It’s not a good idea to leave your laptop on all the time

It is not recommended to keep your laptop running continuously. This video is brought to you by BetterHelp. Depending on who you ask, the Trolley Problem is either the best or worst thought experiment in all of philosophy. For some, it’s an incredibly clear way to make the stakes of moral philosophy understandable and practical. For others, it turns ethics into a watered-down thought experiment with no basis in reality.

Gaining massive popularity with The Good Place popping up recently, and serving as a way of understanding Joel’s actions in the season finale of The Last of Us, this thought experiment has become one of the biggest examples of philosophy and popular culture.

Now, for those of you who haven’t taken philosophy 101, or for those of you who took it at 9am, the Trolley Problem is a demonstration of a major philosophical conflict - the one between consequentialist ethics, which aim to maximize pleasure, minimize pain, and prioritize actions that help many people over those that benefit just a few, and deontological ethics, which prioritizes moral duty on the basis of rational deliberation and is more about Universal truths than practical applications.

There are lots of versions of the problem, but the main gist is something like: imagine there’s a trolley headed down a track that was gonna hit a bunch of people and you could switch it to another set of tracks, meaning it would only kill one person. So basically, you do nothing and lots of people die, or you switch the tracks and willingly cause one person’s death. This can be complicated by asking how this would change if the single person on the tracks was your child or your best friend or Guy Fieri, in which case the only ethical thing to do will be to let the crowd die to save the Lord of Flavor Town.

Now, in case you’re more of a visual learner, here is an example from The Good Place:

“Your family must choose to willingly sacrifice one of the three of you in order to prevent the apocalypse.”

“Find someone else.”

“There is no one else. We didn’t tell her. We didn’t cause her any fear. There won’t be any pain. No, you take me to her. You take me to her right now.”

This problem has recently become less speculative and more practical as designers and programmers making autonomous vehicles consider how these vehicles should behave in a crisis situation. For example, if a self-driving Tesla detects a person at a crosswalk in front of them and determines it doesn’t have time to stop, it’s better to swerve and hit another car potentially hurting many, or to simply plow over the one poor soul.

Guys, it sucks to say this, but a self-driving car is definitely going to kill someone at some point because of a programmer’s Wikipedia-level understanding of ethics. Let’s just sit in that for a sec.

Okay, but should a classroom example be used to solve actual problems that involve actually existing people? Is this a good example of what ethics is supposed to do? And can it actually teach us anything about the real world? Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition on the Trolley Problem. Are you ready to kill?

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