The trolley problem. What would you do?

That's pretty much the way I feel about legos too.

Proof, if further proof were needed, that children are inherently evil.

Yep, but we learned not to be. In the words of the late, exceptionally great, and much missed Terry Pratchett:

Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are . . . well . . . human beings.

I actually got in trouble over this in a class during my school years. Like this video, the teacher neglected to mention anything about the people being unable to move. So I said, "I would just yell to all of them that a trolley was coming and to get off the tracks."

Well, of course the teacher was not prepared for this answer so she tried to modify the situation. I got somewhat irate, as I recall, and said she was cheating. She sent me to the office, where I got a swat for disturbing the class.

tl;dr

Don't try to think outside of the box in school.

That's why I hate the trolley problem (and by extension every other binary choice philosophical problem).

Life is almost never binary.

Evil Overlord in training

Alright... wait a minute here...!

I think everyone jumped the track on this one. This kid clearly hates Lego people! It's not some sort of "philosophical problem" or is "inherently evil."

He just simply isn't impressed with the whole Lego thing. He's bored out of mind.

I agree! I am also bored out of my mind with the whole lego thing. Whenever I get into a car with someone I always remind them that points can be earned by running over lego people.

Especially crippled lego people with broken and missing hands, missing legs. Might as well run them over and break them completely. Or the ones with faded logos from your dad's era of legos -- stamp out those faded icons. Or the ones with missing faces. What happened to their faces?? WHAT HAPPENED TO THEIR FACES?!?!?!?! So bored of it all -- of all the legos... so bored of... legos. Like prostitutes in GTA. I'm so bored of prostitutes... in GTA.

Ut oh.

I always thought this 'problem' was bullshit - not because I dreamed of being some special snowflake 'outside the box' little shit who just wants to bypass the difficulty in question, but because the answer is so obvious. If you have perfect certainty that you can either save 1 life or 5 lives, then that's the same as choosing to kill 1 person or 5 persons. Perfect certainty makes inaction as culpable as action. It's only in reality, where there's uncertainty, that you can balk at taking action.

In the same way I find the moral dilemma of killing Hitler as a baby to be ridiculous. If you, as a time traveler from 2016, balk at the idea of going back to 1889 to kill baby Hitler, but you're fine with going back to 1939 to kill adult Hitler and maybe prevent WW2, then you essentially want hundreds of thousands of people to die in concentration camps just to make you feel good about your murderous action. Ridiculous.

"Don't think outside the box at school"

That says a lot about our school system doesn't it.
It doesn't so much teach us as train us to conform.

Hilarious story Mordhaus.

That's actually used as a Psychopathy test sometimes.

The train is set to run over 5 kids, you can switch it to just kill one kid. Do you murder one child, or do you leave it alone and let it kill five kids?

The main difference in the case of a psychopath is they won't hesitate. One is less than five, bam, decision made. It never crosses their mind that this makes them effectively a murderer.

This is the point of thought experiments. They're not supposed to be unsolvable zen koans. They're supposed to help you identify and examine the fundamentals of your whatever philosophical model for a given topic. This one is obviously doing its job, because when you can construct statements like 'perfect certainty makes inaction as culpable as action' then you already have a richer understanding of ethics than say 95% of the population.

Many people give the opposite answer to yours; they don't think you should take an innocent life deliberately, even if it is for a greater good. Now, are these stupid people? Yes. And you'll find more and more of them when you recast the question in increasingly uncomfortable terms: Should you shove a fat man in front of the train to slow it down, knowing the five will then have time to escape? Should a doctor harvest the vital organs of a perfectly healthy patient to save five otherwise healthy people who happen to be in need of various organ transplants?

Real world solutions and complications to these questions are irrelevant. Petri dishes don't exist in nature but you don't slap them out of biologists hands and yell at them to do real science in the real world. And isn't the fact that so many people would decline to assassinate baby Hitler informative in itself?

He did it because he hates going back for the spare.

It's all about timing. If you pull the lever at the exact right moment, the front axle has passed the junction and the rear axle gets diverted. The trolley will derail.

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]