The inaction would be not giving away bread to save some starving people.
Rephrasing the trolly problem to be about bread and starving people:
Outside your house are 5 starving people. You have enough bread in your house to feed 4 of them. Do you give 4 people bread (pull the lever) or ignore them (not pull the lever)? If you pull the lever, are you responsible for the death of the 1 person? If you don’t pull the lever, are you responsible for the death of the 5 people?
Again, you start the formulation of your moral problem too late. The bread, why is it in a hoard in your house, given that there are starving families? Bread is a very concrete thing, a result of agriculture and shipment and trade and labor; it doesn’t just appear in houses unbidden.
You’re absolutely right that a world where this situation can occur is a flawed world, that’s not what the trolly problem is trying to explain. It’s trying to explain the main points of an ethical framework you can use to analyze any arbitrary situation.
Why are people tied to the tracks in the trolly problem in the first place? Because it’s a contrived example to explain a point. The point being that inaction can cause harm and people can be held accountable for their inactions just as much as their actions.
The OP image asks why ethical theorists don’t ask if it’s right to hoard bread while others are starving, but they do. It’s the trolly problem.
Precisely. It is out of bounds to ask why the person is tied to the tracks because it is contrived; the question proceeds from there. Existential comics asks: “why is it out of bounds? why don’t we ask those other kinds of questions?”
The inaction would be not giving away bread to save some starving people.
Rephrasing the trolly problem to be about bread and starving people: Outside your house are 5 starving people. You have enough bread in your house to feed 4 of them. Do you give 4 people bread (pull the lever) or ignore them (not pull the lever)? If you pull the lever, are you responsible for the death of the 1 person? If you don’t pull the lever, are you responsible for the death of the 5 people?
Again, you start the formulation of your moral problem too late. The bread, why is it in a hoard in your house, given that there are starving families? Bread is a very concrete thing, a result of agriculture and shipment and trade and labor; it doesn’t just appear in houses unbidden.
You’re absolutely right that a world where this situation can occur is a flawed world, that’s not what the trolly problem is trying to explain. It’s trying to explain the main points of an ethical framework you can use to analyze any arbitrary situation.
Why are people tied to the tracks in the trolly problem in the first place? Because it’s a contrived example to explain a point. The point being that inaction can cause harm and people can be held accountable for their inactions just as much as their actions.
The OP image asks why ethical theorists don’t ask if it’s right to hoard bread while others are starving, but they do. It’s the trolly problem.
Precisely. It is out of bounds to ask why the person is tied to the tracks because it is contrived; the question proceeds from there. Existential comics asks: “why is it out of bounds? why don’t we ask those other kinds of questions?”