The Great Train Dilemma In the story the “train switch dilemma” a single train car is rushing toward a group of five unknowing workers who cannot hear the train approaching. Another train worker, who we will call Alex is working at his summer job, he sees the train headed for the five unknowing workers. Alex notices a rail switch lever which if pulled will divert the train unto a different track, however, if Alex pulls the rail switch lever he sees that it will divert the train to a track with one lone worker surly killing the one standing alone. The rail switch lever presents the following dilemma, do nothing and the train continues on its path towards the five, or pull the rail switch lever and send the train towards the one person. In this essay I will show why Alex should not pull the rail switch lever and doing so would be morally wrong. Making a choice that results in the intentional killing of someone and ignoring his or her value would be …show more content…
If we applied this moral principle of Peter Singer’s to the train dilemma we could look at it from a different view. Pulling the rail switch lever and saving five lives would be preventing something bad from happening. However, in doing so, we would be intentionally killing the lone worker on the tracks, which would be sacrificing something (someone) of equal moral importance, an innocent life. How do we determine equal moral importance? Are five lives more important than one, just because there is a greater number of lives? Are all lives equal and the decision to pull or not pull the rail switch lever needs additional factors to decide? I know some would say that five lives are not equal to one life, that they are actually more
The phrase “history repeats itself is quite evident in this film. Currently, China’s economy is in a massive industrial revolution, similar to the American industrial revolution of the early 19th century. After three years of following the Zhang family, first time director Lixin Fan released The Last Train Home, attempting to raise awareness to the down side of China’s powerful economy. While the film The Last Train Home seems to just depict the lives of factory workers, it is also making a political statement about how western capitalism exploits factory workers to produce cheap goods. The film makes this exploitation evident by depicting the fracturing of the Zhang family and the harsh working conditions they must endure.
Everybody lives one life, but some they live many lives. Vivian Daly, in The Orphan Train by Christina Kline, has lived in numerous homes, had 3 different names, and countless life changing experiences in her many years. Niamh Power, Dorothy Nielsen, and lastly Vivian Daly these different characters vary everything from appearance to religious views. These different names make her who she is in life. Everyone of the names is more than just some letters, the changing of names is the changing of her life, the girl she used to be no longer exists when ever that name no longer exists. Nothing in her life stayed the same so why should her name?
moral decisions, we will be analyzing why this scenario poses a dilemma, possible actions that
This paper explores Peter Singer’s argument, in Famine, Affluence, and Morality, that we have morally required obligations to those in need. The explanation of his argument and conclusion, if accepted, would dictate changes to our lifestyle as well as our conceptions of duty and charity, and would be particularly demanding of the affluent. In response to the central case presented by Singer, John Kekes offers his version, which he labels the and points out some objections. Revisions of the principle provide some response to the objections, but raise additional problems. Yet, in the end, the revisions provide support for Singer’s basic argument that, in some way, we ought to help those in need.
In the former choice, we decide to turn the trolley to save five, but kill one. Warren S. Quinn argues that “if our action is a certain kind of withdrawing of aid, it naturally enough seems to count as negative agency” (Quinn 303). The purpose of this choice is not to kill the lives of five. Actually, we have to kill the life of one, but it seems to be the failure to save one. This decision comes from negative agency. On the other hand, the later choice is decide to allow to kill five, but save one. According to Quinn, “negative agency would include the foreseeably harmful inactions that could not or need not have been avoided” (Quinn 292). The purpose of this choice is not to kill the life of one. The consequence that the lives of five is killed also seems to the failure to save them. This choice also comes from negative agency. In this case, we can’t avoid to sacrifice either the lives of five or the life of one. Moreover, this is the conflict between the agencies which have the same nature. Therefore, we can compare the moral values of the two choices by the amount of the sacrifice. As a result, we are morally permitted to turn the trolley in order to save the lives of five, but kill one in this
"Ethical utilitarianism can most generally be described as the principle that states that the rightness or wrongness of action is determined by the goodness and badness of their consequences." (Utilitarianism EOP 9: 603.) Following this guide line the morally right decision to make is to rescue the group with five ...
The ‘Trolley Car Problem’ has sparked heated debates amongst numerous philosophical and jurisprudential minds for centuries. The ‘Trolley Car’ debate challenges one’s pre-conceived conceptions about morals, ethics and the intertwined relationship between law and morality. Many jurisprudential thinkers have thoroughly engaged with this debate and have consequentially put forward various ideologies in an attempt to answer the aforementioned problem. The purpose of this paper is to substantiate why the act of saving the young, innocent girl and resultantly killing the five prisoners is morally permissible. In justifying this choice, this paper will, first, broadly delve into the doctrine of utilitarianism, and more specifically focus on a branch
In life, situations arrive that force us to make tough choices. Sometimes those choices are not what we feel are compassionate or morally right. We make these decisions to save ourselves. These are decisions of self-preservation, and they override compassion. Tadeusz Borowski depicts these choices in his book This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. He shows that when people are put in the choice of doing what’s right or preserving their life, one is preferred over the other. Would they rather save their selves or just watch others be sent to their death. In the novel, the narrator wrestles with his decisions and like Borowski suffers from them.
My question stems from the “The trolley problem” which gives a person the imaginary option of pulling a lever to save five people from an oncoming trolley and killing one person or letting the trolley go and kill the five people saving, that one other person. Another way this dilemma is set up is: say you were walking on a bridge with a fat man and you saw that a trolley was coming below you and was about to hit five people but, you knew if you pushed this fat man off the bridge to block the trolley then you could save the five people at the expense of the fat
Richard Miller finds Singer’s conclusion unrealistically demanding. He approaches the problem differently and claims that we should instead accept the Principle of Sympathy. According to Miller’s Principle, what morality directly demands is a sufficiently strong concern towards neediness. One’s disposition to help the needy is “sufficiently strong” if expressing greater concern would “impose a significant risk of worsening one’s life” . The Principle of Sympathy differs from Singer’s Principle of Sacrifice mainly in two ways. First, the Principle of Sympathy is a moral code that concerns more with an agent’s disposition to give rather than the amount of money he end...
However, in order for her thesis to be correct, the Bystander at the Switch case must always be morally permissible. There should be no situation in which it is morally impermissible to kill the one and save the five. If there were such a situation, where both parts of Thomson’s thesis remained true but it would still be morally impermissible to kill the one because of some outside factor, then Thomson’s thesis would no longer be the complete answer.
Act-consequentialism is a moral theory that maintains what is right is whatever brings about the best consequences impartially considering. The main and most renowned form of act-consequentialism is act utilitarianism which advocates agents choosing the moral path that creates the greatest good for the greatest number, this being the most widely known form of act-consequentialism is the moral theory that I shall be concentrating on though out my discussion. Impartiality is the notion that everybody should count for one and nobody more than one, which is often considered to be a “double-edged sword” (Jollimore, 2017) meaning there is debate as to whether impartiality is a strength or weakness of the theory. Throughout my essay I attempt to point out an important misunderstanding made by theories that uphold impartiality as a weakness of act-consequentialism and how this could lead to the view that impartiality is in fact a strength of both act utilitarianism and act consequentialism.
Singer takes on many assumptions, inferring that if one can agree with each assumption they will also agree with the conclusion. He observes that in a general sense, suffering and death due to a shortage on food, shelter and medicine is bad. The next is that if it is within our power to do something without something else bad happening and without ceding anything of equal moral consequence then we are therefore responsible to do it. This requires us only to keep out the bad and not necessarily to promote the good. Though the idea seems relatively uncontroversial, it is ambiguous. The principle does not take into account the space between those in need and the potential help or if there is only one person or a whole host of people with the ability to help....
Whether to kill one person to save a hundred worthwhile lives is all about looking at the consequences. This can be looked at in three ways, which include the utilitarian, ethical-egoist, and the egoist-altruism view. Ethical egoism theory states that the correct act in any given situation is that which maximizes the self-interest of a person. It is
To begin the lecture, Professor Michael Sandel gave the students a scenario. The scenario was as follows: there is a trolley car that has no breaks and is heading down track. At the end of this track are five workingmen and all would be killed if the trolley car ran into them. However, there is another track going off one side where there is only one worker that would also die if the trolley car hit him or her. So, he asked his students which option would be the better one, continue toward the five workers and kill them all, or spare their lives and turn the trolley car down the other track and kill the one worker. He took a poll by raised hands to see what option most of the students would chose. The majority of the students chose to turn the trolley car and kill the one worker rather than keep the trolley going straight and kill the five workers. Some students shared their thought processes in why they made that decision before the speaker moved on to the next scenario (The Moral Side of Murder”).