Bruce Cohen wrote: BC> Brian is not advocating killing anyone, much less the 'innocent fat man' in the trolley problem. <BC
It's true that I'm not advocating killing anyone in our universe, because as far as I know it currently contains no runaway trolleys of the kind stipulated in the TP. But if it did, I would indeed advocate killing the fat man -- just as Harland said it would have been acceptable to kill an innocent baby that Hitler hypothetically always kept at his side if doing so were the only way to kill Hitler. Harland Harrison wrote: HH> The "Trolley Problem" which Brian Holtz tries to use to justify aggression amounts to this: Do you push an innocent fat man in front of a trolley, if killling him that way would save other people further down the track? <HH No, that's a variant of the original TP. HH> The fat guy owns his own life; if he wants to stop the trolley he can jump in front of it. <HH To hide behind the selfishness of the fat man in this variant is to blatantly dodge the moral dilemma of the original TP, in which the single innocent is tied to the tracks and cannot save the other five innocents. It's trivial to remove this escape hatch by stipulating that the fat man doesn't know (and can't be told in time) what you know about the situation. HH> Pushing the fat guy is legally murder. <HH Ethics is how we decide what laws to write, not the other way around. And another escape hatch clanks shut on Harland's fingers... HH> Philosopher Judith Thomson devised this problem because she thought nobody would ever believe you should push the fat man in front of the trolley. <HH Can you quote her saying she thought nobody would ever opt for pushing the fat man? I'd be surprised if she was that ill-informed. However, I wouldn't be surprised at all if you were confused on this point, since you were still saying nobody would push the fat man even after Kennita told you she would. HH> If you want to read about trolley massacre <HH Killing one innocent is hardly a "massacre". What starts to be a "massacre" is when you would sacrifice four extra innocents just to keep your hands clean. And when I asked you: "is there any number of innocents -- e.g. five billion -- that would change your answer to the Trolley Problem?", you mumbled something about "298,000,000". Now that's a massacre. The first message (810) you cited is systematically rebutted here <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/835> , and you have never responded to my systematic <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/862> rebuttal of the other message you cited -- in which I asked you for the fifth time: "So the hand of a bystander pushing the fat man's chest and thus causing him to die is strictly forbidden, but the hand of a bystander pushing a switch and thus causing him to die might be allowed, even though in both cases the bystander knows that the push will cause the fat man's death?"
