Just put explosives collars on a bunch of murderers and rapists. Need superpowers just press a button and kill one murderer off.
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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"collateral damage"
I just played this as a board game with my friends. They decided that pineapple on pizza is worse than Donald Trump. My hope in humanity is shattered.
That is crazy. I can't think of any part of Donald Trump that I would want on my pizza.
Touché
Aren't we always chanting "eat the rich"? I'd be fine with the food poisoning, hell even the brain eating prions, if it means he won't be president.
Also a spin-off where Trolley Man cures incurable patients one by one using sacrifices of 5
yes, if you change the problem, you change the way we respond. that's why there's so many trolley problems spin offs in the first place
but the end result is the same.
you're always left with five.
But...it's not a math dilemma, it's a moral one. Changing it to hot philanthropic strippers changes the morality.
the morality doesn't exist in the first place because we don't live in a society that would allow someone to tie up six people on two tracks.
we do live in a world with real problems. Complex problems. Problems that lose solvable value when they are reduced to a philosophical joke.
so please tell me more about how we can solve the worlds problems by flipping switches on train tracks.
The artist just immortalized in a strip that does not understand the trolley problem.
Don’t bother trying to explain philosophy directly to people online. We’re so convinced of our own intelligence that we refuse to consider that our knee-jerk reaction to anything might be worth exploring.
If you want people to learn anything, you have to first of all tell them that they’re right, then add whatever you’re trying to teach them as if it’s some nuance of whatever they’re right about. Even if it makes their original opinion completely wrong. It works surprisingly often.
Our egos have an outer layer of armor that prevents us from easily absorbing ideas unless they have a starting point of agreeing with whatever we already believe.
True for most sadly. But not for all.
I'm happy to be proven wrong. It means I learned something that day. And I love learning new things.
I feel the same way, but it’s good to be aware of our own biases - there’s a bit of an aphorism that goes around about advertising and propaganda, that it works best on people who think it doesn’t work on them. If we think we’re immune to something, we let our guard down a bit. I used to think of myself as a very rational, intelligent, realistic guy, but in recent years I came to realise that I was kind of using that to protect my ego - I was wrong about a lot of things, and I could always find excuses to justify my beliefs as rational.
Maybe I still make the same flaw, I don’t know. Nowadays, I try to stay more focused on being nice than being right. That way, even if I’m wrong, I’m not making people’s day worse.
I’m not always successful with that.
Self awareness is doubt. If you're doubting you haven't stopped improving. You're doing well, based on what you've said - keep it up :)
It understands it just fine. Agency is not a factor in the decision. The choice between action and inaction doesn't matter. People think it matters because people are driven by shortsighted emotions.
I think the thing that people often don’t seem to understand about the trolley problem is that it doesn’t have a “single version”, it’s a framework for exploring human decision making. And the correct answer, it’s all a matter of perspective. For example, if all of drag’s friends were on one side of the track, and on the other side of the track, were a number of people who drag does not know, equal to the number of drag’s friends plus one, would drag kill their friends, or the innocent people?
Drag's friends. Drag has at least ten friends probably, and drag's friends are at least 10% better than the average rando. They're mostly communists and queers. The world is better off with them in it than with some random people who are probably capitalists.
Thank you so much for being honest about making that choice - almost everyone would choose their friends, but lots of people wouldn’t admit to that. Being honest myself, I’d make the same call - and if it came down to me picking between my friends and drag’s friends, I’d choose my friends. The whole “calculus” we run (comparing how good our friends are to average people) is a way we justify making our decisions, a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance of our values (save as many lives as possible) being in conflict with what we actually do (saving our friends rather than as many lives as possible). In reality you would have no way of knowing who those other 11 people would be - for example, if I said that one of them is a researcher on the brink of curing cancer, how would that change your decision? These are really tough questions to deal with, and that’s the point of the trolley problem - that people make different choices because they have different perspectives, and different values. There’s no objectively right and objectively wrong answer to any of the scenarios. Just different interpretations and ways to think about it.
Drag chooses to kill those people because drag knows nothing about them. Drag just assume they're randos. And on average, people suck. Drag's friends are great people.
If drag knew more about the people, the equation would change. Drag finds it difficult to reason seriously about a scientist discovering a cure for cancer, since there's no such thing. There are hundreds of cancers. There's no one solution for all of them and there never will be. We'll need hundreds of cures for cancer, many of which we already use today.
If we went with a more realistic scenario, like "one of those people will be the leader of the USA's communist revolution", drag would be much more willing to kill drag's friends. Drag might also commit suicide about it, though, so maybe the numbers aspect is equal anyway. Would drag give drag's life and all drag's friends' lives away for a communist America? Probably, but drag would sure like some assurance it's going to be proper anarchist communism, and drag wants to know if another leader could have taken that place. Does drag even believe in the "great man" approach to history, or is there no such thing as such a leader? Is there nobody that important?
That’s perfect, drag, I don’t think anyone could have put it better. The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment, yet so many people approach it like it’s some sort of engineering problem that has right and wrong answers, I think it’s probably a consequence of our sort of “tech bro” culture that everything needs to fit into this rational, quantitative framework - we have this drive to put numbers on things that just can’t be rationalised in that way.
People are funny, complicated things, and I love them all!
So philosophical debate on this topic is meaningless, because utilitarism is obviously correct?
Please take off your clothes and lay down here, I have five patients in desperate need of organ transplants.
Please see the other comment drag wrote in this thread in reply to the earlier comment replying to drag, which drag wrote before seeing yours.
I, as the doctor, didn't pick you. Your organs happen to be compatible with all five recipients. It's still random chance, you're just unlucky because your organs work best.
So, we gonna chop you up, or not?
Agency might matter depending on societal context. 5 hot guys might be worse than 1 hot guy in a world with limited resources, for example.
Everyone knows that 5 of something is usually better than 1. The dilemma comes from finding a situation where that might not be true, and therein exploring some quirks of our own humanity.
It goes too far when people interpret these quirks as fundamental human traits, but there is genuine merit in testing oneself with fun hypotheticals
testing oneself with fun hypotheticals
fun
you've got a peculiar taste for fun, I must admit
edit
to be fair, I don't disagree, and discussing things like that or pondering them can be fun, but I still wouldn't expect such a choice of words 😅
Trolley problems can be directly mapped to those "would you rather" drinking games. e.g. Would you have sex with your dad to save your mum's life?
The question is meaningless in a normal context, the answer is meaningless in a normal context, but it's fun to explore your limits in strange circumstances, no?
That's true, there's even a party game that consists solely of controversial topics to talk about, not even this kind of weird ones
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What a crock of shit. Living with the knowledge that you killed someone isn't shortsighted, it's tragic. You pulling the trigger to switch the trolley to kill only the 1 person can and will have consequences on your own mental health.
And the comic isn't even about the choice between action and inaction, it's about "Oh wow, 5>1, this dilemma is easy lol" - nah, even if you make it purely about the numbers - unless you're a fucking psychopath, you're not gonna kill your newborn to save 5 strangers.
Living with knowing you did nothing to save 4 people may affect you as badly. To be fair, the person doing the choice is fucked up both ways, if ey is not a sociopath.
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The best part is that, by refusing to be killed themselves, they are making a choice to let the other people die, rendering their hypocrisy evident and their worry fully rendered moot
I mean, the boat appears to be pretty close to the coast, and not very big. I'd just call the coast guard and there are good chances that nobody dies.
To be honest they could actually swim to shore, it's not impossible
Yeah, but what if it was a ship full of assholes? I got shopping to do.
I would read the shit out of this but 5 people I have never and will never meet who nobody knows will die painlessly and I’m just not sure of the moral implications.
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