Life, uh, finds a way.
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Came here for this.
Gah, you beat me to it.
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I've never understood why people have such a hard time with the trolley problem. Obviously, if you pre-emptively move that lone guy over to the rail with the five, you can hit all six at once to maximize your score. Just requires a bit of setup.
Simply hit all six with multi track drifting
Y'all kids and your speedrun strats. Some of us have poor reaction time and need to perform safety setups.
That's exactly what I think would happen with the derailing technique described here. Plus you might lose A couple in the trolley as well.
Or just do whatever you feel like in the moment and then jump in front of the trolley to escape all consequences.
Well sure Batman can beat the trolley problem with prep time.
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Or the trolley potentially carrying dozens of people falls over, killing and injuring more people than would have been otherwise.
Problem EXTRA solved, those jackasses were too lazy to hit the emergency brakes and they can answer to FSM for their crimes.
going over people also soulnds like it would cause a derilment
A train wagon easily weights 20 tonnes and more. If it goes just at 50 kph, it has an impulse of 278.000 kg*m/s. Respectively 278.000 Ns. According to some googling human bones tend to break at around a force of 4.000 N.
Realistically the train is just going to flatten whatever flesh and bones are between the wheel and tracks.
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Sir the Trolley has derailed in an Ohio neighborhood spilling vinyl chloride everywhere. Lets light it all on fire to get rid of it.
We did it Patrick; we saved the city!
They did say CONTROLLED derailment..
Frame perfect trolley skip
Might need TAS
I'm always sad when I see this stuff. I know it's all jokes and whatnot, but the entire meme has been born out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the dilemma that the trolley problem is supposed to represent.
The question isn't, and has never been whether you throw the switch or not. The question is that if you throw the switch, are you responsible for killing the one, or conversely, if you do nothing, are you responsible for killing the others?
Whether you throw the switch or not is immaterial to the point. Kill one or kill four (or whatever) it doesn't matter. You didn't create that scenario, so by your inaction several people died, are you responsible for their deaths, considering you never put them in that position? Or are you exempt of blame since you basically chose to be an onlooker?
I don't really blame anyone for not getting it, I sure didn't for a really long time until my friend rephrased the same dilemma in a different way (and omitted the trolley): you go to lunch and have a delicious subway sandwich, but you were not very hungry so you only are half. On your travels from Subway to wherever, you pass by a homeless person begging for food. If you decide to ignore them and keep your food for yourself for later, and that person dies of starvation later that same day because of it, are you responsible for their death?
In addition to philosophical questions, the Trolley Problem is also a good tool in psychology to study human ethical reasoning. It turns out that people's intuitive responses vary quite a lot based on details that seem like they shouldn't make a difference. If I'm remembering correctly, I believe that a lot more people say that they would divert the trolley if they imagine that they were observing the situation from a gantry high above the tracks, rather than in close proximity to the person who would be killed thereby.
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See, it is kind of a Batman philosophy.
When the Joker presents Batman with a trolley problem [Save Robin or Save Catwoman], Batman always finds a way to circumvent it and save both. Because he is Batman.
People will always try to get the best out of the situation, even though that isn't what the exercise is about.
It's the first question in a battery of questions designed to force you to be aware of inconsistencies in your ethical framework. The first answer is supposed to be obvious: Yes, you throw the switch, but most people's reason for that creates a very messy precedent that the distinction between action and inaction doesn't matter, only the outcome, which later questions can exploit.
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So now you killed the 10 people that were in the train, congrats.
It's not going to flip. Tolleys derail all the time (ask people living in Wrocław). They can't go fast enough to flip. It will just stop after couple of meters.
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The people in the train are the only ones with any power to stop it, but they're divided between "smash everyone quickly" and "smash everyone slowly" factions.
There's an old Talaxian expression: "When the road before you splits in two, take the third path."
That could be misinterpreted to mean “turn around and go back the way you came”
Which would be a valid solution to the trolly problem...
There's an old saying in Tennessee (I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee) that says, take the first path, shame on... shame on you. The third path- you can't get fooled again.
This made me laugh much harder than I'm willing to admit
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So the allegory here is if you're faced with a systemic lose-lose situation, fuck with the control system.
I don't believe in a no-win scenario.
- James T. Kirk
I don't think this person knows what "controlled" means.
You control when it happens.
You're missing the point. The trolley problem represents a moral dilemma. The question should instead be: is any further derivation of this meme ethical? Is responding in a comment immoral in itself?
Everyone knows what the trolley problem is about. I think it's you who's missing the point. Instead of blindly accepting the unacceptable solutions that are offered, come up with your own, better solution.
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A concrete example of this is doctors and hospitals creating guidelines about how to triage care when ICUs were/are full because of unmitigated spread of COVID.
It is definitely an "interesting" phylisophical question to ask:
"If a long term ventilator user comes into the ICU, with the ventilator they own and brought from home, and they are less likely to survive than an otherwise healthy young man who needs a respirator due to COVID infection, is the morally best choice to steal the disabled person's ventilator (killing them) and use it to save the young man's life?"
The policy question that should be asked instead, and never really ways, is "How do we make sure that we never get to the point where we have so many people in the ICU from a preventable disease that we run out of respirators and need to start choosing who to let die?"
This is not just a hypothetical question:
Disabled people continue to plead with us for the bare minimum, like requiring doctors who work with immunocompromised patients to wear N95 respirators while treating those patients.
We continue to chose to stack more people on both sets of tracks instead.
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Isn't this comment basically joking? Why is everyone taking it so seriously lol
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