Choosing not to act is still making a choice and may still result in a negative outcome. It’s the classic trolley problem. While you may not cause harm through an active choice, your inaction can still lead directly to a negative outcome.
One of the issues the Trolley Problem explores is people’s differing willingness to allow harm versus cause it. And that can hold even when the level of harm caused by inaction is significantly higher than what is caused by taking action. E.g. If your personal philosophy dictates that killing someone is always wrong, does it hold if your inaction causes 5 deaths, 10, 50? What if we start tinkering with the people dying? Would you kill a 90 year old man to save a train full of children? The Trolley Problem is really just a starting point to examine that dichotomy between causing harm and allowing harm and just how permeable the line between them can be when you start changing the conditions. Attaching other moral choices to the problem is one way to use the problem to explore a set of beliefs.
Harm was going to happen no matter what you do in the trolley problem. There is no situation where harm does not happen, but there is a situation where you directly are causing harm.
If you give 100 different variations of the problem, I’ll answer 100 different ways, because 100 different questions were asked. Almost none of them actually having a real world application, because there are very few situations in life where a 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, etc option does not exist.
Personally, if I could go the rest of my life without hearing about the trolley problem that’d be great actually.
There is always the option to not pick.
“… or through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics)
You can stand by and do nothing if that’s the lesser evil choice
Choosing not to act is still making a choice and may still result in a negative outcome. It’s the classic trolley problem. While you may not cause harm through an active choice, your inaction can still lead directly to a negative outcome.
I don’t remember the trolley problem being a question with a right and a wrong answer.
One of the issues the Trolley Problem explores is people’s differing willingness to allow harm versus cause it. And that can hold even when the level of harm caused by inaction is significantly higher than what is caused by taking action. E.g. If your personal philosophy dictates that killing someone is always wrong, does it hold if your inaction causes 5 deaths, 10, 50? What if we start tinkering with the people dying? Would you kill a 90 year old man to save a train full of children? The Trolley Problem is really just a starting point to examine that dichotomy between causing harm and allowing harm and just how permeable the line between them can be when you start changing the conditions. Attaching other moral choices to the problem is one way to use the problem to explore a set of beliefs.
“Allow harm”
Harm was going to happen no matter what you do in the trolley problem. There is no situation where harm does not happen, but there is a situation where you directly are causing harm.
If you give 100 different variations of the problem, I’ll answer 100 different ways, because 100 different questions were asked. Almost none of them actually having a real world application, because there are very few situations in life where a 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, etc option does not exist.
Personally, if I could go the rest of my life without hearing about the trolley problem that’d be great actually.