NSmolenskiFan on Nostr: I have more thoughts on this. Hypotheticals like the trolley problem—which these ...
I have more thoughts on this.
Hypotheticals like the trolley problem—which these “longtermist” arguments are—are attention-grabbers precisely because *there is no moral resolution to the problem.* Kill your family, or kill a million people? You can only choose one; which one do you choose? It’s a Sophie’s Choice: all answers to the problem create moral injury. There is no “good” or “right” answer.
People are titillated by the trolley problem because it seems to “reveal” that human beings are all immoral at root, or that evil is unavoidable because we all can be “forced” to do terrible things under certain circumstances. It reveals no such thing about “human nature”. All it shows is that we can get ourselves into terrible situations in which every outcome is tragedy. That should create motivation enough to prevent and preclude such situations wherever possible, not to succumb to them as though they are inevitable. THAT is where morality lies: taking responsibility for preventing trolley problems from ever arising in the first place.
There is a human situation in which trolley problems are virtually guaranteed, and that is war. In war, people have to make extreme decisions they would never otherwise make, and they are traumatized for life by their resolutions of *unresolvable* moral dilemmas.
This is why preventing and precluding war is one of the highest moral imperatives of human societies. A society functioning from the traumatizing moral logic of war is a monstrous society. Any argument that suggests that trolley problems need to be “baked into” the structures of social life as permanent resolutions to unresolvable moral dilemmas is fundamentally misunderstanding the conditions that generate human flourishing over time.
Hypotheticals like the trolley problem—which these “longtermist” arguments are—are attention-grabbers precisely because *there is no moral resolution to the problem.* Kill your family, or kill a million people? You can only choose one; which one do you choose? It’s a Sophie’s Choice: all answers to the problem create moral injury. There is no “good” or “right” answer.
People are titillated by the trolley problem because it seems to “reveal” that human beings are all immoral at root, or that evil is unavoidable because we all can be “forced” to do terrible things under certain circumstances. It reveals no such thing about “human nature”. All it shows is that we can get ourselves into terrible situations in which every outcome is tragedy. That should create motivation enough to prevent and preclude such situations wherever possible, not to succumb to them as though they are inevitable. THAT is where morality lies: taking responsibility for preventing trolley problems from ever arising in the first place.
There is a human situation in which trolley problems are virtually guaranteed, and that is war. In war, people have to make extreme decisions they would never otherwise make, and they are traumatized for life by their resolutions of *unresolvable* moral dilemmas.
This is why preventing and precluding war is one of the highest moral imperatives of human societies. A society functioning from the traumatizing moral logic of war is a monstrous society. Any argument that suggests that trolley problems need to be “baked into” the structures of social life as permanent resolutions to unresolvable moral dilemmas is fundamentally misunderstanding the conditions that generate human flourishing over time.