sith_happened: (Anakin: from behind)
Anakin Skywalker ([personal profile] sith_happened) wrote in [community profile] fandomhigh2020-09-11 09:32 am
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Ethics, Friday, September 11, 2020

"Good morning, everyone," Anakin said, sweeping into the classroom. "Today we're going to re-discuss the ethical quandary offered up by our guest speakers from this week's assembly."

Since some of the reactions to it had been...clarifying.

"The Trolley Problem at its most simplified form goes like this: there is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track or pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?"

Anakin smiled. "Now our guests were unaware of many of the abilities we on the island have to manipulate the scenario in order to save all the lives involved."

Or smush everything, but...Mae.

"So that meant at the assembly we got to wriggle out of the actual moral question posed by this scenario: by being a witness to what is happening, do you have a moral obligation to intervene, and if so, does that mean pulling the lever to divert the trolley into only killing one person? Does pulling the lever make you morally culpable for that one death, where doing nothing just makes you a horrible witness to an accident?"

He shrugged. "It's an interesting discussion, so let's have it. Without the teddy bear explosions."
x_discospider_x: (that's wrinkling my brain)

Re: Answer the questions!

[personal profile] x_discospider_x 2020-09-11 02:52 pm (UTC)(link)
Troy had already done an awful lot of thinking and decision making earlier in his economics class, which left him feeling like this amount of thinking and decision making should be pretty much illegal, but, brow furrowed, maybe trying to hear a little what other people were saying, he did try.

"Why's it gotta fall on us to have to be the potential bad guys here?" he finally managed, lifting his hand as it to emphasize the conundrum. "We're not the ones putting people on trolley tracks, I think we should really be looking towards the person who is and get them to, you know, not?"
x_discospider_x: (uhm...)

Re: Answer the questions!

[personal profile] x_discospider_x 2020-09-11 07:13 pm (UTC)(link)
"Well, obviously, I'm pulling the lever," Troy said, so emphatic there was even a little lever-pulling gesture, "celebrate with all the people whose lives I just saved, and then go find out who's tying all these people to trolley tracks in the first place."