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You somehow have control over a train but you can not stop it. It's headed to the left fork where it'll inevitably kill one of your relatives, you're not sure which. On the right fork, ten strangers are strapped down. Amongst them, five will be future revolutionary inventors and five will be future mass murderers.
| Run a relative over | 10 | |
| Run the future revolutionary inventors and future murderers over | 42 |
There are a lot of strands to this.
Firstly, the whole thing relies on putting complete faith in destiny (five of the people *must* become inventors, the other five *must* become mass murderers), which I'm not so sure about. This story requires from me suspension of disbelief, but I'll do my best.
The relative probably doesn't hold any greater value than an single average stranger. I might have a greater emotional attachment to them, but it would be very self-centred to make my decision based on that. If I want to make the best moral decision, I have to cast aside my own personal attachment to all the people involved.
I don't believe in the importance of individual revolutionary people to the greater scheme of things. Especially in the modern world, there's a limit to how much a lone genius can accomplish. You need a large team of people to accomplish anything truly revolutionary, and the thing about large teams is that one member of them is dispensable without impacting on whole. So the revolutionary inventors aren't really a lot more important than the average person in terms of contributing to the common good (and that's assuming technological progress even constitutes the common good in the first place), although killing them is a significant incidence of suffering in itself.
The mass murderers are also only a little bit important to the common suffering. A mass murder features, by the FBI's definition, four or more people murdered. If there's five mass murderers they'll definitely kill at least 20 people put together. 20 lives isn't many out of over 7 billion people on Earth, but it is still suffering.
You can write it as an equation. Minus 10 lives plus greater than 20 lives plus 1 life for the relative you decided not to kill minus 'x' technology. -10L + >20L + 1L - xT = >11L - xT. That means saving at least 11 lives at the cost of an unknown amount of technological progress. So the moral question, when you unload it from personal emotional attachment, is this: what do you value more, 11 or more human lives or an unknown (but probably small) amount of technological progress? That's a difficult question, because you can't objectively compare technology to human lives. They're fundamentally different things. But I think I think those human lives are more valuable. So I'll run over the 10 people, please.
This is some pretty fair logic, too. What if the inventors came up with technology that later saved millions of lives, though?
Just food for thought.
If inventors whose lives I'm considering ending were indispensable to the project, and I knew all that to start with, then the good utilitarian decision would probably be to save the inventors and the murderers. That means I would have to kill my relative, which sucks for me but is great for the good of humanity.
Save family member, letting the future mass murderers live would have the highest death count in the end
is there a way I can back up the train from thatall first track once my work is done there and run it down the other track?
Good scenario, but I can't answer it. I'll think some more, but it's a toughie.
I'm technically related to everyone on earth so the person on the left fork could totally be a stranger.
I'm not the OP, but I'm pretty curious when you say "I'm technically related to everyone on earth" can you please elaborate?
I think I watched it on vsauce, then another YouTube channel talked about it (I'll get back to you later on the specific one) and really, it just makes sense.
If you believe in evolution, then life on earth came from a common ancestor. So all billions of us have stemmed from an ancient relative making us all related. "All life is connected" is not just a hippie concept. I want to say that we are all 51st cousins if I remember the number right.
I wouldn't take a chance on letting a relative die since it might wind up being one of the relatives I actually care about.
I'd just let the train run over the inventors and murderers. They're people I've never met, and therefore I could care less of they died.
mostly i would choose the relitive to kill and thin randomly kill 5 of the 10 guys that i saved
My natural instinct would always be to save who I have a personal connection and liking to, so I would have to save my relative since I like my family.
It would depend on what they'd invent as most inventions are just to make us more dependable on technology and lazy.
One of the thing about moral dilemma questions is that people are more likely to choose inaction (and I am one of those people). What I mean by this is: which way is the train going originally? I'd ultimately choose not to redirect the train. Even if the train happened to go in both directions, I wouldn't try to alter its course and just chalk it up to fate 'cause I think it'd just be way too much stress on me to decide on who gets to live.
These kind of hypotheticals are fun, but they depend too much on unrealistic factors and constraints.
For example, in this case, we're given the supernatural ability to predict the future of these 10 people, but the inability to predict that this scenario would happen (which would enable us to prevent it).
We're given the power to steer the train, but for some reason not to stop it.
Why would the 10 mass murderers and revolutionary inventors be tied down on the tracks in the first place? By whom were they tied down?
Why is one of my relatives wandering on the left fork of the track? Or are they also tied down?
And so on. I can rarely offer a full answer to these questions because they are often so full of loopholes or lacking detail.
If you like, you could always consider the situation to something like this:
The power to steer the train but not to stop it is relatively common given that a train does take a bit to stop.
If you don't like the supernatural part, let's just assume the five revolutionaries are a part of a medical team in the process of finding a cure for skin cancer. We can also assume that the five mass murderers have killed people before and are convicted criminals who have openly declared that they would kill again, if given the opportunity.
They can all be tied down by a fanatical genius who hates your guts.
Sure, the situation is unrealistic. But hey, the entire industry for fiction novels LIVES on unrealistic situations. Don't worry about giving a "full answer" this kind of stuff is just for fun.
by relative do you mean close family parents or sibling then i would run over the ten people but if you mean like a aunt or uncle then i would run over my relative
The point is you don't know which relative it is. It could be an aunt, it could be an in-law, it could be your mother.
i was just about to edit my answer actually i just kinda stoped typeing in the middle.. heres the second hal no matter what i would run over the 10 because even if they were gonna invent stuff and murder people it probly wouldnt effect me any way so yeah deffiently run the ten over
We need revolutionariees more than I need my family, but that's just kuz I'm a narcissistic facist patriotic who is more obsessed with henry ford than you are with Megan fox or Mather mcconnahay