(May 8, 2009 at 5:20 pm)fr0d0 Wrote: It is, for example, generally and universally, ok to divert a train from hitting 5 people if there is a person on the other line?
It is not ok to push a fat man off a bridge to stop the train and save the people?
Sorry - just made me think of those
I asked a friend about the train situation, they said they would divert it to kill the one person.
Then I changed the question so that the 5 people were Hitler, Stalin, Himmler etc and then they said they wouldn't divert the train.
So then I changed them for slightly less horrible people (I think my example was Fred Phelps... hey I did say slightly less
) and they said they still wouldn't.I found it odd that at a certain level of "horridness" or "evilness" that he would go back to diverting the train (we didn't determine what that was), so there has to be a cut-off point.
Or perhaps there would be a grey area, where it would be especially difficult to make a choice...
Galileo was a man of science oppressed by the irrational and superstitious. Today, he is used by the irrational and superstitious who claim they are being oppressed by science - Mark Crislip
