Thank you so much for being honest about making that choice - almost everyone would choose their friends, but lots of people wouldn’t admit to that. Being honest myself, I’d make the same call - and if it came down to me picking between my friends and drag’s friends, I’d choose my friends. The whole “calculus” we run (comparing how good our friends are to average people) is a way we justify making our decisions, a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance of our values (save as many lives as possible) being in conflict with what we actually do (saving our friends rather than as many lives as possible). In reality you would have no way of knowing who those other 11 people would be - for example, if I said that one of them is a researcher on the brink of curing cancer, how would that change your decision? These are really tough questions to deal with, and that’s the point of the trolley problem - that people make different choices because they have different perspectives, and different values. There’s no objectively right and objectively wrong answer to any of the scenarios. Just different interpretations and ways to think about it.
Thank you so much for being honest about making that choice - almost everyone would choose their friends, but lots of people wouldn’t admit to that. Being honest myself, I’d make the same call - and if it came down to me picking between my friends and drag’s friends, I’d choose my friends. The whole “calculus” we run (comparing how good our friends are to average people) is a way we justify making our decisions, a way to deal with the cognitive dissonance of our values (save as many lives as possible) being in conflict with what we actually do (saving our friends rather than as many lives as possible). In reality you would have no way of knowing who those other 11 people would be - for example, if I said that one of them is a researcher on the brink of curing cancer, how would that change your decision? These are really tough questions to deal with, and that’s the point of the trolley problem - that people make different choices because they have different perspectives, and different values. There’s no objectively right and objectively wrong answer to any of the scenarios. Just different interpretations and ways to think about it.