New trolley problem:
You are a worker at wef, you have access to anarchist cookbook
Do you [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] or [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]
Some time ago I heard that the anarchist cookbook is not recommended and one should use CIA instructions to manufacture improvised explosives etc.
To quote Crimethinc, the anarchist cookbook is “not composed or released by anarchists, not derived from anarchist practice, not intended to promote freedom and autonomy or challenge repressive power – and was barely a cookbook, as most of the recipes in it are notoriously unreliable”
They’re just workshopping ideas for the next Saw movie.
I don’t know a whole lot about moral philosophy, but isn’t the only moral thing to do here not to pull the lever? From a Kantian perspective, pulling the lever can only be ethical if everyone pulling the lever would also be ethical, but that leads to the worst outcome. From a utilitarian perspective, the lives of your loved ones are no more valuable the the strangers’ in the middle, so you would maximize utility by preventint the most deaths. From a cynical perspective, self interested rational actors are likely to decide to pull the lever, so you’d stand to lose more from pulling the lever and most certainly achieving the worst case scenario, than you’d gain from the off chance that the other party made the same calculation and decided against taking the risk. From a natural law perspective either choice can be acceptable so long as the intention behind the action is not to kill any person, and the deaths fall into double effect. So maybe there you could justify pulling the lever.
I wish I could dig up the video snippet where “amoral” philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller destroys the trolley problem: https://www.youtube.com/@carefreewandering/videos
Hopefully you can. Thinking about it now, it reminds me of one of those topics that every redditor™ who thought they were a genius talked to death 10 years ago.
I know it’s buried in one of his videos, but haven’t found it. The gist is that trolley problems are perfectly spherical frictionless cows in a vacuum. They are metaphysical, platonic ideals of dilemmas that never actually occur in the real world. They’re divorced from the uncountably large number of specifics of any real-life situation.
We need to shut these thought experiments down till we figure out what the hell is going on
