i can't even guess as to why they went quiet. not one guess at all. we will never know.
edit: well they're not quiet now once they get called out
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
558 points (82.0% liked)
Political Memes
5453 readers
4666 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The vast majority of people would choose worse, at least in some situations.
Philosopher Bernard Williams proposed this thought experiment: suppose someone has rounded up a group of 20 innocent people, and says that he will kill all of them, unless you agree to kill one, in which case he'll let the rest go. Act Utilitarianism would suggest that it is not only morally permissible, but morally obligatory to comply, which Williams saw as absurd. As an addendum, suppose the person then orders you to round up another 20 people so he can repeat the experiment with someone else, and if you don't, he'll have his men kill 40 instead. Congratulations, your "lesser-evilist" ideology now has you working for a psychopath and recruiting more people to work for him too.
Even the trolley problem, which liberals love to trot out to justify their positions, is not nearly as clear cut as they try to pretend it is. A follow up to the trolley problem is, is it ethical to kill an innocent person in order to harvest their organs in order to give five people lifesaving transplants? The overwhelming majority of people say no.
Act Utilitarianism is something that seems intuitive at first glance, but is very difficult to actually defend under scrutiny, and there are many, many alternative moral frameworks that reject its assumptions and conclusions. Liberals don't seem to realize that this framework they treat as absolute and objective - that you would have to be a "lunatic" to reject - is actually a specific ideology, and one that's not particularly popular or robust.
The trolley problem is clearly not clear cut at all, that's what makes it interesting. This, of course, is lost on the Dunning-Kruger crowd.