I was thinking of commenting this exact thing. Or I would untie the one person, tie them next to the 5 others, and have the trolly go through all of them.
Adum would do wonders in a Saw scenario. “Adum you must choose between shooting this bad person or this bad person who gave you a lollipop back in 1st grade. One will die” “Okay but why do I have to kill either” “Because they are bad people” “Okay but I don’t want to kill someone, what if I don’t kill either” “Then they’ll both die” “But then I won’t be making an actual choice, I’m just a bystander to two murders. This is stupid, you’re stupid, how would it be my fault” “OKAY FINE, JUST GO. Grab that key in the guy’s back pocket and piss off”
If there's no bodies on the other side, then inaction could be punishable by law. By killing someone else and essentially trading their lives for each other, then the action itself would be punishible by law.
In canada it is a crime to administer first aid without consent if the person is conscious. Even if they are bleeding out. You have to wait for them to pass out first and then it is assumed that a reasonable person would consent to life saving care if they are conscious. 😂
If we assume that inaction and action with the same result are one and the same (I know it isn't by law, but let's assume), and if we also assume that changing the tracks from killing 1 person to 5 persons instead is a far worse crime than the other way around. Then it would be better to change the tracks from 5 to 1 person. Unless you believe that the person in control will get punished either way, which is very unfair, obviously.
@@BeeryGamer in our legal system, one life is woth as much as a hundred. It was decided that a terrorist plane with passengers onboard that is flying to a football stadium cannot be shot down.. don't agree but yeah..
@@hterrorarchive2393 Its a common thing I see when people complain about this problem. I have some autism myself but I guess it just never bugged me to not know EVERY detail of a situation
Most hypotheticals. Any time a hypothetical question is asked on Sardonicast it's impossible for him to just answer the silly question that will never happen to him irl. What a silly fella
It's actually kind of interesting that he never really seems to, he seems to lack the ability to consider something purely on ethical grounds and insists on every question beign framed with real world, immediate consequences
My favorite one of these is the Sisyphus Trolley Problem: “The lever only changes the course of the track for 5 seconds, before switching back to the first path, where it will kill 5 people. You must keep pulling the lever in order to save these people (neither you nor the captives need to sleep or eat coz this is a greek myth or something). There is noone else nearby, and no way of leaving or reaching help. Do you keep pulling the lever in the hope that somehow these circumstances will change, or do you decide that this is an inherently futile act and that to keep all of you in this state of imprisoned limbo for all eternity was more cruel than death?”
Pull it until I get tired, let everyone get out their final messages and reflect on why tf they are tied to a set of rails, then leave and go get a burger.
@@ralelunarthat’s not what the trolley problem is for at all. It’s supposed to make you think about your own morality and where you draw the line between action and inaction.
26:00 This one is interesting... Imagine there's a third option where instead you can run over 1,576,800,000 people, reducing their lifespan by just one second each. The total still adds up to 50 years, but at that point you've basically done nothing to anyone involved. Clearly the more people you share the burden with, the less significant the damage will become.
@@leiretxu_99 I love considering that extreme. Honestly I think we do more damage to everyone on our daily commute, just with pollution and such. Probably no lawsuit gonna happen or else everyone who drives would have to get it too
I personally think almost every question is very interesting and calls to mind some facet of ethics in a novel way!Do we overvalue pets vs random animals, do our moral decisions get swayed by the loss of our money, can my morality be bought or changed by the offer of money, am I okay will saving people immediatly if I know it will kill an equal number later, etc.
I mean he kinda approaches it differently than most people, by looking at what he would do in that situation, instead of what he wants to do in that situation
@@HOTD108_ Well, sort-of. The point is meant to be a whole "Can you decide to kill one person if it'll save many people?" thing, but anyone who even vaguely believes in utilitarianism will just go "Yes. Of course. Because you're saving more lives, so YEAH! WHY WOULDN'T YOU!??!" That's why the Trolly Problem's been criticized as a thought experiment, because it's way too easy. If you care about helping the most people and doing the most good in the world possible then you'd harm one person to save 5 other people from being harmed. And then you have Adam, who looks at this and just goes "Yeah, but what does the law say? Would this hold up in court? If not then I don't want to do anything." and he just lets people die even though his inaction is also a choice. It's morally no different from him swapping it from the one person track to the five person track, the outcome is the same either way.
@@HOTD108_ There isn’t a “correct” answer to the original hypothetical. But this quiz was clearly design assuming you would pull the lever in the original. Because most of these variations make pulling the lever less appealing. So if you already wouldn’t pull the lever. Making the lever less appealing doesn’t change anything.
@@dracocrusherLet's put a spin to it. A patient comes to your hospital for a minor surgery and you put them to sleep. Then you remember you have 5 patients in your hospital who need organ transplants or they'll die in the next few hours. You could take the organs of that person on anesthesia and put them in the 5 people basically saving them, put killing the guy in the process. What fo you do?
To me, this has the same problem as when people things along the lines of “I’d take a bullet for you:” We have no way of knowing if that’s true or not until we’re in that exact situation.
Michael from Vsauce actually tested this in his Mind Field show, he got real people to take part in a real-world Trolly Problem where they didn't know what was happening. Of course nobody died and they had therapists and stuff to help people out afterwards so they wouldn't be traumatized or anything, but they did do it for real. People were helping out at a railyard and after being shown how to use the rail super clearly, they were lead into a shed with the rail controls and screens of security camera footage. There, they could physically see there were workers with headphones in who didn't realize the trolly was approaching, 5 on one track and 1 on the other. And because of how far it was to the actual workers, there was no way to warn them or stop the trolly, they just had the option to swap tracks or not. In that situation, most people didn't pull the lever with a lot of them saying stuff like "I just panicked and froze" or "I didn't know if it was allowed". But some actually did and totally made that choice, and those people were also shaken up by the event because "Oh god, I thought I just decided to kill a man!" Super interesting stuff!
@@hildegunst1000 Yeah, that's actually one of the things they talk about a lot in the video. Most of it is them trying to figure out how to do this as ethically as possible without giving away that it's fake, because that'd influence people's opinions.
Back in junior high a friend (that I wasn't suuuper close to to begin with) asked if I'd take a bullet for them. I said "well, I guess it depends, what'd you do to get someone shooting at you in the first place?" Like, why would I jump in without all the facts? I already dont value her life over mine cuz we just arent that close. And everyone around me was so surprised I didn't do the default "yeh". And instead took it seriously. 😅 but by me taking it seriously, they also got seriously offended. Like "we can't even trust you anymore". Hypotheticals are a trap
A fair few people in his chat are always rushing him or having a go at him for taking ages talking about the smallest details and making him out to be stupid for not giving an answer they think is "easy" But i just want to say thats what I love about his videos. That he's so passionate about the littlest of details and looks into all situations and their complexities. It so so interesting to get all these perspectives and ideas i never really thought of before Love your work Adam and thanks for the highlights channel for making it possible for me to get this content ❤
Like Adum I have a very difficult time relating to the trolley problem. If I were a random bystander, there would be absolutely no chance I would intervene with railway machinery like this in a crisis. It's not my responsibility; I have no training; how do I know what I think will happen by pulling the lever, will happen; and what would I say in court to defend my actions or to the family of the deceased? And, conversely, if I were a trained professional in some way responsible for the situation, I would do anything in my control to minimise the damage. Then perhaps I would pull the lever. To me, it simply isn't about morality as much as it is about involving oneself in an already out-of-control situation, and what 'right' you have to do so. I believe when this problem has been tested - I am thinking of Micheal from VSauce's Mindhunter episode, which was really, really interesting - it has been found that most people don't pull the lever.
Alternate solutions to the trolly problem: • Derail the thing before it reaches the switch • Boarding action, à lá _Unstoppable_ • Remove people from the track • Ask for help for the above options.
Problems with these "solutions": · You almost certainly will not have the tools on-hand to derail something as heavy as a trolley before it reaches the people. · I don't know what this one means lol. ·You almost certainly won't have time to move anyone, as the trolley is implied to be coming in very fast and you're positioned far away. ·There are no other onlookers mentioned in the hypothetical set-up, so there's nobody nearby to ask for help from, and even if there was, the trolley is implied to be moving very fast so you doing anything other than making a decision with that switch will almost certainly result in people dying before you can accomplish anything.
This misses the entire point of the hypothetical: to get you to challenge your current moral mindset. Refusing to play ball is just you not wanting to consider making a difficult choice.
@@coletrainhetrick Well then we come back to the problem of the trolley moving fast. You wouldn't physically be able to board it, the same way that you can't get into a car that's speeding down the highway.
It’s simple. Because it’s a manual switch you can hold it so neither of the guide rails are engaged so the trolly simply derails and comes to a harmless halt
That's kind of the point of the entire series. Light starts off as the ideal perfect person, but using that kind of power corrupts anyone, even people who use it for noble purposes.
Adum's logic seems inconstistent when it comes to the "let your first cousin die, or kill three of your second cousins." I would have guessed he would NOT pull the lever based on earlier choices. Before this point the only time he was willing to kill people was to save his friend. When considering his cousins he kept saying, "well, which cousin?" By the time he selected to pull the lever he still didn't have a specific cousin or second cousin in his mind. Unless he is really attributing the first cousin vs second cousin label as first cousin is just naturally that much closer to you, but that seems weird. Edit: After finishing the video, I would have to confirm my feelings. He goes right back to not pulling the lever if it means killing even one person. Why did he select to pull the lever to kill three people to save just one person when the only difference was technical blood relation closeness?
The point of the Trolley Dilemma is to demonstrate that logic and morality are inconsistent with each other. There are always so many factors to consider, it is practically absurd to hold anyone to a standard. Adum was right to latch onto the Law. Most consistent thing in all of these scenarios is that he could open himself up to litigation for actively causing death.
@@Blucham I don't care that he was inconsistent on one question for the sake of consistency, I care for the sake of curiosity behind the choice that was made. As I said in my original comment he didn't really have much to say on first cousin vs. second cousin. When he was answering the friend question, it was clear he would rather directly kill several people to save a friend than let his friend die. But with the cousin question, both first and second cousins are family. My question was, "does he think a first cousin is going to be automatically closer to you than a second cousin, so therefore he would rather have the first cousin alive?" I also never mentioned the law. Though it does inform a significant amount of his choices, it was not his main statement for not killing people. He said, "I don't want to kill people, therefore I am not going to pull the lever because if I did that would mean I am directly responsible for their deaths." Then when pushed back by his chat on his reasoning he also brought up legal issues. That being said, if we were going to bring up the law, that acutally makes Adum's logic even more suspect for this single question. If his main reasoning, or at least some of his reasoning, is that he doesn't want to break the law, then why would he pull the lever to save one person and kill three? The only other time he made that choice was for a friend, which makes sense as he specially said he would be willing to go to jail if it meant saving a friend, but to choose one family member over three others when you don't think of who they actually are other than first vs second cousins feels weird, like maybe he just misunderstood the question, or picked the wrong answer. I was honestly expecting him to go "Oh wait, I just hit the wrong button, I think I had that backwards." But he never did, he just moved on to the next question.
@@LaigledeMeaux Gotcha! 👍 He probably has at least one specific 1st cousin that he loves and would want to save. I bet he just chose not to specify it on the internet. 🤐 Imagining if any of his family members actually watch this and get upset he picked favorites or would condemn any specific 3 to die. These *dilemmas* should be deeply personal and troubling to consider, but have been turned into a voyeuristic game of “Would You Rather.” Adum is considering it seriously and being emotionally affected, while the audience chimes “pull the lever!” I know you didn’t bring up the law thing, I wasn’t trying to contest you about anything there. But its something Adum was consistent about. And it demonstrated that he was thinking in terms of IRL, despite most people saying don’t worry about it. As usual, I love that he’s more thorough, and bringing up perspectives that other TH-camrs haven’t.
@@Blucham I don't think that the people who say to pull the lever are saying such because of a voyeuristic thrill, I think they're just ignoring law because law isn't always moral. I do think it's interesting to look at it from the perspective of being put in a situation with laws in place, but the people disregarding the law are doing so because legality is the last thing to be affected by morals and ethics. Morals change, which makes ethics change, which makes law change. If your basis is legality, you're kinda doing it backwards.
13:25 Ironically enough, a similar scenario to this one is made in inFamous on the PS3. The villain of the game has tied up your girlfriend on one building, and 6 doctors that can save lives on another, and both have bombs that will kill them. If you do nothing, they all die. If you choose to save the doctors, your girlfriend dies. However, if you try to save the girlfriend, you'll find out that he lied and it's some random civilian up there instead, and that the girlfriend is one of the 6 doctors that's immediately blown up.
Maybe this game should have been prefaced by a message saying something like 'No one will ever figure out you pulled the lever and you will never face repercussions for your behavior and you will know this information in this specific situation' to make Adam think more on the level of other people. It is not that realistic, but then again, what about these hypotheticals is
You guys are assuming everybody has to think through these things in identical fashion. How boring. He answered the questions that were asked, and he arrived at different conclusions. He did this all properly and everyone is trying to impose their own logic on him for some reason.
@@MochaRitz We aren't trying to impose the logic of our conclusions, we are trying to explain how the premise is meant to be interpreted and the purpose of moral hypotheticals. There is absolutely no point in them if everyone starts with a totally different understanding of the problem because it means that the conclusions being compared are utterly meaningless because they are incomparable situations. Adam is actually the one trying to force his logic onto others. He continuously says people just want to murder people, based on his assumption that everyone thinks like him and assumes inaction doesn't hold responsibility. Some people hold a distinction between action/inaction, and the choice to act or to not act. The former ignores the person involvement, the former acknowledges that the person still made a choice which resulted in death, and so if either of your choices result in death, you should take the choice which causes less suffering. We are arguing to try and establish a baseline hypothetical so that the actual purpose of a moral hypothetical can be fulfilled (to strip away external factors that may prevent you from acting in line with your moral intuition, in order to reveal your moral intuition, and potentially bring back that external factor later to see how it changes identical situations). Adam however is imposing his perspective onto everyone else and making a declarative assertion about everyone elses motives. You are complaining to the wrong people.
@@MrMyers758 I just disagree, you're not gonna change my mind. This is infinitely more interesting and gives us way more of a look into how he thinks. I can't fathom how you think he's imposing his views on others. He never once told anybody that they were wrong for their approach to this, but the audience said that to him a million times over. At any rate, this is a goofy quiz that has no bearing on anybody. I was thoroughly entertained, which IS the point.
@@MochaRitz " I can't fathom how you think he's imposing his views on others." Did you not read my comment? Did you not read the part where I mentioned that Adam on multiple occasions stated as fact that people just wanted to kill people? Did you subsequently ignore the part where I stated that others consider the choice to not do something as being just as responsible for killing than the choice to do something, and therefore they are responsible for killing regardless of what they do? And did you subsequently ignore the logical conclusion from that, that is that Adam is imposing his own perspective of responsibility onto others peoples decisions and ignoring the possibility they may disagree with his assumption on responsibility? "I just disagree, you're not gonna change my mind." Then you are a completely irrational person and no-one should waste their time discussing anything with you if you are completely incapable of ever having your opinion changed on a given subject. Surely you recognise how ridiculously close minded and stupid it is to state as fact that you cannot have your mind changed on something? Are you aware how arrogant and illogical that is?
"I won't pull the lever because I'm consistent", except he's not, because he chose to pull the lever to save his best friend and first cousin because they're close to him.
"If we are throwing out the law, then you might as well throw out everything else!" No Adam, the point of the Trolley problem is to work out your moral compass, and so all outside influences that may make you act against your moral intuition are stripped out, and potentially added back in for certain scenarios to work out how those external factors influence your decision. For example, after establishing whether you would pull the lever in the standard trolley problem, you could introduce legal consequences, for either decision depending on what the person answered with to see how legality affects your decision making. Also characterising people who would pull the lever in some scenarios as just people who want to kill people is completely disregarding the genuine divergence of thought of whether what matters to morality is inaction/action, or the decision to act or not act. Some people believe that both options will result in them being responsible for death, and so choose the one option with the lesser impact. People really need to stop looking at things from their own perspective, seeing someone with a completely different perspective, and then imposing what motivations someone would have to have with your perspective to take what actions they took under their own perspective. Also how can Adam be so anal and literallist, but then when confronted with the concept of shortening someones lifespan by 50 years, his "literal" interpretation is that they live and then go on life support for 10 years. No Adam, it is taking the date at which the person would normally have died if not for this scenario, -50 years is when they will actually die.
The point of the Trolley Problem was to point out the absurdity in making black-and-white moralistic statements. Morality is not the same as logic. There are always so many angles to approach it from, that it is absurd to try and hold anyone to a standard. At the end of the day, Adum may understand it more than anyone else by discussing the aspects that everyone else ignores. Doesn’t matter what your reasons are for pulling the switch. If you pull the switch, you actively involve yourself and can potentially face legal repercussions. Is it worth it to you? Does your moral compass stand against actual real world scrutiny, or are you just playing hero in your imagination? 🤷🏻♂️
@@Blucham Sorry but did you just completely ignore my comment but still respond to it? You are stating absolutely things which I explained are things which are inconclusive and people have disagreement over. "If you pull the switch, you actively involve yourself" As I explained, this is a matter of opinion, and discovering what someone's opinion on this is a key point of the trolley problem which you seem to be missing. You are making the arbitrary distinction between action and inaction as though inaction is a completely neutral position because of the way you are framing it. From my perspective, you are already involved in the situation because you are already in a position to influence it and understand that you can make a choice. The choice to not pull the switch is a choice which you took knowing it will result in more deaths. You made a choice, and so you bear the moral responsibilities of that choice. Viewing the situation as though your decision is completely abstract from the morality of the situation and only looking at whether you stood still or moved your hand is completely reductionist. It reveals something about the way your mind works and how you divorce yourself from a situation by arbitrary boundaries for your own convenience. "...and can potentially face legal repercussions." As I explained, which you completely ignored, with the trolley problem you remove all external factors which may prevent you from acting on your moral intuition, and then add them back in individually to see how they affect your decision making. There can be iterations of the trolley problem which introduce legal repercussions for either choice which differing punishments depending on your choice, which would create an interesting dynamic of the person answering weighing the moral decisions against potential punishments. You cannot do that if you assume that the law applies in every single scenario, because you aren't controlling for that factor in the first place. Do you not understand the point of controlled experiments? We are trying to find out people's morality in a multitude of different scenarios in the abstract. Legality is a factor that can be introduced but destroys the purpose of the experiment if it is assumed.
@@MrMyers758 I wasn’t gonna go that deep into it, but in main comment, paragraph 2 you literally complain about people imposing their perspectives on others, then in paragraph 3 get upset at Adum for having a perspective you don’t understand. Just seems hypocritical. This ain’t an actual scientific experiment. Adum isn’t part of some survey group, or college class. And neither am I for that matter. We were never posed these rules or intentions you seem to be set on. Why would you make such dissertations out of these brief thoughts and comments?
@@Blucham "paragraph 2 you literally complain about people imposing their perspectives on others, then in paragraph 3 get upset at Adum for having a perspective you don’t understand" First of all, that is incredibly dishonest framing. I understand his perspective, but I disagree with it. So answer me this, how are these two things hypocritical: 1. Having an issue with people IMPOSING THEIR BELIEFS ON OTHERS MOTIVATIONS 2. Disagreeing with someone's perspective How are they hypocritical? They aren't the same thing. "This ain’t an actual scientific experiment." Correct, I used the term controlled experiment because you may understand the logic of it better if it is within that context, because you may understand the idea of having a control in science but not having a control in a series of moral questions. "We were never posed these rules..." We aren't imposing rules, literally you and Adam are imposing rules which weren't mentioned. No-one mentioned the law being applicable, you imposed that rule onto it. What makes something moral or immoral is entirely dependant on context, and you are choosing to impose a context which has not been mentioned. "Why would you make such dissertations out of these brief thoughts and comments?" Because saying something incorrect is often quicker than the explanation as to why it is incorrect. Surely you understand that basic concept? If I say "the Earth is flat", the explanation as to why that statement is incorrect is necessarily much larger, often necessitation LITERAL dissertations. Would you accept your own comment of "Why would you make such dissertations out of these brief thoughts and comments?" as a rebuttal to globe Earth?
This question to me seems interesting because it forces the participant into a situation where you have to choose between being an asshole or being a lesser asshole. Some people try to minimize the cruelty, others go “Welp, if I have to choose, can’t feel bad if I play the role.”
It also brings up the very real difference between watching, or even letting, something bad happen vs Taking action and definitly causing harm, but a percived lesser harm. Like, giving up a victim to a murderer in exchange for 5 hostages.
If Adum liked that, he might enjoy Cyanide & Happiness's "Trial by Trolley" series. They had a vote every few days, where Trolley Tom was going to run over someone and we had to decide who.
The entire “Trolley Dilemma” scenario was posed by a philosopher to demonstrate how absurd it is to try to make morality into simple measurements of “good” and “bad”. There are so many ways to look at it, and so many differing perspectives, and standards you could hold people to… Now it’s just a big meme, and people have blown the philosophical absurdity up into actual absurdity with these variations. Adum got a lot of folks making fun for “not getting it,” but frankly, the fact that he called it out on Question 1, and explained why he hated this whole thing, kinda proves that HE DOES GET IT more than anyone.
God thank you, these comments are giving me an aneurysm. The fact that people are this upset over a streamer approaching some hypotheticals in a way they don't like, is crazy to me.
The obvious solution to the infinitely looping trolley is to hook up some mechanism to exploit the perpetual motion and solve all the world’s energy problems
Life: "Oh no! There is a trolly about to kill more people, or you could choose to kill one man instead. Hurry what do you do!?!" Adam: "Hrmm, let me take a walk and think it over"
By pulling the lever you are taking direct action to commit immoral act of murdering an innocent human being to achieve a good end to save the lives of five men. You are directly responsible of the murder of that one man even if you justify it as saving five lives. However if you don't pull the lever the situation turns from a murder to a tragic accident. You are not held responsible for the deaths of those five men as their deaths were not a result of your direct action. You only fail to save the lives of those five men. So the question here really is, are you willing to commit immoral acts for perceived good ends or do you actually have moral principles even if following them results in perceived bad end? Or to put it simply; do ends justify the means, or do means justify the ends?
Just wave down the trolley. They have brakes. Then find whoever tied people to the tracks and yell at them for recreating the stupidest thought experiment ever.
I think the point of the mental exercise is to test YOUR morality. But if you consider legality as part of the answer, legality is an outsider's enforcement of "society's" morality.
Here’s one trolley problem- there’s two tracks, one line has 10 people tied to the tracks and the other has zero, but if you switch it to the one with zero, the trolley company will lose a lot of money
Actually the morally correct option for the rich man one would be to save him and use the 500k to save other people. Thereby you are technically saving more people.
Wouldn't this mean it was morally right to become a hitman? If every hit earns you 500k and you believe that the people you could save with that money outweighs a single death then doing hits for 500k would be morally correct using the same logic.
Doesn't matter that you can save more people. You choose to kill someone and acted to kill them. No matter the benefice, you are in the wrong for doing that.
@@deusexmangaka3259 but if you don’t do something someone dies anyway. Either way one person dies but with one of them you can do something good after the fact.
@@meurigjenkins I guess yeah. If you believe in the logic of pulling the lever in the original trolly problem to kill one person while saving 5 then I don’t see how being a hit man and using the money to save more lives then you take is much different.
I must be a psychopath because I have never had an innate issue with answering the trolley problems. Also, it was far too funny for me when Adum brought up the "stuff a person in a tube" scenario; that concept is fucking hilarious.
I think the logic behind "don't think about the legality" is because theyre supposed to be questions on morals alone, and because laws very often don't have anything to do with morality. (Because immoral laws exist) Also, you hit the mark on how people lie to themselves. People are also so inclined to kill in these hypotheticals because they don't really value peoples lives at a distance, AND they hold that perspective because they literally don't even comprehend the idea of taking a life. They just don't really think hard about it
In philosophy, our professor taught the trolly problem being about what we “ought to do”, not necessarily what we would do in the scenario I think that helped our discussion a lot
I don't know how the track switching works exactly, is it possible to pull the lever too late so that the train hopefully derails and hits all 6? Bowling mind set.
I think I get what Adum's point is. Someone who is put in the position of being able to pull the lever has actually two choices to make: The choice to engage with the scenario or not, and if they choose to engage with the scenario, the choice to pull or not pull the lever. The average person, if plucked out of their normal everyday life and put into this weird hypothetical, would have to also consider if they think the circumstance presented is legitimate. How do they know that pulling the lever will actually take one life and save five? If they accept the condition of the scenario and pull the lever, that means they have done so with the intent to take a life *REGARDLESS* of whether or not pulling the lever actually causes the outcome proposed by the scenario. They've done it with the intent to save five lives, but that's not even the consideration we need to make yet. Because instead, someone who refuses to pull the lever can either do so by engaging with the scenario as a legitimate proposition and refusing to perform an act with the intent to take a life, OR they refuse to engage with the scenario and in so doing refuse to make the decision to pull or not pull the lever. This may or may not have the consequence of taking five lives, because the person presented with this choice might be practicing skepticism towards the proposition that pulling the lever will save those five lives. A refusal to engage with a forced moral scenario is not morally the same as making a conscious decision to resort to inaction, in my view. Of course, if they had been provided adequate evidence to the veracity of the claim that pulling the lever will save five lives at the expense of one life, then that changes things, since this all hinges on an expectation that the average person would have ignorance of and skepticism towards the hypothetical proposition's claims.
Gotta love Adum. Doesn't want to kill anyone so will remain passive and let five people die instead of one, but will kill five people to save someone he knows lol.
It seems logic to me: the order of priority of things to protect is you>loved ones>strangers>animals>material things. So in any case where your action leads to someones death, do nothing no matter the benefice (you dogde moral/legal responsibility). But if you or your loved ones is in danger, you prioritize them.
@@deusexmangaka3259 Oh of course, I think most people would do the same. I'm just referring to the hypocrisy in his logic for not wanting to become involved for moral/legal reasons to save five strangers vs one stranger, but will toss that aside to save his best friend. Basically save five people cause the death of one = not right for me to decide because it's immoral/illegal/wrong; Kill five people save my bestie = right for me to decide. Maybe I'm just looking at it the wrong way. It seems immoral/illegal either way so why not save five people in either cases or not get involved in either case.
I'd refuse to even be apart of this ridiculous series of questions! Leaving people's fate down to factors such as arithmetic, action versus inaction, how responsibility pertains to culpability as well as alleviating one's own sense of guilt. It's total lunacy to turn a deadly scenario into something as cold and clinical as a thought exercise.
Trolley problem time! A trolley is racing towards a branch in the track. On one branch, one man is tied to the track; on the other branch, no one is tied to the track. If you pull the lever, the trolley will hit a man tied to the tracks. If you don't pull the lever, you'll be really bored. Like... REALLY bored. Also the trolley doesn't start moving until you pull the lever.
The first question illustrates a problem with moral questions like these. I like to think I’d take the action that is the most morally good and causes the least suffering. Maybe I would, but I can’t know. I can’t perfectly imagine what it would be like to be standing there, with a lever in front of me, and a trolley rushing towards people. The only way to find out what I would do is to put me in that situation and see what happens.
Given how legality was brought into this a lot, is there seriously no law that would hold you accountable for not doing anything? I get this model is vague, but the implications of most of them is you know what the lever will do and your hand is already on it; so by proxy, not pulling it is you actively making a choice to have (x) people killed. In my mind, regardless of what you choose, you'd still get punished unless the hypothetical explicitly stated otherwise; but it's to what extent you'd be put away for it. Saying that you suddenly won't be held accountable for doing nothing doesn't make sense to me, when there is at least one other witness there to recount the choice you made to a theoretical court of law.
"but the implications of most of them is you know what the lever will do and your hand is already on it; so by proxy, not pulling it is you actively making a choice to have (x) people killed." Two things: First of all, if this was true, there was never a choice in the first place. It literally just becomes maths if you view it like this, and it defeats the entire point of the hypothetical. Second: If this were true, we are all despicable monsters and evil. "You are making the choice to have 5 people killed". What if I fainted? 5 people would still die. How on earth would it be fair for me to be held responsible if I was unconscious? Because You are making the choice to SAVE 5 people (and kill 1 person) or NOT SAVE 5 people. This distinction is important, because you and I are not saving people right now. So, when are we allowed to not save people? Why is having the hand on the lever the point of obligation? Why isn't it just being in the room with that knowledge, or some other arbitrary line? Because there's only one reasonable line: someone has a) the knowledge and b) the ability to do something. Having these two things would make us obligated to act, otherwise we've "had people killed". With that in mind: You and I both have the ability and knowledge to donate to charity. In a hypothetical world where there's only one charity, if ANYONE died as a direct result of that charity not having enough funds, we are culpable, because we've met the only potential criteria with which we could measure responsibility for inaction. Suddenly we're all murderers using this metric. The entire point of this hypothetical is whether you're willing to let 5 people die in order to not be a murderer. Are you willing to commit an immoral act for a utilitarian good? I should clarify, I like to think I would pull the lever, but anyone who wouldn't isn't a killer. The entire point is that they aren't. You could argue that they're morally reprehensible (or maybe they're just not ready for the responsibility of ending someone's life), but by definition they are not a murderer.
See, the problem for Adum is that 95% of people don't think about this problem for more than, like, 30 seconds, so everyone's gonna think he's overthinking it when in reality he's probably putting in an amount of thought the original hypothetical was meant to provoke.
one day my father and I were walking through the street and passed by some litter. He told me "if you notice that litter and don't pick it up, it's yours. You littered that." I took that lesson to heart, which is why pulling the lever is a no-brainer for me. I don't see the difference between killing and letting die, at least not in this scenario.
I'm not a fan of the trolley problem. The consequences are a bit too removed for our modern, desensitized, world. Which causes people to feel like actively causing someone's death is the same as passively failing to save someone's life. And then say something stupid like "you're choosing not to pull the lever". Oh, Adum covered it with the gas tube scenario.
i love how he does some moral grandstanding about destroying his life savings instead of letting 5 people die, then INSTANTLY chooses to save himself over 5 people.
Yes, self-preservation over random people you don't know isn't an unreasonable choice. Yes, it's way more fucked up to kill people for money. Anyone can become a hit man or go to China to get their organs live-harvested to sacrifice themselves for others at any time if they think otherwise.
these tests seem to make out that you are stationed at the lever expecting a challenge, which seems to me different in important ways from the classical challenge where you stumble upon the lever and it is NOT your job to be a leverman, and you have to figure it out from context
The gas tube situation is a little different because in a scenario in which you could shove someone else in a tube to save the lives, you could probably shove yourself in the same tube. Most people would like to think they would sacrifice themselves for 5 people. The trolley problem is difficult because diverting the trolley is so easy, shoving a person in a tube is super difficult lmao
Well the lever could already be flipped to the '1 person' position, and pulling the lever could switch it over to the 5. Just wait for the trolley to reach the junction, then throw the switch and derail it so it hits all 6 people for certain. No witnesses that way.
Would you kill one person if you could harvest their organs and use them to save five otherwise healthy people? I don't consider this any different from the train tracks. In both, you violate something utilitarian morality neglects: bodily autonomy.
![PASULOL รามเกียรติ์ ตอนที่ 4 นนทกพบรัก [Ramakien Ep.4: Nonthok in love]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tMUQgmZzf_A/mqdefault.jpg)
The real answer is to try to switch the tracks right as it hits them so it derails and, hopefully, goes sideways and gets all six for more points
Fuck, I just left a very similar comment and then I see this. I feel dumb 😔
The train hold way more than five people...
I was thinking of commenting this exact thing.
Or I would untie the one person, tie them next to the 5 others, and have the trolly go through all of them.
Sounds like you're not yet familiar with multi-track drifting.
@@munjee2 This 100%
Got a Trolly problem for Adum: 5 Trailers at 1080p vs. 1 Trailer in 4k
Adum would do wonders in a Saw scenario.
“Adum you must choose between shooting this bad person or this bad person who gave you a lollipop back in 1st grade. One will die”
“Okay but why do I have to kill either”
“Because they are bad people”
“Okay but I don’t want to kill someone, what if I don’t kill either”
“Then they’ll both die”
“But then I won’t be making an actual choice, I’m just a bystander to two murders. This is stupid, you’re stupid, how would it be my fault”
“OKAY FINE, JUST GO. Grab that key in the guy’s back pocket and piss off”
Adum: *pukes on lever*
"I'm gonna take this as literally as possible" proceeds to imagine the least literal thing possible
"Tomar, if you had to sacrifice five of your emaralds to save Jaxxy what would yo-"
"Bye Jaxxy."
Ready for BoneyPlays??
What if he had to choose between his emeralds and his vintage smokestacks?
Inaction can actually be a crime in germany. If you are technically able to give first aid but don't it is a crime
If there's no bodies on the other side, then inaction could be punishable by law. By killing someone else and essentially trading their lives for each other, then the action itself would be punishible by law.
@@YMS yeah, it was mainly just ment as an info cause you said not pulling the lever isn't punishable by law. Agree with you ;)
And really fun vid btw
In canada it is a crime to administer first aid without consent if the person is conscious. Even if they are bleeding out. You have to wait for them to pass out first and then it is assumed that a reasonable person would consent to life saving care if they are conscious. 😂
If we assume that inaction and action with the same result are one and the same (I know it isn't by law, but let's assume), and if we also assume that changing the tracks from killing 1 person to 5 persons instead is a far worse crime than the other way around. Then it would be better to change the tracks from 5 to 1 person. Unless you believe that the person in control will get punished either way, which is very unfair, obviously.
@@BeeryGamer in our legal system, one life is woth as much as a hundred. It was decided that a terrorist plane with passengers onboard that is flying to a football stadium cannot be shot down.. don't agree but yeah..
Can't wait to watch Scoot do this and ensure the trolley kills the maximum amount of people possible.
I love how Adum is actually too autistic for this hypothetical lol
i know right, it’s crazy how people add factors to a literal hypothetical
@@hterrorarchive2393 Its a common thing I see when people complain about this problem. I have some autism myself but I guess it just never bugged me to not know EVERY detail of a situation
I don't think he's autistic, he just likes to be pedantic sometimes, but in a weird way saying you're autistic makes it seem more palatable lol
@@mikeg4691 Nah he is, he’s talked about it before. Plenty of people are on the spectrum to different degrees
Most hypotheticals. Any time a hypothetical question is asked on Sardonicast it's impossible for him to just answer the silly question that will never happen to him irl. What a silly fella
Adum discovers the difference between Legalism and morality
It's actually kind of interesting that he never really seems to, he seems to lack the ability to consider something purely on ethical grounds and insists on every question beign framed with real world, immediate consequences
"You could sue me for damaging the other trolley" is the most adum thing ive ever heard. This is great lol
My favorite one of these is the Sisyphus Trolley Problem: “The lever only changes the course of the track for 5 seconds, before switching back to the first path, where it will kill 5 people. You must keep pulling the lever in order to save these people (neither you nor the captives need to sleep or eat coz this is a greek myth or something). There is noone else nearby, and no way of leaving or reaching help. Do you keep pulling the lever in the hope that somehow these circumstances will change, or do you decide that this is an inherently futile act and that to keep all of you in this state of imprisoned limbo for all eternity was more cruel than death?”
Pull it until I get tired, let everyone get out their final messages and reflect on why tf they are tied to a set of rails, then leave and go get a burger.
@@justincain2702McDonald's would seem gourmet after all that mental energy spent
4:18 Olivia saying "Fuck, I shouldn't have sent you this" perfectly sums up the video
I think Adum missed the point of the trolley game literally just mocking the oversimplification of morality through trolley problems
He's not missing the point, he's explaining how these games are nonsense because they're just designed for people to judge each other's choices.
@@ralelunarthat’s not what the trolley problem is for at all.
It’s supposed to make you think about your own morality and where you draw the line between action and inaction.
04:00 Adam comes up with the "Fat Man" trolley problem to answer the original problem
Thank you for solving morality
"which cousin" got me lmaooo
26:00 This one is interesting...
Imagine there's a third option where instead you can run over 1,576,800,000 people, reducing their lifespan by just one second each. The total still adds up to 50 years, but at that point you've basically done nothing to anyone involved. Clearly the more people you share the burden with, the less significant the damage will become.
Yes, but you'd have actively caused harm (little harm, but still harm) to over 1,5 million people. Imagine the lawsuit 😂
@@leiretxu_99 I love considering that extreme. Honestly I think we do more damage to everyone on our daily commute, just with pollution and such. Probably no lawsuit gonna happen or else everyone who drives would have to get it too
I personally think almost every question is very interesting and calls to mind some facet of ethics in a novel way!Do we overvalue pets vs random animals, do our moral decisions get swayed by the loss of our money, can my morality be bought or changed by the offer of money, am I okay will saving people immediatly if I know it will kill an equal number later, etc.
You have to image the intense Jigsaw music and creepy voiceover explaining everything while Adam monologues for half an hour each.
Present Adam with the tiny Hitler scenario next
Adam is getting into the "Saw" mindset early. 💀
It does feel like this was designed for someone who would pull the lever in the original scenario. So Adam kinda breaks it by not agreeing
Actually there is no intended correct answer. That's the point.
I mean he kinda approaches it differently than most people, by looking at what he would do in that situation, instead of what he wants to do in that situation
@@HOTD108_ Well, sort-of. The point is meant to be a whole "Can you decide to kill one person if it'll save many people?" thing, but anyone who even vaguely believes in utilitarianism will just go "Yes. Of course. Because you're saving more lives, so YEAH! WHY WOULDN'T YOU!??!"
That's why the Trolly Problem's been criticized as a thought experiment, because it's way too easy. If you care about helping the most people and doing the most good in the world possible then you'd harm one person to save 5 other people from being harmed.
And then you have Adam, who looks at this and just goes "Yeah, but what does the law say? Would this hold up in court? If not then I don't want to do anything." and he just lets people die even though his inaction is also a choice. It's morally no different from him swapping it from the one person track to the five person track, the outcome is the same either way.
@@HOTD108_ There isn’t a “correct” answer to the original hypothetical. But this quiz was clearly design assuming you would pull the lever in the original. Because most of these variations make pulling the lever less appealing.
So if you already wouldn’t pull the lever. Making the lever less appealing doesn’t change anything.
@@dracocrusherLet's put a spin to it. A patient comes to your hospital for a minor surgery and you put them to sleep. Then you remember you have 5 patients in your hospital who need organ transplants or they'll die in the next few hours.
You could take the organs of that person on anesthesia and put them in the 5 people basically saving them, put killing the guy in the process.
What fo you do?
Someone asking Adum why he cares so much about the legal consequences of this had the same energy as "you know fun is legal, right?"
14:23 the family reunion this year is gonna be really awkward.
If Adum doesn't even know if he knows his second cousins or not, then it's safe to say that Adum doesn't have family reunions.
To me, this has the same problem as when people things along the lines of “I’d take a bullet for you:”
We have no way of knowing if that’s true or not until we’re in that exact situation.
Michael from Vsauce actually tested this in his Mind Field show, he got real people to take part in a real-world Trolly Problem where they didn't know what was happening. Of course nobody died and they had therapists and stuff to help people out afterwards so they wouldn't be traumatized or anything, but they did do it for real.
People were helping out at a railyard and after being shown how to use the rail super clearly, they were lead into a shed with the rail controls and screens of security camera footage. There, they could physically see there were workers with headphones in who didn't realize the trolly was approaching, 5 on one track and 1 on the other. And because of how far it was to the actual workers, there was no way to warn them or stop the trolly, they just had the option to swap tracks or not.
In that situation, most people didn't pull the lever with a lot of them saying stuff like "I just panicked and froze" or "I didn't know if it was allowed". But some actually did and totally made that choice, and those people were also shaken up by the event because "Oh god, I thought I just decided to kill a man!"
Super interesting stuff!
@@dracocrusher I'll have to check it out then.
@@dracocrusher seems really unethical to me to do this even with therapists afterwards. Still really interesting for sure
@@hildegunst1000 Yeah, that's actually one of the things they talk about a lot in the video. Most of it is them trying to figure out how to do this as ethically as possible without giving away that it's fake, because that'd influence people's opinions.
Back in junior high a friend (that I wasn't suuuper close to to begin with) asked if I'd take a bullet for them. I said "well, I guess it depends, what'd you do to get someone shooting at you in the first place?" Like, why would I jump in without all the facts? I already dont value her life over mine cuz we just arent that close. And everyone around me was so surprised I didn't do the default "yeh". And instead took it seriously. 😅 but by me taking it seriously, they also got seriously offended. Like "we can't even trust you anymore". Hypotheticals are a trap
I think this game would be better if the trolley was actively moving and you had to make the choice as things are happening
It took less than 5 minutes for Adam to turn this into SAW.
A fair few people in his chat are always rushing him or having a go at him for taking ages talking about the smallest details and making him out to be stupid for not giving an answer they think is "easy"
But i just want to say thats what I love about his videos. That he's so passionate about the littlest of details and looks into all situations and their complexities. It so so interesting to get all these perspectives and ideas i never really thought of before
Love your work Adam and thanks for the highlights channel for making it possible for me to get this content ❤
I agree. I feel like hypothetical murder is something you should know all the details for.
Like Adum I have a very difficult time relating to the trolley problem. If I were a random bystander, there would be absolutely no chance I would intervene with railway machinery like this in a crisis. It's not my responsibility; I have no training; how do I know what I think will happen by pulling the lever, will happen; and what would I say in court to defend my actions or to the family of the deceased?
And, conversely, if I were a trained professional in some way responsible for the situation, I would do anything in my control to minimise the damage. Then perhaps I would pull the lever. To me, it simply isn't about morality as much as it is about involving oneself in an already out-of-control situation, and what 'right' you have to do so.
I believe when this problem has been tested - I am thinking of Micheal from VSauce's Mindhunter episode, which was really, really interesting - it has been found that most people don't pull the lever.
Never thought I’d see people backseating the trolley problem 😅
Alternate solutions to the trolly problem:
• Derail the thing before it reaches the switch
• Boarding action, à lá _Unstoppable_
• Remove people from the track
• Ask for help for the above options.
Problems with these "solutions":
· You almost certainly will not have the tools on-hand to derail something as heavy as a trolley before it reaches the people.
· I don't know what this one means lol.
·You almost certainly won't have time to move anyone, as the trolley is implied to be coming in very fast and you're positioned far away.
·There are no other onlookers mentioned in the hypothetical set-up, so there's nobody nearby to ask for help from, and even if there was, the trolley is implied to be moving very fast so you doing anything other than making a decision with that switch will almost certainly result in people dying before you can accomplish anything.
@@HOTD108_he is referencing a movie where they just get on the train and shut it off
This misses the entire point of the hypothetical: to get you to challenge your current moral mindset. Refusing to play ball is just you not wanting to consider making a difficult choice.
@@coletrainhetrick Well then we come back to the problem of the trolley moving fast. You wouldn't physically be able to board it, the same way that you can't get into a car that's speeding down the highway.
@@HOTD108_ um... I was just explaining it... I am not saying anything else
It’s simple. Because it’s a manual switch you can hold it so neither of the guide rails are engaged so the trolly simply derails and comes to a harmless halt
"If the Death Note existed would everyone be Light?"
I mean, I would
That's kind of the point of the entire series. Light starts off as the ideal perfect person, but using that kind of power corrupts anyone, even people who use it for noble purposes.
Adum's logic seems inconstistent when it comes to the "let your first cousin die, or kill three of your second cousins." I would have guessed he would NOT pull the lever based on earlier choices. Before this point the only time he was willing to kill people was to save his friend. When considering his cousins he kept saying, "well, which cousin?" By the time he selected to pull the lever he still didn't have a specific cousin or second cousin in his mind.
Unless he is really attributing the first cousin vs second cousin label as first cousin is just naturally that much closer to you, but that seems weird.
Edit: After finishing the video, I would have to confirm my feelings. He goes right back to not pulling the lever if it means killing even one person. Why did he select to pull the lever to kill three people to save just one person when the only difference was technical blood relation closeness?
The point of the Trolley Dilemma is to demonstrate that logic and morality are inconsistent with each other. There are always so many factors to consider, it is practically absurd to hold anyone to a standard.
Adum was right to latch onto the Law. Most consistent thing in all of these scenarios is that he could open himself up to litigation for actively causing death.
@@Blucham I don't care that he was inconsistent on one question for the sake of consistency, I care for the sake of curiosity behind the choice that was made. As I said in my original comment he didn't really have much to say on first cousin vs. second cousin. When he was answering the friend question, it was clear he would rather directly kill several people to save a friend than let his friend die. But with the cousin question, both first and second cousins are family. My question was, "does he think a first cousin is going to be automatically closer to you than a second cousin, so therefore he would rather have the first cousin alive?"
I also never mentioned the law. Though it does inform a significant amount of his choices, it was not his main statement for not killing people. He said, "I don't want to kill people, therefore I am not going to pull the lever because if I did that would mean I am directly responsible for their deaths." Then when pushed back by his chat on his reasoning he also brought up legal issues. That being said, if we were going to bring up the law, that acutally makes Adum's logic even more suspect for this single question. If his main reasoning, or at least some of his reasoning, is that he doesn't want to break the law, then why would he pull the lever to save one person and kill three? The only other time he made that choice was for a friend, which makes sense as he specially said he would be willing to go to jail if it meant saving a friend, but to choose one family member over three others when you don't think of who they actually are other than first vs second cousins feels weird, like maybe he just misunderstood the question, or picked the wrong answer. I was honestly expecting him to go "Oh wait, I just hit the wrong button, I think I had that backwards." But he never did, he just moved on to the next question.
@@LaigledeMeaux Gotcha! 👍 He probably has at least one specific 1st cousin that he loves and would want to save. I bet he just chose not to specify it on the internet. 🤐 Imagining if any of his family members actually watch this and get upset he picked favorites or would condemn any specific 3 to die.
These *dilemmas* should be deeply personal and troubling to consider, but have been turned into a voyeuristic game of “Would You Rather.” Adum is considering it seriously and being emotionally affected, while the audience chimes “pull the lever!”
I know you didn’t bring up the law thing, I wasn’t trying to contest you about anything there. But its something Adum was consistent about. And it demonstrated that he was thinking in terms of IRL, despite most people saying don’t worry about it. As usual, I love that he’s more thorough, and bringing up perspectives that other TH-camrs haven’t.
@@Blucham I don't think that the people who say to pull the lever are saying such because of a voyeuristic thrill, I think they're just ignoring law because law isn't always moral. I do think it's interesting to look at it from the perspective of being put in a situation with laws in place, but the people disregarding the law are doing so because legality is the last thing to be affected by morals and ethics. Morals change, which makes ethics change, which makes law change. If your basis is legality, you're kinda doing it backwards.
13:25
Ironically enough, a similar scenario to this one is made in inFamous on the PS3.
The villain of the game has tied up your girlfriend on one building, and 6 doctors that can save lives on another, and both have bombs that will kill them.
If you do nothing, they all die. If you choose to save the doctors, your girlfriend dies. However, if you try to save the girlfriend, you'll find out that he lied and it's some random civilian up there instead, and that the girlfriend is one of the 6 doctors that's immediately blown up.
Cool Cat Stops the Trolley
Maybe this game should have been prefaced by a message saying something like 'No one will ever figure out you pulled the lever and you will never face repercussions for your behavior and you will know this information in this specific situation' to make Adam think more on the level of other people. It is not that realistic, but then again, what about these hypotheticals is
"Yeh but if you are going to throw out the legal repercussions, you HAVE to throw out EVERYTHING!"
You guys are assuming everybody has to think through these things in identical fashion. How boring. He answered the questions that were asked, and he arrived at different conclusions. He did this all properly and everyone is trying to impose their own logic on him for some reason.
@@MochaRitz We aren't trying to impose the logic of our conclusions, we are trying to explain how the premise is meant to be interpreted and the purpose of moral hypotheticals. There is absolutely no point in them if everyone starts with a totally different understanding of the problem because it means that the conclusions being compared are utterly meaningless because they are incomparable situations.
Adam is actually the one trying to force his logic onto others. He continuously says people just want to murder people, based on his assumption that everyone thinks like him and assumes inaction doesn't hold responsibility. Some people hold a distinction between action/inaction, and the choice to act or to not act. The former ignores the person involvement, the former acknowledges that the person still made a choice which resulted in death, and so if either of your choices result in death, you should take the choice which causes less suffering.
We are arguing to try and establish a baseline hypothetical so that the actual purpose of a moral hypothetical can be fulfilled (to strip away external factors that may prevent you from acting in line with your moral intuition, in order to reveal your moral intuition, and potentially bring back that external factor later to see how it changes identical situations). Adam however is imposing his perspective onto everyone else and making a declarative assertion about everyone elses motives. You are complaining to the wrong people.
@@MrMyers758 I just disagree, you're not gonna change my mind. This is infinitely more interesting and gives us way more of a look into how he thinks. I can't fathom how you think he's imposing his views on others. He never once told anybody that they were wrong for their approach to this, but the audience said that to him a million times over.
At any rate, this is a goofy quiz that has no bearing on anybody. I was thoroughly entertained, which IS the point.
@@MochaRitz " I can't fathom how you think he's imposing his views on others."
Did you not read my comment? Did you not read the part where I mentioned that Adam on multiple occasions stated as fact that people just wanted to kill people? Did you subsequently ignore the part where I stated that others consider the choice to not do something as being just as responsible for killing than the choice to do something, and therefore they are responsible for killing regardless of what they do? And did you subsequently ignore the logical conclusion from that, that is that Adam is imposing his own perspective of responsibility onto others peoples decisions and ignoring the possibility they may disagree with his assumption on responsibility?
"I just disagree, you're not gonna change my mind."
Then you are a completely irrational person and no-one should waste their time discussing anything with you if you are completely incapable of ever having your opinion changed on a given subject. Surely you recognise how ridiculously close minded and stupid it is to state as fact that you cannot have your mind changed on something? Are you aware how arrogant and illogical that is?
"I won't pull the lever because I'm consistent", except he's not, because he chose to pull the lever to save his best friend and first cousin because they're close to him.
Who are the 15% that chose to kill a fucking cat to save some fucking lobsters?!
This isn’t too surprising knowing how Adam would’ve handled the highway scene in Final Destination
"If we are throwing out the law, then you might as well throw out everything else!"
No Adam, the point of the Trolley problem is to work out your moral compass, and so all outside influences that may make you act against your moral intuition are stripped out, and potentially added back in for certain scenarios to work out how those external factors influence your decision. For example, after establishing whether you would pull the lever in the standard trolley problem, you could introduce legal consequences, for either decision depending on what the person answered with to see how legality affects your decision making.
Also characterising people who would pull the lever in some scenarios as just people who want to kill people is completely disregarding the genuine divergence of thought of whether what matters to morality is inaction/action, or the decision to act or not act. Some people believe that both options will result in them being responsible for death, and so choose the one option with the lesser impact. People really need to stop looking at things from their own perspective, seeing someone with a completely different perspective, and then imposing what motivations someone would have to have with your perspective to take what actions they took under their own perspective.
Also how can Adam be so anal and literallist, but then when confronted with the concept of shortening someones lifespan by 50 years, his "literal" interpretation is that they live and then go on life support for 10 years. No Adam, it is taking the date at which the person would normally have died if not for this scenario, -50 years is when they will actually die.
The point of the Trolley Problem was to point out the absurdity in making black-and-white moralistic statements. Morality is not the same as logic. There are always so many angles to approach it from, that it is absurd to try and hold anyone to a standard.
At the end of the day, Adum may understand it more than anyone else by discussing the aspects that everyone else ignores. Doesn’t matter what your reasons are for pulling the switch. If you pull the switch, you actively involve yourself and can potentially face legal repercussions. Is it worth it to you? Does your moral compass stand against actual real world scrutiny, or are you just playing hero in your imagination? 🤷🏻♂️
@@Blucham Sorry but did you just completely ignore my comment but still respond to it? You are stating absolutely things which I explained are things which are inconclusive and people have disagreement over.
"If you pull the switch, you actively involve yourself"
As I explained, this is a matter of opinion, and discovering what someone's opinion on this is a key point of the trolley problem which you seem to be missing. You are making the arbitrary distinction between action and inaction as though inaction is a completely neutral position because of the way you are framing it.
From my perspective, you are already involved in the situation because you are already in a position to influence it and understand that you can make a choice. The choice to not pull the switch is a choice which you took knowing it will result in more deaths. You made a choice, and so you bear the moral responsibilities of that choice. Viewing the situation as though your decision is completely abstract from the morality of the situation and only looking at whether you stood still or moved your hand is completely reductionist. It reveals something about the way your mind works and how you divorce yourself from a situation by arbitrary boundaries for your own convenience.
"...and can potentially face legal repercussions."
As I explained, which you completely ignored, with the trolley problem you remove all external factors which may prevent you from acting on your moral intuition, and then add them back in individually to see how they affect your decision making.
There can be iterations of the trolley problem which introduce legal repercussions for either choice which differing punishments depending on your choice, which would create an interesting dynamic of the person answering weighing the moral decisions against potential punishments. You cannot do that if you assume that the law applies in every single scenario, because you aren't controlling for that factor in the first place.
Do you not understand the point of controlled experiments? We are trying to find out people's morality in a multitude of different scenarios in the abstract. Legality is a factor that can be introduced but destroys the purpose of the experiment if it is assumed.
@@MrMyers758 I wasn’t gonna go that deep into it, but in main comment, paragraph 2 you literally complain about people imposing their perspectives on others, then in paragraph 3 get upset at Adum for having a perspective you don’t understand. Just seems hypocritical.
This ain’t an actual scientific experiment. Adum isn’t part of some survey group, or college class. And neither am I for that matter. We were never posed these rules or intentions you seem to be set on. Why would you make such dissertations out of these brief thoughts and comments?
@@Blucham "paragraph 2 you literally complain about people imposing their perspectives on others, then in paragraph 3 get upset at Adum for having a perspective you don’t understand"
First of all, that is incredibly dishonest framing. I understand his perspective, but I disagree with it.
So answer me this, how are these two things hypocritical:
1. Having an issue with people IMPOSING THEIR BELIEFS ON OTHERS MOTIVATIONS
2. Disagreeing with someone's perspective
How are they hypocritical? They aren't the same thing.
"This ain’t an actual scientific experiment."
Correct, I used the term controlled experiment because you may understand the logic of it better if it is within that context, because you may understand the idea of having a control in science but not having a control in a series of moral questions.
"We were never posed these rules..."
We aren't imposing rules, literally you and Adam are imposing rules which weren't mentioned. No-one mentioned the law being applicable, you imposed that rule onto it. What makes something moral or immoral is entirely dependant on context, and you are choosing to impose a context which has not been mentioned.
"Why would you make such dissertations out of these brief thoughts and comments?"
Because saying something incorrect is often quicker than the explanation as to why it is incorrect. Surely you understand that basic concept?
If I say "the Earth is flat", the explanation as to why that statement is incorrect is necessarily much larger, often necessitation LITERAL dissertations. Would you accept your own comment of "Why would you make such dissertations out of these brief thoughts and comments?" as a rebuttal to globe Earth?
@@MrMyers758 I hereby remove myself from
further discussion.
This question to me seems interesting because it forces the participant into a situation where you have to choose between being an asshole or being a lesser asshole. Some people try to minimize the cruelty, others go “Welp, if I have to choose, can’t feel bad if I play the role.”
It also brings up the very real difference between watching, or even letting, something bad happen vs Taking action and definitly causing harm, but a percived lesser harm. Like, giving up a victim to a murderer in exchange for 5 hostages.
If Adum liked that, he might enjoy Cyanide & Happiness's "Trial by Trolley" series. They had a vote every few days, where Trolley Tom was going to run over someone and we had to decide who.
Pull the lever and start sprinting to untie the single hostage.
Thanks for figuring it out, Olivia
I think The Good Place had my favourite answer to the Trolley problem "You sacrifice yourself to save everyone else"
You jump in front of the trolley, it runs over you but it doesn't stop, so it keeps going and still kills the 5 people
@@ralelunar and then you can at least say you tried to save everyone.
The entire “Trolley Dilemma” scenario was posed by a philosopher to demonstrate how absurd it is to try to make morality into simple measurements of “good” and “bad”. There are so many ways to look at it, and so many differing perspectives, and standards you could hold people to…
Now it’s just a big meme, and people have blown the philosophical absurdity up into actual absurdity with these variations. Adum got a lot of folks making fun for “not getting it,” but frankly, the fact that he called it out on Question 1, and explained why he hated this whole thing, kinda proves that HE DOES GET IT more than anyone.
God thank you, these comments are giving me an aneurysm. The fact that people are this upset over a streamer approaching some hypotheticals in a way they don't like, is crazy to me.
Exactly! People are trying to find a morally superior position over an absurd hypothetical. It's weirdly religious how people were getting upset.
The obvious solution to the infinitely looping trolley is to hook up some mechanism to exploit the perpetual motion and solve all the world’s energy problems
I like that it got easier to think about as time went on for Adum.
Life: "Oh no! There is a trolly about to kill more people, or you could choose to kill one man instead. Hurry what do you do!?!"
Adam: "Hrmm, let me take a walk and think it over"
By pulling the lever you are taking direct action to commit immoral act of murdering an innocent human being to achieve a good end to save the lives of five men. You are directly responsible of the murder of that one man even if you justify it as saving five lives.
However if you don't pull the lever the situation turns from a murder to a tragic accident. You are not held responsible for the deaths of those five men as their deaths were not a result of your direct action. You only fail to save the lives of those five men.
So the question here really is, are you willing to commit immoral acts for perceived good ends or do you actually have moral principles even if following them results in perceived bad end?
Or to put it simply; do ends justify the means, or do means justify the ends?
I would time it perfectly to when the trolley is exactly at the fork the tracks are in mid swap, so it derails and everyone is safe.
Just wave down the trolley. They have brakes. Then find whoever tied people to the tracks and yell at them for recreating the stupidest thought experiment ever.
I think the point of the mental exercise is to test YOUR morality. But if you consider legality as part of the answer, legality is an outsider's enforcement of "society's" morality.
Adam convinced me, I like his morals.
Here’s one trolley problem- there’s two tracks, one line has 10 people tied to the tracks and the other has zero, but if you switch it to the one with zero, the trolley company will lose a lot of money
The more "oh shit" scenario would be, 'the trolley goes over no one but you'd get an insane amount of debt'.
In this scenario, I am seeking to deliberately bankrupt the trolley company so I can sell more Teslas.
I’m fascinated by the psychology of the person who made this quiz
It's a troll game
Actually the morally correct option for the rich man one would be to save him and use the 500k to save other people. Thereby you are technically saving more people.
Wouldn't this mean it was morally right to become a hitman? If every hit earns you 500k and you believe that the people you could save with that money outweighs a single death then doing hits for 500k would be morally correct using the same logic.
Doesn't matter that you can save more people. You choose to kill someone and acted to kill them. No matter the benefice, you are in the wrong for doing that.
@@deusexmangaka3259 but if you don’t do something someone dies anyway. Either way one person dies but with one of them you can do something good after the fact.
@@meurigjenkins I guess yeah. If you believe in the logic of pulling the lever in the original trolly problem to kill one person while saving 5 then I don’t see how being a hit man and using the money to save more lives then you take is much different.
I must be a psychopath because I have never had an innate issue with answering the trolley problems. Also, it was far too funny for me when Adum brought up the "stuff a person in a tube" scenario; that concept is fucking hilarious.
Who the fuck set off the train in the first place?
Who placed the people on the track?
Who...oh fuck...
It's a trolley, not a train, and is it really that hard to imagine somebody doing something evil in real life?
dude I was just fucking around, it's not that deep
I think the logic behind "don't think about the legality" is because theyre supposed to be questions on morals alone, and because laws very often don't have anything to do with morality. (Because immoral laws exist)
Also, you hit the mark on how people lie to themselves. People are also so inclined to kill in these hypotheticals because they don't really value peoples lives at a distance, AND they hold that perspective because they literally don't even comprehend the idea of taking a life. They just don't really think hard about it
6:30 NO. ADUM. ITS AN ETHICAL QUESTION. it’s about what’s right, not what you personally could do.
In philosophy, our professor taught the trolly problem being about what we “ought to do”, not necessarily what we would do in the scenario
I think that helped our discussion a lot
Most of us won’t pull the lever, which is the point of hypotheticals like this.
didnt know they turned this meme into a game
feels weird seeing this meme years ago man i feel old
I would pull the lever and then gaslight myself into thinking I didn’t know the one guy was there
I don't know how the track switching works exactly, is it possible to pull the lever too late so that the train hopefully derails and hits all 6? Bowling mind set.
I think I get what Adum's point is. Someone who is put in the position of being able to pull the lever has actually two choices to make: The choice to engage with the scenario or not, and if they choose to engage with the scenario, the choice to pull or not pull the lever. The average person, if plucked out of their normal everyday life and put into this weird hypothetical, would have to also consider if they think the circumstance presented is legitimate. How do they know that pulling the lever will actually take one life and save five? If they accept the condition of the scenario and pull the lever, that means they have done so with the intent to take a life *REGARDLESS* of whether or not pulling the lever actually causes the outcome proposed by the scenario. They've done it with the intent to save five lives, but that's not even the consideration we need to make yet. Because instead, someone who refuses to pull the lever can either do so by engaging with the scenario as a legitimate proposition and refusing to perform an act with the intent to take a life, OR they refuse to engage with the scenario and in so doing refuse to make the decision to pull or not pull the lever. This may or may not have the consequence of taking five lives, because the person presented with this choice might be practicing skepticism towards the proposition that pulling the lever will save those five lives. A refusal to engage with a forced moral scenario is not morally the same as making a conscious decision to resort to inaction, in my view. Of course, if they had been provided adequate evidence to the veracity of the claim that pulling the lever will save five lives at the expense of one life, then that changes things, since this all hinges on an expectation that the average person would have ignorance of and skepticism towards the hypothetical proposition's claims.
He went full blown Destiny mode about the meat Industry
Gotta love Adum. Doesn't want to kill anyone so will remain passive and let five people die instead of one, but will kill five people to save someone he knows lol.
It seems logic to me: the order of priority of things to protect is you>loved ones>strangers>animals>material things.
So in any case where your action leads to someones death, do nothing no matter the benefice (you dogde moral/legal responsibility). But if you or your loved ones is in danger, you prioritize them.
@@deusexmangaka3259
Oh of course, I think most people would do the same. I'm just referring to the hypocrisy in his logic for not wanting to become involved for moral/legal reasons to save five strangers vs one stranger, but will toss that aside to save his best friend.
Basically save five people cause the death of one = not right for me to decide because it's immoral/illegal/wrong; Kill five people save my bestie = right for me to decide.
Maybe I'm just looking at it the wrong way. It seems immoral/illegal either way so why not save five people in either cases or not get involved in either case.
My response: I jump in front of the fuckin' trolley! So now it's the problem of whoever put me in this situation in the first place.
my new fav channel
26:36 Ah yes, I guess I was about due for my daily panic attack.
I'd refuse to even be apart of this ridiculous series of questions!
Leaving people's fate down to factors such as arithmetic, action versus inaction, how responsibility pertains to culpability as well as alleviating one's own sense of guilt.
It's total lunacy to turn a deadly scenario into something as cold and clinical as a thought exercise.
Only 8 minutes in and Adam reminded me why it's called the trolley problem
If I didn't tie them to the track then it's not my responsibility. I'd never go up to the lever in the first place.
Trolley problem time!
A trolley is racing towards a branch in the track. On one branch, one man is tied to the track; on the other branch, no one is tied to the track.
If you pull the lever, the trolley will hit a man tied to the tracks.
If you don't pull the lever, you'll be really bored. Like... REALLY bored.
Also the trolley doesn't start moving until you pull the lever.
"i'm consistent officer"
The first question illustrates a problem with moral questions like these. I like to think I’d take the action that is the most morally good and causes the least suffering. Maybe I would, but I can’t know. I can’t perfectly imagine what it would be like to be standing there, with a lever in front of me, and a trolley rushing towards people. The only way to find out what I would do is to put me in that situation and see what happens.
Given how legality was brought into this a lot, is there seriously no law that would hold you accountable for not doing anything? I get this model is vague, but the implications of most of them is you know what the lever will do and your hand is already on it; so by proxy, not pulling it is you actively making a choice to have (x) people killed. In my mind, regardless of what you choose, you'd still get punished unless the hypothetical explicitly stated otherwise; but it's to what extent you'd be put away for it. Saying that you suddenly won't be held accountable for doing nothing doesn't make sense to me, when there is at least one other witness there to recount the choice you made to a theoretical court of law.
"but the implications of most of them is you know what the lever will do and your hand is already on it; so by proxy, not pulling it is you actively making a choice to have (x) people killed."
Two things: First of all, if this was true, there was never a choice in the first place. It literally just becomes maths if you view it like this, and it defeats the entire point of the hypothetical.
Second: If this were true, we are all despicable monsters and evil.
"You are making the choice to have 5 people killed". What if I fainted? 5 people would still die. How on earth would it be fair for me to be held responsible if I was unconscious? Because You are making the choice to SAVE 5 people (and kill 1 person) or NOT SAVE 5 people. This distinction is important, because you and I are not saving people right now. So, when are we allowed to not save people? Why is having the hand on the lever the point of obligation? Why isn't it just being in the room with that knowledge, or some other arbitrary line? Because there's only one reasonable line: someone has a) the knowledge and b) the ability to do something. Having these two things would make us obligated to act, otherwise we've "had people killed".
With that in mind:
You and I both have the ability and knowledge to donate to charity. In a hypothetical world where there's only one charity, if ANYONE died as a direct result of that charity not having enough funds, we are culpable, because we've met the only potential criteria with which we could measure responsibility for inaction. Suddenly we're all murderers using this metric.
The entire point of this hypothetical is whether you're willing to let 5 people die in order to not be a murderer. Are you willing to commit an immoral act for a utilitarian good?
I should clarify, I like to think I would pull the lever, but anyone who wouldn't isn't a killer. The entire point is that they aren't. You could argue that they're morally reprehensible (or maybe they're just not ready for the responsibility of ending someone's life), but by definition they are not a murderer.
I guess Adum lives life like the Seinfeld finale
So many choices and so many outcomes.
See, the problem for Adum is that 95% of people don't think about this problem for more than, like, 30 seconds, so everyone's gonna think he's overthinking it when in reality he's probably putting in an amount of thought the original hypothetical was meant to provoke.
one day my father and I were walking through the street and passed by some litter. He told me "if you notice that litter and don't pick it up, it's yours. You littered that."
I took that lesson to heart, which is why pulling the lever is a no-brainer for me. I don't see the difference between killing and letting die, at least not in this scenario.
9:40 'has let 10 people die'
it makes me irrationally upset to watch this video. please no more hypothetical questions for adum
I'm not a fan of the trolley problem. The consequences are a bit too removed for our modern, desensitized, world. Which causes people to feel like actively causing someone's death is the same as passively failing to save someone's life. And then say something stupid like "you're choosing not to pull the lever".
Oh, Adum covered it with the gas tube scenario.
Your comment at 4:24 is a perfect summary
Adum reviewing his own moral choices.
i love how he does some moral grandstanding about destroying his life savings instead of letting 5 people die, then INSTANTLY chooses to save himself over 5 people.
Yes, self-preservation over random people you don't know isn't an unreasonable choice. Yes, it's way more fucked up to kill people for money. Anyone can become a hit man or go to China to get their organs live-harvested to sacrifice themselves for others at any time if they think otherwise.
yeah those are totally the same thing
Are the 5 clones evil clones or regular clones though?
13:19 glad you wouldn’t kill Scoot
these tests seem to make out that you are stationed at the lever expecting a challenge, which seems to me different in important ways from the classical challenge where you stumble upon the lever and it is NOT your job to be a leverman, and you have to figure it out from context
The gas tube situation is a little different because in a scenario in which you could shove someone else in a tube to save the lives, you could probably shove yourself in the same tube. Most people would like to think they would sacrifice themselves for 5 people. The trolley problem is difficult because diverting the trolley is so easy, shoving a person in a tube is super difficult lmao
Well the lever could already be flipped to the '1 person' position, and pulling the lever could switch it over to the 5.
Just wait for the trolley to reach the junction, then throw the switch and derail it so it hits all 6 people for certain. No witnesses that way.
yell at the trolleydriver to stop trolleys stop very fast
Would you kill one person if you could harvest their organs and use them to save five otherwise healthy people?
I don't consider this any different from the train tracks. In both, you violate something utilitarian morality neglects: bodily autonomy.
I do think HowToBasic should go to jail though. But just because I hate him.
You weren't the person to put any of those people on the tracks, so regardless of your decision, you hold no culpability for any person being killed.
Im glad I can finally have an opinion on this
Woah this game isn’t in 4K?
0 / 10
It literally is in 4K lmao.
Since he did this I’d love to see him do Earth Reviews
Just catch whoever is tying people to the tracks.