carolxdanvers:

ladybubblegum:

letmetellyouaboutmyfeels:

ingridverse:

animeengineer:

feanor-the-dragon:

feanor-the-dragon:

Hey so the trolley problem is dumb because the real person at fault for any of the deaths is the person who designed the trolley without an emergency braking system, the people who put in the purchase order for a trolley without an emergency braking system, the people who approved a PO for a trolley without an emergency braking system, the people who delivered a trolley without an emergency braking system, the organization that inspected and certified a trolley without an emergency braking system,and the operator who did not make a huge stink about being assigned to a trolley without an emergency braking system.

Whether you pull the lever is irrelevant, because a whoooole mess of people fucked up for you to be in that hypothetical situation.

Seriously, like, as a professional engineer, I find the premise of the trolley problem offensive. Cause like, so many safety regulations have been violated that it’s just… insane.

“But, Cody, what if there was an emergency braking system, and it failed?”

Failure to perform regular maintenance and inspection. So, it’s still someone else’s fault.

“What if maintenance and inspections were done correctly, and it still failed?”

Some engineer somewhere failed to design a failsafe with the necessary redundancies. Again, it’s someone else’s fault.

“What about sabotage?”

The saboteur is obviously to blame.

“What if it’s just a freak accident?”

Once again there’s that engineer failing to place redundancies.

“What if it was just an act of God, and the engineer and everyone else did everything right?”

Then God is to blame. Duh. Not sure why this is so hard to get.

Any accident investigator will tell you that an accident is caused by a chain of incidents, and there were always several places the disaster could have been stopped.

Trolley problems are just philosophers being cruel to their audiences.

I would look at whoever is tying people to trolley tracks. That might be the issue right there.

Maybe the real trolley problem was the OSHA violations we made along the way.

Engineers confidently and incorrectly “solving” philosophical thought experiments should be its own genre at this point

The trolley problem has fucking NOTHING to do with “Whose fault is it?”

It’s about whether the action of diverting the trolley to kill one person rather than five, when that one person would have lived without your intervention, and specifically whether taking that action means that you are now a participant in the system of immoral actions that resulted in a loss of life. Or, if you abstain from taking any action, does that mean you have not participated in an immoral act, or is your inaction immoral by its nature?

There are other versions of the problem. A pilot deciding whether to crash in a populated area, risking the lives of people on the ground for a landing that may allow his passengers to survive, or if he should steer towards an unpopulated area that will be more likely to kill everyone on board. “oh, but whoever did maintenance on the plane–” shut the fuck up, this isn’t the point. Nobody cares that Jeff didn’t check that there were enough phalanges. The question is which is more moral: taking the lives of fewer people who are not in danger to save a greater number of those who are in danger, or taking no action and allowing those currently in danger to die in order to spare the lives of a smaller number of innocent bystanders.

Wannabe philosophers confidently and incorrectly “refuting” solutions by concentrating the responsibility onto a bystander rather than acknowledging that the rest of the world exists. In the same breath that you say that this isn’t about whose fault it is, you wax on about whether pulling the switch makes the bystander “a participant in the system of immoral actions that resulted in a loss of life” or whether inaction by the bystander is “immoral by its nature”. You’re searching for morality in a scenario that contains none, and mocking the people suggesting you search elsewhere.

Fun fact: abusers love to do this – they’ll present their victims with two awful choices, then claim that by making a choice, the victim became a participant. And it’s bullshit. A bystander forced into a ridiculous choice in a scenario not of their making represents nothing other than an additional victim of the tragedy.

And let’s answer the other forms of the question that you and others have posed:

“A pilot deciding whether to crash in a populated area, risking the lives of people on the ground for a landing that may allow his passengers to survive, or if he should steer towards an unpopulated area that will be more likely to kill everyone on board.” – you try to minimize the loss of life, end of story. Pilots are already taught how to minimize casualties in an emergency landing. If a landing strip is unavailable, that usually means going for a field or meadow and hoping it’s abandoned; if that’s unavailable, you look for unoccupied roads, then large bodies of water near shore, then leafy forests. An area containing more people than the plane has passengers will most likely also contain inconvenient outcroppings such as buildings and cars, and not be a suitable landing site, so this won’t really come up as a problem anyway. And if you can’t tell what decision leads to the smallest loss of life, you give it your best guess and move on to the business of trying to minimize the harm your decision made. The same chain of responsibility that clears the pilot of fault also provides them with a clear path of decision-making to find the best possible option.

A doctor contemplates murdering a vagrant to harvest his organs and save six patients – in doing so, the doctor would be creating a world in which vagrants must always worry about being harvested. And no, you can’t say “this happens in a vacuum, the effects on the greater world don’t matter”; that either means that there is no “greater world” and these are the only people in existence – which rather changes the equation, if this is all that’s left of humanity – or else there are other people in the world, but we don’t care about the suffering we inflict on them, which makes the search for morality in this scenario rather hypocritical. Trying to make this decision solely about the doctor, patients, and sacrificial vagrant completely ignores the reasons why such a decision matters.

A foreign academic stumbles upon a death squad preparing to execute twenty civilians; the commander of the squad offers to let nineteen of the civilians go if the academic kills the twentieth: the commander is attempting to legitimize his actions by coercing the academic into participating in the genocide, which would complicate future international efforts to stop the killing. The appropriate action depends on the fullness of the academic’s bladder – ideally, he would urinate on the commander’s shoes, but if that option is unavailable he will need to settle for spitting in his face. This isn’t a question of morality, it’s a question of real-world consequences that will be ignored if you try to make it about philosophy instead of reality.

A trolley is speeding toward its doom, and its only hope is if you push a fat person in front of it to slow it down: Trying to make this about morality or philosophy misses the more pressing issue of physics – the inertia of a single person, even a particularly large one, cannot slow a trolley down enough to prevent a crash; if the trolley is traveling so slowly that such an impact would stop it, it’s traveling so slowly that it isn’t in any danger. It is acceptable to throw the fatphobic philosopher who posed this scenario into the path of a train, even if that train is not in danger of crashing.

A self-driving car suddenly recognizes a pedestrian in its path, but is driving too quickly to safely brake and will likely kill its passenger in a collision if it swerves away: pedestrians should not be suddenly entering a high-speed road like this, meaning that either the pedestrian recognition is wrong or the pedestrian has run into the road against the laws of traffic. Giving the self-driving system the authority to kill its passenger would present an opportunity for malicious or confusing inputs to kill passengers and the occupants of other vehicles outside of genuine emergencies; it is reasonable to limit crash-avoidance measures to those that do not threaten the lives of the passengers.

Amazing how much easier things get when you stop focusing on the contrived moral quandaries and start looking at the actual real-life cause and effect of these choices!