no one fucking told me about states banning RCV during all that yapping on here about how i should VOTE THIRD PARTY OR ELSE IM COMPLICIT in the DNCs CRIMES
it may or may not be joever, very blackpilled at this moment
edit it’s actually 10 states. 5 in the past two months.
oh, i think pulling the lever makes you a murderer. but that’s the point of the trolley problem: it’s not that there is a right answer, its that your answer will help you understand your own morality.
Are you willing to let four more people die just to avoid being a murderer? Do you assign to that label more moral value than you assign to human lives?
I’m not willing to be a murderer. you seem to be overlooking the person you would be killing.
And you are overlooking the other 5 people, claiming that you are not complicit in their death even though you, as the one standing at the lever, are the only one able to save them. Your status as “non-murderer” is more important to you than their lives.
have you considered that “the end justify the means” is bad, actually, and that deontological ethics are the only way to actually be sure you are doing the right thing?
This is an acceptable position. “Even if you think murder is good in a specific case - don’t. Too many past murderers also tried to justify their acts. We humans are too good at self serving rationalization to be trusted with such things”
The problem with this, is that you can’t drag that solution to the voting issue. It works for the trolley problem because it relies on the fact that murder is a big taboo. Voting isn’t a big taboo - you don’t have a long history of “voting is bad” consensus. That idea is new, and has to stand on its own merits.
and no one is saying voting is bad. but voting for bad people definitely is bad.
Not voting is giving half a vote to the worse candidate.
you can’t give half a vote.
I didn’t put any of them in that position, and I’ll be damned if I murder anyone.
You didn’t put any of them in that position. And you didn’t put that other person in a position where scarifying them is the only way to save the five people. You are not responsible for the situation, and yet you ended up with the power to pick the outcome. Out of several bad outcomes, yes - but you still have the the opportunity to pick the lesser evil.
You wish you didn’t get that opportunity. You wish you weren’t in this position. The six people tied to the track also wish they weren’t in this position. But this is not real life, where complaining about the unfairness and wishing the misfortune didn’t happen to you can solve everything and make everyone happy. This is a moral dilemma, engineered to root out the smart solutions and leave you with the hard choice - four human lives weighted against your personal moral status.
And you decided that four lives is an acceptable price to pay so that you can keep basking in your innocence.
your characterization is bad faith. my degree is in philosophy. i know what my ethics are, and it’s not “Bask in innocence at all costs”. it’s “do the right thing”. the right thing cannot be determined by the outcome since we can’t know the future, so it would be impossible to know what the right thing to do is. therefore, the ethics of the action must be in the action itself. murdering people is bad. pulling the lever is bad. qed.
You do know the future though. At least - to some extent. You know that one of two candidates is going to be elected, not matter what. Or, at least, almost no matter what. Maybe a huge asteroid will hit the Earth and the elections won’t matter. But the probability for these is so low, that you can effectively “count on” the fact that one of these two candidates is going to get elected.
The only question is which one.
knowledge of the future is impossible since you can only know true things and the future hasn’t happened yet, so it has no truth value.
i have a policy against choosing evil.
And the result of that policy is greater evil getting chosen.
I’m not responsible for what others choose.
that’s literally not what it is. it helps you understand your own ethical instincts. i’m deontological, and no deontologist, having examined the full trolley problem, pulls the lever. consequentialists do, but i believe consequential ethics is bad. it leads to doing bad things and even internally cannot consistently tell you the right thing to do.