#1 Thought experiment - "The Trolley Problem"

[bennyboy]

My belief is that if the situation is sufficiently complex, then one can allow for the effect of hope in the moral decision-making.  In the case of organ harvesting, there's an alternative-- "hope" that someone dies in a motorcycle crash or something soon enough for recipients to be saved by his organs.

You're escaping the thought experiment, though. Suppose someone presents you with the organ-harvesting scenario as a thought-experiment, wherein there is no room for serendipitous motorcycle crashes. Do you harvest the one person's organs, in order to save five people?

This is a hard question, because I can see the 1 but not the 5, and cannot make value judgments. Even with the original, if the train was on a path toward 5 old people, and the 1 was a cute little girl, it would be an easy decision-- bye bye old people.

The OP balances this-- you can at least see that you aren't choosing between a cute little girl and a bunch of old people. But the experiment you're talking about now doesn't balance values: I can SEE the person I'm killing, and this person now has a value, whereas the others are just numbers to me still. We all, every one of us, make this kind of decision every day: I choose to buy a new car instead of donating the money to buy mosquito nets for African children, etc. That's because those kids are hypotheticals (to my mind), and my car is real. However, if I was IN Africa, and could see the little waifs who would receive my mosquito nets, I think my decision-making would be very different.