Sathya Tadinada

Period 3

19 October 2020

What’s the Right Thing to Do?

 Hypothetical Scenarios:

o The Trolley Problem:

 You are driving a train and you find five people on the track. You try

stopping but your brakes aren’t working. However, there is a side branch,

that has one person on it. Do you turn or keep going forward? What is the

right thing to do?

 Reason to turn:

o It is better to kill less people than more people.

o In 9/11, the people who crashed in the field are viewed as

heroes because they killed the people in the plane and not

those in the towers.

o Trolley Problem: An Onlooker’s Perspective

 There is no side branch to turn. You are on a bridge watching the train and

standing next to you is a fat man. Your choice is to either watch five

people die or push the man off the bridge, saving the five.

 Reason to not push:

o You are making an active decision to sacrifice someone’s

life, who otherwise wouldn’t have taken part in it.

 o Pushing someone with your own hands is worse than

turning the direction of a train.

o Doctor in an Emergency Room:

 6 patients come to your office (they’ve all been in a trolley accident). 5

have moderate injuries and 1 is severely injured. You can spend all your

time helping 5 and then the one person dies, or vice versa.

 Majority says “save 5” because 5 lives is better than 1.

o Transplant Surgeon:

 Five patients are in severe need of 5 different organs. There is a healthy

patient napping. Do you take the five organs of the healthy person to save

the five patients?

 Moral Reasoning:

o Consequentialist: Locates morality in the consequences of an act.

 The end justifies the means.

o Categorical: Locates morality in certain duties and rights.

 Philosophy teaches and us and unsettles us by confronting the ideologies of what we

already know.

o It estranges us from the familiar, by inviting and evoking a new way of seeing.

 Once the familiar turns strange, it is never the same again.

 Disillusionment and self-knowledge are rites of passage.

 Having good philosophy may make you a worse person (perhaps before you become a

better one).
 The very fact that we come back to philosophical questions may suggest that though they

are impossible in one sense, they are unavoidable in other sense.

o They are unavoidable because we live through versions of these scenarios every

day.