don't get me wrong, i think the trolley problem is stupid as hell. but somehow people still manage to go under the bar

ftr my nuanced take is that while it is indeed preferable to kill one person to save many people, it fundamentally can't be expected of people to make that decision, and a society where those in power (the person at the metaphorical lever) feel empowered to make those kinds of decisions from a detached viewpoint of utilitarian calculus is itself an insult to the value of life. the five people on the tracks should revolt against a system that reduces their life-worlds to numbers

but really i do think there's something pathological to this kind of insistence that moral questions don't exist, everything reduces to technical problems, and i would simply have perfect foreknowledge of all possibilities and preëmpt them so it can only good happen, so there. as silly and contrived as the trolley problem is, in life we are forced to make snap decisions between sub-optimal alternatives

and meanwhile real-life safety systems are far more often the product of experience than some big brain boffin using their girthy neurons to predict all possible failure points ahead of time

@esvrld the trolley problem was popularized by virtue ethicist Philippa Foot to critique utilitarianism. people who use utilitarian ethics to solve the trolley problem unironically are missing the point of the meme

this brings us back again to the worldview of the person at the lever. what makes you so sure your vantage point is so objective as to equip you to decide what outcomes are good for everyone?

@esvrld inventing safety regulations from platonic first principles

@josephbenton it's wild that noöne else has realised that it's bad to be hit by a trolley

@esvrld i wrote a whole essay about this! or i guess the related issue of "why it's stupid to treat the trolley problem like some sort of key to unlock tech ethics generally" https://mcorrell.medium.com/get-tech-the-hell-away-from-the-trolley-problem-f7e1f6e5522d