Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "The Trolley Problem Is A Joke" video.

It's not a real dilemma, there is one clear and correct answer to the question. The more interesting question is whether people would actually make the decision in real life quickly enough to actually make a difference. A much more reasonable one would be something along the lines of adding something to food that a small number of people could be allergic to, but that cures some other ailment. That at least does have some degree of merit to it as this does happen fairly often and the fact that it's not 100% for certain if anybody will be harmed, it makes it a lot harder to answer.
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@r0bw00d That's out of scope for the problem. You only get to choose which track it travels down, or whether or not you chuck the fat guy off the bridge. Which is another issue as you don't usually have situations where there are literally only 2 possible reactions to it.
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Indeed, in a literal sense there is a very clear correct answer to the problem. You can make it more interesting by toying with the people on the tracks or whether it's a switch versus chucking some fat dude over the side. If it's pre-holocaust Hitler on one side or the other, could potentially make for very interesting considerations, especially since it's before the holocaust and not during it. You can make it equally likely that the people will remain on the track, or change the percentage that they recognize the danger and get off. But, as stated, it's really only good as an illustration of how you might approach evaluating a moral dilemma or the way that various schools of thought might apply.
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@YouthRightsRadical The whole rollout has been done incompetently. It should have been a period of allowing longer and longer periods where the drivers are allowed to have their hands off the wheel covering a larger and larger number of types of situations until enough had been covered to reasonably be done safely. Monitoring the car driving for a couple minutes at a time isn't that hard to do. Having worked security, it is incredibly hard to be ready to step into action after hours of nothing at all needing action to happen. I fail to see why driving a car would be different in that respect. Instead what we get is these murdermobiles that kill motorcyclists and pedestrians because Elon has a hard on for being first, but lacks the maturity or intelligence to recognize that his solution is dangerous AF.
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I need to pick up the box set. The Good Place is one of the funniest shows from the last decade. And I'm glad that they opted to stop producing more episodes while it was still very good. It's a concept that they explored about as thoroughly as possible without ruining it for the viewers.
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That one is easy, it will just run them over if they said mean things about Elon on Twitter. Joking aside, the self-driving car example is something that wouldn't even remotely be hard if Elon wasn't such a psychopath. The status quo of only swerving if it can be done safely is probably what's going to happen. And with the improved sensor array that ML powered cars has, it should be a much safer situation as the car would know if it's safe to swerve or has to plow through the pedestrian as it could quickly assess both options for items in the way. It should also be smart enough not to be in the position to begin with, provided that the pedestrian doesn't step out from behind a large object too close for the car to stop. In which case the car would likely just run over the pedestrian as happens now. Sometimes philosophers make things more complicated than they really are because it's their toy, but in cases like the cars, there is a pretty clear way that it should be done and it doesn't really involve any further ethical considerations. It's been decades since swerving was a reasonable way of handling the condition in most cases, and even before that it was purely because braking technology was bad enough that the car might not stop in a reasonable distance.
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The problem with it is that it's only got one real choice. If you choose to let the 5 people die, then you're probably a serial killer or really screwed up in the head, otherwise, the only reasonable choice is to swap one for the greater number as there's usually no particular reason to believe that that one person is somehow more important or that that option is somehow better. If it's not a 100% death scenario, like there's perhaps a 10% chance that that individual will realize what's going on and get off the track, but 90% that they can't or won't, it's a much more useful question as now you've got a 90% chance of killing the one versus the 100% chance of killing 5. Which is a lot harder to answer. If it's 90% in both cases, it gets even more messy and even more realistic as there's a 10% chance that making the switch didn't even save anybody's life.
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@@jzsbff4801 It's not a special definition. A dilemma isn't going to have an easy answer.
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