EDIT Ok so it’s just the trolly problem.
EDIT2 : AHA War Games 1983. “The only winning move is not to play.” (We might call this the final product of a lot of smart philosophical digestion, because it’s a famous movie). There’s always the perfectly valid option to ditch the riddle. (Because maybe the riddle is dumb, or maybe the riddle is no better than a thousand others, utilitywise )
Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about???
OP, whatever you are on, don’t use it ever again. There is no reason to think that torturing and killing kids will solve global warming. In short, it is a useless hypothetical that adds nothing to the discussion about solving the problem. Meaning it useless, while you get to pretend that you are somehow smart. Newsflash: you are not.
We don’t need to. We just need to stop letting business interests direct economic priority.
Sharp as a bag of fresh mozzarella you guys
If you want a serious answer ask a serious question. Not an absurd and ghoulish hypothetical.
Trolley problem is a bullshit in the first place, just as your “what if” nonsense. Millions of innocent children are dying and being tortured already by the capitalism, which is also main cause of global warming.
Ok, why is the trolley problem bullshit? Seriously.
Because the narrative can be edited so easily to result in whatever outcome makes your argument for you.
It’s not empirical, it’s simply an amplifier for whatever agenda is warranted by it.
You can construct a trolley problem to justify anything you want. It’s about the constraints that the person who posed the question chose. You don’t really get to choose in a trolley problem. The constraints choose for you. In the real world, our options are not so constrained and the outcomes are not so clear. As such it is useless for actually figuring out what to do.
The trolley problem is a useful basic philosophical experiment to get people to think about things and reflect on constraints, assumptions, and values. And often the best response is in fact “fuck these constraints and assumptions!”
So the trolley problem is not bullshit, but it is very very often misapplied in a bullshit or bad faith way, for example last year in the US I saw a lot of liberals uncritically and unironically appeal to “the trolley problem” to rationalize voting for the party that was committing a live-streamed Holocaust. They were using it to absolve themselves of the responsibility to think about and own their moral judgements, and that is the sort of misuse that a lot of people balk at.
Who’s justifying?
*people can construct, not you specifically. But maybe you, I don’t know.
Are you going to read or think about the comment or are we done here?
Because it implies utilitarianism is the best option by oversimplifying the problem. For example in your example you gave zero details on the situation.
It’s what we call an abstraction. This particular abstraction highlights a moral point.
Not bullshit. Useful and interesting.
Typically, an abstraction maintains the essence of the original. Asking “what if <good thing>, but it costs <bad thing>” isn’t an abstraction.
I’m not aware of a proposed solution to climate change that involves mass torture or murder.
The question feels more like one of those terrible parlor games where you have to pick a few cards and then argue some randomly generated point.
China isn’t capitalist and is factually the largest contributor by far to global warming across the globe. Sure, the US is second on the list, but after that, it’s quite far down before capitalism appears again.
Capitalism may suck, but it dilutes the water to pin nonsense like this on it when there’s actual arguments against it that merit real consideration.
China has the most people within its borders. Your logic seems to imply that dividing China into say 10 different states would solve the problem. A much better metric is per capita.
- Per capita it’s not, by far it’s not.
- Ever wondered why it has such emissions? Because it produce literally half of everything produced in the world, for usage of both you and me and everyone else. Sourcing of emissions by consumption make it way worse for west. Why? Capitalism, imperialist countries consume far more.
- Historical emissions. Wow. Even worse picture for the west. They don’t get to deindustrialise then whine about China’s emissions. Why? Capitalism again.
- Outsourcing production to cheaper countries isn’t ecologically friendly move. Capitalism again.
- China is the only country which consistently rolls out ecological initiatives on a systemic level, US dismantle even their own poor as shit regularions and euros set up the emission market and are trading it, pretending it’s meaningful. Capitalism again.
lol… per capita. Apologia at its finest.
“China is perfect!” - said the communist.
Wow you managed to make a complete illiterate and bad faith dumbass of yourself in just two sentences. You should repost that to some reddit main, maybe you would get some reward.
It’s not surprising that a wannabe-communist wouldn’t know what apologia means.
Can’t you even flame on topic? Pathetic
Care to repeat that in English??
we’re already torturing and murdering millions of innocent children in gaza, africa and southeast asia and we’re actively enabling climate change to maintain american dominance; is that okay?
Your emotions are getting in the way of your thinking
their emotions are fine, you’re just a gutless coward who is incapable of engaging with reality
That’s some good rationality there. Well done.
If there is absolutely no other option, yes. Even dropping nukes over the whole earth is okay if that solves a massive long term problem.
Yeah I guess that’s the ultimate math of it. I’m new to chewing this riddle. I think the most popular answer is to shout that the riddle doesn’t exist. I’m still chewing on it.
I will gladly torture some puppies if it means that no more dogs are killed after that. The end result is more important than short term “issues”.
I used to have an ethical dilemma about animal testing in medicine but then realised that the animals would have been killed anyways and would have had a shitty life before that, in farms or something. Now, at least their suffering is not in vain.
Ideally, there would be no suffering of any organism, but if push comes to shove, you have to make sacrifices.
Yeah the logic is clear. But consider the lesson of War Games.
The riddle can also be a mindfucking trap. The first, implicit, assertion of these kinds of riddles is that you must solve the riddle because the riddle is important (because it accurately represents reality or something)
But that might not be so.
So if we’re gonna cut through the riddle then that might be our access point.
