- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
There is a variant of the trolley problem wherein you are asked whether you'd push an obsecenely obese person off a bridge in order to have their weight stop a train and therefore save five people. Most people don't even think of one particular benefit from a utilitarian standpoint: that by killing this obese person, you can save other lives indirectly due to not incurring public medical fees used to maintain this person's life.
So they avoid the tricky question, where the utility issue isn't obvious. Obviously in the first situation, you shove fatso to save five people. Of course. Thanks for the gimme question.
But they avoid the tougher question of whether you shove off lardass even when there aren't five people right there.
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