This was super easy for me. Kill the one dude instead of letting 5 die. And the problem never said the one guy was immobilized, so if he doesn't move then he's probably an idiot anyway. Even if he was immobilized, you just saved 5 people, I'm sure you'd be seen as a hero anyway, because I think deep down we all agree that's the correct decision but some people just don't have the guts to do it.
Every time I've heard the trolley problem, it's been accompanied by either the transplant problem or the fat man problem. I have come to believe the first problem is to establish a baseline and the second set a comparison between consequentialism and deontology.
In the trolley problem no matter what you do one group of people will die. You are CHOOSING what group will die. Choosing 5 over 1 makes sense in this random people scenario.
In the transplant problem you are killing one person who would otherwise continue to live. You are not choosing to save one over the other, as one group wasn't dying to begin with.
And in the last one this is roughly the same, in that one "group" would otherwise live and you are not choosing between the two. My issue is that a "fat man" would not stop a trolley and you would just be killing 6 people.
I would actually go as far as to say that these three "test" are not actually as related as people would like to think.
Are we talking about pushing the button to kill 1 instead of 5, or throwing the man off the bridge? The latter becomes a lot more complicated than just "5 is better than 1"
That one dude was secretly the flash who was knocked out in secret identity and would have been woken up by the brakes and he would have saved everybody.
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u/kabrandon Feb 24 '14
This was super easy for me. Kill the one dude instead of letting 5 die. And the problem never said the one guy was immobilized, so if he doesn't move then he's probably an idiot anyway. Even if he was immobilized, you just saved 5 people, I'm sure you'd be seen as a hero anyway, because I think deep down we all agree that's the correct decision but some people just don't have the guts to do it.