Save everyone. No sacrifice is needed unless the man wants to do it.
EDIT: Re-read it, I am kind of confused do you mean the trolly is coming down a hill to the people and you need to push the man to stop it?

 

If fatboy is some innocent bystander, then no.
If ten people get mowed down, that's not my fault.
If I kill fat man, that is.
How do I know the fat guy will even stop the trolley, or these isn't some braking system that hasn't kicked in?
Imagine if you turfed him over and the trolley stopped? Uh Oh!

Maybe if the fat guy was some scumbag I had just arrested, or he just tried to sell my kids drugs, then I'd send him flying, hopefully not to land on the workers and kill them.

 

i think the analogy would have been better said like this.

a car is about to hit a little 5 year old girl who stepped out in the street to get her ball, cause you know how often that is, a car is coming at 45 miles per hour, head on about to hit her, likely kill her. you have the chance to push the girl out of the way, but will likely get hit by the car instead, most likely ending your life. there is no way around you are her dying. WHICH would you PICK?

 

I agree with AVC. Not my Fault. But if you have time to push the fat guy, and he roles down the hill. Couldnt you just Run down the hill and tell the workers to get the hell out of the way?

Just a thought.

 

mine made perfect sense,

but if you wanted a better scenerio: it would be

you and your friend are being chased by a horde of bears, human hungry bears, they're traveling about 8 mph and are about half a mile away, your traveling at 4 mph cause you and your friend have a broken foot each from jumping off a ledge. you and your friend are both carrying about 10 pounds of medicine each that you need to get to a bunch of sick people or they will die. you two both have 1 bullet left. you think fast, those people at home need to live and you need to live, but if you and your friend keep at this pace, you two will end up getting caught up by the bears and eaten to death. so you have two options, try your best to get away at a 10% chance of making it out alive. or guarantee a 100% chance that you will live and others will live by shooting your friend in the leg so that he can get eaten up and you have the chance to escape.

DAMN GOOD scenerio if i might say!

 

If it was a good friend of mine, I couldn't do it. However, if it was someone that i just met and it meant me or him. I think I would do it.

 

If it was someone I cared about, I would definitely not have been able to do what Shane did to Otis. However, if it was a stranger or acquaintance, I'd be a little more inclined to the idea if it was me or them. But, ultimately, I would try my hardest to save both our asses. It seems like in the episode they spent so much time struggling on the ground, that they both could have possibly made it out of there had Shane not done it in the first place.

 

this reminds me of another popular one.. if you could go back in time would you kill baby Hitler? As for your scenario, it is hard to choose A or B and because it is such a hard choice the brain searches for other options like seen above. The thing is that we can only speculate what we would do. I don't think I could think fast enough to come up with a plan much less think of pushing a fat guy onto the track. My natural instinct would be to start screaming... I know, I'd be so worthless, lol

 

laugh out loud, no!

 

I wouldn't. I'm glad my people killed that tyrant. WW1 was a tragedy but my people did not wish to live under foreign rule.

 

I don't think you can compare the two situations to be honest. I didn't see how Otis and Shane weren't able to keep running. They could have kept running. If Otis had of ran out of breath and slowed down for the zombies to catch up that wouldn't be Shanes fault and if Shane kept running and left Otis behind that wouldn't be his responsibility either. He purposefully shot the man.

I disagree that this hypothetical situation is a moral dilemma because in a state of compulsion there is no such thing as morality, so either choice is not more or less moral than the other. Morality is about preventing this situation from occurring in the first place.

I wish academic philosophers would stop wasting their time on such questions like this and concentrate on the morality of the initiation of violence, in the form of taxation, laws, and regulations. Ya'know, stuff that actually impacts peoples lifes but of course if they did this they would have no job.

 

I would jump and save the 10 people and the fat man

 

Who would have guessed all of that would happen though? Think about it. What would you do if someone came into your home and started pushing you around telling you what the rules were and how you had to behave? You probably wouldn't like it and would attempt to do something about it.

I would blame the cause of WW1 (and the subsequent chain of events) on Austria as they pulled the first trigger, so to speak.

Plus other factors, such as the peace treaty offered to and accepted by Germany, that you brought up, contributed greatly to WW2.

 

I'm not sure about your point about Gavrilo as we know that the winners write history so I will take that point with a large grain of salt. Gavrilo also died before the war ended (if I remember correctly, it was around that time) and he was imprisoned for 4 years prior to his death barely surviving, in what I would assume to be very poor conditions. If the assassination did not take place, Serbia may have ceased to exist, I may not be living today, my people may not be living today. Gavrilo did what he thought was best for his people. At that point in history I am sure that Gavrilo was busy focusing on his dying people and how to break free from oppression, leaving little time to worry about foreign affairs.

I do understand the math, and the numbers are truly catastrophic, but just because you're the little guy, it doesn't mean you should be forced to suffer, bite your tongue, and not have a say in what happens in your own country. At that point, you're looking after your own survival and doing what you can to ensure that there is a future for your people.

I'm sure you're correct on your first point in your last paragraph and I agree that it was a mindless war, but the war turned into something so much more then Serbia/Austria VERY quickly.. Do you think The Allies went to war to protect Serbia from Austria/Germany? Of course not. They went to war because Germany found a good excuse to declare war and wanted to attempt to expand themselves. Had Germany simply declared war on Serbia, it would have been a war of Russia against Germany.