And I’m being serious. I feel like there might be an argument there, I just don’t understand it. Can someone please “steelman” that argument for me?
And I’m being serious. I feel like there might be an argument there, I just don’t understand it. Can someone please “steelman” that argument for me?
That’s the fucking point of the trolley problem. How can so many people get here and not fucking understand it’s supposed to present the dichotomy between utilitarianism and deontology. If you have a duty to not commit murder, and pulling a lever murders people, you can’t pull the lever. It’s a valid position.
If deontology is wrong, we should immediately round up every depressed person, kill them, and harvest their organs.
If you are talking about deontology and utilitarianism from two to three hundred years ago…
Maybe your characterizations are accurate.
But uh, in more modern ethical theory…
Both camps have realized that pure adherence to the older forms of these ideas leads to absurdities and moral prescriptions which do not broadly match actual empirical responses to hypothetical scenarios.
As a result, most modern ethical theories are some kind of a hybrid of deontologic and utilitarian principles.
Anyway, let me try to illustrate this with a 'hypothetical' ethical question:
You have 300 dollars. This is your food budget for for 30 days. Say you only eat one meal a day, and if you do not eat at least one meal every 3 days, you will starve to death.
An ethical meal, produced by well compensated and treated laborers, costs $40 dollars.
A non ethical meal, produced by unpaid slave laborers in a far away land, who often die of exhaustion and exposure, costs $10 dollars.
Both meals have equal nutritional value and tastiness.
Does the deontologist decide that any level of harm to people they don’t know is permissible and eat 30 $10 dollar meals?
Or do they decide no level of harm is permissible to others and buy only 7 $40 dollar meals and then starve?
Or do they purchase some combination of $10 and $40 dollar meals so as to minimize permissible harm to themselves and others according to some kind of calculation?
Is the deontologist in this third scenario not employing some kind of utilitarian calculation?