A trolley problem, some personal stuff, a bit of Islamic jurisprudence, and then the Honda. 

1)  Trolley time.  Let’s start with the trolley problem.  People proposing trolley problems often do them in two parts.  First, there’s the anodyne one with the easy answer:

A trolley is rushing down the tracks towards a group of five people.  If it hits them, they will die.  If you pull a switch, you can divert the trolley onto a different track.  There is one person on that track, and they will die instead of the five.  Do you pull the switch?



And of course you answer “yes” and then you get sucker-punched with something like this:

Five people are dying of organ failure, from different organs.  If they get transplants they will live out their normal lives,  Without the transplants, they will die.  In front of you is a healthy person who has the organs that they need.  If you kill the healthy person you will save the five.  Do you kill them?



Okay so on one hand trolley problems can be a legitimate tool for exploring values and morality.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff you can unpack with them. But on the other hand these little bait-and-switches can be, frankly, very irritating.  They’re set up to put our rationality at war with our intuitions, emotions, and habits of thought. 

Yes, that can sometimes be a useful or at least informative exercise.  But for most of us, the likely response is going to be less “Hmm, maybe deontological ethics are more appropriate here than a simple utilitarian analysis” and more “Oh, ffs.  Now you’re just being ridiculous.”



We’ll return to this shortly.  First, a short digression on living green.

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