A philosophical choice
By billzehua
@billzehua (573)
China
March 14, 2010 10:13am CST
Today I watched a lecture vedio from Havard university, it's mainly centering on justice, moral standards.The professor began with this hyperthetic siutation to students there: suppose you are steering a trolley car hurtling down the track. the thing is that the brake of trolley is not working and suddenly you see in the upfront there are five workers which are meant to be dead if you can't stop the crashing. then you accidentally find there's only one worker on the side track.Now time for your choice, to crash into the workers on the main track, or to steer into the side track to kill the one worker yet sparing the other five workers? what would you do? Of course the majority would go to the option to save the five, just as one lady put it, quote, it would be wrong to kill five people if you could have killed one instead. well, when this dilema came to me,I started to think, either way the answer would be hard to justify, coz why any part of these two groups should be the victims, who entitles us to define what should be right to choose the to-be-dead one?
To take this puzzle further, suppose if you are just an onlooker rather than the trolley steerer, same with the condition of two tracks, but there's a really fat man standing beside you who you can push downside to stop the trolley crashing into any one of the workers, what would you do? would you make the decision as easily as that in the first case? Then quite some students start to hesitate on this.
I m not hereby vowing any commiments to make the 'right and justified'poop, coz to me it's philosophical puzzles, just as the hyperthetic we usually do to guys, if the wife and husband's mom both fall into water, who would the husband go for first?
Philosophical questions are never easy to bargain, coz ask yourself what's philosophy, i turned my back to my girlfriend, Philosophy is ideas that are above the understanding of average person, ideas that are featured to be abstract, nonconceptual and unstably-defined. what would you say?
1 person likes this
4 responses
@cobrateacher (8432)
• United States
14 Mar 10
Hi, Bill!
Neither choice is, in any way, excusable. Should there be no choice, however, one murder is preferable to 5.
I hate hypotheticals that leave us with no acceptable choice at all, and this is, indeed, one of those!
@billzehua (573)
• China
16 Mar 10
That's why people can argument some hypothetical question for thousands of year without yielding any definite answers.similar arguments that whether human beings are borne to evil or good goes the same way.In each condition muder is doomed to happen,and I don't think any one should blame the trolley steerer making any decision then.
1 person likes this
@topffer (42156)
• France
14 Mar 10
Hi billzehua,
State of necessity has been discussed since three thousand years by philosophers. If you are attacked, would it be a great dilemma to wound or kill your attacker to save your life ?
State of necessity has been pushed to the limit in the 3rd century BC by a greek philosopher, Carneades : in a shipwreck, says Carneades, if a man see a man weaker than him on a plank that cannot carry both of them, should'nt he push the other man in order to save his life with the plank ? If he is aware of his self-interest, he will act like this. If he prefers to die than to hurt another man, he is fair, yet he is mad, because he respects more the life of others than his own life.
In each good disaster film -- The Tower Inferno, Titanic... -- we see some disciples of Carneades : philosophical ideas are sometimes at the level of understanding of an ugly brute ;)
@billzehua (573)
• China
16 Mar 10
Hi Topffer,thank you very much for your information, I like it. In my eyes, we live in state of necessity everyday, every decision we make or drop has a downside, but no one pays attention to it untill the downside comes to a crunch level, like lives have been cost, or big loss have been casused, then gossips or scandals are born.
@billzehua (573)
• China
15 Mar 10
eh...I decided to leave out this question to the practial condition when it comes.I believe we all have unconsciously met these default lines in other forms,but we got over them, so you know wat i m talking abt.
@Stevules (8)
• United States
14 Mar 10
Hmmm. There's a higher chance that the group of 5 people has at least one unfriendly character, where as hitting the one guy is an even bigger gamble. He could be a part time volunteer, or a doctor just taking a part-time job. Tough decisions are hard to make, but they do make you better for it afterwards.
@billzehua (573)
• China
16 Mar 10
Hi Sevules, you do have a deep perception into this, but I wonder, within that split second,do we have the time to be that cynical about the world, people?
