this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Agency might matter depending on societal context. 5 hot guys might be worse than 1 hot guy in a world with limited resources, for example.

Everyone knows that 5 of something is usually better than 1. The dilemma comes from finding a situation where that might not be true, and therein exploring some quirks of our own humanity.

It goes too far when people interpret these quirks as fundamental human traits, but there is genuine merit in testing oneself with fun hypotheticals

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

testing oneself with fun hypotheticals

fun

you've got a peculiar taste for fun, I must admit

editto be fair, I don't disagree, and discussing things like that or pondering them can be fun, but I still wouldn't expect such a choice of words ๐Ÿ˜…

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Trolley problems can be directly mapped to those "would you rather" drinking games. e.g. Would you have sex with your dad to save your mum's life?

The question is meaningless in a normal context, the answer is meaningless in a normal context, but it's fun to explore your limits in strange circumstances, no?

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

That's true, there's even a party game that consists solely of controversial topics to talk about, not even this kind of weird ones

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago

That's not a matter of agency, that's still a matter of the goodness of the action. You constructed a version where more of the magic hot guys is bad, and made the valence negative again. So now one is better, and agency still isn't a factor.

What's actually interesting is the doctor version. Kill one healthy person and harvest their organs to save five people from death? That, at first glance, puts agency back in the equation. But drag still thinks the key isn't agency. It's power. In the trolley version, you have no power over who's on the other track. You didn't choose that person in particular to die, they just happened to be in the way. In the doctor version, either you or the boss chose a healthy person to die. You got to pick. You cannot take responsibility for picking. And you cannot support a system in which another person picks either. But when random chance picks who has to die, that's fine. There's no abuse of power in that one. Killing who you need to kill in order to save others isn't abusive power. Picking who dies, when you could have picked someone else, that's abuse.