Wow, I had no idea there was such opposition to (as you said) silly things on a meme community. I also don’t understand how your assertions invalidate the core premise. It seems to me that by focusing on the meta-context of someone hypothesizing a contrived scenario you may be avoiding the question being posed, which is “if you or someone else is going to die, and you both have control over who does, is it morally defensible for you to allow the other person to die so you can live?”
You could create a different hypothetical scenario, such as “you are on a plane that is crashing with someone else and there is only one parachute. Is it wrong for you to take it and jump?” I think that could be an interesting question to grapple with, but according to my understanding of your argument the answer would just be, “blame the guy that didn’t pack two parachutes.” Fair enough, but that does nothing to address what is trying to be asked.
You could come up with specific scenarios to ask specific questions, but making it a trolley problem meme instead does a couple things. First, it puts the question in a common framework that many people are already familiar with. If you understand and accept the premise of the basic trolley problem, posing other questions as one should make it easier for you to understand. Second, it’s a lot easier to create trolley problem memes. If someone wanted to make a meme of the parachute scenario above, they would have to draw or find art assets to put it together. Making a trolley meme requires three images; person with the lever, tracks, and the trolley itself. It would be really easy for someone with even the most basic photo editing skills to put something together, which makes asking these questions (in a silly format no less) far more accessible to more people, and I think that’s a good thing.
Now, being more accessible does mean that it’s easier for those who aren’t able to articulate themselves to make these memes. Looking at the original meme again you’re right that it isn’t written well. But the very first thing I learned studying philosophy was the principle of charity, which has two parts. First, assume the other person has something worth saying. Second and more relevant here is that questions of meaning come before questions of truth. When I read the text as written in this meme the truth is obviously “no you won’t be charged with murder.” But when I consider the typo, the run on sentence, and just take in the scenario as shown in the picture, I have to wonder if the creator is actually concerned with the legal ramifications, or moral and maybe emotional ramifications they feel a need to express through legal questioning.
I don’t know, I guess I just wrote a short essay basically saying I feel like I understand the meme better than I understand the mentality you’ve expressed here. I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
Well, you’ve wandered straight into the problem that is unavoidable if you study trolley problems for long enough. Context matters HUGELY and is an infinite fractal. Take for example your airplane/parachute situation - there is no single answer and therefore it’s unanswerable because it’s so dependent on the situation, the people involved, where are you, how much time do you have, how heavy are the two of you, do you have time to tie yourselves together and attempt to both use the parachute, etc etc etc. But the worst bit is so many people will then try and make a trolley problem equivalent, which you also can’t do without changing the context further.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with academic conversations about trolley problems, but low quality, unanswerable variants posted in meme subreddits might not be the best place.
I don’t know man I think it was a good post. If you didn’t like how this convo went you could always just fall back to “sir this is a wendys” in the future
Wow, I had no idea there was such opposition to (as you said) silly things on a meme community. I also don’t understand how your assertions invalidate the core premise. It seems to me that by focusing on the meta-context of someone hypothesizing a contrived scenario you may be avoiding the question being posed, which is “if you or someone else is going to die, and you both have control over who does, is it morally defensible for you to allow the other person to die so you can live?”
You could create a different hypothetical scenario, such as “you are on a plane that is crashing with someone else and there is only one parachute. Is it wrong for you to take it and jump?” I think that could be an interesting question to grapple with, but according to my understanding of your argument the answer would just be, “blame the guy that didn’t pack two parachutes.” Fair enough, but that does nothing to address what is trying to be asked.
You could come up with specific scenarios to ask specific questions, but making it a trolley problem meme instead does a couple things. First, it puts the question in a common framework that many people are already familiar with. If you understand and accept the premise of the basic trolley problem, posing other questions as one should make it easier for you to understand. Second, it’s a lot easier to create trolley problem memes. If someone wanted to make a meme of the parachute scenario above, they would have to draw or find art assets to put it together. Making a trolley meme requires three images; person with the lever, tracks, and the trolley itself. It would be really easy for someone with even the most basic photo editing skills to put something together, which makes asking these questions (in a silly format no less) far more accessible to more people, and I think that’s a good thing.
Now, being more accessible does mean that it’s easier for those who aren’t able to articulate themselves to make these memes. Looking at the original meme again you’re right that it isn’t written well. But the very first thing I learned studying philosophy was the principle of charity, which has two parts. First, assume the other person has something worth saying. Second and more relevant here is that questions of meaning come before questions of truth. When I read the text as written in this meme the truth is obviously “no you won’t be charged with murder.” But when I consider the typo, the run on sentence, and just take in the scenario as shown in the picture, I have to wonder if the creator is actually concerned with the legal ramifications, or moral and maybe emotional ramifications they feel a need to express through legal questioning.
I don’t know, I guess I just wrote a short essay basically saying I feel like I understand the meme better than I understand the mentality you’ve expressed here. I’m interested to hear your thoughts.
Well, you’ve wandered straight into the problem that is unavoidable if you study trolley problems for long enough. Context matters HUGELY and is an infinite fractal. Take for example your airplane/parachute situation - there is no single answer and therefore it’s unanswerable because it’s so dependent on the situation, the people involved, where are you, how much time do you have, how heavy are the two of you, do you have time to tie yourselves together and attempt to both use the parachute, etc etc etc. But the worst bit is so many people will then try and make a trolley problem equivalent, which you also can’t do without changing the context further.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with academic conversations about trolley problems, but low quality, unanswerable variants posted in meme subreddits might not be the best place.
Alright, I guess I’ll just post the purely humorous ones then.
The post was fine. People who get angry at the concept of a thought experiment are just admitting that they’re uncomfortable with thinking.
It’s be one thing if it was some thinly vieled “gotcha”, but it isn’t.
I’m not angry, I’m just like sigh this again
I don’t know man I think it was a good post. If you didn’t like how this convo went you could always just fall back to “sir this is a wendys” in the future
I could go a wendy’s tbh