<p>[cue cheesy commercial music]
Are you a psychopath? Do people often call you shallow? Do you exhibit signs of coldheartedness and egocentricity? Find out if you're a psychopath in only 5 minutes with this simple test.
[/end music]</p>
<p>Seriously though, check these out.</p>
<p>Problem 1:
You observe an out-of-control trolley hurtling towards five people who will surely die if hit by the trolley. You can throw a switch and divert the trolley down a side track saving the five but with certainty killing an innocent bystander. There is no opportunity to warn or otherwise avoid the disaster. Do you throw the switch?</p>
<p>Problem 2:
You are standing on a bridge behind a fat man. You observe an out-of-control trolley hurtling towards five people who will surely die if hit by the trolley. The only way to stop the trolley is to push the fat man in front of the trolley. Do you do so?</p>
<p>Problem 3:
As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You can flip a switch and divert the train to run one person over instead of five, but that person is your mother. Would you flip the switch?</p>
<p>They're all variations of the same original problem but they're awesome thought exercises</p>
<p>The psychopath part comes from the BigThink video that reminded me of The Trolley Problem. In the video, the psychologist speaking presented the first two situations and said that a psychopath would throw the switch and push the man without a second thought.</p>
<p>A trolley is headed towards three children tied to the tracks. However, you can only see their shadows on the wall of your cave, and can’t be sure the shadows match reality.</p>
<p>There is a lever that can move the trolley onto another track, which only has one child on it, but the child is babbling about evil demons and you know that evil demons are prone to deception.</p>
<p>However, a mad tortoise who hates children has a head start to the level and will prevent you from using it with his knife if he can beat you to it.
You aren’t sure you can outrun him, because if you halve the distance to him, even an infinite number of times, he will still be ahead of you. </p>
<p>This fat man could stop the trolley if you pushed him in front of it. however there is a large veil of ignorance floating nearby and going towards the fat man will cause both of your to be blinded by it, meaning you could end up in front of the trolley when it arrives instead. And you’re not fat enough to stop it.</p>
<p>There happens to be a bomb nearby that would derail the trolley and save the children, but it would kill a man in a room covered in Chinese, who does not understand Chinese but can answer questions given to him in Chinese by following the rules in his manual.</p>
<p>You see that one of the Chinese answers on the wall says that you could save everyone by firing the cannon on Theseus’s ship nearby at the trolley. The only problem is that men are taking the ship apart plank by plank and are moving the planks five yards to the right while replacing the parts in the original location with metallic parts.
You’re not sure which ship is being referred to.</p>
<p>We talkd about this at a philosophy lecture at debate camp in the summer, but included problems where you had to kill a child, and some others. Apparently we were the most hardcore group because there were about 5 people who would take the utilitarian approach every time.
It’s not really about being a psychopath though, more about your morals and how you view utilitarianism, right?</p>
<p>I say now that I’d throw the switch the first two times, but I don’t know if I’d really be able to do it if placed in that situation. The interesting thing is that throwing the switch (or like pushing the fat man) all require you to act. You’re deliberately sentencing someone to death. Whereas if you don’t do anything it’s almost like you’re letting nature take its course. So how many people would really be able to save the five and how many would hesitate to step in at all? The “easy” solution is to just do nothing, though I wish I could say that I’d save the five.</p>
<p>I wish I was in a philosophy class. I think this seems really interesting to think about.</p>
<p>I flip the switch in the first one, but I don’t push the man, and I don’t flip the switch in the third one. Some people live and some people die. The first one makes sense to flip the switch. Five random people saved instead of one random person saved? Yeah. The second one? No, I’m not going to directly kill someone. I mean, flipping a switch that would likely cause a death is different than pushing someone to his death. And for the third, I’d much rather have my mother over five random people. If I get to chose, it should be what is most beneficial for me, no? I’m sorry if that makes me psychopathic.</p>