RE: Trolley Problem/Consistency in Ethics
January 24, 2018 at 11:39 am
(This post was last modified: January 24, 2018 at 11:41 am by Longhorn.)
Well... The two examples aren’t really the same.
In the trolley problem, someone must die. So it makes sense to choose saving five people over one. In the transplant problem, you aren’t choosing between one inevitable outcome and the other, you’re consciously killing a person that did not HAVE to die at all, picked by you at random. Why them instead of any number of other patients? They were going to live, they were not doomed like the person on the tracks. You become the trolley in this scenario, not the powerless person making a decision between bad and worse. You choose to do it without being forced and it involves going out of your way to harm them. Therefore it’s not the same. I don’t think it’s accurate to put those two together.
In the trolley problem, someone must die. So it makes sense to choose saving five people over one. In the transplant problem, you aren’t choosing between one inevitable outcome and the other, you’re consciously killing a person that did not HAVE to die at all, picked by you at random. Why them instead of any number of other patients? They were going to live, they were not doomed like the person on the tracks. You become the trolley in this scenario, not the powerless person making a decision between bad and worse. You choose to do it without being forced and it involves going out of your way to harm them. Therefore it’s not the same. I don’t think it’s accurate to put those two together.
