I doubled up a number a while back so now we skip forward lol
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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Kant would disagree.
Many philosophers (many of whom are Kant's contemporaries,) think Emmanuel Kant can be a dick sometimes.
But Kant would argue by pulling the lever and getting involved, you are taking responsibility, but ultimatly the guy(s) who secured the victims to the tracks are to blame. And your lawyer will argue this in both criminal and civil court.
I think you misunderstood. It's the scenario that's flawed not what happens when you pull the lever.
Whoever set up the contraption has responsibility.
Yes, but partitioning blame is not the point. Thomas Aquinas wouldn't touch the lever, because doing so may jeopardize his path to heaven.
Kant wasn't around when Nazi Jew hunters were literally scouring Europe for hidden Jewish refugees, but he did address the murderer at the door and argued it was right and proper not to lie to the murderer to protect a friend.
Sartre and Camus (and pretty much all their contemporaries) had to deal with real Nazis, so they'd pull the damn lever because ultimately it doesn't matter who set it up, even if they successfully escape to Brazil or Argentina. The situation is here and now and up to us to act. (And while there are few literal trolleys, there are plenty of instances in which a smaller mischief supports a greater good, or preventing a greater harm, sometimes involving selecting who lives and dies.)
A mother would steal medicine for her sick and dying kids, for instance, and rightly so, which is why it is necessary to create a society in which she doesn't have to, and defy the society that prevents her from caring for those children.
Countless Muslims in Spain would eat pork before their colleagues and before God so as to not be discovered and reported to the Inquisition. But then in Islam (by my limited comprehension) God forgives when you do what you do to survive.
There's no right answer to the Trolley problem. It happens to be a paradox of deontological ethics (mores defined by creed) but its point in full form is to show that there are often no right answers, and we are driven as much by what we feel is right or wrong, as by what we compute is the most rational ethic.
The Trolley problem just happens to be the one turned into a meme, and is easy to draw on a chalkboard in philosophy class.
It’s almost difficult to believe Kant wasn’t just pulling a Schrödinger and proposing a ridiculous thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of genuinely holding those views.
The idea that morality exists only as an intrinsic quality of an action, regardless of context or consequence, is more theology than philosophy. It’s useless to the point of harm to anyone faced with a world beyond a university or a monastery.