this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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I've seen two interesting spins on the trolley problem recently.
"Just blow up the trolley." This is actually a very apt description of accelerationism. Blowing up the trolley doesn't stop the forward momentum -- it just turns the trolley barrelling towards the trapped people into a fiery wreckage barreling towards the trapped people. Plus if there's people on the trolley... Yeah.
"Untie the trapped people while other people push back and stop the trolley". This is once again rather emblematic, this time of blind idealism. The idea that if we get enough people, then we can stop the trolley, sounds good on paper and makes you feel nice. But it ignores the reality that people cannot hold back a trolley like that. It just isn't possible for the necessary number of people to simultaneously push back against it.
Not to mention, the whole point of the trolley problem is that the trolley is a metaphor for an unstoppable event that is impossible to avoid. It's nice to think we could dismantle it, but we can't.
The trolley problem is a philosophy 101 thought experiment. It's not an absolute guideline for philosophy.
As a side note, even if it was, there are many people who disagree with pulling the lever, like the whole branch of Deontology, for example. It's bizarre that everyone on here assumes that everyone else on here has to be operating under the exact same moral framework, and if you disagree you're either an idiot or a Russian bot. The idea that anyone could ever draw a red line against a particular action just, you know, organically is treated as totally alien.
In real life, things are never as simple as in a philosophical thought experiment. There's incomplete information, there's multiple actors, there's long term factors affecting cause and effect. Let's look at some ways in which an individual's choice on who to vote for in an election differ from the trolley problem:
You don't have full control of the trolley. Instead, there are millions of other people who collectively decide which track the trolley will go down.
There are more than two tracks. Some of them might be unlikely to be chosen, but they still exist.
There are people who have engineered the situation to be the way it is, who have the ability to change it, and who can benefit depending on what choice you make.
The trolley problem will be repeated, over and over again, indefinitely. Depending on which track it goes down, it could influence the number of people on the tracks in the future.
There's uncertainty involved in everything. You don't know the exact number of people on each track, you don't know what all the other actors are going to do, you don't know how the people engineering the situation will behave, etc.
If you make the necessary changes to the hypothetical to make it actually reflect reality, it is so convoluted that it's no longer recognizable as a trolley problem and the choice becomes a lot less clear. There are plenty of Consequentialists who would agree with pulling the lever in the context of the hypothetical, because of all the constraints imposed in the hypothetical, but who would, in real life, say that you should consider every possible alternative and carefully consider the consequences before condemning one person to death to save five.
Don't derive your moral philosophy, or political philosophy, from random memes and thought experiments. Read.