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I call to my loved ones on the trolley that this is the time to use the emergency brake which is already there in case of the much more likely scenario of someone getting caught in the doors. Then, once the trolley has come to a stop with everyone safe I start lodging complaints with the department of transportation over the insane number of safety violations that led to this.
Clearly both trolley drivers’ dead man’s switches have failed, as has the electronic system that is supposed to detect that, as well as the signal system that registers every track switch. Also, the manual oversight of public transportation has failed catastrophically, either not noticing that something weird is going on or choosing to not shut down the trolleys despite noticing it. No one is supposed to be able to switch trolleys headed in opposite directions unto the same track in the first place, and certainly not anyone with access to an unsupervised manual switch. The design of that junction is insane and illegal.
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”
The anarchist cookbook contains a recipe for “bannanadine” a fictional drug derived from banana peels which as far as I know only exists as a prank for extremely gullible highschool students. This can give you some insight into the quality of recipes included
They’re just workshopping ideas for the next Saw movie.
Oh wait they did this in The Dark Knight.
A trolly is heading down the tracks towards a philosopher. Do you pull the lever to redirect it?
Only if the other line has more than one philosopher on it
analytic or continental?
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 dunno, I kinda agree with this person
Philosophy should be banned.
Imagining a sci fi book where the last remnants of humanity are forced to solve trolley problems by an AI.
“I have no mouth but I must scream” by Harlan Ellison is about an AI that’s kept a small group of humans alive indefinitely to torture them.
No trolley problems exactly, but people do make painful choices in the story.
That’s what I was thinking of, but it’s millions of people and they’re all whittling their own numbers down via being forced to participate in increasingly outlandish trolley variations.
ooh, and what if it was simulating their consciousnesses and torturing them endlessly for previously failing to help bring about its existence?
Well looking at the diagram, the trolleys have both passed the switch points already so I guess all you can do is watch.
There’s no tracks to move them over, the lever was never even going to do anything to begin with.
We need to shut these thought experiments down till we figure out what the hell is going on
What if I jump onto the tracks and die with my family member?
For the love of God won’t somebody do something to improve railway safety? We need to stop these trolleys from causing problems all the time.
Basically the kind of rail system I’d expect America to build.
This would be more interesting without the three strangers.
If both of you do nothing, two people die. If both of you pull, all die.
Best case one person pulls, saving all their loved ones. The other person loses one.
What do?
As it’s written in the OP pulling the lever IMO is always unconscionable as you’ll kill three others AND risk killing 6 more.
In the OG prisoners dilemma, the best result was when both people choose the selfless act, the second best overall was if only one person did, but that was worse for the selfless one, and the worst option overall was if both people acted selfishly, but it was better for the person who would have acted selflessly.
Something like:
- both one year of prison if no one talks.
- if one person talks, they get no years and the other guy gets 3
- if both talk, both get 2 years of prison.
So here it should be worst for you if you don’t pull the lever but the other person does, but the best (least people die) scenario is if neither person pulls the lever and allows one loved one to die each. The incentive structure should be set up that no matter what your opponent does, acting selfishly will mean less of your loved ones die.
Maybe if you pull and the other person doesn’t, their trolley also somehow kills its occupants? And it’s two people per trolley and one person per track.
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.
Schrodinger’s Prisoner’s Trolley Problem
There is a random chance that your and your adversary’s switch are flipped because of the decay of 2 atoms of uranium. Does free will exist?
University of Virginia in Charlottesville’s Prisoner’s Trolley Exception: People put into an undecorated white room would rather pull the lever than be bored
