Pull the lever??

Pull the lever??

I pull the lever because given a choice between acting and not acting the former is preferable.

I'm not a civil transportation employee so I have no business interacting with the lever that changes the trolley's orientation on the tracks. I simply leave the lever and return to home in time for supper. Mother made a meatloaf and I need the protein.

I'd prefer not to wave to people, so I won't pull it.

Why waste energy pulling a lever to move some tracks so the trolley can go a longer route wasting more energy only to have the same result?

because it's aesthetic

So you can wave to the people on the trolley more easily

I dont find it aesthetic.

but I do

But Im the one responsible for lever pulling so Ill leave it be.

I'll kill you if you don't pull it

the original problem has too many embedded problems, such as the inherent equality of all lives

...

I am ready to die for my ideals.

Are you retarded?
>the dilemma is too much a dilemma and im projecting my personal opinions but i dont want to answer with a personal opinion

So do I actually have to wait till after Jesus gets run over before I get my Five Guys burger or can I just flip the lever and be over there waiting in line while he's getting plowed by the trolley?

a thought experiement's conditions need to be derived from the real world. if they aren't, it's useless.

for example, the prisoner's dilemma, unlike the trolley, is a USEFUL one, but the boundaries and rewards need to be very carefully defined, otherwise you get wildly diverging results

the very conditions of the trolley experiment are flawed

Jesus every time. reminder that Jesus told Judas to kill him so that he could be released from the burden of his physical body which the demiurge had trapped him in

Jesus will just respawn, but I don't really care for five guys and I'd rather not get on G*d's shit list.

obviously you dont change the lever, because if something DOES go wrong, then it could be blamed on you. what if it derails after you switch it? if you dont switch it, it derailing has nothing to do with you

No they aren't, and no, it doesn't have to be carefully defined.

>philosophy cant deal with ambiguity
u wut m8

humans aren't equal. that's a flawed experiment.

it would be like setting up a "thought experiment" trying to determine the morality of a situation where if you kill someone, they come back to life stronger and healthier

it's retarded because that's not how the world works

if your "philosophy" intentionally obfuscates facts and then reifies them, you're intitutionalizing ignorance.

facts exist, and you need to build philosophy around them.

>humans aren't equal. that's a flawed experiment.
You're projecting your own biases.

>it would be like setting up a "thought experiment" trying to determine the morality of a situation where if you kill someone, they come back to life stronger and healthier
It's a thought experiment where you have to make a decision based on limited information, like every other decision you've ever made in your life.

>it's retarded because that's not how the world works
So basically you don't want to answer because you project that all lives are equal but they aren't, when the only limited information you're given is that there are people.

>facts exist, and you need to build philosophy around them.
You are literally retarded.

>being spooked

What am I doing with my left hand right now? How can you even decide to respond to me if you don't know where my left hand is? Would you respond to me differently if you knew what I was doing with my left hand? By the way I'm typing with with one hand.

we have more complete informational every year that goes on. I'm not even a positivist but idiots like you who are gnostically agnostic about even basic facts are absolute retards. you're SO certain that you know nothing, but what is the basis for that certainty?

in the end, your faith is only in yourself, but your own intelligence is limited, so your faith declares that the basis of knowledge is constricted to an unreasonable degree.

your strongest belief and operational principle is that everyone else is equally as ignorant as you are, and so you declare their work to be arrogant. I can't honestly think of a more stupid position to hold.

>every year
So you're just going to wait several years before deciding whether or not to pull the lever of a speeding train?

>I'm not even a positivist but idiots like you who are gnostically agnostic about even basic facts are absolute retards. you're SO certain that you know nothing, but what is the basis for that certainty?
>etc
There you go projecting again.

Positivists believe in science. Scientists pursue knowledge. They pursue knowledge because they realize their knowledge is incomplete. Despite this, they still act on their finite and limited knowledge.

Not being an omniscient god that doesn't know literally everything is no excuse not to engage in a thought experiment and claim it's divorced from reality, when the idea of you having full knowledge, being omniscient and godlike, is even more divorced from reality.

the problem is that you enforce the idea that everyone is equally as ignorant as you.

a question that IMPOSES ignorance in an area that we are not necessarily ignorant about is fucking stupid.

not everyone is as stupid as you. but the ONLY thing you're claiming to actually know, is that somehow you know that everyone IS in fact, not smarter than you

you're making assumptions that the world conforms to what you think about it, and that people are no more or less intelligent than one another. that's a gnostic assumption with zero evidence.

Eh, I can wave at them from over here too.

What? I'm lazy.

That trolley is my property, don't tell me what to do with it.

So you're claiming that you would know more than the hypothetical person in the though experiment, even though you don't know anything about him. You just know he must be stupider than you, because everyone is stupider than you because you're the smartest person in the world and know more than everyone else combined.

Are you really this retarded?

The only ignorance that is being imposed on you is that you don't know anything about the people, except that they're people. When you drive to work, you know there's people in cars. You know there's lots of cars. You know there are cars so far down the road you can't even see them. But when there's traffic, you can infer there's a lot of cars, even if you can see them, and those cars have people in them. You know there's people. There's people in apartment buildings, in houses, in stores. You know there exist people, despite not having any specific knowledge about them. You know there's someone else shitposting on Veeky Forums, even on boards you aren't browsing. And so on.

Why is this concept so hard for you to grasp, that you can know there are people but know almost nothing about them. Do you really think it's impossible to know how many people there are, but know almost nothing else about them?

If you were for example, police chief, and had to do this by proxy, and your man on the ground radios you, telling you only that there's 5 people and 1 person on their tracks, and lets say you trusted this person, but there's no more time for him to communicate any more information, and you would have to operate based on this limited information, is that so unreasonable?

Or are you simply trying to say any kind of thought experiment is pointless, because it isn't reality? Or did you think you were clever and were able to sidestep the question, since you apparently think you're so smart.

Yes just for the lulz
Meat is murder

What if the meat is entirely composed of my own flesh which I alone am consuming?

what I know is that we are aware people are different in capacity. we know this quite well.

the only extreme claim here being made is that YOU believe that everyone is equal. but to know that you'd need to have insight into every single mind, and absolute knowledge of the brain.

establishing differences requires very little evidence in comparison to establishing absolute parity, which is your claim. and to establish absolute parity, you yourself are claiming that you have superior knowledge

you're SO smart in fact, that you think yuor stupid little thought experiment is infallible.

even your response isn't actually addressing the epistemology of the question. you just throw out more stupid fucking analogies like you were trained to do, unthinkingly.

take a basic fucking formal logic course you idiot.

>the only extreme claim here being made is that YOU believe that everyone is equal
Where do I say this? You are retarded. The only part that's "equal" is what limited information you know for the purposes of the thought experiment. That's equal to every other person being told this thought experiment. I may very well be giving you information you would not have otherwise known.

>but to know that you'd need to have insight into every single mind, and absolute knowledge of the brain.
Oh, so only god can do thought experiments is what you're saying.

>you're SO smart in fact, that you think yuor stupid little thought experiment is infallible.
What the fuck drugs are you even on kiddo? How is a thought experiment infallible? It's a thought experiment to understand one's own subjective sense of morality.

Saying you won't act because you would not act based on such limited information is a perfectly valid, but pallid, answer. What the fuck does "infallibility" of a thought experiment have to do with anything, whatever the fuck that means.

>take a basic fucking formal logic course you idiot.
Are you serious? You have serious brain damage user.

The act of not acting is still an action.

Veeky Forums had some fun with this ages ago

>That video