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[Draignean]

There's certainly a distinction somewhere, but its vague as heck

Ah, the boon and bane of English. Makes for great poetry, but it's imprecise as all hell.

Not to mention all the bloody pronunciation rules and their exemptions. Why is final syllable 'Wretched' pronounced markedly differently than that of 'Retched'? Hell, the only real difference in pronunciation is in that last syllable, but the only difference is in the first letter!
 

[helmacon]

What really gets to me with these is the "mob" variant.

A mob of people has 5 taken hostages. They say they will kill the hostages unless the perpetrator of a certain crime is brought fourth and executed. You do not know who the perpetrator is, but you have the means to frame an innocent person and have him executed to save the five.

In the original trolley question I would always save the 5.

In the mob question, I cannot justify taking action.

I feel very strongly of my answer in both questions, yet they are different answers.

I think I have a natural aversion to "giving in" to the demands of other people in the second question. I am upset by the idea of framing and killing an innocent man, but it dosent actualy influence my decision. I'm a bit ashamed to admit that, but it's just honest introspection.

Here is a new variant for you.
There is a machine that has acquired six people at random from the population. It divides tham into groups of 1 & 5.
It will kill the group of five unless you throw a switch that will cause it to kill the 1 instead.

Do you throw the switch, or not?

answer the above first^^

Spoiler: followup scenario (click to show/hide)

The machine will continue acquiring people and killing one group until each individual of the entire human population has gone through the machine once. You have the opportunity to throw the switch at the beginning, but after the first group you cannot change the setting. It will always kill either the 1 or the 5 according to the original setting.

[NJW2000]

Always 1.

 EZ unless you engage with it emotionally like you might irl. But I'd try not to do that in real life.

[Greiger]

Ah yea that mob variant one that's interesting.  Never heard that one, and I think that would be a case where I would choose inaction.  Maybe not for the right reason though. 

I think it would be pretty obvious to everyone involved that I just picked some random person off the street and not the actual perpetrator.  And the risk of evidence pointing to the actual perpetrator later is too great. No point framing an innocent person without 100% surety it will succeed.  Unless someone came forward and volunteered for the framing. But maybe I'm looking at it wrong.

Seems like there are indeed at least a dozen diffrent ways this same question can be framed and indeed tiniest little details can change the answer.

[Harry Baldman]

Always 1.

 EZ unless you engage with it emotionally like you might irl. But I'd try not to do that in real life.

It's not a question of emotional engagement as much as it is of distancing yourself from one principle in favor of another.

The 1 person/5 person train track dilemma can be handily solved by going with the principle of charity - do good for the maximum number of people. The mob variant complicates it because doing the maximum good requires violating the principles of justice. You're not just killing a person, you are killing a person who doesn't deserve it for a crime someone else committed, whatever the reason, which is a gross miscarriage of justice even if it saves people.

I had a fun text about euthanasia that I read today in much the same way, it mentioned an imaginary situation that highlighted the difference between inaction and action:

Imagine two men, Smith and John. They each have a 6-year-old cousin that happens to be the heiress to a massive fortune. If she were to die, their guardian would receive the fortune and become a very rich man.

Smith is the guardian. While his cousin is taking a bath, he walks into the room and drowns her in the bathtub, and cleans up any evidence to make it look like a complete accident, and gets away with it and the massive fortune.

John is the guardian. While his cousin is taking a bath, he walks into the room with the intent of drowning her in the bathtub, but the cousin is startled as he enters and slips, banging her head on the wall and falling into the water face-down. John is prepared to push her head underwater if she stirs, but this proves unnecessary and his cousin drowns in what looks like a complete accident. John is very satisfied and gets away with a massive fortune out of it.

Did John act less reprehensibly than Smith or vice versa? Are their crimes possibly equivalent? One of the retorts to this was that they are indeed both unquestionably immoral, but for different reasons - Smith acted unjustly, as he had no right to drown a six-year-old girl in a bathtub, while John acted uncharitably, as he made no effort to help a six-year-old girl when it would have made all the difference.

[MrRoboto75]

Seems like there are indeed at least a dozen diffrent ways this same question can be framed and indeed tiniest little details can change the answer.

[Akura]

I'm starting to wonder if all my coworkers were all dropped on their heads while drinking lead paint. At least one of the pricers is almost certainly pressing buttons at random, and the other one/two are hardly any better. Next, the clothes go to the 2-4 people who put the price tag on the clothes. They're supposed to check that the thing they're putting a price tag on is supposed to be the thing that price tag goes on. They don't. They ticket them so fast that many of them don't have the tag completely in, and they keep wondering how they keep stabbing themselves with the needle.

Then the clothes come to me. All of them. To me. And only me. I have to look at every single item, do the job of the people before me and check if the tag is correct, then put the clothes on the rolling rack in the order they're laid out in the store so that the 2-4 people who roll them only need to work from one end of the department to the other in one go. This of course, requires that I know the entire store layout at any given time, and somehow be aware of changes to the layout that they make without telling me. Or when they do tell me, they never tell me the extent of the changes. Our store processes 8000-9000 pieces a day, at least 2/3rd's of which are clothing, almost all of which goes through me.

And some of my coworkers complain that their jobs are too hard.

(Where... it is a fairy name... and doesn't imply any malevolence).

That it's a fairy name implies some malevolence. Not all fairy tales are happy and good.

What kind of car has only a single bolt securing the entire freaking engine?

...Far Cry 2's vehicles?

Seems like there are indeed at least a dozen diffrent ways this same question can be framed and indeed tiniest little details can change the answer.

However, the delay you cause the trolley by making it come close enough to wave to causes a businessman on the trolley to be late for work, lose his job, and then he kills his wife and three kids, then himself.

[TD1]

A man yells at you from the approaching train: "If you pull that, I'm gonna kill myself and then my wife!"

However, you really, really want to watch the train pass by.

You also recently read up on the Hedonistic Calculus.

[Rolan7]

I'm starting to wonder if all my coworkers were all dropped on their heads while drinking lead paint.

What kind of car has only a single bolt securing the entire freaking engine?

...Far Cry 2's vehicles?

I love this thread.

Seems like there are indeed at least a dozen diffrent ways this same question can be framed and indeed tiniest little details can change the answer.

I love it SO MUCH.
Mostly for the earlier discussion, which I was eager to join, but I think it's fine without me.  Wonderful stuff.

I mean, of course you should pull the lever though (in the original scenario).  But do you?  And either way, how do you live with it?
People are not rational, and pretending so is unhealthy repression.
But I mean duh, pull it.  The contrived situation isn't your fault.

PS trying to attack the scenario as implausible defeats the point.  It's a metaphor for situations which are real.  Though often people wrongly simplify complex issues into such binary ones.

[Egan_BW]

If this happened to me then I would have to think about the situation, figure out what the switch did, and actually count the people tied to the tracks, look at their faces to tell if they're anyone I know, look farther down the track to see if the train would crash if I pulled the lever...
And by the time I had enough information, five people would be run over. Refusing to make a choice is a choice itself, but it's also a sneaky choice that likes to make you choose it while you're still at figuring out what choices you actually have to make.

[Frumple]

I would, considering that inactivity's been a common response since the scenario was first introduced, and from what I've personally seen, age doesn't correlate much with a change in that. Conventional morality leans towards not pulling the switch if anything, near as I've noticed. It doesn't exactly like to take responsibility for stuff it didn't directly do, really. Makes for some uncomfortable conclusions regarding second order activities (culpability for elected officials, consequences of excess on third parties, stuff like that) and whatnot.

[itisnotlogical]

The word "thicc" (or to really spell it correctly, t  h  i  c  c) is one of my favorite neologisms. I just realized that it is impossible to say it out loud, because it's a homophone of a word that means exactly the same thing in a broader context.

[Neonivek]

That it's a fairy name implies some malevolence. Not all fairy tales are happy and good.

Man that freeken movie is just an endless well of stupidity. I could just keep going on and on about "Well according to the movie, no; All fairies are good."

Why OHH why did they just not give her a different name OR explain that her parents were evil fairies or something? She can still take that name later in the movie.

This is like if a TMNT movie revealed that Shredder was his given name.

---

Also watching a Christian movie and THANKFULLY so far it isn't super hateful yet. The Christian is acting somewhat reasonable, in fact freakishly respectful for a Christian movie.

It is just that he lives in a crazy atheist town full of what I can only assume survivors from the Crusades.

Sure it is another "Christians are persecuted for their beliefs in America" movie, but I'll take funny faux-martyrdom over hateful.

But I fully expect this movie to drive down hate lane... But until then this is HILLARIOUS!

I mean someone walked out of class because the Teacher asked for a moment of silence... Which is, to my knowledge, quite secular... and when the main character created a Bible Club the principle warned the main character against kidnapping people.

[wierd]

Ok, let's twist things REAALLLY hard here--

Maleficent's mother, being a greater magical fairy, used divination to determine her child's future, saw a terrible calamity, and named her daughter after what she saw. This distressed her daughter terribly, predisposing her to be emotionally vulnerable, and thus when King Stephan did the thing he did, it caused her to flip her biscuits, and live up to her namesake.

Granted this is totally apologetics for what I agree is a STUPID thing to do (name a greater fairy something like THAT-- honestly), but lamplit like that, it at least makes some sense. Without it? Psawh.


As for the whole "Train derail ethics falderall"--  False dichotomies suck bollocks. No. They suck bollocks, in a very real way. There are always more choices. One can flip the lever, and yell (because this train is clearly not hypersonic) up at the guy standing on the tracks, and tell him to get his dumbshit ass off of them.  then nobody gets hurt at all. But no. The framer of the argument wants to beg the fucking question. Fuck him.

[Rolan7]

False dichotomies do suck!
But metaphors can still be useful.  An example doesn't teach anything if you simply pull out a BFG.
"There are always more choices." is a valid argument, I grant.  It's never so black and white.
But in the course of navigating that complex situation, balancing various outcomes, you are likely to need to judge the needs of one against the needs of the many.

And while so overwhelmed, it might be useful to know where you stand in general, thanks to a simplistic metaphor.