#trolley problem

thought experiment: a runaway train is barrelling down the rails, set on a course to collide and kill 500 innocent people who have been tied to the tracks by the fresh prince of bel air.

there is a second track which the train can be diverted to, which has nobody on it. if a certain lever is pulled in time, the train will switch to the second track, and everyone will survive.

however, will has played a nasty trick: on the lever, which is definitely the only way to change the train's course in time, he took a sharpie and wrote "IF YOU PULL THIS LEVER YOU ARE CRINGE". he made sure to draw the letters as big as possible so everyone will be able to see them.

you are the only person who is able to pull the lever in time. if you do, you will save 500 lives, but for the rest of your life some people will think that you are cringe, including some of the ones on the tracks. (many will probably say that the prince was actually the cringe one for putting you and all those people in that situation in the first place, but not everyone).

Artificer: do the calculations for a perfect multi track drift to stop the train

Barbarian: breaks the lever

Bard: I'm going to make a meme about this scenario

Cleric: casts revivify on the one person

Druid: leaves it alone, let's nature take its course

Fighter: tries to stop the train with strength

Monk: meditates on the correct action. Meanwhile the 5 people die.

Paladin: swore an oath never to kill an innocent person, refuses to pull the lever

Ranger: pulls the lever to save the most people

Rogue: allows the 5 people to die, robs their corpses

Sorcerer: fireballs the train

Warlock: runs over the one, eldritch blasts the 5.

Wizard: calculate the maximum amount of utility. Meanwhile the 5 get run over because utilitarianism is a flawed theory. We cannot just spend our entire lives calculating various amounts of pleasure and pain, BENTHAM. Especially because we cannot quantify pleasure and pain in communicable mathematical terms!

Also photo of me with the actual corpse of Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism

The Statement: Imagine 6 people tied to train tracks. Five of them are tied together and one is tied on another detour track. A trolley is speeding towards the track with five people tied, you have a lever in front of you that will change the trolleys track to the detour track with only one person attached. If you dont do anything the trolley run over the five people, if you pull the lever the trolley will kill only one person but you will the cause that one person died. So will you pull the lever?

The ethical dilemma: If you do not pull the lever 5 people die who could have been saved, if you do pull the lever only one person dies but you are the direct cause of that person's death. Either way people die.

The solution: To solve ethical dilemmas we cannot use ethics, rather we should use logic and reason. As such to solve this ethical dilemma we need to figure out what is the best course of action.

To Start we need some core principles or assumptions to begin your reasoning.

Assumption 1. Each individual life is as important as anyother.

Assumption 2. The more minimal the loss the better the solution.

Assumption 3. The trolley problem is in an ideal world where the trolley can have one of only two results, first being running over the five people, and the second being running over the one person.

With these assumptions we can begin our reasoning.

Using the 3rd assumption we cannot jam the trolley in the split (or have it drift to kill all 6 people).

Using assumption 1 and 2 we shall choose the result that results in the least loss, as all the six people are equal the least loss result is the one where the least number of people are killed. That being pulling the lever and killing the one person. Resulting a loss of one person.

So the best solution is pulling the lever as that mimimizes the death to only one person.

Everyone may have different answers but this is the answer i have come up with and will stick to. You may disagree and that is up to you.

The questions vampirism raises are like, "What would it be like to be forced to feed on humans to survive, even though you used to be human? To be granted supernatural powers and immortality, but have to live with yourself as something hated by mankind and even God Himself?" But many writers remove all those hard questions and say "My vampire can just drink animal blood, or they are a different kind of vampire in some way that avoids all moral quandary. They can basically live like a regular person, just with extreme sunlight sensitivity and allergy to garlic, but they can keep the supernatural powers, of course." But in doing so, they remove what's interesting about vampires in fiction!

Same with the trolley problem and Omelas, people keep trying to sidestep the hard questions these hypotheticals raise, trying to restore a sense of false certainty like "I never have to compromise my rigid principles if I just think of some clever solution!" It misses the whole point of those hypotheticals. In the trolley problem, somebody WILL die regardless. In Omelas, there is no compromise between liberating the child and keeping the paradise intact. It's one or the other. Avoiding the problem is not a "solution."