The Trolley Problem - Designs With No Right Answer - Extra Credits
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 มิ.ย. 2020
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The Trolley Problem is one of the most famous hypotheticals in the philosophy of ethics. There are endless permutations, focusing on different aspects of the question: What if the one person on the second rail is a great leader? Is ethics a simple numbers game where 5 is always greater than 1? All very important questions but ultimately there is no correct way to answer the trolley problem. And many games strive to mimic this design by providing players with choices that, like the trolley problem, reveal more about the player's philosophy than a simple right or wrong answer.
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#ExtraCredits #Gaming #GameDesign
Solution: multi-track drifting.
Why kill some when you can kill all?
Go to joking jail.
I came to the comments to post this exact same comment
If going to hell, why not do it with style?
Deja vu
There's only one solution: trolley drift!!!
I took an ethics class this semester and my professor posed this problem to us multiple times. I think my biggest complaint is inaction is still an action. You choose to do nothing. Which also means you choose to let the people die. But that’s just me.
Well, you are not alone in that thought.
YESSS not doing anything is doing something why cant people see this
It is like trying to fix a broken nuclear reactor - if you have no idea about it, don't do it, you could be making it worse.
Ultimately I don't think you can choose something wrong. I personally wouldn't condemn a person for either decision. However it should be noted that a person who decides to pull the lever does become part of the action chain, whereas a person who chooses to do nothing doesn't. So if it turns out that the 5 people were just pretending and they were never actually in danger, then it would be really terrible if you still chose to pull the lever because you thought you knew more about this situation than the person responsible for it.
That's specific to this version of the trolley problem though and not generally applicable I think.
You are not alone. There is a whole philosophical view that argues about it, Sartre's existentialism. He argues that we are condemn to be free and even not acting is a choice.
Correction let the people be dumb and die
“This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors”
-Micheal The Good Place
“This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors”
-Literally everybody who meets chidi
Omnical I agree
His ex girlfriend, his ex ethics friend... It's everyone
Personally I think moral philosophy is incredibly interesting.
Yeah this is something he probably had to go through
The solution to the trolley problem is simple: have people on youtube vote on who to run over, thus absolving you of moral responsibility.
@Voltaic Fire missing the joke
Unfortunately no, because multi-track drifting was never considered by Tom. Despite constantly suggesting it.
Trolley Tom!
This is known as the Pontius Pilate approach
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”
I get that reference.
if you choose you decide... so... i dont choose to decide because i cant decide. im not a judge.
Monky R The idea behind the quote is that you don’t get a choice to not participate. The minute the choice is presented to you, you’re forced into a binary decision between action and inaction. Not making a choice - and thereby allowing five people to die when you had the power to save them - is still choosing inaction, so you never really had the option not to choose. You may not be a judge, but you were unwittingly forced into that position the moment you were presented with the lever.
That's not really true at all.
In real life, choosing not to participate is a possible choice. Only in hypothetical situations where you have all information is it no longer a possible choice.
In a real life trolley problem, you may not know that the 5 are capable of escaping but the 1 is trapped by the foot.
A more likely scenario. You see an opportunity to rescue 1 person or 5 people, but not both, but you don't have training. You intervene and become endangered as well. Actual trained professionals now need to rescue 7 people. The correct choice is to not participate.
@@tristanneal9552 Depends on whether you know there is a decision to be made or not. If you don't know there is a lever allowing you to select, then you are just an observer. But the moment you realize you have the ability to select, you are now a participant.
As for most things, there's a RUSH song that covers this.
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
I completely agree that inaction is a decision. Sort of an "if you're not with me you're against me" idea.
Yeah but if you DECIDE to kill the one person, that blood is directly on your hands, whereas if you didn't the 5 people would've gotten ran over regardless of whether you were present or not.
@@george8306 If you have the power to do something you have to CHOOSE not to.
Which one?
@@j.yossarian6852 Free Will.
I feel like the trolley problem is the living definition of
"Damned if you Do and Damned if you Don't"
I mean it's less damned if you do, cause less people die.
@@ff-qf1th Or more damned, depending on your moral code.
The solution is simple:
Blow up the railroad before the trolley reaches the workers so that the Germans can't have any supplies.
heck yeah
?
But why should we hurt the Germans too?
@@Mind_Crimes its kinda like a ww2 meme
Vive la france
Be honest, you did this episode just so you could do that musical intro, didn't you?
But trolly problem has nothing to do with musicals
R/woosh
@@mrman4433 *_W/rOoOSh_*
Shhhh let him have his moment
They made a good choice though.
Hmm, the game that reminds me a lot of this problem is Papers Please, with choices that focus doing something that you don't want to do, but that helps your family survive, or going against the system, at the risk of your own family
Vsauce did a test where he made it seem like people were in an actual trolley problem and saw what they did, because what you do and what you say you'd do are two completely different things. most people did nothing because they were frozen in fear, the ones that weren't frozen in fear ended up diverging the train
lol what. isnt that like illegal. psychological damage and such
@@arf101088 It's not like people are forced to participate, or continue participating
@@GiorgosKoukoubagia what? Consenting to be part of an experiment is like step 1 on the ethics of doing scientific research. They can't agree to a test or realize they can stop if they don't know it's a test.
@@arf101088They screened the participatents and had an psychologist on the team to reduce damage as much as possible
Oh man, now I really want to watch an Extra Credits episode discussing how musical theatre could be better translated or gamified into video games.
"As an MMO healer who do you priori-"
"Tanks"
"But what about if a DPS is doing really well? then you migh-"
"Tanks"
"If they are doing so well that the pull threat though? It might be a good idea"
"If they are pulling aggro they are not dpsing well, they are dpsing badly. Tanks get healed first, those are the rules. Next question please."
Yup.. break the rule and its PW .. :)
Ah the trifecta of raid rules dps doesn't run in front of the tank, tanks get heal priority, and DONT STAND IN THE FIRE
it's not always that simple. well in the simple tank and spank fight it is, but there is always some raid damage, and you can usually spare something for the DPS, but how much can you spare.
when the enrage timer is getting close sometimes the tank is the one you should let die.
@@dynad00d15 -100 DKP!
That is why I loved playing a DK tank in WOW... though I remember some healers hating me because as a blood tank they wouldn't have to heal me at all at times.
Solution: Pull the other lever to send Yzma into the crocodile moat.
WRONG LEVEH CRONK!
@@SJrad Why do we even have that lever?
WRONG LEVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-
So that's why they have that lever...
WRONG
L
E
E
E
V
V
V
V
A
A
A
A
R
R
R
R
.
.
.
.
In a crisis I tend to act rational, temporarily shutting off my feelings - so I'd pull the lever and deal with the trauma later...
Do you think in a crisis you would push a person onto tracks if you knew it would trigger automatic breaks on an otherwise unstoppable train/trolley?
The finale of Tales of Xillia 2 is two trolley problems stacked on top of each other. You have had two games to get to know the world, and a full game to get to know the characters involved, pick who lives and dies. I cried very hard.
“Jesus take the wheel!”
“What do you mean you don’t have a license?”
RNGesus take the wheel then!
ROFLMAO
Ok just saying
Here’s my trolly path
One side 5 family members that you love but they hate you but they have all of you money and it will be destroyed if you choose them on the other side there are 5 random people who have the cure for every thing but one rando is you most hated person u know
My opinion is the random people because my family over others for me
Also for the original question I would choose the single person because the majority over comes the few
Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
Accepted a side quest to take out a roving group of bandits. I was momentary concealed by a tree when I spotted them appearing in an unexpected large number. They hadn't seen me and were on a path that would take them into a tunnel where two friendly stalkers were sitting at a campfire. I wasn't in an ideal position to engage the bandits as I had limited cover and would have been exposed to grenades yet I also knew the two stalkers would be quickly overwhelmed if I didn't intervene. At the same time I also realized once the bandits wiped out the two stalkers they would then enter the tunnel to loot the bodies, upon which they would be clustered together in a narrow space and I could easily take the majority out with a single grenade. I ended up making the latter decision which paid off effectively. Stalker is an open world game and there was no obligation or consequence to aid the two stalkers. Yet the moment stuck with me for a long while and left me bothered by the moral question of my decision.
Kraken Complex: games are awesome
Had you met the two friendly stalkers before? Did they seem real to you, with their own backstories, concerns, families? Did you _like_ them? I suspect that those things would have made a difference in the game - and in RL, too. In RL, that _shouldn't_ make a difference, but it probably would, for most people.
PS. Great story!
Good example. Ofc, then you have to ask yourself, would you be more or less likely to choose the same if it happened to you in real life?
Would your life weigh more or less heavily compared to the two others?
Just imagining this as a real life scenario, I've never been more acutely aware that I'm precisely the kind of idiot who'd leap into action to ensure non-bad-guys didn't get ambushed, without thinking it through much if at all. Sometimes I wonder how I've lived this long lol
Das some real gamer shit there.
My answer to the trolley problem hinges on the answer to another question: "How much legal trouble will I be in for operating a trolley without a license?" If there are no legal repercussions for operating the lever, then arithmetic wins; otherwise I hope that those who believe in divine providence are correct because five people are about to suffer from trolley-related trauma without divine intervention.
I mean, the one who tied the people to the rails should be the one in trouble. But by pointing out the extra question you highlight how useless the original problem is. It's just a bad simplification of moral philosophy that forces people into impossible scenarios. Fun for thinking, sure, but entirely counterproductive for real life applications, where you always have more options, more variables and more actors that can be held accountable.
I find myself kind of refusing the premise when it comes to auto-drive cars. They're restricted to roadways, so there's still some responsibility to "look both ways before you cross the street" -- I mean, the problem already exists today and we don't really wrestle with it -- everyone just does their best, and we don't have millisecond reaction times to be able to spot an escape route, communicate with other vehicles to make a hole, or slide in bumper-to-bumper with another car. Presenting a trolley problem feels like a big, dumb "BUT WHAT IF" kind of situation when the real world is never that binary.
I also reject it as invalid, on the grounds that the computer is too stupid to understand the question. All it knows is moving through space and avoiding obstacles.
@@Roxor128 The question is how do we, as humans, code the car software to choose what to do in situations where there is a high percentage chance of damage to one of two parties
@@bright_eyes_ We don't. Again, the computer is too stupid for that concept to even apply. Would you ask a butterfly to make such a decision? Of course not! It doesn't understand the concept. Same deal with the computer, times ten.
@@Roxor128 The computer doesn't need to understand the concept. The difference with the butterfly is a human isn't coding it. It isn't about the computer being moral or understanding anything, it's about what morality should we as humans use when writing the code. The question is how do we code the car to move through space and avoid obstacles? If an automatic car is driving down a road and something unexpected happens and it is going to hit 5 people, do we code it to swerve onto the sidewalk and hit 1 person instead? The act of making code that would do that is the same as pulling the switch in the trolley problem. It is effectively coding a car to sacrifice 1 person that wouldn't have been hit if the code wasn't written that way. Hitting 5 people would have been an unexpected accident, whilst hitting the 1 person would be an intensional act. The question people are asking is: is it okay to potentially sacrifice a life to save more lives?
@@bright_eyes_ And you're still not getting the point: The computer's program, like the butterfly's mind, IS TOO SIMPLE.
You can't program a computer to sacrifice one person to save five, because _it doesn't know what a person is._ All it knows is "free space" and "obstacle". It doesn't know what those obstacles are, and it doesn't need to either.
Just being able to avoid obstacles is enough to get the job done and being able to recognise what they are is just adding unnecessary complexity that _will_ introduce bugs, and a safety-critical system is the last place you want bugs.
I've been pondering the trolley problem a lot myself lately--or more specifically, I've been pondering two variants of the trolley problem that focus on slightly different areas of ethics. While I came up with said variants myself, I doubt I'm the first person to do so.
Variant 1: You are standing away from the tracks and can see the runaway trolley approaching. There is a lever next to you that will switch the rails, saving the five and dooming the one. You can also see another person nearby making a mad dash toward the lever with the clear intent to pull the lever. Now you have three choices instead of two, but there are still only two possible outcomes. Your first choice is to pull the lever yourself, dooming the one and saving the five. Your second choice is to do nothing, meaning that who lives and who dies depends on whether the other person reaches the lever before it's too late to switch the rails. Your third choice is to tackle the other person, preventing them from pulling the lever and thus ensuring that the five die and the one survives.
I came up with Variant 1 largely to demonstrate that passing the buck to someone else (such as through inaction) is still a choice and that the number of options available to you is not necessarily the same as the number of possible outcomes.
Variant 2: Same as Variant 1, but there's no second person trying to pull the lever, meaning it goes back to a simple choice of pulling or not pulling the lever. However, both tracks lead into tunnels and the trolley will keep going after running over the one or the five. You have no way of knowing what's on the other side of those tunnels. Maybe the track with the one on it also has six people on the other side of the tunnel while the track with the five on it has no one on the other side. Maybe there's no one on the other side of the tunnels on either track. Maybe the tracks converge on the other side of the tunnels, making the whole question of what's on the other side irrelevant.
Variant 2 is meant to demonstrate that an act that might appear reasonable or moral to us based on the information available to us might ultimately do more harm than we originally believed it would. This is one problem that games can have trouble showing us; the most effective way to give the player unknowns that they can't plan for is through luck, but other players will eventually figure out what the unknowns are and what the odds are for any given unforeseeable consequence, thus reducing any such decision to a calculation of the odds for any player who reads up on the choice before making it. Also, unforeseeable consequences (especially if they play out in a way that makes the choice you thought was less harmful turn out to be the more harmful one) can feel cheap to a player, as though the game is mocking you for doing what you believed was the right thing to do, even if it's realistic for people to have to make choices without all the pertinent information.
This stirred my brain and I like it.
Damm this is deep
You should go listen to cautionary tales 2.2 a tsunami of misery.
It's related to your tunnel.
Ok so the 1st variant is a bit dumb. Because your not doing nothing anymore. Morally the issue is taking the action to pull the lever. So there's not 3 actions. As there's no moral reason to ever tackle someone. Because then your taking both morally bad routes. The 2nd variant is interesting but ultimately doesn't matter I'd argue. You do the best you can with the information given. Personally I never imagined the trolly stopping so I've always thought of it that way. Again I think this doesn't change the moral dilemma.
I'll give one of my own that I think does. And that's having a bigger effect on the pulling. Instead of pulling a level you instead are physically pushing the person onto the track. To stop the trolley (logistically I'm not sure how that works or anything but you are aware if will stop the trolley saving the 5)
As the physical action now feels like murder the people who would pull the trolley's Lever drops significantly. Even though it's approximately the same question. A study I looked at had it drop from 78% to 22% that's a 56% drop that's huge. And it shows how if you feel more responsible for the death people are less likely to do it
For variant 2 I believe that if you have limited information to make a decision you should just use what information is given if you can't get any more. Since you don't have any reason to believe there are people on the other side of either tunnel, if you would turn the lever on the regular trolley problem you should also turn it here
As Kreia in Kotor once said “Apathy is Death. Worse than death, because at least a rotting corpse feeds the beasts and insects.”
Good one.
The tricky question is:
Is deliberately choosing not to choose indeed apathy?
@@DJWyre I would argue not, because deciding on who dies would be in a sense murder.
so I would just try to kill as many as possible and then you can't call me apathetic.
@@DJWyre I'D say its nto but because most people instead of choosing nothing, dont do anything because they cant choose. Those people that choose to do nothign will be usually tossed into a same group with the rest, since its so hard to determine if they chose or not. And people afterwards will lie if it improves their moral image so you will have hard time determining whose who
I think that and the endgame speech are my favorite Kreia moments
I'm gonna take the Kirk method here: Wait until the trolley's front wheels have passed the switch, and pull the lever before teh rear wheels pass, thus either derail or stop teh trolleycar.
Or a killstreak for 7 kills.
This was my thought as well... Even if it ends up not working I can at least know I tried to stop the trolley
And that is the problem with those A or B scenarios. In reality, even when there are only 2 choices, there is either 1 or more options besides those....or you as a human have the power for brute force a 3rd option. Real Life is a lot like Minecraft in that way, because unlike video games and the Trolly Problem, you can create a new option.
This will just make the trolley multitrack drift and kill everyone
Not quite. What you want is the front wheels to try to both ways and lift out of the switch and derail the thing so it loses forward power. Split switches rarely tip over.
"Physicians with limited time resources during a pandemic maybe forced to make decisions about which patients they can treat"
**Shiffers**
Hallo everybody.
Its me, Trolley Tom and this is my trolley.
Okay, byyyyyyyyye!
God voice: *TOM!*
Jan Feeder II I thought of this
And that man there is Tram Sam. He's my mortal -or rather immortal- enemy. Trouble with the trolley everyone
Gee golly fiddlesticks if only people would order Trial By Trolley on Amazon.
I'm a doctor, and I can empathize. I made real life choices in real life. It's indeed so hard.
Triarge can be tough
There's a great work by Naoki Urasawa called Monster that ventures this subject.
I bet you do, every day. Keep up the good fight!
Another very good medium for trolley problems is Dungeons and Dragons. My favorite variation is the self sacrifice version where a third option is you jump into the enter section and knock the trolley off the tracks. As a DM I adding this option and the with the decision choose the one person and didn’t sacrifice themselves.
"Hey, guess what. I've just solved the Trolley Problem" (Michael)
UGH!!! I THOUGHT I WAS OVER THE GOOD PLACE. This episode features a lot of my favorite games too. Thank you!
Solution: move the lever halfway so that the junction is in a bad configuration and derails the trolly.
Out of the box thinking... except that when the trolley derails, it deviates and fall on the side, killing the person on the tracks and all the people inside...
Which, kind of, solve the problem in a very equal way... everybody dies, indiscriminately... :)
Multi-track drifting is the coward's answer.
There are no black and white choices in real life. There are always other options, also in real life there are other extenuating circumstances. One argument is that the trolly problem is based on a fallacy that would lead one to incorrect conclusions in both morality and in fact.
@@GiantButterKnife or the hero's answer, depending on who is on the track.
But what if it derails onto BOTH (one & five)?
Autonomous car: Sees Pedestrian
Also carL *hits the pedal to the floor*
Me: sees cyclist
Also me: BONUS POINTS BABY WHOOOOOOOO
*pedal flat out*
I knew we shouldn't have trained the car with Carmageddon.
Thanks carl
Funny story, the companies producing these cars have said definitively that they prioritize the life of the driver (because people dont want to own cars that will kill them)
could breaks bean option, like isn't that the exact scenario that emergency breaks are made for?
In the words of Rush, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
It's not so much that, but the fact that by moving the lever you are deliberately killing someone, as opposed to just letting someone die.
But by not moving the lever, you are deliberately killing the other five.
This, it's so stupid. "Not doing anything means you aren't guilty". I guess that means neglecting and ignoring your children is fine, because you aren't guilty as long as you don't do anything.
@@stevenyoung9738 Thinking about it. Deciding to do nothing, because that way one can pretend he did nothing wrong or just so he can claim he is not guilty because he did nothing seems ot be egoistic and maybe even extra guilty. That person basically decided to kill the 5 people, so he can reason to not have done something wrong, by deciding to do nothing.
Sounds like a good way to setup an "us" vs "them" situation and call anyone who doesn't your side one of "them." Very manipulative use off peer pressure.
The solution is clearly to pull all 5 people away from the incoming trolley and put them safely next to your child
And THEN pull the lever
😂 Morbid, yet efficient and thorough. I like it
Yeah. Removing any of the "These people cannot get off the track" without explaining why really makes the situation way too simplified to offer any true insight.
Leave no witnesses
Here’s one, if you’re trackside, pull the lever halfway, trolley jumps the tracks, everyone’s fine.
*Six kill streak*
Imagine driving an AI-driven car to then get into an accident and your car is gonna be like: "Nah, my driver is not worth it."
This is one of the major problems: whether car manufacturers may value the lifes of the passengers more than the lifes of bystanders
@@togamid I'd say the manufacturer is always going to value the life of the passengers more, since they're the customer and thus their source of income.
Bigger moral question; how much money can the driver pay to set the sensitivity themselves.
@@togamid What do you think is going to happen in a capitalist system?
I personally think the computor driver should always value people outside the vehicle above the passengers. Getting into a robot car is a choice, simply existing in the vicinity of one is not. If you chose to let the robot take the wheel, then you should bear the risks.
I feel like the more intriguing approach to the Trolley Problem is less "what should you do?" and more "what *would* you do?".
It's easy to say that saving the greater number of lives is correct in a hypothetical situation, but it's much harder to actively condemn the one life in practice. That gap between our morality and our actions is where things can get really messy.
Flounder. probably.
The problem is that since innaction is still a decision here, the answer to that is kind of obvious. You should kill the 1 over the 5. The more interesting question is whether you are willing to take upon that decision and burden. Its a question more meant to express the innate difficulty of utilitarianism than to test one's morals.
As Mr Spock said: “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or one.”
Amen to this. I've never understood how this question is even a point of debate.
BlackAlpha1 this is not a strictly a logic question, although it is a way to see it. Yes math (logic) says 5>1, no one is arguing against this, what we are arguing over is that choosing to interfere in this system can make you morally responsible for the death of the person.
BlackAlpha1 imo people get way too lost in this specific problem and don't think about the larger debate, that being the moral validity of utilitarianism. In broad terms, utilitarians view logic as being morality, or at least intrinsically tied to it. They don't care if you have ever committed a crime or made a mistake, if your life saves others then you must be killed. In their POV it's for the greater good, and the end justifies the means. There are many arguments to be made against these concepts and I greatly recommend you to look into it, but although I do have my opinions about it, I acknowledge its not clear to find the right answer.
@@ItsAsparageese Take the predecessor example of the one person being your child. Most people are going to choose the 5 people as the causalities Every. Single. Time. why? Because "IT'S MY SON/DAUGHTER!" (modern gender considerations aside) and that supersedes any form of logical objectivity, especially in the moments before the choice is taken.
It's simply how humanity is. What you say you will do and what you actually do can often be two different things, so you can say "I'll turn the track to the 1 person" but would you do so without hesitation and without regret after the fact? I believe we call such people psychopaths.
ArtofthePossible Choosing to let your own child die has far-reaching implications well outside of the trolley problem. It’s like the question of should the doctor harvest the organs from the healthy person to save the many sick people. From a purely practical perspective, obviously not! It would undermine people’s trust in their doctors and that very paranoia is today why most people chose not to donate.
Solution: let one wheel set go past then immediately pull the lever to get MULTI TRACK DRIFTING!
So the train would stop??
@@thecritiquer9407 no it would hit all 6 people
@@thecritiquer9407 The point of multi-track drifting is to be on both tracks and hence kill everyone.
@@thecritiquer9407 if you want to do that you need to have the lever in the middle. They never specified that there was a person inside. Except when the problem is you driving the train.
Actually if there were 2 wheels on each side. They would not get hit at all.
Ok the answer to the self-driving car is easy
It's already been solved for decades
Legally the only action I'm allowed take while driving is to apply the brakes if that pedestrian dies anyway then fine
But if I swerve off the bridge I'm now legally liable for all injuries and property damage resulting regards of what caused me to swerve in the first place
There's a bunch of related ones for self driving cars though. You could even have the specific trolley problem where 5 people jump out in front of the car and the car could swerve into 1 person to avoid them.
the self driveing car wont have a trolly problem.
the car will be hooked to the net and the, as will the pedistrian in the road via the smart phones, your car will willl avoid the pedestrians automatically
@@leeroberts4850 I think assuming that everyone has a cell phone in all circumstances is overly optimistic.
I agree, for autonomous cars the correct answer is reduce liability, protecting lives is seconds within the law
@@leeroberts4850 Self driving cars don't need the pedestrians to have smartphones, they use cameras and radar to "see" people with image recognition. Source: I have a car that does this already. It's not perfect, especially if the people / obstacles aren't moving, but it's already pretty reliable so who knows where we'll be in 10 years.
I wanto to quote Mass Effect on that one:
Garrus: "They don't give a damn about the consequences. Suppose that's what it is going to take, Shepard. The ruthless calculus of war: 10 billion people over here die, so 20 billion over there can live. Are we up for that? Are you?"
Shepard: "If all life in the galaxy vanishes because we hesitate, what choice do we have?"
Garrus: (Sighs) "This is going to be a rough war."
There's also the fact that Admiral Hackett, when deploying his forces against the Reapers for the first time, realises that he's outmatched and must withdraw. However, he can't pull back without taking losses, because the Reapers would just pursue and run them down.
In the end, he orders the 2nd Fleet fight a fatal rearguard action, allowing the 3rd and 5th Fleets to escape.
This is why garrus is the number 1 bro
This is totally why my Shepard was a borderline death seeker by the end of the trilogy, and went for the Control ending with only a moment's hesitation (that being "Dammit, tali I'm sorry I'm doing this to you")
@@AegixDrakan
Unless you consider the "multiple choices were a ruse" opinion, in which destruction was the only salvation for everyone (and kinda makes sense given how the Reapers operate).
Man all of my Ethics Professors loved this problem. I always argued theres no way I can answer this question until I've been in this situation and it would depend on who's on the track
I strongly recommend a cellphone called "seedship", where you face decisions like this constantly. Simple game, different, i love it
Video: “The Trolley Problem”
Me: “Trouble with the trolley, eh?”
Breeze Harbour PTSD intensifies.
Ughhhhhhhhhhhhh. Somehow my friends didn't remember that, despite one being a huge Spyro fan. That, the Satyr's bagpipe song, and the ice hockey thing are probably the only things I remember from that game.
Yes.
Breeze Harbor! Nobody reference Spyro anymore!! You are officially epic.
The double trolley is more interesting. It's where you have two trolleys that each can go on one of two tracks (both trolleys are heading for the track with five people on them and there is only one track with five and are two tracks with one person) for a total of three tracks. You still have the choice of pull the lever or do nothing, but the added caveat of the other person's decision. If neither of you pull the lever then the trolleys will collide before anyone is run over thus saving all parties, but if you do you can save five lives, provided the other person also pulls. You could also not pull the lever and if the other one does then you will have let five people die where they will have killed one person.
I am honestly a little surprised the card game “Trial by Trolly” wasn’t brought up
Came here to say this.
Agreed
Because ExplosmEntertainment has 10.5M subscribers, only 55k people backed the game and there's 7.8B people in the world, meaning 0.001% of the earths population are likely to know about it? Assuming everyone is as likely to know about it no matter where they live ofc.
:P
The trolley problem gets even weirder when you add in incomplete information. Imagine if instead of five people just sitting on the track, there was a 50% chance that the trolley would hit five people and a 50% that it would miss them. There is still an average of 2.5 people dying so mathematically it would still be "optimal" to pull the lever, but do you guarantee that one person's death or do you hope for no deaths?
I always have a different answer for the trolley problem because the stakes have been postulated weirdly, adding strange convoluted ideas, like knowing how so-and-so will grow up if they are allowed to survive, etc.
As such, I have actually boiled down priorities pretty well: first my life and those I care about, then age, then numbers.
Whether or not someone is a murderer/world-class medic can factor in randomly, but it will never trump myself and/or loved ones.
The solution to the autonomous-driving issue is actually quite simple: No one ever in their right mind will buy a car that does not choose for the buyers safety.
Exactly ;)
People who value their own lives over others' wouldn't. Someone like a self-enlisted soldier might. But yes, the vast majority of people are self-serving in that way.
Better solution, use less cars, and do not automate cars. Go for trains. Invest in buses. Automate trucks carrying supplies that aren't humans, if you have to, and make sure they choose human life over their cargo.
The trolley problem for autonomous vehicles is a useful thought experiment, but ultimately translates poorly to the real world. The trolley problem does not occur in real life with the cut and dried simplicity that the hypothetical situation lays out. "No one ever in their right mind will buy a car that does not choose for the buyers safety." I know that's a false statement, because I would provided the car was quantifiably safer than the average driver. We're rapidly approaching that day. I will risk dying erroneously due to a silly software error that most likely has never really occurred when I can lower very real (13th leading cause of death in the US today) risk of dying in a regular, plain jane car accident. To me, it's insane to choose otherwise.
The obvious solution is not allow the cars to speed to a potentially lethal level in areas with pedestrians
This made me think of that tumblr trolley problem, there is one track, filled to the brim with people, but you can stop the trolley and cut off the company's profits.
That doesn't sound like an ethical dilemma.
@@jeffbenton6183 And yet we still haven't stopped the trolley.
"The telivision show, the good place."
Trolley Tom: Am I a joke to you?
It was brought up for me qgain with VSauce's video
If the one person is someone I don't know, then save the 5 strangers.
If it's someone I know (and care about), sacrifice the 5. #Noregrets
3:48 I heal the one that is doing the best job staying out of aoe circles because the other is probably going to die again any way.
I remember sacrificing the mage to keep the warrior alive. His attitude was that he should be healed because he was taking damage. The tank silenced him by pointing out he wad not staying out of the fire and was breaking aggro to show his DPS. Now thinking about. I think he chose to please his personal ego on the expense of the party’s safety. While I chose to save the rest for the sake of getting through with the dungeon.
But on the other hand, the other one is going to live anyway. O-0
Tank every time: if he dies I'm probably next!
@@razgrizdarkheart2330 unless you're about to end the boss timer, at that point you might as well let the tank die and hope everyone else can finish the boss quickly before the party is overwhelmed (either via direct boss damage, or the time limit itself)
Kill one, save five. In that pandemic idea, save the youngest first going from
Most Serious of the Young
Most Serious of the Middle Age
Less Serious of the Young
Less Serious of the Middle Age
The Elderly.
Japan’s elderly did something incredible by cleaning up radioactive waste so their grandchildren wouldn’t have to risk their lives doing it. If we save the youngest, we are saving a part of the next generation. If we save the middle aged, we are saving the current workforce, if we save the elderly, we are saving the wisdom. We can recover from all three, but the youngest ones are the ones that are going to be the most valuable in the long run
Solution: Double track drifting.
So you don't have to be biased.
Which tells me you value equality above life. Not an unusual attitude but rarely one put into a trolley problem.
Mutlitrack drifting!
Kill everyone. A true sociopathic solution.
"Trolley Problem"
*MULTI-TRACK DRIFTING!!!!!*
Is there a way to derail the trolly so everyone involved di- oh wait...
Throwing the point when the trolley is over it should do the trick!
Dual-track drifting
Patheron Aetherson depending on the divergence length, duel tracking can save everyone though. So you can then have the dilema of saving everyone, or no one.
@@patheronaetherson2860 Dual-Track TOKYO drifting... which means drifting and having a super loud Industrial Techno mix blasting.. :)
The XO of the first ship I was stationed on had to experience his version of the Trolley problem. There was out of control flooding on his ship, and he made the call to seal the doors to the impacted areas to save the ship. He knew there were men still on the other side. In that case, it was choose between deaths of those men, or a much higher risk of the entire ship sinking potentially killing more. It was a choice between a guarantee of death for a few, and a chance of death for many.
Though it happened many years prior, he was on the verge of crying recounting it to us.
Doesn't the job description make the choice for him? His duty is to the ship and ALL the men on board, not just those few. This isn't really a trolley problem because the choice you present to me is between a few people and all the people.
@@Wtdtd Again, it's a choice between a guaranteed death for three or a potential of death for three hundred. How do you weigh that? It's like the trolley problem where you have one track with a man, and on the other track further down is a another trolley switch that's flipping randomly between 9 empty tracks and 1 track with 20 people.
I would keep going bacause that single person knew that the trolley would keep going so i will not let one person die because of the negligence of five.
Thomas Aquinas’ “Principle of Double Effect” pretty definitively solves the Trolly Problem
Agreed. Idk why it was ever contentious to begin with, it seems self-evident to me that anyone who has the physical ability and informational awareness to reduce total harms in any situation has an inherent ethical obligation to do so, or ensure someone more able is called to do so, or to at least attempt either of those.
Jean-Luc Picard put it well: "I will not let simple arithmetic decide morality."
Try moralmachine.mit.edu/ then, it brings up other choices that doesn't deal with arithmetic.
Though the premise is simplistic because it's meant to make you think and evaluate where you stand, not to be realistic...
Though.. th-cam.com/video/1sl5KJ69qiA/w-d-xo.html
Arithmetic has already decided more lives than you can imagine, whether more directly, such as astronauts on ships or fighting gunboats or less directly in terms of logistics and food production expectant values. Making sleep medication available may enable another 10 suicides or daylights savings might mean needing less energy and helping the planet while increasing suicides. One has to close the Pandora's box of the enlightenment and scholastic movements to return to a time when it doesn't.
Why not?
I mean... sure, he said that, but the trolley problem is not a complicated problem... So if we agree that the objective is to save as many lives as possible, arithmetic is all that's left.
@@stealthbeastgaming If a car is going to hit 5, but you can change the trajectory throwing one in front of it, is ok then?
But then again, Mon Capitan often breaks the rules of space and time to find a way to save everyone...I doubt most people would have access to a deflector dish capable of redirecting the tachyon stream through the auxiliary plasma conduit.
The answer is USUALLY the tank ( from an ff14 WHM) i've had to let almost whole teams die, so I could focus on keeping the tank going to finish the fight. It's not often ( I am pretty good at managing time and mp) but sometimes.
Especially if a LB is almost formed. Sorry turret mage you will have to wait.
when has the DPS been critical? it's not like they are gonna kill something in the next 3 seconds that the tank would buy in time for the rest of your team.
@@xyvazkrown8048 Sad truth of lives of the DPS. Unless a third-party factor is involved, the Healer and the Tank will win, whilst a Healer and a DPS will fail. The DPS just makes things a bit faster.
TANK > HEALER > DPS .. Simple as that..
Another interesting moral choice that's in the news: the recent scandal on artwork restoration. The piece of art is deteriorating with time, if you do nothing it will degrade slowly until the point where it is essentially lost. Does that give you the right to act now and try your best, if you're not skilled in restoration? Or should you acknowledge your inability and refuse to work on the piece, not risking worsening the situation. For me, the answer is obvious, but what do you think?
I think this gives an interesting insight on the classical trolley problem. The answer depends if you are a trained trolley operator, or if you're just a skilless passenger with no clue of what you should do.
Hire a professional.
This reminds me of the problem that, depending on how you word the same issue, people respond very differently.
When it's phrased as, save 1 life vs 5 life, most choose 5. But if it's phrased as, would you actively kill 1 innocent life for greater good, or not kill anyone yourself, it's a lot harder to go with the same decision.
You should try “trolley Problem Inc.”
A while back I asked my CLE teacher what he would do if he were put in the trolley problem, would he sacrifice a life to save five more or would he sacrifice five lives to save one.
It started a discussion during that class and I'm honestly surprised he didn't realize that I was just trying to distract him from actually teaching us so I could sleep-
nice, i thought distracting my science teacher with his ring of keys was smart-
I'm sure he realized...
When you consider the carbon-footprint of a human being, the obvious solution is multi-track drifting.
Do you think you can achieve the net 0?
If not, how do you plan to off yourself?
@@ViolosD2I By trolley of course.
What about the pollution created by of the manufacturing of a replacement trolley and 7 cremations
@@Kekatronic We need stronger human-proof trolleys. And Zoroastrian funerary rights where you're eaten by birds.
"Murder on the Owl Express," a well-known act from "A Hat in Time."
At the end of the level, you decide who "myurdered" an express owl from the clues you collected on the Conductor's train. All six options are correct, but each lead into to their own conversations! One of the choices for the murder is Hat Kid herself (the player character)!
A Meet Me in St. Louis reference... now that is something I have not heard in a long, long time... I LOVE IT!
For the classic problem: *Let's speed the trolley to max power and fly off the tracks*
For the gaming scenario: Sacrificing a named pet pig for meat to survive far from home in Minecraft is about one of the toughest choices not even the combatants of the World Wars could've prepared for!
Just have them look to the sunset.
*story mode flashbacks*
just make a fishing rod, jeez. We don't need to eat our pets.
PeepeePoopoo!!!!
Vsauce did Mindfield episode about trolley problem and people being put into such situation looks like really bad idea. I personally would like to intervene and do the change but when you see people put into the situation it is really not that easy. Link to the episode: th-cam.com/video/1sl5KJ69qiA/w-d-xo.html
The shock of the moment catches most people off guard as well as the idea of being responsible if they choose the option to save the most people but being directly responsible of a death. A moral conundrum. The mind works in ways unknown.
Glad you mentioned this. Absolutely loved how he set everything up. The results were amazing. The gentleman that cried was heart felt.
Thank you for the link
This kind of sounds like Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek. There is no winning, unless you reprogram the situation.
I feel like a lot of RPGs I've played have had a sort of setup where you either help your companion, who you've grown to like, or betray them for the greater good, potentially causing you to lose that companion forever. Unless you collect all 500 pine cones, in which case you get to find a perfect solution that doesn't anger anybody. And since I'm an obsessive completionist, I usually manage to sidestep that problem.
"hop aboard"
so i can be held legally accountable?
oh heck no i will not be legally accountable!
"I don't believe in the no-win scenario". I reprogrammed the trolley to stop before it reached the switch.
Ah, taking a page of Captain Kirk's Playbook I see.
Ah, I see you're a man of culture as well.
As the Rush song says: If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.
I was a DM for a custom dnd campaign and the big twist at the end of the game was that the Big Bad was stealing resources from the dimension the players lived in to allow 4 alternate elemental dimensions to flourish. The entire campaign was trying to figure out the disappearance of the lush landscape and what significance these dimensional rifts had in common. The ethical dilemma is do you sacrifice the only life you've ever known in order to save 4 planes of existence or do you allow these other dimensions to die out in order to continue living your life the way you used to. Trolley problems are amazing when using alignment charts lmao
4:40 okay massive props to the animators here for getting Eleanor's likeness so perfect that she was instantly recognisable with no context whatsoever
Who's Eleanor? What's she from? I don't get the reference. Please help.
@@jeffbenton6183 The main protagonist in 'The Good Place' my dude
Chidi is already there from the start
@@LK_tutturu yeah but that's after they mentioned the show, Eleanor comes on screen with no context whatsoever and is immediately recognisable, personally i think more so than chidi
Third option: "HEY GET OFF THE TRACKS, COMING THROUGH!!!"
When presented with people, seemingly able to move, yes. Then it's them who have the agency.
"F**K OFF!" Might be the reply.
Triage situations, where the number of injured far exceeds the medical capacity at hand, such that the medical personal cannot possibly provide adequate care to each patient to ensure their survival. There is specialized training, especially in military medicine, where the medical personnel are instructed to quickly assess each patient, how much care they would need, the likelihood of the patient's survival with that care, and then to decide whether to care for that patient or not, and then move on to the next patient. Doctors and nurses in such situations can ill afford to waste precious supplies, and even more precious time, on a patient who has grievous wounds and low chances of survival, if that same care to treat that one patient, can be allocated to save multiple patients.
For the trolley problem, not making a decision is a decision unto itself. In this situation, either one or five will die in this scenario, and the trolley/switch operator will be responsible for death in both cases.
"A robot may not injure a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm."
I'm taking a class on amateur game design and I'm binge-watching this series while working on a project
0:05 Matt: I don't need it... I definitely don't need it...
0:11 Matt: I NEEEED IITTTT!
My brother-in-law had the perfect solution to it: move the lever to exactly the middle so that the trolley isn't 100% committed to either direction and derails
Or the trolley kills all six people. ;)
@@karelspinka3031 not if the tracks are reasonably far apart.
Yeah that's just multitrack drifting
I personally would pull the lever but there's the difference between how someone would actually react and what they would choose minefield did a great episode on the trolley problem.
In regards to 2:55;
3rd option, remember that there's usually a 3rd option and give the car better brakes and have it try to stop.
4th option, remember that there are cascading effects that can and/or should ultimately influence that decision (for example, if the car is passing over a busy interstate).
5th option, forego driverless "smartcars".
Me: i'll derail it and save everyone.
Dr. Trolley: it's not possible!
Me: No! It's necessary...
*Hans Zimmers starts playing*
Thanks, there aren't only two solutions to a problem … most of the time.
What about the passengers in the trolley?
@@DaRealKakarroto Well, in this abstract example there are, otherwise the question lose sense
Problem..... " An "UNSTOPPABLE" trolly with only "YOU" on board "
The passengers on the trolley are far more likely to survive, and a good chance unscathed, from a derailment, than pedestrians on the rails.
An interesting episode for sure, reminded of my old Taekwondo instructor he always started a class with a short Philosophy lesson
There's a tabletop game called The King's Dilemma, which is a storytelling game with cooperative and competitive aspects to it where you play a council of nobles making decisions for your nation while minding your resources, your own house's position to power, and the ever-growing consequences of the choices you collectively make. The bad thing is that it can only be played once from beginning to end because it's a legacy game and your choices irrevocably changes the state of the game, but it's a hell of a thing that lets you negotiate a series of trolley problems and possibly even avoid having to face some of the problems entirely if you're lucky enough. I've played it a bit before and I've been itching to get my own copy and a group together to start our own game.
My face completely lit up when I realized you were going to sing The Trolley Song. Meet Me In St. Louis for the win!
You lost the opportunity to have a little Spock say "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".
Wrath of KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN
There is an issue that I'd say could have been more talked about here, though. There are situations that present themselves as trolley problems, but have a very clear 'right' choice, thus making the point of the choice's existence moot and morally reducionist.
Looking at you, Mass Effect 2 (the Geth question in A House Divided).
Brilliant moral question, ruined by the game's morality system.
how is this 21 hours ago when the vid was 13 minutes ago
@@Adam-st4xm Patrons getting early access to the video.
You're wrong, because ethics and morality are objective.
@@haddyDrow1 I would say that ethics and morality aren't objective, instead everyone has there own views on morality and the majority of people agree on most things, so it would seem like its objective when its really not.
For me, the best troley problem in a game is in the decisions in Lisa: The Painfull RPG. In those choices, there is no option that doesn't mean a loss for the player
Wow, you've reminded me that I started that game in another PC and never finished it. I'll go back to it soon.
First thing that came to my mind is final decision in Life is Strange 1, when we have to decide: save single life of someone close to you or save entire city of people you've never met
Fun fact: Philipa Foot was the granddaughter of US President Grover Cleveland.
You don't say?
or....just hear me out on this, we tell people to quit playing on the train tracks!
Classic victim blaming.
But the version I always heard was that the people on the tracks are railway workers, wearing ear protection so they can't hear the train.
@@josephsager9425 though I don't want to engage in "classic victim blaming" I feel like railway workers should be *more* aware of the possibility of a train and thus should either not be wearing ear protection or have some kind of process in place to ensure this scenario isn't possible. in either case, I'd definitely choose to let the trolly roll over 5 people who are standing on a track and seem to have deliberately prevented themsleves from being able to hear an oncoming train, I'll call this the "Darwin take the controls" approach. :P
As for the Autonomous cars question, we definitely do not want any of this "swerve to avoid" malarkey, that ends no where well. Autonomous cars should be programmed to handle the situation just as a human driver is expected to. be wearing seatbelts, and brake as soon as aware of the situation. no more, no less.
It might sound odd, but I once had the trolley problem asked in a job interview, and they were deadly serious. Lacking context it might sound strange, but when you're applying for a position on a team that creates software for self-driving cars is makes a lot more sense. The trolley problem is potentially a _real problem_ for self driving cars.
Edit: And right after I make the post I get to the point in the video where they actually mention it in the context of self-driving cars.
Now, whatever position you take on the question, keep in mind that no one will _buy_ a car that doesn't prioritize the passengers. They'll prefer to drive themselves instead, so that they can prioritize themselves. Which isn't a good solution either, because humans are terrible drivers from an objective standpoint.
You had me at "ah fork" 😆
If I was presented with that problem I'd ask "On which track is someone I know?"
If there was none, I'd save 5 people
If there was one, I'd save them (along with 4 other people if they happen to be on the right track)
If there were two on both tracks, I'd value the one closer to me (and have mental issues til the end of my life)
Additionaly, if there was someone important to humanity versus someone that is very close to me... well, I save the important guy, because if I didn't then the entire human population would hate me and the person I saved, so instead only I would suffer with serious mental issues... I mean... on one hand I'm screwed, the one close to me is screwed, and possibly the humanity is screwed, while on the other hand only me and the one close to me is screwed.
Thank you, that's a good analysis.
. . .
I would not judge the morality of either decision, since it isn’t a scenario of moral freedom.
Michael from Vsauce in his series Mind Field did the trolley experiment on unwitting people who thought they were there for an interview.
It was interesting. If the reader sees this after mind field is no longer free (only free this year) the results in short were
The ones who didn't pull the lever didn't want to be responsible for the death of any
Ones who did pull it weighed number of lives
And one great guy said something that stuck. In this scenario all the peeople were rail workers. 4 walking together and one stopped to take a call.
The participant said
The single person was the only one with a foot on the rails, and that person was a rail road worker who knows rails shake violently as trains approach and thus had the greatest chance of survival without being able to look around and ask anyone else "hey, do you feel that?"
I will always chose pull the lever because of his 'fending for yourself' idea
I also like the trolly problem where you have no degrees of separation. IE: You are standing on a bridge above a trolly, below on the tracks are five people that will die if the trolly is not stopped. However, with you on the bridge is another person (usually stated as overweight) and if you push them onto the tracks, it will stop the trolly and save the five people. It’s like the classical, but you have to physically murder the one person.
For the automation problem: Let all cars decide ethical problems via RNG.
For the pedestrian: blessRNG
some people already do that... its called religion..
RNGeeejus take the wheel!
In the case of automation, ethical questions are invalid. The computer isn't smart enough to understand them.
Try to derail the train by moving the switch back and forth quickly.
charlie regan but what if it spins sideways and hits both groups?
Ooff, the trolley starting rolling, crushing the 5 people, a bit of metal landed on the single person, and the 25 people in the trolley all perished as well...
Would you like to load, quit or realise that the dilemma is described in a simple manner so that it's quick to think through and discuss, and ignoring the discussion means you would probably seize up if you ever see it happen in front of you and wind up defaulting to the 5 being run over.
That's only the first level of the Trolley Problem. It goes much deeper and each time shows that even a good choice can have negative consequences.
Allow me to bring up Death and Taxes, where trolley problems are the main gameplay! You're a Reaper and you have to choose between a set of dying people who gets spared, and your choices will affect the living world. But you're not just limited to sparing or killing a set number of people. After all, your boss's quota is a suggestion, and there's nothing stopping you from saying "Fuck it" and killing/sparing more than you're instructed to. So begets another layer of dilemmas: How far are you willing to defy your boss for what you think is the greater good?