this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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What you are failing to understand is, that this was the most realistic version of the trolley problem you could encounter; there was no option you could take, that wouldn't have supported real world genocide; someone would have always died under the trolley. The three basic options available all lead to genocide; by choosing democrats you supported some real world genocide and ideologically genocide, by choosing republicans you supported even worse genocide in the real world and ideologically. By choosing neither, you didn't ideologically support genocide, but you supported the actual worse genocide option in the real world.
You chose what you perceived as morally righteous by deciding not to ideologically support genocide, but by choosing that, you enabled real world consequences resulting in more actual genocide than what would have happened if you chose otherwise.
Also, quite ironically, philosophy was my second major in university, so maybe you should take that class instead. Lol
If you have a major in philosophy, then surely you're aware that there are plenty of moral systems that argue against pulling the lever in the trolley problem, and the many critiques of it that exist. Surely you couldn't have spent years studying philosophy and walked away with the conclusion, "Act Utilitarianism is obviously objectively correct, and anyone who disagrees must be too stupid to understand it."
You are making me seriously reconsider my impression of Finland's educational system.
Every hotshot freshman walks into Philosophy 101 thinking that everybody else's ideas are "ideological" while theirs are just "common sense" (nevermind that they all believe different things). If the professor does their job properly, and the students aren't completely obstinate, then they will leave Philosophy 101 understanding that this is not a valid way of understanding anything.
Anyone who claims that everyone else is operating based on ideology and they are not, is simply unaware of their own ideology. And being unaware of it, that ideology has a far greater hold on them than it otherwise might.
The Trolley Problem isn't even meant to have a definite answer. The thought experiment was developed for the explicit purpose of demonstrating how people's moral intuitions differ, as do different schools of moral philosophy. To think, "Pulling the level is obviously objectively correct, and this is a non-ideological claim" is completely and utterly absurd and demonstrates total ignorance of moral philosophy.
What do you think the point of philosophy even is if all it's theories can be dismissed as "ideological" and your own personal "common sense" is a reliable way of determining truth?
You're trying to argue that my position is not empathetic, but that's nonsense. It is empathetic towards Palestinians, who are, contrary to popular beliefs, "actual living humans." You want to build societies off of empathetic principles, alright, first step lets all agree that we shouldn't slaughter innocent people or support anyone who does.
See, your stance may be ethical, moral even, in that you're trying to follow this abstract principle about minimizing harm. But your problem is that you think that those ideas are what matters, while you ignore the real human suffering that's resulting from those ideas.
See, I can play that game too! Almost as if you're still trying to assign special status to your own "common sense" beliefs and refusing to place them on the same level of other people's ideas and allowing them to be subject to critical examination.
Where I come from, morality and ethics refer to what you should and shouldn't do. To say, "You acted in a way that was morally correct and kept yourself morally pure, but you shouldn't have" is self-contradictory nonsense.
What you ought to be saying is that you believe my theory of ethics is incorrect and that yours is correct. But to say that would mean that you would have to admit that you have a specific theory of ethics (such as Act Utilitarianism) which would then be open to critique. And returning to the original point, if you accept that you are operating on a specific theory of ethics with a specific set of assumptions, then there's not really any reason to be "baffled" that other people don't follow it, maybe they simply don't subscribe to the same assumptions about ethics that you do.
But what you're doing instead is ceding to me that my ethical positions are correct, but then asserting that there is some sort of, idk, "Superethics" that supercedes all ethical theories, and which is somehow, not an ethical theory like the other ones are despite the fact that it's a theory of what you should and shouldn't do. And this "Superethics" is apparently supposed to be so obvious and objective that everyone in the world should automatically understand and accept it, regardless of their other beliefs or experiences.
It's kind of incredible that countless philosophers have wasted so much time studying ethics, which is for scrubs and rubes, but hardly anyone seems to have touched on the far more important concept of Superethics.
Meanwhile, my ethical theories are utterly divorced from what I think produces good results for society or what my sense of empathy or my conscience tells me. I just wrote a bunch of random principles on scraps of paper, pinned them to a dartboard, put on a blindfold and spun around three times, and now I have to completely ignore everything I'm inclined to do in slavish devotion to these abstract principles. Personally, I think you should just be relieved that the dart hit, "No Genocide" instead of "Always Genocide."
You don't understand anything.
Look, different people experience things differently, feel things differently, and have different moral intuitions, and different things that they think are "obvious" or "self-evident." This needs to be said, because I'm not sure if you're aware of it. If everyone acted purely based on that, then there would be no end to conflict, and no ability to cooperate on almost any level. In order to resolve these differences, or at the very least to communicate them to others, we take these experiences, feelings, intuitions, etc. and we rationalize them into moral principles.
The reason that I quipped about "putting principles on a dartboard" is because that seems to be how you think people arrive at them. That they are completely arbitrary and unrelated to empathy or moral intuitions, and that they must therefore be in constant conflict with them. That's a completely ridiculous and backwards way of seeing things.
There is no conflict whatsoever what my empathy and conscience tells me and the moral principles I believe, because they are one and the same. The latter is nothing more or less than an attempt to rationalize and verbalize what the former pushes me towards.
When I say that I will not support genocide under any circumstances, this is not some external concept that I read in a book somewhere or that my reason is trying to enforce against the will of my emotions or my conscience. It is my conscience, it is my empathy. The only distinction is that I have packaged my inner experiences of those things into words that are comprehensible to others.
Is is really so hard to accept that my sense of empathy leads me to a different conclusion from yours?
The point is less that I want to critique your specific moral theory (though I will), but more that I want you to acknowledge that it exists, in order to help you understand why people don't see things the way you think they should. I am not a deontologist, though I believe that view is more popular in the States than in Europe.
I'm more or less a Rule Utilitarian. I would argue that moral rules are essentially theories on how to produce desirable results. Such rules are necessary for several reasons: first, because there are many factors that can compromise a person's judgement in the moment, and second, because having such rules or theories allows us to test what works and what doesn't in a broader and more systematic way. I would add that my rules are more like suggestions or guidelines, that can be deviated from, but only if I'm very confident in that judgement, and prepared to accept the fallout.
Imo, your positions are only really defensible from the specific standpoint of Act Utilitarianism, which I see a lot of problems with. Perhaps the biggest is that in practice, you will still end up resorting to moral rules (or mental shorthands if you prefer) because to do otherwise would simply take too much time. When you go to the grocery, you probably don't evaluate the moral implications of every item every time you go there, and if you did, it probably wouldn't be based on something so abstract as "maximizing utility" or "the greatest good for the greatest number," but perhaps, "Which companies treat their workers well," or "Which products are made in countries I want to support," or "Which products contain no meat or animal products?" If you are making evaluations based on standards like that, then those are the moral rules you are operating under, "I should only buy goods from companies that treat their workers well," and so on.
But when you don't recognize those rules as such, then you lose the ability to critically examine them, evaluate them, or even express them. If you aren't making a conscious effort to refine those rules, then those rules are just going to be passively absorbed by what other people around you are doing, or what you're taught, or how things have always be done traditionally, or the ideology of the dominant socioeconomic class: none of which are good reasons for doing something.
Let me bring it back home. When I evaluate a moral claim like, "You should always vote for the lesser evil," then I look at historical examples and see whether the results that strategy has produced are things I consider good or desirable. "If you believe your survival is threatened, it's ok to resort to genocide," has an absolutely terrible track record historically. It's no more rational to believe that than to believe you can fly if you jump off a building. The theory simply has not every held up in practice at all, it is unsupported by evidence and I would even say that it is straight up unscientific. Because the process of evaluating moral theories has at least some similarities to the process of science, perhaps the biggest limitation being the element of subjectivity in evaluating outcomes. But I believe we are on the same page that the results from that belief have always been overwhelmingly negative. But since you aren't evaluating your rules, you won't notice when historical precedent is warning you against something.
So, I'll invent another thought experiment then, since it seems like you're not understanding what I am saying either. Let's say I give a homeless person a thousand dollars, and tell them it's because I want to help them. They're happy, and use that money to get a hotel room and new clothes, and thus get a job and manage to return to partake in the society. What I did was good, yes? Now in actuality I erroneously believed that money to be cursed; so not only was I acting ethically wrong because I was lying, I was also acting morally wrong because my intent was malicious.
Your stance is, that what I did cannot be morally right, since I was indeed intending it to be evil, and that is what matters. My stance is that what matters is that what I did only had a good effect on the world. I am not denying other viewpoints exist, nor am I oblivious to them, I am taking the stance that causing the least amount of harm to living things is essentially the most important thing when considering what is a morally good action. (Edit// this is called "harm reduction")
Now to be clear my stance isn't "ends justify means" either as isn't yours, because had I beaten up some terrible criminal and taken that money from them, it would only have made what I did in actuality even worse, and couldn't be a moral stance to build a society on. Beating up people on the street for money is not maximizing good even if that money is given away in good actions, I'm sure we agree on that.
By moral purity I mean the willingness to do anything, as long as one perceives it to be the most morally good action they can personally take, no matter what actual consequences it causes. You did what you believed was right, and now the bus is headed off the cliff. Or am I still misunderstanding the core of your ideological standpoint?
I disagree with that interpretation of consequentialism.
What determines an action's rightness or wrongness is what consequences can be reasonably expected to occur from that action, not what results actually occur. If I help an old lady across the street, and that just so happens to lead to her being in the street at the time that an out of control car hits her, then I am not to blame for that outcome, because I could not have predicted it. To say that I should be blamed for that when it's a matter of pure chance (or that I deserve credit for doing something I reasonably expected to cause harm, but happened to produce a good result) is, well, silly. It means that it's just a matter of luck whether your actions are moral or not, and that there's no way of knowing ahead of time whether they will be.
That doesn't line up with your argument at all. The only way your position makes any sense is by arguing that the ends justify the means.
Imagine that I had a cursed sword that grows more powerful with each person I kill with it, and my country is ruled by an evil dragon that I need a very powerful sword to defeat. Is it ethical to go out and murder a whole bunch of innocent people (who might also get murdered by the dragon) in order to power up my sword so that I can defeat the dragon? To say "yes" would certainly require saying that the ends justify the means. But this is no different from what you're arguing. The dragon is Trump, the cursed sword are the Democrats, and the innocents are the Palestinians. At the point when you're feeding innocents to the cursed sword or voting for someone who's engaged in genocide, you yourself have become a danger to society and to the world.
You talk about "a moral foundation to build a society on," but if you care about that at all, then obviously my position is the correct one. How on earth is "sometimes it's morally obligatory to do genocide" a moral foundation to build a society on?
The most morally good action one can take is the one that can be reasonably expected to produce the best consequences, and moral rules/theories are designed to help make those predictions. If the actual consequences are things that could have been reasonably predicted, then there's not really a difference between the actual consequences and "what I perceive to be a morally good action." Again, you are ignoring where my moral rules come from and acting as if I randomly arrived at them by throwing darts.
Look; if your obscuring and derailing this discussion the past few messages has been an attempt to disengage me, well, you have now succeeded.
In your quest for moral absolutism in a world very flawed, you have ended up supporting genocide while trying not to. Even Hannah Arendt in her critique of lesser-evilism doesn't come to the conclusion one should choose the worse evil by not opposing it as you're insisting here; but to always remember that the lesser evil is still evil, and do all that can be done so you won't end up in the situation where you're forced to choose in the first place.
You are not responsible for the system that's forcing you to play by it's shitty rules, and you're not personally responsible for not managing to change it, or even for whatever the election result ended up being. But you are responsible for your own actions, and those you're supporting here have been the ones enabling a lot worse outcome for the world. The bus is still headed off the cliff.
As I have sadly lost my faith in you taking part in this discussion with honesty, continuing has been rendered pointless. So: Have a good day! :)