Please answer to the best of your ability. You will be graded.
You see a runaway trolley moving toward five tied-up (or otherwise incapacitated) people lying on the tracks. You are standing next to a lever that controls a switch. If you pull the lever, the trolley will be redirected onto a side track, and the five people on the main track will be saved. However, there is a single person lying on the side track. You have two options:
1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.
I hate these types of fabricated dilemmas. This is the kind of thing that gets me itching to rant about the problems with the "effective altruism" movement.
JuanHamm wrote:So what's the argument for letting the four people die? Just that you aren't making a conscious decision to kill them?
I think the Transplant problem makes it trickier:
Here is an alternative case, due to Judith Jarvis Thomson,[3] containing similar numbers and results, but without a trolley:
A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor. Do you support the morality of the doctor to kill that tourist and provide his healthy organs to those five dying persons and save their lives?
JuanHamm wrote:So what's the argument for letting the four people die? Just that you aren't making a conscious decision to kill them?
I think the Transplant problem makes it trickier:
Here is an alternative case, due to Judith Jarvis Thomson,[3] containing similar numbers and results, but without a trolley:
A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor. Do you support the morality of the doctor to kill that tourist and provide his healthy organs to those five dying persons and save their lives?
