It’s an abstraction over many real world scenarios.
Example: You are one of two people in the hospital waiting for an organ transplant. One becomes available, and it’s basically guaranteed that there won’t be another arriving in time to help both of you. You can exert influence to get that transplant, and so can the other person. Do you do it?
Who put you into this situation and what crimes should they be charged with?
Well again that’s a very different scenario again, and context matters hugely. There are simply far too many important variables to reasonably analyze it on its face.
The point is that it is a hypothetical situation where you have to decide whether you want to influence an other persons death if it might save yours or not. The context does not matter at all.
You don’t get other options, you have to choose. And based on your answer, you will reveal your morality.
You put these in the same context, like a trolley problem, so you can easily compare them to other problems.
I honestly can’t imagine a non-at-least-slightly-problematic reason you’d bring this up… but putting that aside for a moment, in general I agree with you that overanalysing these can be tiresome. The problem with this one in particular is it’s such a contrived variation that it really brings it upon itself. In fact, it’s precisely because it’s particularly context dependent, that I have more of an issue with it.
It’s more that it doesn’t meet the bar of an abstract thought experiment that can be discussed without context in the first place that it’s the issue, and most thought experiments do, including the original one.
Basically I’m saying “this one would require contextualizing and overanalysis in order to get anywhere at all, and that’s tiresome, therefore that’s why it’s bad”. Do you see?
P.S. There’s also no part where we’re taking this “literally” per se.
It’s an abstraction over many real world scenarios.
Example: You are one of two people in the hospital waiting for an organ transplant. One becomes available, and it’s basically guaranteed that there won’t be another arriving in time to help both of you. You can exert influence to get that transplant, and so can the other person. Do you do it?
Who put you into this situation and what crimes should they be charged with?
Well again that’s a very different scenario again, and context matters hugely. There are simply far too many important variables to reasonably analyze it on its face.
It isn’t a different scenario.
The point is that it is a hypothetical situation where you have to decide whether you want to influence an other persons death if it might save yours or not. The context does not matter at all.
You don’t get other options, you have to choose. And based on your answer, you will reveal your morality.
You put these in the same context, like a trolley problem, so you can easily compare them to other problems.
Not to call anyone out but trying to be literal, contextualize and overanalyze abstract though experiments is one of the neurodivergent test questions
And this is no way means to be assigning value, more of an awareness notion
I honestly can’t imagine a non-at-least-slightly-problematic reason you’d bring this up… but putting that aside for a moment, in general I agree with you that overanalysing these can be tiresome. The problem with this one in particular is it’s such a contrived variation that it really brings it upon itself. In fact, it’s precisely because it’s particularly context dependent, that I have more of an issue with it.
It’s more that it doesn’t meet the bar of an abstract thought experiment that can be discussed without context in the first place that it’s the issue, and most thought experiments do, including the original one.
Basically I’m saying “this one would require contextualizing and overanalysis in order to get anywhere at all, and that’s tiresome, therefore that’s why it’s bad”. Do you see?
P.S. There’s also no part where we’re taking this “literally” per se.
I do and have seen what you’re trying to mean (and I tried to frame in a way that’d alleviate the known problematics.)
But we’re also going into the overthinking direction.