I’d pull the lever to kill one person immediately. Assuming the decision maker at each stage is a different person with different opinions on moral, ethical, religious, and logical questions, then it’s a near certainty that someone is going to pull the lever to kill the people at their stage. If you’re lucky, it’s the very next guy. If you’re not, it’s the guy killing a million people a couple of iterations later. If I’m the first guy, I’ll take the moral hit to save the larger number of people.
If you’re not, it’s the guy killing a million people a couple of iterations later
I feel like running over all those bodies would make the train come to a stop way before it ran over a million people.
Now I sit back and wait for some morbid soul who is better at math and physics than me to figure out the answer.
Now if we assume the victims tied up are frictionless orbs, and the train is also a frictionless orb, and the two of them are travelling in a frictionless void than I reckon we could kill a few more.
But then would they die if they don’t slow the train down? The train would necessarily have to impart some energy in order to effect a change in their bodies.
I mean if you’re going fast enough with a pointy train, you could chop up people pretty easy. You just need to make sure that each person is a tire width apart to make sure the wheels don’t lose traction. Assuming a person is roughly half a metre across and a tire is 75cm in diameter, we get 1.25m per person, so a track of 1250km for a million people. Not very long at all.
I agree with your logic, so far as it goes. However, there are, currently, just over eight billion humans in existence. If my quick, over-tired math is correct, that means only 34 people have to say no, until we run out of people to tie to the tracks. Assuming, at that point, the system collapses and nobody dies, I’d guess 34 people would refuse - might be the better choice.
Would you trust the entirety of human existence to be decided by 34 people? In my experience from watching reality TV, the last one always screws the rest over for their own benefit.
Imagine being the last one. You could singlehandedly wipe out half the global population. This would normally be a bad thing, and it is, but it would also make every surviver twice as rich, solve food scarcity and halve the pollution, perhaps even saving humanity from itself.
If that’s not enough, think about everyone now having double the amount of kittens and half the traffic on the roads.
Oh yeah. I was assuming an infinite series (somehow). Also, odds are good that out of 34 people, one of them would misunderstand the rules or be crazy enough to do it anyway for various reasons. I’d probably still do it.
Exactly. If you have the means at hand, you have the responsibility to act. At the risk of taking a shitpost way too seriously, if you were in that situation and actively chose to leave the decision to someone else to kill double the people, then you acted unethically.
Technically the 2nd guy could just let it go through and nobody dies. However if it was to double over and over forever until it stopped, then technically the best option is to just double it forever. Nobody would ever die? If someone decided to end “the game” as it were and kill some people, then that’s on them.
Pretty sure there’s a base case when you run out of people to tie to the tracks. A naive log2 of 8 billion is only 33 decisions.
True, since we’re analyzing a hypothetical ethical question I shouldn’t leave any open assumptions. I made the assumption that at some point, at least one person will have to die, as in I see this trolley problem as a situation where at the end there is no choice and the maximum number of people die.
It’s on them, but it affects thousands or millions of others.
As such if you can prevent that, and don’t, it’s also on you too.
I think this is a good metaphor for how humanity has “dealt” with problems like climate change.
If you make a tough decision, it causes hardship now, but prevents hardship in the future. If you don’t make a tough decision now, someone in the future has to either kill a lot of people, or just pass the buck to the next guy. People justify not making the tough decisions by saying that maybe eventually down the line someone will have an easy decision and there will be nobody on the side path, even though all observable evidence says that the number of people on that path just keeps growing exponentially.
On the one hand, the possibility exists that the buck gets passed forever, especially as the kill count numbers grow substantially making the impermissibility of allowing the deaths grow with it. It’s not likely the any given person would kill one stranger, let alone millions.
On the other hand, in an infinite series, even something with miniscule odds will still eventually inevitably happen, and some psycho will instantly become the most infamous murderer in history, followed immediately by the person that didn’t just kill one person and end the growth before it started.
But what if you’re the tenth person with 1024 on the line? Or the 20th person with 1,048,576? Etc. Is there ever a point (before it’s everyone, in which case risk doesn’t increase) where you stop pulling it?
If we all collectively agree to just pass it on, then either:
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It’s infinite, and it just passes on forever, or…
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It’s not infinite and somebody at the end has no choice, in which case nobody in charge of a lever has killed anyone
So yeah, I say pass it on.
Except that somewhere down that chain someone is almost certainly going to choose to kill people, so by passing the trolley on down to them you’re responsible for killing a lot more than if you ended it right now.
And since every rational person down the line is going to think that, they’ll all be itching to pull the “kill” lever first chance they get. So you know that you need to pull the kill lever immediately to minimize the number of deaths.
Only the person pulling the lever is responsible for his/her action though. There is a difference between passively passing on and actively murder someone
Dentological ethics: you have a duty to not murder people, so you don’t pull the lever
Utilitarian ethics: pulling the lever will kill less people
If I hand a machete to Jason Voorhees I think I’m at least partly responsible for the people he hits with it. I know what he’s going to do with that thing.
I guess then the issue would be: do you ever find out the result of your actions? If no, then I guess it’s sort of a “glass half empty/full” kind of thing, because you could just pass it on and assume the best and just go live your life quite happily.
Although if you did find out the result, imagine being first, pulling the lever and then finding out nobody else would have.
If it’s infinite (up to the current human population), we’re all tied up on the tracks. Unless we’re leaving out the exact number of people that would bring it to approximately the full population, I guess.
As long as I’m not on the tracks, I’ll take the hit and kill one instead of risking a potential genocide.
Someone needs to stop tying people to those train tracks or this trolley problem will never go away.
Step in front of the train: Tell your manager this whole project is dumb, provide a list of reasons why it’s a bad idea and explain you are prepared to resign rather than enable its further development.
MULTI-TRACK DRIFTING!! Which also kills the other lever guy, bonus!
