Hm… in the trolley problem at least one person gets saved, but if you don’t lay off a person and the company goes bankrupt, everyone is out of a job, so that makes the choice much easier. And even if you could formulate the problem so it really was a choice between 1 person getting fired or 5 other people getting fired, that would be easy; it’s obviously better to fire just one (at least, as long as you don’t know anything else about the people—for some people getting fired would be a bigger problem than for others).
I wished for an example without killing, but maybe it is essential to the problem, after all. I guess the choice would at least have to make you do something you’d normally consider immoral, like stealing or lying, else you’d just say ‘oh, harm only one vs. harming several, easy choice’.
Hm… in the trolley problem at least one person gets saved, but if you don’t lay off a person and the company goes bankrupt, everyone is out of a job, so that makes the choice much easier. And even if you could formulate the problem so it really was a choice between 1 person getting fired or 5 other people getting fired, that would be easy; it’s obviously better to fire just one (at least, as long as you don’t know anything else about the people—for some people getting fired would be a bigger problem than for others).
I wished for an example without killing, but maybe it is essential to the problem, after all. I guess the choice would at least have to make you do something you’d normally consider immoral, like stealing or lying, else you’d just say ‘oh, harm only one vs. harming several, easy choice’.