There is no sinking ship. Fake news!
The best part is that, by refusing to be killed themselves, they are making a choice to let the other people die, rendering their hypocrisy evident and their worry fully rendered moot
Yeah, but what if it was a ship full of assholes? I got shopping to do.
I mean, the boat appears to be pretty close to the coast, and not very big. I’d just call the coast guard and there are good chances that nobody dies.
To be honest they could actually swim to shore, it’s not impossible
I would read the shit out of this but 5 people I have never and will never meet who nobody knows will die painlessly and I’m just not sure of the moral implications.
It’s close to the second ghost rider (and maybe the first, been awhile since I dug up my old comics) who didn’t have powers until innocent blood was spilled (though typically it was the villain who spilled it).
“collateral damage”
Just put explosives collars on a bunch of murderers and rapists. Need superpowers just press a button and kill one murderer off.
The artist just immortalized in a strip that does not understand the trolley problem.
Don’t bother trying to explain philosophy directly to people online. We’re so convinced of our own intelligence that we refuse to consider that our knee-jerk reaction to anything might be worth exploring.
If you want people to learn anything, you have to first of all tell them that they’re right, then add whatever you’re trying to teach them as if it’s some nuance of whatever they’re right about. Even if it makes their original opinion completely wrong. It works surprisingly often.
Our egos have an outer layer of armor that prevents us from easily absorbing ideas unless they have a starting point of agreeing with whatever we already believe.
True for most sadly. But not for all.
I’m happy to be proven wrong. It means I learned something that day. And I love learning new things.
I feel the same way, but it’s good to be aware of our own biases - there’s a bit of an aphorism that goes around about advertising and propaganda, that it works best on people who think it doesn’t work on them. If we think we’re immune to something, we let our guard down a bit. I used to think of myself as a very rational, intelligent, realistic guy, but in recent years I came to realise that I was kind of using that to protect my ego - I was wrong about a lot of things, and I could always find excuses to justify my beliefs as rational.
Maybe I still make the same flaw, I don’t know. Nowadays, I try to stay more focused on being nice than being right. That way, even if I’m wrong, I’m not making people’s day worse.
I’m not always successful with that.
Self awareness is doubt. If you’re doubting you haven’t stopped improving. You’re doing well, based on what you’ve said - keep it up :)
Entire thing is analysis paralysis. There always some information that will change desired outcome.
deleted by creator
Classic Kahneman/Tversky here
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.
I, as the doctor, didn’t pick you. Your organs happen to be compatible with all five recipients. It’s still random chance, you’re just unlucky because your organs work best.
So, we gonna chop you up, or not?
I think the thing that people often don’t seem to understand about the trolley problem is that it doesn’t have a “single version”, it’s a framework for exploring human decision making. And the correct answer, it’s all a matter of perspective. For example, if all of drag’s friends were on one side of the track, and on the other side of the track, were a number of people who drag does not know, equal to the number of drag’s friends plus one, would drag kill their friends, or the innocent people?
Yeah exactly, the trolley problem is just like a benchmark of moral and ethics, the outcome is irrelevant. The thought process is what is relevant.
Drag’s friends. Drag has at least ten friends probably, and drag’s friends are at least 10% better than the average rando. They’re mostly communists and queers. The world is better off with them in it than with some random people who are probably capitalists.
Thank you so much for being honest about making that choice - almost everyone would choose their friends, but lots of people wouldn’t admit to that. Being honest myself, I’d make the same call - and if it came down to me picking between my friends and drag’s friends, I’d choose my friends. The whole “calculus” we run (comparing how good our friends are to average people) is a way we justify making our decisions, a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance of our values (save as many lives as possible) being in conflict with what we actually do (saving our friends rather than as many lives as possible). In reality you would have no way of knowing who those other 11 people would be - for example, if I said that one of them is a researcher on the brink of curing cancer, how would that change your decision? These are really tough questions to deal with, and that’s the point of the trolley problem - that people make different choices because they have different perspectives, and different values. There’s no objectively right and objectively wrong answer to any of the scenarios. Just different interpretations and ways to think about it.
Drag chooses to kill those people because drag knows nothing about them. Drag just assume they’re randos. And on average, people suck. Drag’s friends are great people.
If drag knew more about the people, the equation would change. Drag finds it difficult to reason seriously about a scientist discovering a cure for cancer, since there’s no such thing. There are hundreds of cancers. There’s no one solution for all of them and there never will be. We’ll need hundreds of cures for cancer, many of which we already use today.
If we went with a more realistic scenario, like “one of those people will be the leader of the USA’s communist revolution”, drag would be much more willing to kill drag’s friends. Drag might also commit suicide about it, though, so maybe the numbers aspect is equal anyway. Would drag give drag’s life and all drag’s friends’ lives away for a communist America? Probably, but drag would sure like some assurance it’s going to be proper anarchist communism, and drag wants to know if another leader could have taken that place. Does drag even believe in the “great man” approach to history, or is there no such thing as such a leader? Is there nobody that important?
That’s perfect, drag, I don’t think anyone could have put it better. The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment, yet so many people approach it like it’s some sort of engineering problem that has right and wrong answers, I think it’s probably a consequence of our sort of “tech bro” culture that everything needs to fit into this rational, quantitative framework - we have this drive to put numbers on things that just can’t be rationalised in that way.
People are funny, complicated things, and I love them all!
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.
testing oneself with fun hypotheticals
fun
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 😅
Trolley problems can be directly mapped to those “would you rather” drinking games. e.g. Would you have sex with your dad to save your mum’s life?
The question is meaningless in a normal context, the answer is meaningless in a normal context, but it’s fun to explore your limits in strange circumstances, no?
That’s true, there’s even a party game that consists solely of controversial topics to talk about, not even this kind of weird ones
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.
You pulling the trigger to switch the trolley to kill only the 1 person can and will have consequences on your own mental health.
That’s called selfishness, and it’s not generally considered a factor in ethics. At most, that changes the equation to 2 vs 5. Still easy.
unless you’re a fucking psychopath, you’re not gonna kill your newborn to save 5 strangers.
Then psychopaths are right and neurotypical people are wrong. The world would be better off if it had more psychopaths, as you describe them.
But you’re wrong about psychopaths. See, what you’re describing is limited empathy. You have more empathy for your baby than for five strangers, because of your limited point of view and inability to abstract the situation and see the bigger picture. A psychopath, according to pop psychology (psychopathy doesn’t actually exist in serious psychology, but let’s pretend it does) has no empathy. A psychopath doesn’t care who dies. They probably save the baby because it’s more socially acceptable and will make them look good. That’s selfishness again.
If you want to know who saves the strangers, well that’s someone who has empathy for both the baby and the strangers, and the wisdom to empathise equally with both. That kind of wisdom is extremely rare because natural selection doesn’t favour it. It doesn’t offer any advantage over the rest of the species to be that selfless. So you’d be most likely to find it in an extremely rare combination of autistic traits, or in a very enlightened Buddhist monk.
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.
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.
But…it’s not a math dilemma, it’s a moral one. Changing it to hot philanthropic strippers changes the morality.
the morality doesn’t exist in the first place because we don’t live in a society that would allow someone to tie up six people on two tracks.
we do live in a world with real problems. Complex problems. Problems that lose solvable value when they are reduced to a philosophical joke.
so please tell me more about how we can solve the worlds problems by flipping switches on train tracks.
I want more of this. Reminds me on the anime Darker than Black, where those with power always had to fulfill some contract to use their power, else they’d die.
Man, this anime is so underrated. I like it a lot. I question the artistic direction on the second season, but at least the ending wrapped up the whole show nicely.
A little correction, nobody really know what happens when a contractor doesn’t do that side-effect thingy. It is never mentioned if they would die, nor that it’s even implied. The way I see it, they’d simply develop strong impulse to do so.
The Dave Chappelle bit about Bill Cosby being a superhero… but he rapes.
Issue #1 or 5? You decide!
This got a bonus chuckle from me.
Ugh, this guy’s gonna be a problem.
Like a whole thing 😫
I just played this as a board game with my friends. They decided that pineapple on pizza is worse than Donald Trump. My hope in humanity is shattered.
That is crazy. I can’t think of any part of Donald Trump that I would want on my pizza.
Touché
Aren’t we always chanting “eat the rich”? I’d be fine with the food poisoning, hell even the brain eating prions, if it means he won’t be president.
How democrats unironically viewed the election.
I don’t get it.
deleted by creator
USA voters in the recent election never had a choice between genocide and not genocide, though, so your rambling seems pretty delusional.
Democrats : we have a complicated diplomatic relationship with this foreign state that is exacerbated by our domestic politics. We want this war to end, way more aid to flow into gaza, and a real, two state solution with a change of leadership in both nations so Palestine can co-exist with Israel.
MAGA : PALESTINE DOES NOT EXIST AND NEVER WILL, WE WILL SEND A FLOOD OF UNLIMITED WEAPONS ON DAY 1, THE WEST BANK DOES NOT HAVE ILLEGAL SETTLEMENTS, JUST NORMAL COMMUNITIES. OUR AMBASSADOR TO ISRAEL IS A FUNDAMENTALIST CRISTIAN WHO WANTS ARMAGEDDON AND OUR SECRETARY OF STATE HAS CALLED FOR TOTAL WAR.
You:
These are the same people.
Yall are absolute clown cars, and have sentenced the palestinian people to even more mass death with your empty, vacant posturing. Its fully possible there will be no west bank or gaza after these 4 years end, partly due to your actions. Great job.
You must have misclicked, I am saying Democrats were a clear choice, that the concept that a voter could morally abstain from voting for them because of Gaza is pure fallacy.
There is no trolley problem normalizing Genocide relating to Democrats in the USA election, because genocide was always normalized and never on the ballot.
In fact, the trolley problems that user is referring to likely pointed exactly that out and they still don’t understand it, an absolute concavebrain whoosh scenario.
This guy pulled the lever and is mad that it was rusted in place.
I mean, I did too. But I knew it was rusted first. Had to try anyways.
I just know that the people at fault are both the assholes who cut the repair and replacement budget and the guys who tied the people to the tracks, and not some randoms who aren’t even in the same country.
that’s rich.
the only idiots who willingly misattribute this thought experiment are conservative trolls and Leftists, in my experience.
honestly I think Democrats are the only ones who can fully grasp the concept of the trolley problem since both conservatives and leftists are much too extreme to make a non-biased choice. That can only be true because Democrats ride the fence between the two so well(according to both conservatives anf leftists).
but hey, I’m just some retard on the internet according to them as well. 🤷
Extreme leftism is when you have a bedrock principle or two that you refuse to compromise on. Centrism is when everything, even genocide, is negotiable.
really great how you made a net negative sound like a positive, when in reality Leftists are just hyper focused on a facet of a larger problem and completely ignore the bigger picture because it doesn’t make them feel warm and fuzzy.
that’s fine. Genocide is acceptable by Leftists too if it’s Muslims.
btw, where was the leftist outrage for the millions of Wygers in China? not brown enough? not convenient enough during an election?
so what makes lefties IGNORE Wyger persecution in china?
Leave aside for a moment the argument we might have about what is happening in China… What the fuck would I be able to do about that? Do I vote in China? Do my tax dollars fund their military?
Leave aside for a moment the argument we might have about what is happening in China… What the fuck would I be able to do about that? Do I vote in China? Do my tax dollars fund their military?
so it’s based entirely on convenience. that’s even worse than being a racist.
your economic dollars do. the entire American economy is dependent on cheap Wyger labor.
how about pushing political leadership to apply pressure on China to stop enslaving Wygers? How about stop buying anything from China?
Your money, not tax money, but YOUR money enables China to continue to enslave Wygers.
when you go to the store, how about you look at where all your shit is made. I bet the technology you’re using to spray your liquid shititlement everywhere online is even made by Wygers in China.
Can’t lefties get their messaging straight? You guys are the “anti-establishment” crowd. the most organized anarchists! The best corpopinkos in the world!
I’ll just keep calling them hypocrites though.
Um… Do you mean Uyghurs? Because maybe you shouldn’t get so upset about others not caring about that genocide when you aren’t even aware of what the people being genocided are called.
You have to keep the focus on China otherwise you have to face the indefensible American support of genocide. You ask me to seek influence over my own government who already rattles the saber at China, yet I can’t even influence their very direct funding of Israel’s genocide! Tell me how you imagine that would be done? Tell me how I might apply pressure on China in 1/1000 the amount I might apply on my own government.
You have to keep the focus on China otherwise you have to face the indefensible American support of genocide.
and there we have it folks! lefties can’t even fathom anything other than what fits their narrative. they realize the hypocrisy and immediately move the goal posts. just like another extremist faction we know!
You ask me to seek influence over my own government who already rattles the saber at China, yet I can’t even influence their very direct funding of Israel’s genocide!
so which is it? are you demanding your government to stop supporting genocide or are you powerless to stop your government from supporting genocide?
someone else said this, and I think it’s very appropriate right now.
…I think you’ve opted in to accepting genocide. How can you accept such a thing? The absolute minimum you should demand of your party is that they oppose genocide. Otherwise, what is the fucking point?
who said that? 🤔 Oh! it was YOU!
Tell me how you imagine that would be done? Tell me how I might apply pressure on China in 1/1000 the amount I might apply on my own government.
IDK, lefties certainly did enough damage this election to cause Hitler’s second coming to happen. I believe you’ll figure something out to make the situation worse, for everybody. Because that’s the leftist way.
And american voters also didn’t get to do anything about the palestinian genocide because there were two choices and pretending there were more is delusional at best. And the choice was between a party unwilling to take a strong stance against it vs a party actively encouraging it and saying they’d help. While also openly wanting to genocide minority groups in their own country.
Well, there is a third choice. It’s the centrist choice of either not voting or voting for an irrelevant party, equivalent to saying “let the others decide”.
Just stop trying to paint the dems as “unwilling to take a strong stance against it” when they were absolutely “actively encouraging it”. What is with this liberal disease of totally ignoring actions while obsessing over words?
You think I’ve opted out of a decision, but I think you’ve opted in to accepting genocide. How can you accept such a thing? The absolute minimum you should demand of your party is that they oppose genocide. Otherwise, what is the fucking point?
When there are 2 choices and you choose neither that is opting out of a decision, and nothing else. It’s throwing your hands up and saying “well i cant change it anyway, let’s just do nothing”.
Also, stop pretending like trumps and kamalas stances are identical. They’re not. Trump is right up there with netanyahu in seeing palestinians as subhuman.
Ah, yes, centrists. The only ones able to think.
Ah, yea, extremists. The only ones who “have all the answers”.
Ah yes, z axists, the only ones able to “rise above” the issue
Can Trolley Man at least multi-track drift?
I keep seeing this image, were ist from?
Initial D parody.
While you are at that… https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=j0QSrhGw4cU
So he killed Stan Lee?
And here was I thinking that this character was so terrible that it caused Stan Lee to spontaneously spring back into existence in order to make that opinion known.
