Why are those 5 people there? How can I be sure they'd be killed? How can I be sure they don't want to be killed. It's not wrong not to kill the one man because you can't be sure of the situation.
There are variations of this (incredibly, incredibly boring) problem that consider this. The five people are workers, the one person is a trespasser, or they're all workers, or all trespassers and so on.
> It's not wrong not to kill the one man because you can't be sure of the situation.
People don't make decisions with perfect information. We make decisions based on the best information we have available. Refusing to sacrifice one to save five because you don't know how they ended up there smacks of making excuses to get out of making hard choices.
>People don't make decisions with perfect information.
That is exactly the reason why the trolley problem is bad. People don't make decisions with perfect information, but the trolley problem is such a perfect information problem.
The thing is, people follow some sort of behavioural pattern that simplifies reality. Shooting people with guns is bad, therefore killing people with switches is bad. Choosing to kill people with switches might make them more likely to kill people with guns and people with guns are more of a danger than people not flipping switches.
These heuristics aren't optimal in theoretical scenarios that test the limits, but they work in every day scenarios.
Assume all things are sure. The point of the moral conflict is to address the core problem of the moral dilemma not side details and speculative hypotheticals.
bhickey|2 years ago
> It's not wrong not to kill the one man because you can't be sure of the situation.
People don't make decisions with perfect information. We make decisions based on the best information we have available. Refusing to sacrifice one to save five because you don't know how they ended up there smacks of making excuses to get out of making hard choices.
imtringued|2 years ago
That is exactly the reason why the trolley problem is bad. People don't make decisions with perfect information, but the trolley problem is such a perfect information problem.
The thing is, people follow some sort of behavioural pattern that simplifies reality. Shooting people with guns is bad, therefore killing people with switches is bad. Choosing to kill people with switches might make them more likely to kill people with guns and people with guns are more of a danger than people not flipping switches.
These heuristics aren't optimal in theoretical scenarios that test the limits, but they work in every day scenarios.
corethree|2 years ago