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this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Ah yes, the trolley problem, a philosophical thought experiment which famously has a moral and an immoral choice.
The trolley problem has always been really interesting to me, not because of the problem as it is usually considered, but because of the framing of the problem.
We could stop the trolley, derail the trolley, hop on board the trolley and take control of it. All of these, and more, are within our power.
But those are not valid choices. The trolley must not be stopped, even if the trolley will end all human life.
We can only choose whether the trolley goes left, or right.
We must never ask who put the people on the track, or why we can’t protect people from the excesses of the trolley.
Yea its so incredibly pro status quo, that's why liberals love using the trolley problem as the rules allowed within the framing only leave the lesser evil option.
That's also why I love this picture, let's just blow the trolley up it keeps murdering people
It's also a thought experiment taking place during a short, discrete moment of time on the track. What if you stretch out the track by years? The path that seemed good before may have way more people tied to it in the long run.
That's how I saw it if the Dems felt they could get away with doing a genocide forever without a political consequence. I mean, it's hard to get much worse than that, but if the Dems feel they can do anything as long as it's one step less out loud evil than what the fascist Republicans are doing, and the Republicans keep sprinting right as fast as possible, there's literally nothing that will stop them from later abandoning those other groups people liked to put on the trolley as being saved if Harris got into office.
This election, liberals wanted us to vote for the trolley to genocide Palestine in order to protect other minorities in the US.
Next election, the liberals will want us to vote for the trolley to genocide gender binary non-conforming and transgender people in order to protect other minorities in the US.
The election after that… hey, wait, this reminds me of a poem I read somewhere…
Utilitarian ethics are ill suited for important things. Those people should embrace virtue ethics, except they probably think fucking Bill Clinton or Obama are paragons of virtue.
It's not like it's a hard problem in philosophy, it's more a metric for how an ethical system views problems.
The problem here is that reducing US politics to one action in one event and not looking at the long term ramifications is, well, silly. People kept going "trolley problem, trolley problem, trolley problem" on lemmy, twitter and elsewhere, but the problem was actually much more complicated than this extremely simple and contextless thought experiment.