One physcological moral delima often brought up in psychology classes and articals, one I read in Newsweek a few years goes something like this. The point of the article is that there in many cases cannot be a wrong answer.
But paraphrazing the example would go something like this:
There is a speeding individual train car that has disconected from the rest of the train with faild breaks about to pass under a bridge you and a fat guy are standing on. If you push the fat guy off the bridge, it will stop the train and save the 50 people in the car, but the fat guy dies. Or you don't push the guy onto the tracks the 50 people fly off the rails and over a cliff and die, but you don't kill the fat guy. What do you do?
Neither is wrong because the future is still a crap shoot. Say you don't push that fat guy, the 50 die, and then that fat guy goes on to be a cerial killer. Or you do push him, but one of the 50 you save is a kid who grows up to be a ceerial killer.
Now, as much as I hated Bush, if he had been able to get the fighter jets in the air before the planes hit the towers I would have given the order myself to shoot down those passenger Airliners. It would have sucked, but less people would have died.
The purpose of this thought experiment is to demonstrate that morals cannot be absolute and can only be taken on a case by case basis.
But paraphrazing the example would go something like this:
There is a speeding individual train car that has disconected from the rest of the train with faild breaks about to pass under a bridge you and a fat guy are standing on. If you push the fat guy off the bridge, it will stop the train and save the 50 people in the car, but the fat guy dies. Or you don't push the guy onto the tracks the 50 people fly off the rails and over a cliff and die, but you don't kill the fat guy. What do you do?
Neither is wrong because the future is still a crap shoot. Say you don't push that fat guy, the 50 die, and then that fat guy goes on to be a cerial killer. Or you do push him, but one of the 50 you save is a kid who grows up to be a ceerial killer.
Now, as much as I hated Bush, if he had been able to get the fighter jets in the air before the planes hit the towers I would have given the order myself to shoot down those passenger Airliners. It would have sucked, but less people would have died.
The purpose of this thought experiment is to demonstrate that morals cannot be absolute and can only be taken on a case by case basis.
