If reminding a bunch of people that trolleys are typically built in places with a lot of stuff that can be thrown on the track is all it takes to “beat” philosophy, then maybe the philosophers didn’t have anything to say worth listening to in the first place.
Especially when they’re trying to ask questions to determine a moral course of action, why does anyone have to die when some property damage would do the trick just as well?
That’s why the question was devised in the first place, to illustrate how ridiculous the two schools of thought represented by either decision were when taken to their logical conclusion.
The original correct answer was to do something more productive than just standing around with your thumb up your ass debating utilitarianism vs not taking a direct action to kill someone.
says philosophers should exercise more intellect
gets called anti-intellectual
There’s weapon’s grade something in this discussion but if it’s anti-intellectualism I ain’t the one bringing it son.
The point of a thought experiment isn’t to creatively invent your way out of answering. It’s to give you a lens to examine your beliefs. The trolley problem can be a train problem or a giant falling safe problem or a two-bombs-with-a-button-to-switch-detonators problem. The specifics aren’t there for you to fantasise they’re there to give context to one of the most entry-level problems in ethics.
You didn’t impress your philosophy buddies by refusing to engage with a hypothetical. You made them groan and then they laughed about you when you left the room.
If such a faulty experiment is the basis of our ethics it’s little wonder why the world has become such a cynical and nihilistic place.
Suggesting an alternative isn’t refusing to engage with the hypothetical, it’s engaging in the hypothetical in a way that someone who thinks they’re so smart for studying philosophy should really fucking know how to entertain.
And again, the whole question was devised to point out that both answers are horrifying, morally bankrupt, and a logical conclusion of a faulty school of ethics, so insisting the question is “basic ethical philosophy” is just damning the entire foundation even more.
You’re not making a case that I should feel embarrassed about a snafu in philosophical thinking, you’re making a case that the real trolley problem is whether I should have gone back and shot the philosophy majors you think were snickering behind my back before they could do any actual damage by indoctrinating someone with actual deciding power into their effective death cult school of ethics where never thinking twice about “someone dies anyways” outcomes is perfectly reasonable.
Your “foundational ethics question” is equally as ridiculous as asking if I’d cheat on my SO if it would cure their cancer and also they wouldn’t forgive me for it. That’s not how anything ever works and insisting there’s some deep meaning in it is a farce, and the author of the question itself intended for it to be a farce, and trying to defend it as anything but a farce just makes you a farce
