In 1937, it was 40 hours a week per household. Now it's 80 hours a week per household. The amount of work done by the average person has doubled for the same or less pay.

Drag chooses to kill those people because drag knows nothing about them. Drag just assume they're randos. And on average, people suck. Drag's friends are great people.

If drag knew more about the people, the equation would change. Drag finds it difficult to reason seriously about a scientist discovering a cure for cancer, since there's no such thing. There are hundreds of cancers. There's no one solution for all of them and there never will be. We'll need hundreds of cures for cancer, many of which we already use today.

If we went with a more realistic scenario, like "one of those people will be the leader of the USA's communist revolution", drag would be much more willing to kill drag's friends. Drag might also commit suicide about it, though, so maybe the numbers aspect is equal anyway. Would drag give drag's life and all drag's friends' lives away for a communist America? Probably, but drag would sure like some assurance it's going to be proper anarchist communism, and drag wants to know if another leader could have taken that place. Does drag even believe in the "great man" approach to history, or is there no such thing as such a leader? Is there nobody that important?

Drag's friends. Drag has at least ten friends probably, and drag's friends are at least 10% better than the average rando. They're mostly communists and queers. The world is better off with them in it than with some random people who are probably capitalists.

You pulling the trigger to switch the trolley to kill only the 1 person can and will have consequences on your own mental health.

That's called selfishness, and it's not generally considered a factor in ethics. At most, that changes the equation to 2 vs 5. Still easy.

unless you're a fucking psychopath, you're not gonna kill your newborn to save 5 strangers.

Then psychopaths are right and neurotypical people are wrong. The world would be better off if it had more psychopaths, as you describe them.

But you're wrong about psychopaths. See, what you're describing is limited empathy. You have more empathy for your baby than for five strangers, because of your limited point of view and inability to abstract the situation and see the bigger picture. A psychopath, according to pop psychology (psychopathy doesn't actually exist in serious psychology, but let's pretend it does) has no empathy. A psychopath doesn't care who dies. They probably save the baby because it's more socially acceptable and will make them look good. That's selfishness again.

If you want to know who saves the strangers, well that's someone who has empathy for both the baby and the strangers, and the wisdom to empathise equally with both. That kind of wisdom is extremely rare because natural selection doesn't favour it. It doesn't offer any advantage over the rest of the species to be that selfless. So you'd be most likely to find it in an extremely rare combination of autistic traits, or in a very enlightened Buddhist monk.

Please see the other comment drag wrote in this thread in reply to the earlier comment replying to drag, which drag wrote before seeing yours.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/14997510

That's not a matter of agency, that's still a matter of the goodness of the action. You constructed a version where more of the magic hot guys is bad, and made the valence negative again. So now one is better, and agency still isn't a factor.

What's actually interesting is the doctor version. Kill one healthy person and harvest their organs to save five people from death? That, at first glance, puts agency back in the equation. But drag still thinks the key isn't agency. It's power. In the trolley version, you have no power over who's on the other track. You didn't choose that person in particular to die, they just happened to be in the way. In the doctor version, either you or the boss chose a healthy person to die. You got to pick. You cannot take responsibility for picking. And you cannot support a system in which another person picks either. But when random chance picks who has to die, that's fine. There's no abuse of power in that one. Killing who you need to kill in order to save others isn't abusive power. Picking who dies, when you could have picked someone else, that's abuse.

The greatest work of art ever created was made by writers who think subtext is for cowards. It's called Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. It's about a cyborg ninja who turns fascists into human confetti. It tackles fundamental themes of human agency from the point of view of nature, nurture, culture, and identity. It deconstructs and then reconstructs the concept of free will while criticizing the military industrial complex and entire entirety of conservative ideology. The final boss of the game is a United States senator who wants to "make America great again" and you rip out his fucking heart after spending an hour debating political philosophy with him.

Radical, illogical levels of misogyny are not an altered state of consciousness. Evil is mundane.

If you're the kind of person who thinks feminism is annoying, then you deserve to be annoyed. It wouldn't upset you if you were cooler.

It understands it just fine. Agency is not a factor in the decision. The choice between action and inaction doesn't matter. People think it matters because people are driven by shortsighted emotions.

Musk fans don't want humanity to advance. They hate technological progress.

No shields. They'll attract Shai-Hulud.