(also of course we should note, in reality, you couldn't really *know* that those are the only two options, and so the best choice might be to search for a third option where no one dies, even if that means you end up running out of time and didn't think about who's better to kill)
(but I know I know, that's not helpful for philosophy thought-experiments X3 )
🇳🇱
If thereis a viable third option you see as potential, sure. Ultimately its a judgement call. Its entierly possible you can look around and quickly realize that there are no third options in sight for you to even attempt.
Consider the situation where you have about 2 seconds to pull the lever and after that the people would die about a second later.. pretty easy to conclude you dont have time for any other options.
@snow
@freemo @codepuppy
I think 1. @snow is correct in that there is no objective metric, and 2. @Shamar is correct in that this is not a question anyone sane would ever ask.
1. If you are measuring suffering, I can argue that fleeting emotions of a dying person are insignificant compared to the long lasting grief of their close friends and family, therefore you should not count the people, but their relatives. You could argue that more people means more relatives, but that is not as clear and objective as you suggest. You could tweak the numbers to make the statistical argument more compelling, but that would make the situation even more absurd as per 2.
2. Such a situation is impossible unless orchestrated by yourself.
If you have time you'll would attempt to save everyone, and whatever you attempt is it wouldn't guarantee someone's death in case of success.
If you don't have time you wouldn't have the time to understand or realize the situation either.
Also after the fact, nobody in their right mind would be discussing the correctness of your decision. It's like arguing that a pilot of a plain, that had a sudden engine failure and crashed in a city, should have veered towards apartment block A instead of apartment block B, since they could have figured out there were less people there by smell or something. The discussion would rather be why did the engine fail.