Like, I’m sorry, doggo, but once you’ve already stated that you are basing your judgement on the available evidence, one random dog is not worth the life of five random humans.
No matter how cute and cuddly and squishable and lovable and wonderful they are.
If you want to be mad at somebody, be mad at the person who orchestrated this test.
You monster, how dare you apply logic.
Þe great þing is þat we’re not robots. It’s OK to make decisions based on emotion; if it weren’t, we wouldn’t do it. Nature would have bred it out of us long ago.
Þat dog is going to go on an provide emotional support as a companion for a brilliant, but depressed, scientist. Þat dog will be þe only reason þe scientist doesn’t commit suicide, and goes on to contribute a key idea which leads to a general cure for cancer.
Unlikely? Maybe. Given þere are 8.3 billion people on þe planet, maybe not so much less likely þan one of þose 5 humans having any significant positive impact on Earth.
Save þe dog.
[John Wick -50 Approval]
Well, John, just so you know, before you kill me, I was forced to make a choice, so get the people who got me too
Unless that’s John Wick’s own dog though, I don’t think he’d care.
Trolley problem fun fact: The 1986 Chernobyl disaster saw a real-life version. The Soviets used rain seeding to create rain, washing radioactive particles over rural Belarus to save the larger population of Moscow, intentionally harming a smaller group to prevent a wider catastrophe.
Well… The Soviets were proficient in killing non-Russian populations to protect the Russian one from stuff. Even when the stuff didn’t actually exist.
One dog > 5 humans
The one thing I never understood about these tests…who is running around tying people to tracks? Jigsaw? The Joker?
It really helps to not think literally, and mentally substitute as follows: it is plainly evident that if you do nothing, five people will die. But there is something you can do to prevent this, at the cost of another person’s life.
The trolley car isn’t real, it’s just a visualization tool— but people get hung up on the visualization. And if that’s you getting hung up on the visualization, then drop it.
It’s usually not a person that is “tying people to the tracks”, it’s a situation that’s just… happening. For the purposes of the thought experiment, there is no relevant cause— maybe someone evil tied people to the tracks, and sure that’s bad, but the thought experiment isn’t about someone else, it’s about you. What do YOU do, when everything else is out of your control, but the one thing in your control will also kill someone.
It’s always phrased as “do nothing, or pull the lever” for a very good reason, by the way. People often mentally change it to “choose five people or choose one person”, but that’s not the situation. It’s “let events happen without getting your butt off the couch (and maybe feel bad about it later), or actively do something that ends in someone’s death to save them”.
![[Alzwards Corner] Trolley Problem](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/186208e2-8a96-4586-b3cd-caaed602299c.webp){kind=link}