Excerpt:
The doctor who performed the Netherlands’ first case of euthanasia on a child under 12 did so with due care, the supervising committee concluded after investigating. The patient, a child of nearly 2 years who suffered from several severe medical conditions, died at the end of 2025.
I can confidently predict, then, that your solution to the Trolley Problem would be to not pull the lever.
The correct solution.
The solution that causes more death is the correct one?
The solution where you don’t kill someone is the correct one.
Lemme rephrase the trolley problem: you’re a surgeon. You have five people dying on the table, in need of an organ donor. A healthy young man with a broken leg shows up at the ER. Do you butcher him for parts to save the five dying people?
no, that is the incorrect answer,
to not pull the lever, the puller considers their culpability in the harm caused by their intervention. “morality is determined by the action.”
where as those who pull the lever decide on the morality by the amount of harm. “morality is determined by the results”
the ones who abstain on pulling the lever are not making a moral choice of the situation, they are preventing an action that can cause harm and assigning blame of the greater situations harm on someone else. a very self centered consideration.
Fair enough.
I definitely wouldn’t want to be a minority if you were in charge. Good of the many and all…
There was an old interactive guide I think of every time this comes up, democracy is already a problem for minorities, and even getting to a compromise may be hard
It’s kind of off-topic, though
Yeah this whole sub thread is off topic.
Trolley problem is interesting because there isn’t a cleanly correct answer, and both answers can lead to atrocities when applied at societal scale. It also leads to interesting questions about the value of a human life, which lead to thornier topics.
Utilitarian theory dictates that the lives of five people are worth more than the life of one. That could easily lead to tyranny of the majority, however.
if you want to alter the trolley problem go ahead and make your claim, but do not attempt to twist the trolley problem and assume my results. your straw man insinuation is dis-honest
I haven’t altered anything, nor have I insinuated anything.
I have, however, applied reductio ad absurdum.
You have altered it. If you kill the patient you are a murderer. If you switch the tracks you are minimizing the damage done by a person that tied a bunch of people to the tracks. They are not morally equivalent.
Not even apples and oranges, more like apples and gas giant planets.
The healthy patient is most likely going to survive and thrive for many years.
The two year old was going to die within a decade; would never be able to walk or talk; couldn’t even learn to feed themselves.
I’m talking about the trolley problem?
What part of my comment confused you?
edit = never mind. I saw the other comments this person made. I will just ignore them.
I responded to the trolley problem comment, I made no comments on the article itself.
you have no idea how organ donation works.
And you seem to struggle with hypothetical analogies. Sucks for both of us I guess.
Five? It’s five million. There are five million people on the trolley tracks. The correct answer is to pull the lever and then run to try and save the one person on the other set of tracks. Any decent person would at least TRY to save everyone, even if they’ll fail.
Okay. Say you have five million people waiting on organ donation. Do you chop up the healthy young man with the broken leg to use his parts to save five million?
Your solution, while admirable, is not the trolley problem.
Well, if he’s just in there for a broken leg and he’s conscious, I think I’d ask him to volunteer. Is there a reason we can only use his organs and not mine?
Your scenario seems overly complicated when field surgeries already exist, where medics frequently have to make life-or-death decisions already via triage.
What about you? How do you save the five million patients?
You’re coming up with edge cases that sidestep the trolley problem very effectively.
Given the actual trolley problem, I said it before and I’ll say it again: I would not pull the lever.
It’s your choice how you’d do it, but at the end of the day, you doomed the 5 million to die, where simply pulling the lever, which was in front of you, a small convenient act, could have saved them.
It’s intentionally tough a problem that has no real correct answers. Is your conscience, your personal ethical purity, worth 5 million other full human lives? Perhaps. But not many others see it that way.
Technically you get to keep your hands clean, say you didn’t kill anyone, but really, you chose not to save 5 million people for that small privilege, which only impacts your own self, your own wellbeing, your own mental health. You save yourself from having to bear the consequences of acting, sacrificing 5 million others in the process. It’s entirely a selfish act that can be conveniently argued away, but only naively, by isolating the act of saving 5 million lives from the act of causing one death. The real question isn’t which is worth more, of the two tracks, but how highly you value your own convenience and the integrity of yourself against the lives of others. If you place your own mental wellbeing above that of another being, that’s one thing. Placing it above 5 million others that will never get to even have a mental health anymore, is a very high estimation of your own worth. But it’s valid. We see action by inaction every day, causing pain and suffering all over the world.
This is different from the hospital analogy you keep bringing up. And not merely on a technicality. The premise is not the same at all.