• Random Dent
    18•2 years ago

    If we all collectively agree to just pass it on, then either:

    • It’s infinite, and it just passes on forever, or…

    • It’s not infinite and somebody at the end has no choice, in which case nobody in charge of a lever has killed anyone

    So yeah, I say pass it on.

  • @blackstampede@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
    41•2 years ago

    I’d pull the lever to kill one person immediately. Assuming the decision maker at each stage is a different person with different opinions on moral, ethical, religious, and logical questions, then it’s a near certainty that someone is going to pull the lever to kill the people at their stage. If you’re lucky, it’s the very next guy. If you’re not, it’s the guy killing a million people a couple of iterations later. If I’m the first guy, I’ll take the moral hit to save the larger number of people.

    • @aseriesoftubes@lemmy.world
      16•2 years ago

      If you’re not, it’s the guy killing a million people a couple of iterations later

      I feel like running over all those bodies would make the train come to a stop way before it ran over a million people.

      Now I sit back and wait for some morbid soul who is better at math and physics than me to figure out the answer.

      • @Reliant1087@lemmy.world
        2•2 years ago

        I mean if you’re going fast enough with a pointy train, you could chop up people pretty easy. You just need to make sure that each person is a tire width apart to make sure the wheels don’t lose traction. Assuming a person is roughly half a metre across and a tire is 75cm in diameter, we get 1.25m per person, so a track of 1250km for a million people. Not very long at all.

    • @merc@sh.itjust.works
      5•2 years ago

      I think this is a good metaphor for how humanity has “dealt” with problems like climate change.

      If you make a tough decision, it causes hardship now, but prevents hardship in the future. If you don’t make a tough decision now, someone in the future has to either kill a lot of people, or just pass the buck to the next guy. People justify not making the tough decisions by saying that maybe eventually down the line someone will have an easy decision and there will be nobody on the side path, even though all observable evidence says that the number of people on that path just keeps growing exponentially.

    • @rockSlayer@lemmy.world
      4•2 years ago

      Exactly. If you have the means at hand, you have the responsibility to act. At the risk of taking a shitpost way too seriously, if you were in that situation and actively chose to leave the decision to someone else to kill double the people, then you acted unethically.

    • @kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
      5•2 years ago

      On the one hand, the possibility exists that the buck gets passed forever, especially as the kill count numbers grow substantially making the impermissibility of allowing the deaths grow with it. It’s not likely the any given person would kill one stranger, let alone millions.

      On the other hand, in an infinite series, even something with miniscule odds will still eventually inevitably happen, and some psycho will instantly become the most infamous murderer in history, followed immediately by the person that didn’t just kill one person and end the growth before it started.

    • Doc Avid MorningtonEnglish
      6•2 years ago

      I agree with your logic, so far as it goes. However, there are, currently, just over eight billion humans in existence. If my quick, over-tired math is correct, that means only 34 people have to say no, until we run out of people to tie to the tracks. Assuming, at that point, the system collapses and nobody dies, I’d guess 34 people would refuse - might be the better choice.

      • @blackstampede@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        3•2 years ago

        Oh yeah. I was assuming an infinite series (somehow). Also, odds are good that out of 34 people, one of them would misunderstand the rules or be crazy enough to do it anyway for various reasons. I’d probably still do it.

        • Doc Avid MorningtonEnglish
          2•2 years ago

          You weren’t wrong, the meme implies an infinite series, and I might be cheating to apply real-world constraints to an absurd hypothetical.

  • @cloudy1999@sh.itjust.works
    2•2 years ago

    If we keep doubling, will I eventually be a person on the tracks? There are a finite number of people, so eventually I would be, right? So, passing the buck would be equivalent to handing my fate to a stranger.

    OTOH, if there are an infinite number of people, then this thought experiment is creating people out of thin air. Do these imaginary people’s rhetorical lives even matter?

    Either way, it seems better to kill 1 person at the start.