I’m not very good at moral philosophy, but any decision-process that results in 5 people dying in order to avoid “feeling guilty” isn’t something I can accept.
Especially since I’m not sure I follow your reasoning. If infringing on someone’s agency (e.g. killing someone) is wrong infringing on the agency of five people’s agency is at least equally wrong, but probably more wrong. By not killing the one person, you infringe on 5 time as many agency.
I don’t think that failing to act is infringing on the five’s agency since they would die anyways if I wasn’t there. So I’m not limiting their choices, I’m merely failing to increase them.
And try to see it from my perspective, where any decision-process that results in one innocent person being tortured in order to somewhat improve the lives of others isn’t something I can accept.
But in the Trolley Problem thought-experiment you are there. If you aren’t there, your actions won’t have any relevance to the situation anyway.
You state that infringing on someone’s agency is evil (makes someone a bad guy). How doeares your actions (just like not choosing is also a choice, not acting can also be an action) leading to the loss of 5 agency as opposed to 1 agency justified in this?
And torture vs. dust-specks is a different beast from the Trolley Problem, in my opinion, so I’m not going to respond to that part.
If I enter your house and clean your dishes and then leave, when you come home you see your clean dishes and can deduce that someone was in your house. If on the other hand I don’t change anything, you cannot. So acting and not acting are in fact different and axiomatically denying that difference makes you draw a in my opinion wrong conclusion.
I’m not very good at moral philosophy, but any decision-process that results in 5 people dying in order to avoid “feeling guilty” isn’t something I can accept.
Especially since I’m not sure I follow your reasoning. If infringing on someone’s agency (e.g. killing someone) is wrong infringing on the agency of five people’s agency is at least equally wrong, but probably more wrong. By not killing the one person, you infringe on 5 time as many agency.
I don’t think that failing to act is infringing on the five’s agency since they would die anyways if I wasn’t there. So I’m not limiting their choices, I’m merely failing to increase them.
And try to see it from my perspective, where any decision-process that results in one innocent person being tortured in order to somewhat improve the lives of others isn’t something I can accept.
But in the Trolley Problem thought-experiment you are there. If you aren’t there, your actions won’t have any relevance to the situation anyway.
You state that infringing on someone’s agency is evil (makes someone a bad guy). How doeares your actions (just like not choosing is also a choice, not acting can also be an action) leading to the loss of 5 agency as opposed to 1 agency justified in this?
And torture vs. dust-specks is a different beast from the Trolley Problem, in my opinion, so I’m not going to respond to that part.
If I enter your house and clean your dishes and then leave, when you come home you see your clean dishes and can deduce that someone was in your house. If on the other hand I don’t change anything, you cannot. So acting and not acting are in fact different and axiomatically denying that difference makes you draw a in my opinion wrong conclusion.