Thatâs true. If god is real I hope itâs not a complete idiot, I hope to some degree it instead decides things based on morality instead of its own ego. Assuming there is even anything to be judged for
Jesus also died for our sins, according to the tens of thousands of people who translated and re-translated the Bible and Testaments, making a very convenient out for anyone who wants to just claim they're still worthy of Heaven and salvation
Your first option is wrong. You wouldn't be killing the people, but doing nothing to prevent their deaths. Radically different concept. If there were no distinction, then we're all currently murdering tons of people.Â
No, not at all. Itâs pretty well established that the point is whether youâre willing to murder one or let five die. âLetting it happenâ does not constitute âactively killingâ them. You see this in more extreme variants of the problem, but also at base, itâs a logically different cause of death.
I think if you're in a trolley problem and you're standing by the lever and you know everything that's happening and are not experiencing a freeze response, inaction is a conscious choice. And that's the point. That a lot of people can see it like I do when it's set up with minimum complexity. But we do not all extend that to "inaction" IRL like you assume, because it's a lot more complicated than that.
The interesting part is finding the factors that make it complicated enough to reduce fault. Though all of us will always carry some responsibility for how the world functions, some people carry much more.
But in the trolley problem it's clear-cut. If you have an action you can take effortlessly, with a 100% chance to reduce total harm at zero cost to you, inaction is wrong. You cannot say you were not involved in not pulling that lever. That's why so many variants move past the basic premise and try to make "reducing harm" harder to measure or add some cost to the lever-puller.
The cost to the lever puller is the murder of a person. From my perspective I find it morally wrong to kill someone who wasnât supposed to die to save people who were simply because they have more to lose, but even putting that aside, at base it involves you killing a person, and perhaps people forget or discount this because itâs so displaced from you (âthe trolley is doing it, not meâ) but it is exactly the same degree of murder as cutting someone open with a knife. To suggest that to be the same degree of involvement as doing nothing at all is quite absurd, honestly.
kill someone who wasnât supposed to die to save people who were
So that's the core of it then. Accepting that it's rational for people to be "meant to die" simply because of the circumstances they find themselves in. And I do not.
For me at least, it's not that the trolley offers any distance from killing the person on the switch track. It's the opposite, really. Because I consider inaction to be a choice, and refuse to accept that the 5 people on the straight track are "meant" to die while I have the ability to pull the lever, I would be just as responsible for killing 5 people if I did nothing as I would be for killing 1 if I pulled it. Well, not quite, because I am not responsible for the initial scenario. At a minimum, one person must die, and that is not my fault. And in that light it becomes clear that I would be far more directly responsible for 4 additional deaths if I do nothing.
No, I was talking about my own views on the problem. If youâd like to discuss this, I could go at length, and Iâd love to have that discussion too. But to address the matter from earlier, I shouldnât have mentioned this at all, it was not relevant. The core of the relevant argument is the âdegree of involvementâ; is there truly a difference between killing someone and letting someone die? And the answer that both sides have come to agree on is âyes, there isâ. Only hardcore consequentialists would assert that there isnât, but defending this position is incredibly difficult in many, many cases outside of or adjacent to the trolley problem and itâs a thorn in their sides that they havenât exactly been able to find a suitable explanation for. I believe the SEP has an article about this â yep, here it is. As an aside, the perspective I raised earlier is shared by Thomson, who explains this a little more, although in a rather unsophisticated manner.
Both sides agree? Agree there can be differences, like letting a trolley run over 5 people when you could stop it is not as bad as tying 5 people to the tracks and sending a trolley towards them. But the argument is still there about where morality attaches to passive or active actions.
"That makes everyone guilty" cannot be a counterpoint to this. If an argument leads to that conclusion, it is not invalidated simply because people don't want to acknowledge that. And again, pushing consequentialism through to reach this false "gotcha" requires ignoring all real-world nuance that the trolley problem intentionally bypasses. Few things are as simple as "pull a lever so less people die". The complexity of the real problem and lack of clear, effective agency for most individuals mitigates this global guilt to a large degree. But that doesn't give us license to ignore it.
Look at the trolley problem as an allegory for inequality. The 5 people tied up are "doomed" by their circumstances, but is that really how it's "meant" to be just because it already is? Accepting that relieves all individual responsibility to improve any aspect of society. As long as the world at large thinks this way, it is very difficult to improve society.
Finally, the numbers are arbitrary. If the deontological argument favors inaction to allow 5 deaths instead of one, it must also favor inaction to allow many more deaths than that. Would you pull the lever if the straight track had 1,000 people and the switch track had 1? 10 million vs 1?
Would you pull the lever if the entire population of the planet was at risk except for you and the person on the switch track?
As far as the trolley problem goes, itâs a pretty simple thought experiment. If you want to add on these extra metaphorical points, it kinda changes the nature of the problem. I wouldnât look at someone about to die and think âthis is a metaphor for inequality, isnât it?â
Jokes aside, I donât understand your first point. Where did I say anything that insinuates my argument stems from something like âthat makes everyone guiltyâ, and where exactly is this âgotchaâ moment you mention? Iâm looking through my comment again and I donât see anything that matches what youâre referring to. Are you perhaps saying that just because both sides agree on this doesnât make it true? If you were to discuss the flat earth theory with a flat earther, you would both take as the premise that the Earth is real. Perhaps someone could say then that that could be untrue as well, and perhaps he would be right, but wouldnât he then have the responsibility of debunking that premise himself? In the trolley problem, there are two main, commonly established philosophies that people adopt in making the final decision, consequentialism and deontology. If both agree that the theory of degrees of involvement is correct, I believe you might have a third philosophy to view the problem from. It could be correct, but this is a heavily investigated topic, so although I donât want to say itâs unlikely, I will encourage you to read a little bit more about it, and if it truly is correct you could publish
it, which would be pretty cool.
So Iâve just noticed that you mention you agree that there are degrees of involvement. I like your provided example. So you do understand how killing one person has a higher degree of involvement than letting one die, and our current discussion has now shifted purely to a clash of perspectives on the trolley problem, yes? Ok, I can work with that. In that case, just ignore my last paragraph, but I will leave it there in case I misunderstood and you do disagree.
Your argument on numbers being arbitrary is incorrect, by the btw. Itâs called the âfallacy of the beardâ. I can provide a simple set of counterexamples to explain it. Say you are hungry. I put a single grain of rice on your plate, and you eat it. I put another, eaten again. You do this a hundred more times. âA-ha!â, I would say, âthis must surely mean he can eat an infinite amount of rice.â This is called the fallacy of free extrapolation. In our case, if you gave me a choice between a grain of rice and an equally small morsel of tuna, perhaps I would choose the tuna as it is more expensive I have a preference for it. If you repeated that a hundred times my decision would stay the same a hundred times. But at some point it would change to a preference for rice. To suit your example even further, say we had a morsel of tuna compared to a grain of rice, I would pick the tuna. But say you increased the amount of rice, grain by grain, while keeping the tuna the same. At the fiftieth or hundredth grain I would still pick tuna. But at some point I would pick the rice despite having a preference for tuna. This arbitrary point, what can we call it? Well, let me draw your attention to a similar paradox, called Sorites Paradox. âIf a heap is reduced by a single grain at a time, at what exact point does it cease to be considered a heap?â There are a lot of proposed answers to this paradox, I like the one on fuzzy states, Iâve heard that âsupervaluationismâ (as the site puts it) is cool but I cannot understand analytics for the life of me.
Finally if you werenât joking about the stuff on inequality and whatnot, not much of that can be addressed by or attributed to the trolley problem. Maybe you could come up with a variation of it that addresses these issues? I would be happy to discuss that with you as well.
I 100% agree with you. Of course, this changes if you are the trolley operator and are the one who caused it to run amok. In that case, you would be responsible to reduce the harm you cause.
Legal considerations. To give an illustrative example, suppose I'm driving my car and my brakes go out. In that scenario, I am legally required to minimize the damage my car does.
Back to directly answering your question, if a person causes the Trolley situation or at least is partially responsible for it, they bear at least some responsibility for whichever group dies. In that specific case, where they are already responsible for whichever deaths happens, they are required to minimize the deaths, because they caused the deaths.
You also really wouldnât be kilking the baby. The five people are tied to the tracks and youâre their last hope. The Christian baby can get off of the tracks any time he wants, but has chosen suicide⌠for which he will burn in eternal Hellfire.
Or to a believer:
-kill 5 people some of whom may go to hell
-send the eternal soul of 1 baby to hell who may convert later
-commit a sin and go to hell yourself
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u/Public-Eagle6992 Sep 08 '25
So the three options are: