was surprised to hear that most people's instinctual reaction to the trolley problem is to kill the 1 to save 5. my first reaction is: why should i intervene? i don't necessarily see how one can compare human lives as if they were objects/shekels/what have you. why not just let the situation run its natural course? how is it just that the one innocent man will be sacrificed for the 5? put yourself in the one man's shoes. i understand how in certain real-life dilemmas, you're left with no option sometimes, but the trolley problem doesn't seem that straightforward to me. take for example the Hiroshima and Nagasaki example. how was targeting civilians the most ethical option on the table? why couldn't the use show Japan the might of the nuclear bomb without killing innocents, or, at the very least, by killing soldiers/combatants. i see the problems of utilitarianism and hedonism the more outlandish your thought examples get. and yet, there are philosophers like Joshua Greene who argue it's our best bet at a meta-morality, since de-ontological approaches will always be clouded by our genetic ancestry, specific religious rulesets, and so on. he argues utilitarianism is what gave the creators the idea that slavery was wrong, and that gays/women are deserving of rights, which was clearly very much ahead of the curve compared to most of the rest of the world at the time. what think you /sci/?