Comic Strips

Drag's friends. Drag has at least ten friends probably, and drag's friends are at least 10% better than the average rando. They're mostly communists and queers. The world is better off with them in it than with some random people who are probably capitalists.

Please see the other comment drag wrote in this thread in reply to the earlier comment replying to drag, which drag wrote before seeing yours.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/14997510

Living with knowing you did nothing to save 4 people may affect you as badly. To be fair, the person doing the choice is fucked up both ways, if ey is not a sociopath.

You pulling the trigger to switch the trolley to kill only the 1 person can and will have consequences on your own mental health.

That's called selfishness, and it's not generally considered a factor in ethics. At most, that changes the equation to 2 vs 5. Still easy.

unless you're a fucking psychopath, you're not gonna kill your newborn to save 5 strangers.

Then psychopaths are right and neurotypical people are wrong. The world would be better off if it had more psychopaths, as you describe them.

But you're wrong about psychopaths. See, what you're describing is limited empathy. You have more empathy for your baby than for five strangers, because of your limited point of view and inability to abstract the situation and see the bigger picture. A psychopath, according to pop psychology (psychopathy doesn't actually exist in serious psychology, but let's pretend it does) has no empathy. A psychopath doesn't care who dies. They probably save the baby because it's more socially acceptable and will make them look good. That's selfishness again.

If you want to know who saves the strangers, well that's someone who has empathy for both the baby and the strangers, and the wisdom to empathise equally with both. That kind of wisdom is extremely rare because natural selection doesn't favour it. It doesn't offer any advantage over the rest of the species to be that selfless. So you'd be most likely to find it in an extremely rare combination of autistic traits, or in a very enlightened Buddhist monk.

testing oneself with fun hypotheticals

fun

you've got a peculiar taste for fun, I must admit

That's not a matter of agency, that's still a matter of the goodness of the action. You constructed a version where more of the magic hot guys is bad, and made the valence negative again. So now one is better, and agency still isn't a factor.

What's actually interesting is the doctor version. Kill one healthy person and harvest their organs to save five people from death? That, at first glance, puts agency back in the equation. But drag still thinks the key isn't agency. It's power. In the trolley version, you have no power over who's on the other track. You didn't choose that person in particular to die, they just happened to be in the way. In the doctor version, either you or the boss chose a healthy person to die. You got to pick. You cannot take responsibility for picking. And you cannot support a system in which another person picks either. But when random chance picks who has to die, that's fine. There's no abuse of power in that one. Killing who you need to kill in order to save others isn't abusive power. Picking who dies, when you could have picked someone else, that's abuse.