You articulated it before and better than I could.

I think the point of the thought experiment is to help people discover what their intuitions are, what the reasoning is behind them, and where that leads to contradictions. What's important about the trolley problem isn't that people say you should flip the lever. It's that when asked "why?" the answer is almost always "because it is better to save five lives than one". But then when it comes to pushing the fat man or cutting someone up for organs, they say you shouldn't do it, even though the math is the same. At which point people have to work to resolve the contradiction. There's a bunch of ways to do it, but hashing out which one you prefer is absolutely worthwhile and teaches you about yourself.

> What the trolley problem teaches us is that those running a closed system should run it so as to minimize the loss of life within it.

Maybe, but that's absolutely not what people are using the Trolley Problem for, and we don't really need the Trolley Problem to reach that conclusion in the first place. The point of thought experiments is to isolate the moral dilemma from details that might distract from the core intuition, but that's worse than useless because those details aren't distractions, they're profoundly important.

This is why sam Harris is so insufferable.

“What if insert impossible scenario therefore x”

An exhausting pointless way to try to understand the world.

I think the response there is that the apparent lack of generalizability means only that you have failed to analyze the situation correctly. What the trolley problem teaches us is that those running a closed system should run it so as to minimize the loss of life within it. That is, if I am entering into a transit system, and a trolley problemish situation arise in it, I should rationally want the people running the system to flip levers and push buttons such that fewer people die, because I am statistically more likely to be one of the five than the one.

Whereas we shouldn't want people using others as means to an end in an open scenario. Again, because the number of people who might want an organ from me at any given moment is really much higher than my odds of needing one myself.

In both cases, the trolley problem shows is that our moral impulses are rooted in rational self-interest, rather than, say, simple utilitarianism.

Lmao This is a great comment. I swear people take silly internet forums way too fucking seriously

> This is only a problem if you consider ethics and morality to be absolute laws that never change.

No, it's a problem if you want to create generally applicable rules or convince people that something is right or wrong. What does the Trolley problem tell us about the ethics of killing people to harvest their organs for lifesaving transplants? Nothing, because despite the fact that you're choosing between killing one person and letting several die, they don't engage our moral intuitions the same way.

Edit: Thought about this a little more, and it's easier to make my point if we reverse the Trolley Problem. Would you pull the lever to switch the trolley from the track with one person to the track with five? Obviously not, that would be monstrous. So we can generalize a rule that reads something like "it's wrong to take an action that you know will increase the number of deaths", right?

So is it wrong to save the life of an organ donor? I think the answer is just as obviously "no". The Trolley Problem has completely failed to generalize.

So what good is the Trolley Problem if it only lets us examine our moral intuitions about scenarios that literally involve choosing which people tied to a track should die. That's not something that anyone is going to encounter.

This is only a problem if you consider ethics and morality to be absolute laws that never change. Of course the responses to thought experiments change over time and across cultures, human thought isn't governed by static and unchanging laws. That's sort of the point. Likewise changing the framing can give some insight in how people think and how that can change.

There are possible causes for the high cost of rent other than the landlords becoming robber barons:

1. Insufficient supply of housing. In some parts of the country, zoning laws and permitting processes discourage developers from building affordable housing.
2. High value of houses. If a house has a high market value, landlords will charge a high rent to ensure that they are earning a decent return on their equity in the house.
3. High property taxes. If the property owner is paying high taxes, he/she will need to charge more for rent to ensure that property taxes can be paid.

Obviously these causes can work together - an insufficient supply of housing will drive up the value of houses, and these two causes together will cause rents to increase.

I have no idea which (if any) of the above apply to New Jersey - you might want to research zoning laws, building permit policies, and real estate taxes in your area.

Agreed.

What if a conflicting society was the ideal? It would allow for one to express themselves. A cohesive society, may be an oppressive society.

Because it makes a more cohesive society.

The edit really elevated the comment from stupid to amusing.

There are psychologist who think that our moral worldviews vary by genetics. For example, they think conservatives have different genes than liberals.

https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives

It's not just interesting and worthy of study, it calls into question the entire utility of thought experiments. Which is the point of the article, although it does a strangely poor job of explaining why it's important.

If thought experiments are extremely sensitive to framing and demographic variation, then whatever conclusions we reach using them aren't generalizable. That is to say, if we get different answers to the Trolley problem depending on which generation we ask, then we're definitely going to get different answers if we change the trolley into a car, let alone a bigger change like a bullet, explosion, or disease.

And this is something of a general problem with argument by analogy, which is basically what thought experiments are. The conclusions you reach with an analogy often don't generalize to the thing you're drawing a comparison to. They differ enough that you can almost always generate an equally appropriate analogy that reaches the opposite conclusion.

So, like, saints. We should have saints days.

Dude. Do you think that other forms of economies don't have people buying things or shops or something? What on earth are you on about

The anti-progressive progressive movement attacking gentrification again.

Even listen to yourself. You start with "swap away from capitalism" and then you go right into consumerism and corporations. Like, you could even go one full sentence without fall back on capitalism again.

The indoctrination was successful.

Like Zizek et al said, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

We are so indoctrinated into capitalism that it's impossible to imagine any other way.

Thanks!

I was under the expression that the etymology of Gentrification had something to do with gentile, but it seems like it comes from Gentry, which is just a (historically white) social class. A bunch of Chinese nationals buying up a condo block is still technically gentrification.

> Most don't have the stomach for it.

If "it" means more comments like this and people like you, then I absolutely don't have the stomach for it.

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Since "good" and "bad" cannot be materially measured, they can only be subjectively determined. They are social constructions, concepts. It's totally illogical to insist that they can be measured. You can only measure material.

How else would you make everyone adhere to your "universal" ethics, other than by enforcing them? Perhaps, you convince people otherwise. However, if you find someone adamantly opposed to it, their existence would contradict your universal theory. As it obviously wouldn't be universal if there's other conflicting ethics that exist.

People perform basic necessary tasks to live. By not performing them, they would be executing themselves, in a sense. Values are materially driven. It's likely that your values have conformed to benefit your own material conditions. If they haven't, I would consider you illogical. Your actions would be unpredictable and inconsistent.

Happy cake day