Jill Stein announced a surprise presidential bid Thursday, seeking the Green Party’s 2024 nomination. Stein, a physician who ran against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016 as the Green Party&…
This is exactly the kind of situation the trolley problem was invented to illustrate… and I’ve never seen anyone fail at it so badly with such a weird take.
You’ll allow the greater evil to happen because you don’t want to have any part or any responsibility in helping a lesser evil happen. But you do have responsibility, because you do have a choice. In the trolley problem, f you never knew about the lever, you couldn’t be asked to pull it or not. In the election problem, if you can’t vote you have no responsibility. But the trolley problem states you know about the lever, and in the election scenario, you do have a vote. So you are involved no matter what. And that means you’re just as guilty as the person who acted; only your action resulted in more deaths than the person who acted either way. Yours was the worst possible choice.
Try flipping the words from evil to good. The greater evil is worse, and the lesser evil is better. Therefore, you are choosing the worse scenario rather than the better one. It’s ridiculously absurd.
If your method of voting is to choose the best person you can imagine, rather than someone who has an actual chance of winning, why vote for any candidate? Why not just write-in vote for Superman? Surely he is less evil than any candidate on the ballot.
Voting is like a game with rules. Sometime you simply can’t win. But if you want the best outcome for the game you need to pick the strategy that leads to that outcome. Folding your arms and refusing to change your strategy when your preferred outcome has no chance of success ensures that the people actually playing the game will have it their way. Demanding nothing but the absolute best to earn your vote, and thus not voting for someone with a chance, is statistically identical to supporting the worse evil. It’s sheer foolishness.
This kind of purity contest accomplishes nothing but shooting yourself in the foot. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And allowing the greater evil to win.
in the trolley scenario, i don’t touch the lever. you can choose to be a murderer, but i won’t.
In the trolley scenario, you chose to let 6 people die. Neither choice makes you a murderer. But one choice causes much more harm than the other.
flipping the switch makes you a murderer.
This is exactly the kind of situation the trolley problem was invented to illustrate… and I’ve never seen anyone fail at it so badly with such a weird take.
You’ll allow the greater evil to happen because you don’t want to have any part or any responsibility in helping a lesser evil happen. But you do have responsibility, because you do have a choice. In the trolley problem, f you never knew about the lever, you couldn’t be asked to pull it or not. In the election problem, if you can’t vote you have no responsibility. But the trolley problem states you know about the lever, and in the election scenario, you do have a vote. So you are involved no matter what. And that means you’re just as guilty as the person who acted; only your action resulted in more deaths than the person who acted either way. Yours was the worst possible choice.
Try flipping the words from evil to good. The greater evil is worse, and the lesser evil is better. Therefore, you are choosing the worse scenario rather than the better one. It’s ridiculously absurd.
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If your method of voting is to choose the best person you can imagine, rather than someone who has an actual chance of winning, why vote for any candidate? Why not just write-in vote for Superman? Surely he is less evil than any candidate on the ballot.
Voting is like a game with rules. Sometime you simply can’t win. But if you want the best outcome for the game you need to pick the strategy that leads to that outcome. Folding your arms and refusing to change your strategy when your preferred outcome has no chance of success ensures that the people actually playing the game will have it their way. Demanding nothing but the absolute best to earn your vote, and thus not voting for someone with a chance, is statistically identical to supporting the worse evil. It’s sheer foolishness.
This kind of purity contest accomplishes nothing but shooting yourself in the foot. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod