[hyper_reality]

> - higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters)

Choosing between preserving the life of one cat vs one lobster seems straightforward enough. But the trolley problem was asking whether one cat was more valuable than five lobsters. According to the stats, many people agreed, but how about one cat vs a million lobsters? Or one cat vs all the lobsters on earth? Most people would think that making lobsters extinct would be very bad (unless they really hate lobsters).

The difficulty is when we can no longer rely on intuition and have to come up with a precise exchange rate of when one being's life is more valuable than another's, which, like you say, is impossible to do in the complicated world we live in and our limited understanding of consciousness and neuroscience. In absence of that, deferring to the first law "whenever possible, do no harm" seems sensible.

[bluesnowmonkey]

I chose to kill the cat, because there are too many of them and they devastate natural ecosystems, killing birds for instance. Lobsters on the other hand are badly depopulated. In both cases undoing a wrong committed by humanity.

[m0llusk]

This is prominent in the elderly or children tests. Older people have gifts of experience that can be invaluable to the rest of us, especially when broadly shared. Children have great potential but through most of human history have been relatively cheap, easy to replace, and more of a value sink than generator.

[beeboop]

I wish the featured page did more of this