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RE: Stopping the trolley

Comment comment by NomadSoul on 02 February 2008

I agree. Although I hate to do it, I'm going to have to quote Star Trek: Sometimes the needs of the few do outweigh the needs of the many--or at least equal them.

I think it has to do with two things: first, our sensitivity to context--in other words, utilitarian ethics might make sense on paper, but when we're actually in a situation we are much more affected by our emotions and intuitions than we will readily admit. The second thing is that suffering is a qualitative and immeasurable--so the suffering of one person might be comparable to the suffering of five, if we have to make comparisons.

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RE: Stopping the trolley by gnifyus :: NR7

I was thinking later that the trolley/fat man situation doesn't exactly compare apples to apples when faced with a choice of ethics. One choice is based on actually deliberately killing someone by the results of our own actions, whereas the other 'choice' is doing nothing about something that isn't our fault to begin with.

This thought experiment can have a twist thrown into it: What if one of the five endangered people on the track were a loved one; a daughter or son? Then would we throw the fat man down?

These cases make us wish we were super-human like in the first Spiderman movie where he has to choose between allowing the tram full of people to fall to their death; or allowing Mary Jane Watson to fall to her death. With Spiderman being a superhero of course, everybody is saved.

Although I hate to do it, I'm going to have to quote Star Trek:

As you can see from the above, that's probably not much to be sorry about around here.. :-)

Posted 02 February 2008, Hide, Parent, Reply