Ethical dilemmas don’t have to involve killing: firefighters are also trained to make rational (rather than emotive) life and death decisions: it may be better to leave resuscitating the baby who is seriously injured and concentrate instead on rescuing 2 adults still caught in the wreckage. Here training has an impact on the nature of the decision making process. Indeed, I recently heard the wife of a firefighter say that she had noticed his rational mode of decision making spill over into his personal life as his training became ingrained in his psyche.
Botogol, I enjoyed the piece immensely and found that it made me reconsider my own instinctive “of course you would push the fat man” response, having done the maths. If I truly, actually, honestly imagine myself in the exact situation, with a particular fat man in front of me (not a general fat man), then I am NOT so sure I could do it, bearing in mind, as you pointed out, that, like you, I wouldn’t even have the moral courage to be rude to somebody in the ordinary course of events, even when it might serve a logical purpose. It’s partly the jump from the generic to the specific but perhaps that is the same as the jump from Far to Near.
BTW, MatthewB, I think the point is that the man is fat because it takes someone OTHER than yourself to stop the train—self sacrifice is ruled out as an option so the soldier has to also decide between the fat man and the 5 railworkers.
Ethical dilemmas don’t have to involve killing: firefighters are also trained to make rational (rather than emotive) life and death decisions: it may be better to leave resuscitating the baby who is seriously injured and concentrate instead on rescuing 2 adults still caught in the wreckage. Here training has an impact on the nature of the decision making process. Indeed, I recently heard the wife of a firefighter say that she had noticed his rational mode of decision making spill over into his personal life as his training became ingrained in his psyche.
Botogol, I enjoyed the piece immensely and found that it made me reconsider my own instinctive “of course you would push the fat man” response, having done the maths. If I truly, actually, honestly imagine myself in the exact situation, with a particular fat man in front of me (not a general fat man), then I am NOT so sure I could do it, bearing in mind, as you pointed out, that, like you, I wouldn’t even have the moral courage to be rude to somebody in the ordinary course of events, even when it might serve a logical purpose. It’s partly the jump from the generic to the specific but perhaps that is the same as the jump from Far to Near.
BTW, MatthewB, I think the point is that the man is fat because it takes someone OTHER than yourself to stop the train—self sacrifice is ruled out as an option so the soldier has to also decide between the fat man and the 5 railworkers.