#1 Thought experiment - "The Trolley Problem"

[The Grand Nudger]

Do you see a "should" anywhere in life, or should we just get rid of the word entirely?

Obviously not where some people do, eh?  The world...no, my kids are in it.  People who leap to absurd suggestions about burning the world because someone disagreed with their moral assesment of the trolley problem or it's ability to speak in any meaningful sense to our moralities.....maybe

You think so?  I know that in a lot of emergencies, dozens of people will stand around with their thumbs up their asses assuming that if nobody else is doing anything, they probably don't need to either.  Meanwhile, women are getting raped, babies are getting burned up in fires, stabbed people are bleeding to death on the street.

I do think so, yeah.  I related a similar experience a few posts back...wherein people just stand there staring what would be, even to them, emergencies. I'm not going to condemn them for it.

Shitty things happen to people, sure..but I don't know that women are getting raped -because people do nothing, that babies are getting burnt up in fires -because people do nothing, or that people are being stabbed and bleed out on the street -because people do nothing-.  Must be some cases like that, but probably not enough consider them representative. I assume that you would also see such a statement to be wildly simplistic.  I also assume that you could come up with examples of bad things happening to people precisely -because- people do something.  Those moral majority types are do-gooders..you know. Military "interventionists"...do-gooders....and how about those honor killings, amiright? All just people trying to do the right thing, as they see it.

In that sense, inaction might be considered a hedge against those -many- moments when our moral intuitions...or appraisals of a situation, are fundamentally flawed by reference to a standard that we have no control over or hand in.