It understands it just fine. Agency is not a factor in the decision. The choice between action and inaction doesn’t matter. People think it matters because people are driven by shortsighted emotions.
What a crock of shit. Living with the knowledge that you killed someone isn’t shortsighted, it’s tragic. You pulling the trigger to switch the trolley to kill only the 1 person can and will have consequences on your own mental health.
And the comic isn’t even about the choice between action and inaction, it’s about “Oh wow, 5>1, this dilemma is easy lol” - nah, even if you make it purely about the numbers - unless you’re a fucking psychopath, you’re not gonna kill your newborn to save 5 strangers.
Living with knowing you did nothing to save 4 people may affect you as badly. To be fair, the person doing the choice is fucked up both ways, if ey is not a sociopath.
Agency might matter depending on societal context. 5 hot guys might be worse than 1 hot guy in a world with limited resources, for example.
Everyone knows that 5 of something is usually better than 1. The dilemma comes from finding a situation where that might not be true, and therein exploring some quirks of our own humanity.
It goes too far when people interpret these quirks as fundamental human traits, but there is genuine merit in testing oneself with fun hypotheticals
That’s not a matter of agency, that’s still a matter of the goodness of the action. You constructed a version where more of the magic hot guys is bad, and made the valence negative again. So now one is better, and agency still isn’t a factor.
What’s actually interesting is the doctor version. Kill one healthy person and harvest their organs to save five people from death? That, at first glance, puts agency back in the equation. But drag still thinks the key isn’t agency. It’s power. In the trolley version, you have no power over who’s on the other track. You didn’t choose that person in particular to die, they just happened to be in the way. In the doctor version, either you or the boss chose a healthy person to die. You got to pick. You cannot take responsibility for picking. And you cannot support a system in which another person picks either. But when random chance picks who has to die, that’s fine. There’s no abuse of power in that one. Killing who you need to kill in order to save others isn’t abusive power. Picking who dies, when you could have picked someone else, that’s abuse.
yes, if you change the problem, you change the way we respond. that’s why there’s so many trolley problems spin offs in the first place
but the end result is the same.
you’re always left with five.
The artist just immortalized in a strip that does not understand the trolley problem.
It understands it just fine. Agency is not a factor in the decision. The choice between action and inaction doesn’t matter. People think it matters because people are driven by shortsighted emotions.
So philosophical debate on this topic is meaningless, because utilitarism is obviously correct?
Please take off your clothes and lay down here, I have five patients in desperate need of organ transplants.
Please see the other comment drag wrote in this thread in reply to the earlier comment replying to drag, which drag wrote before seeing yours.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/14997510
What a crock of shit. Living with the knowledge that you killed someone isn’t shortsighted, it’s tragic. You pulling the trigger to switch the trolley to kill only the 1 person can and will have consequences on your own mental health.
And the comic isn’t even about the choice between action and inaction, it’s about “Oh wow, 5>1, this dilemma is easy lol” - nah, even if you make it purely about the numbers - unless you’re a fucking psychopath, you’re not gonna kill your newborn to save 5 strangers.
Living with knowing you did nothing to save 4 people may affect you as badly. To be fair, the person doing the choice is fucked up both ways, if ey is not a sociopath.
Agency might matter depending on societal context. 5 hot guys might be worse than 1 hot guy in a world with limited resources, for example.
Everyone knows that 5 of something is usually better than 1. The dilemma comes from finding a situation where that might not be true, and therein exploring some quirks of our own humanity.
It goes too far when people interpret these quirks as fundamental human traits, but there is genuine merit in testing oneself with fun hypotheticals
That’s not a matter of agency, that’s still a matter of the goodness of the action. You constructed a version where more of the magic hot guys is bad, and made the valence negative again. So now one is better, and agency still isn’t a factor.
What’s actually interesting is the doctor version. Kill one healthy person and harvest their organs to save five people from death? That, at first glance, puts agency back in the equation. But drag still thinks the key isn’t agency. It’s power. In the trolley version, you have no power over who’s on the other track. You didn’t choose that person in particular to die, they just happened to be in the way. In the doctor version, either you or the boss chose a healthy person to die. You got to pick. You cannot take responsibility for picking. And you cannot support a system in which another person picks either. But when random chance picks who has to die, that’s fine. There’s no abuse of power in that one. Killing who you need to kill in order to save others isn’t abusive power. Picking who dies, when you could have picked someone else, that’s abuse.
you’ve got a peculiar taste for fun, I must admit
edit
to be fair, I don’t disagree, and discussing things like that or pondering them can be fun, but I still wouldn’t expect such a choice of words 😅
deleted by creator
Classic Kahneman/Tversky here