lodi
Joined 10 years ago
Joined 10 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
* I'm exaggerating a bit of course.
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[1] I was listening to a podcast where trolley problems were brought up and the speaker was lamenting how clearly "unethical" and "irrational" your evolved intuition is given that most people will let the train hit 10 men working on the tracks than to divert it and kill 1 innocent. Trolley problems are intellectually interesting for various reasons but jumping to that conclusion is clearly absurd. Your intuitions are shaped by millions of years of genetic and social evolution to precisely be most rational for actual real-life problems. If you were actually standing at that switch you'd be thinking...
* do I actually trust my eyes in this situation? Are the workers on a parallel track and there's no actual problem here?
* if I pull the switch, will it derail the train and kill N+1 people instead of the 10.
* will the workers just notice the train in time and scurry off the track? Or will the train just stop? How good are brakes on a train anyway?
* how much time do judges and juries spend solving trolley problems?
... and while you were paralyzed thinking about these and a million other things, whatever was about to happen would happen and there would be no trolley problem.
You're doing something bad in this hypothetical scenario, but it's not violence. Maybe it's "accessory to violence" or "willful ignorance" or some other immoral or illegal thing that you should be jailed for, but it's not literally "violence". Blurring this distinction is dangerous; people will start using actual violence against figurative "violence" in a kind of aggressive "self-defense".