Why do people care about this trolley problem thing now? Plenty of videos which are all over 10 minutes talking about it, like, REALLY is it that interesting? I don’t think so…
So you killed one person? To save numerous others? When the others would’ve died through your inaction?
Curious.
This one had it coming though
Like the fat villain?
Push the fat guy
Ah shit…here we go again.
So you killed one person to save all those others.
Hmm.
Batman would like a word…
Batman’s magic pointy ears assure that none of his victims die, even through IRL such a street-fighter would have a long body count just from the sheer numbers, including a few from his Rogues Gallery.
Moreover, the magic pointy ears assure that any traumatic lifelong injuries (including TBAs from concussions) fade from public awareness and Bruce’s memory, so he can sleep well at night forgetting those who failed to fully recover.
ive seen this story before… i cant remember where…
Ah, I’m something of another solution myself.
… Is the murder weapon a plunger?? 😂
Bludgeoned to death with a rubbery dome, what a horrible way to go
I think it was the rod for the manual track switch.
That makes so much more sense lol 😅
I dislike thought experiments because they try to apply certainty to reality. If the outputs are known, morality that has little bearing on our real choices takes over. Utilitarianism dominates where the totality of human lives becomes deductible.
No ethical theory can be proven true for reality, as proof only exists in the realm of the forms. Formal systems require axioms that are based on induction, introducing uncertainty into all logical conclusions. We just have to make the best choices considering the information we have, accepting that we will sometimes be wrong.
A good dramatic breakdown is the movie Eye In The Sky (2015, one of the last films featuring Alan Rickman), which portrays an opportunity to stop a terrorist attack via a drone strike, but the Hellfire Missile attack risks additional civilian casualties.
I mean, the trolley problem is just a starting point. It’s literally one of the simplest thought experiments
The next set of thought experiments goes something more like “say you have 5 people in need of organ transplants, and 1 health person with those organs, do you kill them and take their organs to save 5 others?”
And even later you got another like “there is a dirty nuclear bomb in the middle of the city, and you got someone who you think might be responsible, do you torture them to maybe get a way to defuse the bomb out of them?”
And so on
The trolley problem is literally just a starting point in philosophy class, the experiments get more elaborate, closer to the real world, and less certain as you move towards greater understanding. Until at some point you just deal with real issues such as abortion or animal welfare (like whether veganism is the morally correct choice, which is a lot more controversial than I think it ever should be, but I digress), and the shortcomings of ethical systems and which ones maybe come closest to our intuitions (and then you got philosophers such as Hume which thought that our moral intuition is the only thing that matters), and so on.
Things are a lot lot more nuanced than just the trolley problem, and there are some really tough bullets to bite for utilitarianism in thought experiments. Or at least showing the need to rework the system somewhat, but then it isn’t just a simple “best outcome” even in clear-cut situations.
In practice though, nobody really follows a strict ethical system, and it does show an interesting problem of trying to codify morality into a rational and consistent system. And we get to these edge cases typically by thought experiments, and then try to go from there. Breaking our theories by pushing them to the limits.
But while nobody follows a strict system, you still see elements of these systems in people’s behaviours and choices. Such as maximizing a moral quantity (utilitarianism), or doing what is considered to be a good person thing to do (virtue), or Kantianism, or any numerous of subcategories and other systems which don’t fall neatly into the typical categories. But, for example, in hospitals under triage, they typically follow a kind of utilitarian system
Dirty bombs are for novices. Real nuclear supervillains make a clean bomb (expends all the fissile fuel neatly) and then salts it with a cobalt-60 shell.
I really love that they are on top of a train after a tunnel, implying there was a really intense fight scene leading to this.
Also, implying the survivor is going to eat it on the tunnel roof in about 3/8ths of a second
Depends on which direction the train is going, really 🤷
Bro is about to be decapitated by the tunnel tho
Depends on which direction the train is moving in.
The only time I change from 5 to 1 is when the 1 is the person who tied the 5 to the track. Absolutely only time. Challenge my sith on this.
But at what cost? How many of his challenges did you have to face? Is the numbness over taking this life shock, or have you become so truly numb to death that, even in victory, there is only the endless void?
Can you live in the world you have created, or have you merely started down the path of the monster yourself?
“I’m the guy with the plan because I’m smarter than you, Jack, I’m smarter.” [😡➡️☠️] “Yeah, but I’m taller.”
