Excerpt:
The doctor who performed the Netherlands’ first case of euthanasia on a child under 12 did so with due care, the supervising committee concluded after investigating. The patient, a child of nearly 2 years who suffered from several severe medical conditions, died at the end of 2025.
The solution where you don’t kill someone is the correct one.
Lemme rephrase the trolley problem: you’re a surgeon. You have five people dying on the table, in need of an organ donor. A healthy young man with a broken leg shows up at the ER. Do you butcher him for parts to save the five dying people?
Not even apples and oranges, more like apples and gas giant planets.
The healthy patient is most likely going to survive and thrive for many years.
The two year old was going to die within a decade; would never be able to walk or talk; couldn’t even learn to feed themselves.
I’m talking about the trolley problem?
What part of my comment confused you?
edit = never mind. I saw the other comments this person made. I will just ignore them.
I responded to the trolley problem comment, I made no comments on the article itself.
no, that is the incorrect answer,
to not pull the lever, the puller considers their culpability in the harm caused by their intervention. “morality is determined by the action.”
where as those who pull the lever decide on the morality by the amount of harm. “morality is determined by the results”
the ones who abstain on pulling the lever are not making a moral choice of the situation, they are preventing an action that can cause harm and assigning blame of the greater situations harm on someone else. a very self centered consideration.
Fair enough.
I definitely wouldn’t want to be a minority if you were in charge. Good of the many and all…
There was an old interactive guide I think of every time this comes up, democracy is already a problem for minorities, and even getting to a compromise may be hard
It’s kind of off-topic, though
Yeah this whole sub thread is off topic.
Trolley problem is interesting because there isn’t a cleanly correct answer, and both answers can lead to atrocities when applied at societal scale. It also leads to interesting questions about the value of a human life, which lead to thornier topics.
Utilitarian theory dictates that the lives of five people are worth more than the life of one. That could easily lead to tyranny of the majority, however.
if you want to alter the trolley problem go ahead and make your claim, but do not attempt to twist the trolley problem and assume my results. your straw man insinuation is dis-honest
I haven’t altered anything, nor have I insinuated anything.
I have, however, applied reductio ad absurdum.
You have altered it. If you kill the patient you are a murderer. If you switch the tracks you are minimizing the damage done by a person that tied a bunch of people to the tracks. They are not morally equivalent.
Oh, your version is much easier, no moral questions whatsoever. Matter of fact, it’s not even a problem anymore.
Five? It’s five million. There are five million people on the trolley tracks. The correct answer is to pull the lever and then run to try and save the one person on the other set of tracks. Any decent person would at least TRY to save everyone, even if they’ll fail.
Okay. Say you have five million people waiting on organ donation. Do you chop up the healthy young man with the broken leg to use his parts to save five million?
Your solution, while admirable, is not the trolley problem.
Well, if he’s just in there for a broken leg and he’s conscious, I think I’d ask him to volunteer. Is there a reason we can only use his organs and not mine?
Your scenario seems overly complicated when field surgeries already exist, where medics frequently have to make life-or-death decisions already via triage.
What about you? How do you save the five million patients?
You’re coming up with edge cases that sidestep the trolley problem very effectively.
Given the actual trolley problem, I said it before and I’ll say it again: I would not pull the lever.
It’s your choice how you’d do it, but at the end of the day, you doomed the 5 million to die, where simply pulling the lever, which was in front of you, a small convenient act, could have saved them.
It’s intentionally tough a problem that has no real correct answers. Is your conscience, your personal ethical purity, worth 5 million other full human lives? Perhaps. But not many others see it that way.
Technically you get to keep your hands clean, say you didn’t kill anyone, but really, you chose not to save 5 million people for that small privilege, which only impacts your own self, your own wellbeing, your own mental health. You save yourself from having to bear the consequences of acting, sacrificing 5 million others in the process. It’s entirely a selfish act that can be conveniently argued away, but only naively, by isolating the act of saving 5 million lives from the act of causing one death. The real question isn’t which is worth more, of the two tracks, but how highly you value your own convenience and the integrity of yourself against the lives of others. If you place your own mental wellbeing above that of another being, that’s one thing. Placing it above 5 million others that will never get to even have a mental health anymore, is a very high estimation of your own worth. But it’s valid. We see action by inaction every day, causing pain and suffering all over the world.
This is different from the hospital analogy you keep bringing up. And not merely on a technicality. The premise is not the same at all.
Well, the original trolley problem is five people. Not really sure why the guy that brought up the trolley problem decided to insist on five million. Not even sure how the trolley problem is relevant to the article, tbh, but I responded to the trolley problem.
How is that hospital analogy different, apart from the method of execution? You either kill one person, or allow five to die through inaction in both cases. The reason I like the analogy is because it strikes at a much deeper aspect of human psychology–the method of killing matter as much as, if not more, than the act of killing.
Nazis ran into this same dilemma: on the eastern front, they found that even the hardest SS Hitler lovers could only do 3-4 executions before they became psychologically incapable. That’s why they came up with the gas trucks, but the screaming still bothered people, so they came up with the camps. Instead of pulling a trigger and washing the brains off your rifle at the end of the day, you just had to flip a switch.
Would it make it easier for you to answer if I said eight billion? What would you do? One person on one set of tracks, the entire rest of the population of Earth on the other. Do you pull the lever then?
Nope
The amount of people on the other track is meaningful, true, but the point I made stands just as well with 5 people instead of 5 million. Latter just highlights the dissonance we all battle with within ourselves when sweating the dilemma. But it’s the same hyperbole the hospital analogy does, so in reality it’s the same in taking the original problem and stretching it out to absurd proportions to make the point.
Even so, the doctor dilemma you present is a worthwhile one to get anxious about in its own right anyway, and I’m not saying it’s not. Just different. If the question was not that you are the doctor, but a person with a lever, pulling of which would send a nurse to take the otherwise healthy man to be cut up for parts to save the 5 others, then we’d be in the same realm. The trolley analogue of your dilemma would be that you are the conductor, perhaps, and as the conductor may choose to change tracks or not. Being an active party already in play is different than being a bystander forced in the situation without connection other than the action, or lack of one, to take.
Fair enough.
I have some thoughts on the active/passive proposal you mentioned in your second paragraph, and I’m not sure whether I sit on the side of it being irrelevant or still equivalent. Possibly both. The choice is ultimately still the same, and I don’t think it necessarily changes the moral calculus if you’re a conductor/doctor/bystander.
But my solution to the trolley problem is still to not flip the switch.
you have no idea how organ donation works.
And you seem to struggle with hypothetical analogies. Sucks for both of us I guess.