Yeah it’s entirely valid, it’s intended to be a tough problem with different answers depending on who answers. I was just trying to elaborate on the other side of it since initially you seemed to imply there’s a “correct” answer which is yours, so I just gave my view on it with similar confidence to illustrate there isn’t one. All sides of it can be morally justified and since there isn’t any good choices there at all, by design, it’s kind of easy to lose sight of that.

And yeah, essentially the dilemmas are of the same form, but I believe it’s meaningful whether one is “supposed” to be there making the choices vs. someone from outside the situation that isn’t normally expected to be making the choice. If the conductor that drives the train chooses not to pull the lever, it’s different from a bystander choosing not to. The latter can more easily justify not participating, the former simply can’t, because it’s their very job to make that choice, and the levers being a part of the framework within which they work day to day, should make inaction much more significant and unseemly. Same for the doctor making the choices, but on top of that, there are the extra layers of having made the doctor’s oath, which a bystander wouldn’t have made, and also the fact that a bystander can’t be expected to know the implications and details and applicability of “cutting to pieces” someone like mechanical spare parts, which I assume isn’t as easy as that and a doctor would know to calculate that into it, unlike a civilian.

But I digress. Just wanted to illustrate that the choice not to act is not “correct” since by design there can not be a correct answer. But correct for you is valid. It seemed weird to talk about it as if it was objective so I got a bit sidetracked to throw my several handfuls of cents in.

The amount of people on the other track is meaningful, true, but the point I made stands just as well with 5 people instead of 5 million. Latter just highlights the dissonance we all battle with within ourselves when sweating the dilemma. But it’s the same hyperbole the hospital analogy does, so in reality it’s the same in taking the original problem and stretching it out to absurd proportions to make the point.

Even so, the doctor dilemma you present is a worthwhile one to get anxious about in its own right anyway, and I’m not saying it’s not. Just different. If the question was not that you are the doctor, but a person with a lever, pulling of which would send a nurse to take the otherwise healthy man to be cut up for parts to save the 5 others, then we’d be in the same realm. The trolley analogue of your dilemma would be that you are the conductor, perhaps, and as the conductor may choose to change tracks or not. Being an active party already in play is different than being a bystander forced in the situation without connection other than the action, or lack of one, to take.

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.

Oh yeah this war of mine is actually another one in this very same realm I believe, good catch! Been intending to play it, perhaps now’s the time finally

The Banner Saga series. I have had the first one in my library for perhaps a decade, tried to start it a few times and never got into it.

Until a week ago, that is, when I got past the slow start and oh my does it pick up from there! Currently nearing end of the second one and I’ve been devouring these games, outright unhealthily to be honest, but I’m going to let it take me, I think the third one ends the saga, so this has a natural end and I’ll let myself go wild until that.

It’s pretty amazing how much one can do with so little, kind of. When the story is good and writing too, and the art style works, it doesn’t need all that much in terms of technical fidelity to be amazing.

Edit: If anyone has suggestions for other games like this, I’d be more than happy to hear them. I hear king of dragonpass and its lineage is almost a perfect fit, and I remember trying one of the newer ones a decade or so ago and having a blast but never finished. Are there others?

And why not, it’s one of the largest consumer markets right now, with anomalous concentrated level of wealth inherited from brutal conquests and colonial times giving each consumer buying power generally much higher than in other equal markets.

Can’t blame them for trying. Also can’t blame EU not giving in so readily.