Is it ethical to hoard wealth that exceeds the cost to live at the expense of others’ quality of life?
The second question is just the trolly problem rephrased. The trolly problem teaches about causing harm through inaction, and not what to do if you come across people tied to a railway. The second question is asked a lot.
Is hoarding bread inaction? You have to obtain the bread and put it into your hoard, which seems pretty action-y to me.
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?”
Except In modern society, when you “flip the tracks” (steal the bread) the other track is empty and nobody got hurt (because the massive companies that produced it will never see any missed profits)
Marxist version: Is it ethical to steal labor in order to hoard bread which itself creates starving families who must “steal” bread to survive.
Yes of course, how else are we going to procure free labour? Seed drugs into undesirable communities to destroy them, or cover them with constant shade with overpasses? That’s a lot of work… but might as well do it anyway. We have a good work ethic after all.
Ye… I mean… no? I m… what?
Because ethics questions are supposed to be complicated.
Not quite a conundrum when the answer from everyone you ask is: “obviously no”
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Not that the rich shouldn’t hoard bread, but it’s pretty easy to make even if you don’t have a lot of baking experience. There are good low-knead bread recipes that only take a few hours to make and only uses flour, salt, instant yeast, and water. Fresh baked bread from the oven also tastes so much better than anything at the store. And it doesn’t cost like $6 per loaf like at the store.
🤔 Stealing bread to feed your family.
🥰 Stealing flour to feed everyone.
