Why? Because I refuse to get into the people appraisal business?

If you want me to assume that a life is worth a life then you'll have to show your work. I see no inherent reason to assume that 5x has to be greater 1x when it comes to lives. Especially, when the intrinsic value of x rises and diminishes both in qualitative value and remaining years left on earth if left unattended.

It is almost certain that one set of 5 lives randomly chosen won't equal the next set of 5 lives you happen to come across.

I didn't change the scenario to get an answer I wanted, I adjusted the scenario to account for a statement Lestat had made and to clarify a position I don't think credible.

There's a book which consists of variations of this problem not constructed to get particular answers but to test our commitment to the answers of previous presentations of the problem.

We are dealing with 5x vs 1y. Since we don't know the value of x or y, this pretty much just means that we need to assume that x and y are equal. If we are assuming x and y are equal and also that all lives are beneficial for society wouldn't we want the 5x instead of the 1y? I don't need to show work why x=y because how does one determine a persons value?

I understand the thought process of not wanting to have the guilt of being responsible for killing 1 person to save 5, however one should also feel guilty for not saving a net 4 lives, imo

In diverting the train towards the 5 people you will be directly responsible for 5 deaths. To commit an act that you would have not committed had you been better informed and to not revert back when the extra information is available to you and there is still time to prevent 5 people dying, who would not have died had you not acted originally, seems wrong.

What commitment? We made a decision based on available information, now we have more information and won't necessarily reach the same decision.

"Could you like green people?"
"Yes"
"What if they were really nasty?"

It's to test our commitment to whatever moral framework or logic we've applied to get the answer. It's not about just asking a different question it's about exploring the consequences of the reasoning we've used. Your example doesn't test any reasoning used to answer the initial question, mine to Lestat did though I agree with you it wasn't particularly clever it was only intended to clarify a problem I consider Lestat's position to entail.

It may seem wrong, but it is consistent if your original position was not to divert the train if it would kill someone else on the other track.

Regardless of what has transpired so far, you now have a brand new situation in which 5 people are on one track and 1 on the other. If you wouldn't have diverted the train before, why would you now?

The only reason I can think of is that you would be letting emotional guilt override the consistency of your original position. If you would divert the train in this instance, then you should be willing to do so initially.

In the second presentation you will be directly responsible for the deaths of 5 people. Given your original comment that you should not involve yourself in life or death matters that don't concern you this concerns you by fact of you being the one that has diverted the tram. I don't think you need to aspire to consistency here and in this instance I agree with tame_dueces that these questions are different enough that they may warrant different answers.

Hence I think you can not act in the first case and act in the second while remaining consistent with the idea you should not involve yourself in life or death matters that don't concern you.

My point is that I am not in the business of evaluating each individual life. I can easily think of scenarios where one life would objectively be worth more than 5. Therefore, I'd want to remain neutral and let nature take its course. However, I did think of a scenario where I would be inconsistent...

If I were piloting a distressed plane that was about to crash into one of two crowds on the ground and either cause the deaths of 1000 people, or just a few, I would attempt to steer the plane into the less populated area.

I honestly cannot align this with my position to not divert the train. So I may need to rethink this whole thing!

All I can come up with so far, is that there would always be some chance that I could save the plane and/or avoid hitting anyone on the ground. But I don't think this works... If the plane were nose diving into a crowd of 1000 and I could steer it into 10 people to avoid the 1000, I would. Something is wrong with my logic...

In the train example, I am not piloting anything and therefore do not feel responsible. I guess if I were an engineer on the train I should be willing to divert in order to save the majority as well. So there is something that is causing me to think differently when I am just a passive bystander and directly involved in the situation.

Clearly, 5 lives will be worth more than 1 on average. But I still say I should not be the one to make that decision. However, I guess if I'm directly involved I would be forced to.

That's what makes this scenario better than the others, that you're somehow now actively responsible for people even if you did not want to be.

I'm wondering if diverting the train back to the original track, once you realized there were people on the second track, would be like you did not interfere at all.

This is where I disagree. I made the decision I felt was right when I thought the track was empty. That decision has past and is over now. Upon learning that the track is NOT empty brings up a whole new situation. It's the same situation as if I had just come upon the scene and now have to decide whether or not to divert the train. And as I've said, I would choose not to.

Am I responsible? Well sure, you could say that. But I would not feel bad about it in the same way I do not feel bad about making what I felt was a good pre-flop decision that turns out to be wrong. Life is forward moving and we cross bridges as we get to them.

What about returning the train to the original destination and walking away like you never interfered?

I think you are touching on moral noncognitivism. It is the school of thought which says that moral statements, which may take the appearance of truth-aptness (i.e. either true or false objectively) are actually just emotional statements that are not truth-apt.

The concept intuitively seems right to me. As we tease out in these threads, it is rare that anyone can logically support the moral choices they purport to hold in accordance with a sound / consistent moral system -- but they just know what is "right" based on what feels right.

I've seen debates where one party literally tells the audience to imagine something horrible like rape or murder happening to someone they love, really imagine it happening, and now ask if the person who did it should be given all kinds of kindness and benefits and whatnot, or should that person be given brutal treatment. Just one anecdote, but it really went a long way for me in pushing back the veil of logic and reason and suggesting that at heart our moral decisions are all reactions of this kind.

It all boils down to feeling: yuck = bad, proud/happy/warm&fuzzy = good, and no reaction at all = marginal situation so appeal to the status quo, whatever the law says as if the law was authoritative, or fit in by choosing what you think others will expect to hear, etc..

Why are you responsible? Again, much of my position stems from a deterministic world view. I view events as part of a causal chain. Are you responsible if you stop to chat with your neighbor for 5 minutes on his way to work and he gets hit by a bus (had you not stopped to chat, he would have already crossed the intersection where the bus hit him)? Are you going to fret over it and blame yourself?

Just as you (I assume) would not fret over this, I would not fret over diverting the train when I thought the tracks were empty. I did nothing wrong when I took my initial action (just as you did nothing wrong when you stopped and talked to your neighbor). However, both of our actions inevitably caused a death. You seem to think it was directly. I say they it is indirectly even though we both played a part.

I think any attempt to plead ignorance of the consequences of our actions are harder to defend when we have the opportunity to reverse the decision to one we would have made had the information been available. I'd also suggest losing a hand of poker would feel very different from making a decision that resulted in 5 people losing their lives and that in truth you really would feel very bad about taking a decision that cost 5 people their lives whether that decision was made ignorant of the consequences or not. Even from a personal perspective I think you have reason to divert the train in the second case.

I do think we have reasons to change the lever from a personal perspective in the original presentation if we consider it from a slightly different perspective. Imagine that there was someone else at the lever, consider that you are one of the 6 people on the track, do you want him to push the lever? The answer for me is clearly yes given that we will be one of the 5 83,3% of the time.

You mean lie to myself to make me feel better? You can't change the event. It happened. Move forward from there.

I'm not sure why I'm having such a hard time explaining myself with this. I wish I were more eloquent. I'm sure there are much better examples than the ones I've provided.

These cases aren't comparable. In the case of talking to your neighbour it is implausible to expect someone to foresee those consequences. If you had failed to look down a track before diverting a tram on to it then it could be argued you demonstrated a negligence not present in the first case. It is entirely reasonable to distinguish between the directness of your actions in diverting the tram and the indirectness of the actions in stopping to talk to a neighbour.

I don't disagree with this. What we disagree on is whether we are able to reverse the decision. You seem to want to pretend that switching the train back to its original path means the initial action to switch it never took place. I contend that it DID take place and you now have a whole new decision to deal with!

I guess what I'm saying is, no backsies...you switched the train and no amount of pretending that you didn't will change this fact. If you decide to switch it back again, it will be as though you had just arrived on the scene. So make sure it's what you would have done in the first place.

This is different than the way it was originally presented to me! I was asked what if you later learned that the track was not empty. I assumed this meant I had every reason to assume that the track was empty before I diverted it. If it was due to my own negligence, then I would switch it back. But please note that this is ONLY because I now have a self serving vested interest in what happens.

I divert the train towards the single individual in both cases but you are pretending you aren't involved in the 5 deaths when your actions will result in them.

I disagree their deaths may concern us by fact of our diverting the train, distinguishing between the cases requires no pretence.

Where is the line upon finding out that there are 5 people on the track you reverse the decision. Is it while you are at the lever? 5 seconds later? 1 minute? In any case it seems that there must be a line that distinguishes your proximity to the events that you would act?

But I ask again: What commitment? Any answer is obviously given with an absence of information in mind. So when you add information we would obviously expect answers to occasionally change.

I mean, remove the information about the 5 people and your thought experiment is about whether you want to commit murder or not. Information matters.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the reason behind this is because in the train example it feels like you are not responsible because you are not acting. In the plane example you are already actively responsible for deaths, so the choice to be responsible for fewer deaths seems obvious.

When people won't divert the train it seems the position is to not interfere with 'fate'. My position however is that not acting still makes the person responsible for an extra 4 deaths.

Any commitment we've previously demonstrated. If you ask me a question and in answering I demonstrate a line of reasoning it seems fair for you to point out occasions where that line of reasoning would lead to some absurd conclusion. If you were to do so I would have to demonstrate why your application of that line of reasoning is flawed or revisit it.

My question to Lestat wasn't even that complicated he claimed that if he had changed direction of the tram to save 5 only to notice he had inadvertently directed the tram towards 10 people he would not switch it back as these would be discrete events. I merely wanted to restate it back as the original 5 v 1 to keep it closer to the original issue and to highlight a claim I wanted clarifying.

To the people that would not divert:

What if instead of diverting to kill one person instead of 5, not diverting the train will detonate a bomb that kills a large quantity of people. Is there a certain # in which you finally divert? 50? 500? 1,000? At a certain point doesn't many lives saved over 1 persons life seem like the logical thing to do?