You’re choosing between “lots of people being killed” vs “LOOOOOOTTTTTSSSS of people being killed”
I’m choosing to be against killing. If killing is wrong, either option is unacceptable.
If your parents said you could eat your own shit (stored in a septic tank for the last month) or your whole sister, raw and alive, you would still prefer neither option.
Source: medium
In 1976, Judith J. Thomson expanded the problem into the classic version that most of us know today.
Would you push a fat man off a bridge to stop a runaway trolley from killing 5 workers on the tracks?
This version is not just about switching tracks, but brings the moral issue much closer to home by saying if you want to save 5 people, you yourself have to push someone off a bridge.
To make matters worse, these are also the only two choices that you have. There is nothing else you can do; there is no escaping the problem.
[…]
Like many philosophy instructors, I have given this thought experiment to my students many times. In my philosophy classes, Students of all levels and ages are repulsed by the experiment. They think that it is stupid that there are only two choices and that there is nothing else they can do.
[…]
But something I have never seen given much consideration is the initial response that my students and so many others have to the problem.
[…]
Our intuition is that if we are in a lose-lose moral situation where the right moral action does not feel satisfactory, then someone else made a bad moral decision already; leaving us holding the bag.
The trolley problem is bullshit. No Descartesian Evil Demon has created a world, real, dream, simulated or otherwise, in which I am the sole person in charge of a life-or-death problem where more or fewer must die.
No demon at all has created it; other humans have. You aren’t the sole person responsible for responding to it, but your actions will contribute to what happens next, non-action included.
You can say that this kind of situation implies someone else has done something wrong, leaving you holding the bag, and you’d be right, if nobody had done something wrong, we wouldn’t have a genocide to talk about in the first place- but saying that leaving you holding the moral bag was a wrong thing to do doesn’t change the fact that you are now holding that bag, along with all the rest of us. And about half of us (referring to the people of the US as a whole), if you haven’t noticed, have every desire of causing even more harm. “Neither” is simply not an option when failing to choose the least bad thing will result in someone else choosing the worse one. It’s not fair, it’s repulsive even, but the universe does not work in such a way as to ensure only fair moral choices exist. Morality is a thing we invented, the world doesn’t care about conforming to it.
Getting the best outcome you have with the bad options presented you matters more than whether or not you feel your own personal hands are clean- because metaphorically clean hands will not save the people of Palestine, and likely would doom some, and others elsewhere, that could have been saved. A clean feeling conscience bought by leaving people you could have helped to die is little more than a delusion of innocence.
Neither do I, as I’m a transhumanist, but that is pretty much irrelevant to this, because how on earth do one’s feelings about one’s species even have any bearing on this?
You’re choosing between “lots of people being killed” vs “LOOOOOOTTTTTSSSS of people being killed”
Based on your own morality you have outlined, ethically you would choose to vote Kamala then, as under her far far fewer people will die.
I’m choosing to be against killing. If killing is wrong, either option is unacceptable.
If your parents said you could eat your own shit (stored in a septic tank for the last month) or your whole sister, raw and alive, you would still prefer neither option.
Source: medium
The trolley problem is bullshit. No Descartesian Evil Demon has created a world, real, dream, simulated or otherwise, in which I am the sole person in charge of a life-or-death problem where more or fewer must die.
No demon at all has created it; other humans have. You aren’t the sole person responsible for responding to it, but your actions will contribute to what happens next, non-action included.
You can say that this kind of situation implies someone else has done something wrong, leaving you holding the bag, and you’d be right, if nobody had done something wrong, we wouldn’t have a genocide to talk about in the first place- but saying that leaving you holding the moral bag was a wrong thing to do doesn’t change the fact that you are now holding that bag, along with all the rest of us. And about half of us (referring to the people of the US as a whole), if you haven’t noticed, have every desire of causing even more harm. “Neither” is simply not an option when failing to choose the least bad thing will result in someone else choosing the worse one. It’s not fair, it’s repulsive even, but the universe does not work in such a way as to ensure only fair moral choices exist. Morality is a thing we invented, the world doesn’t care about conforming to it.
Getting the best outcome you have with the bad options presented you matters more than whether or not you feel your own personal hands are clean- because metaphorically clean hands will not save the people of Palestine, and likely would doom some, and others elsewhere, that could have been saved. A clean feeling conscience bought by leaving people you could have helped to die is little more than a delusion of innocence.
#rekt
It’s not the universe, it’s the human world. This is a solely human problem, and I do not find myself emotionally attached to the idea of being human.
Neither do I, as I’m a transhumanist, but that is pretty much irrelevant to this, because how on earth do one’s feelings about one’s species even have any bearing on this?
I don’t think you understand the syntax of my sentence, sorry.
Removed by mod