Instead of trolley problems (), maybe we should be talking about Rube Goldberg problems. Imagine you're confronted with an extraordinarily complex Rube Goldberg machine. On one end is a switch that can be flipped to start it going, after which it will run through its various complicated motions and finally stop. On the other end is a person who will be seriously harmed or killed by the machine if the switch is flipped. Imagine there's a person who knows all this and decides to flip the switch, and the person at the other end is harmed or killed with certainty. Do you hold the switch flipper responsible for the harm?
What if the machine were 10x more complex? 100x more complex? What if part of the machine could misbehave in such a way that the person at the end isn't harmed with certainty, but only with some probability? What …
Instead of trolley problems (), maybe we should be talking about Rube Goldberg problems. Imagine you're confronted with an extraordinarily complex Rube Goldberg machine. On one end is a switch that can be flipped to start it going, after which it will run through its various complicated motions and finally stop. On the other end is a person who will be seriously harmed or killed by the machine if the switch is flipped. Imagine there's a person who knows all this and decides to flip the switch, and the person at the other end is harmed or killed with certainty. Do you hold the switch flipper responsible for the harm?
What if the machine were 10x more complex? 100x more complex? What if part of the machine could misbehave in such a way that the person at the end isn't harmed with certainty, but only with some probability? What if the machine has 10 switches, all of which have to be flipped by 10 different individuals before the machine starts and harms the person; do you hold any of the individuals responsible for the harm?
#morality #ethics #TrolleyProblem
() Trolley problems are silly because they are decontexualized, and so are the proposed Rube Goldberg ones. I am satirizing them all, in part, though I do think if you're going to play around with thought experiments RG is a bit closer to modern lived reality than a runaway trolley.
