/lit/ - Literature

You are tasked with supervising fund allocation for pharmaceutical research. Currently the top priority is developing a cure for a disease that kills 50000 people annually but recently an unexpected breakthrough has been made in developing a drug for another, even more lethal disease that kills 250000 each year. Experts estimate that if this drug was given the priority, the probability of success and time needed would be the same as with the first cure. What should you do from utilitarian, deontological and virtue ethics points of view?

What would be the legal consequences of pulling that lever?

.

What if the man you kill is a scientist, working on a cure for cancer, and is very close to making a breakthrough? What if one, or both, of the children grow up to become mass murderers?

Their are too many variables that you cannot account for. It's never that black and white.

Furthermore are you accountable for the deaths of the children if you refuse to kill the man in order to feed them?

It's an ethical conundrum, you can't win either way.

>>4766315

So, did we ever figure out an answer?

So, a friend and I discussed the Trolley Problem recently, and a variation just occurred to me. Someone else may have done this before, but I find it kind of interesting.

Say you're placed in a room by a mad scientist, and he informs you that there is a trolley heading down a track, and the lever in front of you can be pulled to turn the trolley so it heads down a different track.

There is a 50/50 chance that there are three people tied to the first track. There are no more than three, and there are no less, unless there are none.

The second track, down which the trolley will head if you flip the switch, may or may not (again, a 50% chance) have one person tied to it.

So, to reiterate, if you flip the switch:

25% chance you've saved three lives at the cost of one.
25% chance you've saved three lives and no one died.
25% chance you've killed one person and saved no lives.
25% chance you've done nothing, really, since there was nobody on either track.

If you don't flip the switch:
25% chance you let three people die but avoided killing one.
25% chance you let three people die and could have saved them without killing anyone.
25% chance you saved a life and nobody died.
25% chance it didn't matter if you flipped it because nobody was on either track.

Whatever your answer was in the original problem, is there any way in which the answer you have for this problem is different, or affected at all by the variation?

>>4095260
>contraindictions

Remember this thread? Comedy Gold

Your feels on nihlism, etc

>pic related