#trolley-problem

[silvermoon424]

New reaction pic for y'all to be used when you get into an argument about trans healthcare and your opponent starts talking about the 0.8% or whatever of trans people who regret transitioning

[masturbatress]

[st-just]

The root of my frustration with a lot of trolley problem discourse is that 'What does it mean to act ethically in a world where shitty luck and the actions of strangers you'll never meet have left you without any purely good options?' is, like, possibly one of the most relevant and universally applicable questions moral philosophy might help answer.

Saying it's a bad question because it's the negligent trolley engineer's fault literally exactly misses the point - yes how to deal on a personal level with systems and infrastructure that designed without much care for human collateral damage is an incredibly useful thing to think about!

[nando161mando]

They will decide to kill you eventually.

[trace-forward-base]

This was a good use of my two hours

[covid-safer-hotties]

[strawlessandbraless]

I thought tumblr might find this Trump tariff trolley problem both tragic and telling

[defectivegembrain]

As a positive thinker, I prefer to think of it as a trolley opportunity

[lodgeofthecat]

Good Mornin'

[artbyblastweave]

There's a runaway trolley careening down the tracks. There are five guys tied to the tracks, three of whom you were peripherally acquainted with in college and they were just absolutely dogshit human beings, super awful to be around, bad to their friends, bad to their partners, they take and take and take and never give and never learn, you've been following the trainwrecks on facebook and they have not improved or matured at all. The fourth guy you used to work with and he's, like, fine on a moral level, you guess, but his personal aesthetic never advanced past that mid-2010s Narwhal-bacon MBmBaM-styled twee insufferability and while you don't wish death on him per se you're glad you're no longer coworkers 'and if you save him you're 90 percent sure you're gonna get an earful over accepting the terms of the trolley problem at face value without trying to find some non-existent kobiyashi maru third option. Fifth guy won the nobel prize for his oncology research and will certainly continue to do great work in the field but is also deeply suicidal to an extent that he would prefer to be run over by the trolley, the other four guys are screaming and crying but he's hooting and hollering. Tied to the other rail is your brother-in-law, who's great with your sister's kids but bad with finance and owes you about two grand from the last time you had to dig him out of a hole for your sister's sake, which you realistically won't get back regardless but definitely won't get back if you allow him to be crushed by a runaway trolley. Make your call

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

[orcboxer]

Okay let me try this one again. The Trolley Problem sets up a scenario that sucks to be in. You either kill one guy, or you kill five guys. Nobody likes these options. We all don't want this be happening. That's kind of the point. It's a moral quandary. It's supposed to feel bad.

Now, according to a recent post floating around on tumblr, choosing either of the two options demonstrates "learned helplessness" and makes you a neolib sheep. The only correct answer, the post states, is to reject the question altogether. (Or to change the parameters of the question to include an option that saves everyone, thus eliminating the moral quandary.)

It sounds nice, doesn't it? Fuck this bad situation, we control our imaginations, so let's imagine a situation that doesn't suck. Hah! Bet you didn't think of that!

Here's the problem. Even though I think most situations generally have at least one solution that is both Feasible and Not Terrible, I have to admit that there are some situations (as in, not zero of them) where all the feasible options are unpleasant. This is a natural consequence of living in a world where A Lot Of Things Suck.

But if shitty situations do exist, even if it's super super rare, then it's not unreasonable to ask, "How should we make decisions when we find ourselves in a shitty situation?"

This is the beginning premise of the Trolley Problem. It says, "Hey what if you were in an unambiguously shitty situation? There are many shitty situations, so let's imagine one that is contrived enough to get everyone on the same page regardless of political affiliation, AND really emphasizes the key parts that I want to discuss."

Tumblr says "let me stop you right there. What if instead...we imagined a different scenario that wasn't as shitty?"

Well, okay, but then we're not talking about the same thing anymore. That doesn't actually count as an answer to the problem, you're just changing the subject to a completely different thing.

Tumblr goes on to say, "Exactly. That's the only thing you should ever do when confronted with an ethical quandary. Frankly the fact that you are willing to even consider a scenario that sucks suggests that you are fundamentally incapable of considering less shitty scenarios."

I just want to say I think that's bullshit. I don't think every problem is a trolley problem, but I do think that some problems are a trolley problem. And I think that those problems are worth discussing, even though they don't feel good. The trolley problem exists as a framework to discuss those problems.

Maybe our aversion to difficult decisions has an impact on our ethical reasoning, and maybe we should actually question how our ethical standards hold up under the weight of that aversion. So maybe moral quandaries like the trolley problem are worth discussing. And if you don't want to engage with the quandary, then don't - you don't have to concoct a whole essay about how the quandary is inherently morally bad.

It's possible that what you really want to say is that it sucks when people treat certain situations as trolley problems, when those specific situations actually do contain unambiguously feasible and unambiguously perfect solutions. I would agree with that.

But like. Let's not pretend that you can reduce all of ethics down to unchallenging black and white moralism.

[aggrondaily]

[coolcrazycoffeecat]

[jettacar]

i had an idea to modernize the trolley problem

[marinebiologyshitposts]