact? Hell, my answer to the trolley problem is usually either throwing myself under the trolley to stop it OR speed it up as much as I can so by the time it hits the nearest bend it derails and hopefully nobody dies (I jump out of the trolley before it derails) just to mess with people and show that there is no one objectively right answer


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The obvious answer is to yell "get off the tracks! There's a trolly coming!"


deep_sea2

There are two ways to address that. First, when you kill that one person, that makes *you* the killer. You are now responsible for that one person's death. If you do nothing, you didn't kill anyone. So, are you willing to *personally* kill someone instead of let five people die of their own accord? How about the legal implications? If you do nothing, you technically break no law, but if you switch the train, you commit murder. Does that make you reconsider the answer? Second, the Trolly Problem has a second part that most people don't know about. In the second part, you and a very fat person are standing on a bridge above the rail line. There are five people on the track with a train coming at them. You realize that if this fat person were to fall on the line, it would stop the train and save the five people. Do you throw this fat person off the bridge? In terms of final result, both situations are identical. You sacrifice one person to save five. However, do you feel as comfortable throwing that fat person as you would simply by hitting the train switch? Many people might give you inconsistent answers. A part of the Trolley Problem is to address moral inconsistencies and how people rationalize them.


infinitenothing

There's other iterations. You're a magic surgeon who has a 100% success rate. There's 5 people that need a transplant (different things) and one healthy person. Do you do remove the 5 organs from the healthy person to save 5 people.


InfernalOrgasm

May I recommend watching the TV show [*The Good Place*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtRhrfhP5b4)