Do You Pull the Lever to Divert the Trolley?

How much time is there to think? I'm pretty slow to make decicions. Most likely I run out of time and I do nothing.

You have all the time in the world. If needed, you can stop time to make the decision (not to warn anyone or make changes to the scenario, though).

One ought to do (1), nothing. This becomes more obviously the correct choice when the scenario is altered slightly to the Fat Man scenario.

Instead of a lever and an alternate set of tracks, you find yourself over a footbridge and can push a fat man onto the tracks to stop the trolley from killing the five tied to the tracks, and in the process kill the fat man. Again, one ought to do nothing.

Killing is worse than letting die.

Then I pull the lever. Even if the original destination had only 2 people.

There's an article on wikipedia about this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

Don't pull the lever, stab the person on the other track and let them bleed out to be fair to the five people on the other track.

vxzcv wrote:

Then I pull the lever. Even if the original destination had only 2 people.

There's an article on wikipedia about this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

Dood, it is a famous problem by Phillipa Foot. Everyone knows the Trolley Problem.

It is a tough one. It comes down to the basics of Utilitarianism. J.S. Mill would say that you should push the Fat Man and/or pull the lever. But he also says that spending $1 on a cup of shit coffee from the vending machine is evil b/c it could have gone to help a starving person.

If you think about Utilitarianism too much, you start to feel like a demon.

I remember my Phil 101 professor asking one girl in our lecture about her last purchase. It was a CD (Endtroducing...) from a record store near campus that she had bought on the way to class (1990s). He proceeded to spend the next 90 minutes discussing how terrible she was for doing that when it could have saved numerous lives with the money. She was in tears at the end and he really did a great job of explaining the theory. Then, of course, we all left and went on with our lives...