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Should you kill the fat man?
Four scenarios are described in this philosophy experiment and they are associated with gauging the inherent levels of morality that each one of us has in ourselves.
In the first scenario, it is described that the breaks of a train have failed and five people are standing right in the middle of the track where this train is headed. It turns out that a collision between the train and those five people is inevitable and the only way out is that if the driver diverts the train in the ‘right’ direction as there is a siding. In that siding, there is a person stuck. This philosophical dilemma poses the question that should the driver divert the train towards the siding or let it loose, which would entail the killing of five men. If the driver diverts the train, only one person would be killed.
My answer:
I opt for the driver to turn the train because according to my preliminary responses, I believe that maximizing happiness is a moral requirement. If the driver turns the train, five people will be saved. I also tend to follow the utilitarian perspective in this regard which advocates that the better action is one which ensures good and prosperity of the majority. According to the results of this scenario in the quiz, my preliminary opinion and the response of this experiment had no contradiction.
In the second scenario, which is known as ‘Fat man on the bridge’, there is a person who is standing on a footbridge which is lodged on the tracks. The first person is well aware of the fact that this train is going to hit the five men stuck on the track and is approaching soon. In this scenario, the collision is inevitable. Here the condition for avoiding a head-on collision is to throw a heavy weight on the train from above to stop it according to the laws of motion. The scenario entails that the only weight available is a very overweight man and he too is also sentient of the fact that the train will hit the five men. The question is whether the first person should throw the stout man on the train to stop it or let the train continue its journey. The former condition would imply that the fat person dies while the latter implies that five people will be killed if the train hits them. Flipping the switch might seem realistic if this was to happen in the real world, but in a fictional problem or a philosophical dilemma, there is a strong distrust expressed for those people who use other human beings as a means to an end CITATION Syt19 \l 1033 (Sytsma).
My answer:
I responded with choosing the option that the fat man should be pushed on the track. The analysis of this quiz opined that my response is consistent with my claim that only one person should be killed instead of five because again, this will maximize happiness as it is a moral requirement.
The third scenario is highly identical to the scenario which is mentioned above but here, there is a key difference. The first person knows that the fat man has sabotaged the breaks of the train because he was highly upset with the increasing rate of fares. Just like in the previous scenario, there is only one way to stop the train and save five people who are stuck on the train lines and that is to push the saboteur on the train to stop it from killing the five men. If this was not done, the five people on the track would be dead in no time.
My answer:
Out of the two options, I opt that the fat man should be pushed so that he stops train. The analysis of this response advocated that throwing the saboteur off the bridge is consistent with my previous response. The resulting analysis also said that there is an inconsistency in my responses, because in my preliminary answers, I held that causing another person’s death, whatever the case may be, is always and utterly wrong. I would like to present a counter-argument in this case and would maintain that causing another person’s death is not wrong if we are aware of the fact that he put several lives in danger. I also opted for this claim earlier because I was not aware of the context that lie ahead of me.
The fourth scenario is the most interesting of all.
Description of the scenario: In this final scenario, the fat man is now in custody of the police after being arrested. The fat man asserts that in a major urban center, he has hidden a nuclear device which is set to explode in a day; 24 hours from that very moment. There are some conditions in this scenario which have to be kept in mind by all those people who are involved in this philosophy experiment:
In 24 hours, the bomb will explode.
If the bomb explodes in this time as mentioned in the first statement, it will exterminate one million people irrespective of age, gender, or any other criteria.
There is a strong chance that if in 24 hours, the explosive device discarding squad gets to the nuclear device, the deadly device may be defused.
No one can do anything to let the location of the explosive device slip from the fat man. No amount of persuasion or convincing will help in this case.
The only way out is that there is a 75% chance of the fat man’s complicity, only if he is tortured.
The question here is that is it moral to torture the fat man in order to save a million lives?
I opted for an unconventional response but in hindsight I was viewing the scenario through a bigger picture. This philosophy experiment led me to believe that the fat man ought to be tortured because the probability of him disclosing the location of the deadly device is high. The analysis revealed that it is directly contradicting with my initial claim that torture, as a matter of core values and principles, is immoral and wrong. I would like to present a counter-argument here that without being aware of the situational context, how can one support torture. A very brief hint of consistency was exhibited here because this response was harmonious with the other answers that I had given. One might object that I should have thought about various other scenarios before claiming that torture is always wrong, but here, I again maintained a utilitarian perspective and opted for the fat man to be killed in the pursuit to save a million lives. Our moral intuitions also tell us that causing harm or violence to others is totally wrong and one should avoid such a scenario at all costs CITATION Mol16 \l 1033 (Crockett).
Consistency level:
My consistency score in this philosophy experiment turned out to be 58% which is lower than the average score. The average score of this philosophy experiment is 75%.
The philosophy experiment asserts that it is highly preferable if the moral choices of an individual are governed by some moral principles that are consistently applied. But I would like to corroborate another statement from the analysis that most of the moral choices we make are more like feelings of the gut or are based on intuition.
Works Cited:
BIBLIOGRAPHY Crockett, Molly. "The trolley problem: would you kill one person to save many others?" 12 Dec 2016. The Guardian. 27 1 2020.
Sytsma, Justin, and Jonathan Livengood. " "Causal Attributions and the Trolley Problem." ." (2019).
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