This thread is the reason I won't watch the Saw movies.

It's a lose-lose situation. Therefore, as we all know, the proven answer is to flip open your communicator and tell Scotty to beam up all the people tied to the tracks. If you're in command, you don't accept lose-lose situations, unless some expendable engineering red-shirt is in the line of fire.

On a more serious note, these situations are ones that you have to react to rather than think through. Thus, logic is irrelevant. If you had time to think it through logically, any intelligent person would spend that time trying to stop it from happening, trying to save everyone. Eventually, if these efforts failed, then the decision would again be irrational, instinctive. Basically, in a situation like this, your brain is just going to scan through the people in peril and make a snap-judgment... probably based on which person you'd like to have sex with the most, or which is the closest relation...or, maybe if you have strong maternal instincts, which is the youngest. Instinct, not logical morality.

This is also what society would expect a person to do. Anyone that could logically determine the correct moral choice and then act on it, rather than wasting this time trying to save everyone, would not be considered human. Vulcan maybe, but not human.

Pleonasm!

Red shirts are always expendable, and (nearly) always in the line of fire.

I'd save the five people in every situation of course.

5 > 1

Q.E.D.

Yes. James T's take on the "Light up or leave me alone." approach...

I think he was the only cadet to ever use that at the Star Fleet Academy when he was in training.

According to that radiolab show, and some Harvard dude, I can outthink 99% of the population. This is not news to me.

So... ? You bite your lips, turn green and stop the train with your bare hands ? Or are you saying this is a Kobayashi Maru test ?

Yes, exactly. In this situation, the 'right' thing to do is not stand there logically debating the correct moal action, it is to hack into the computer the night before and alter the scenario such that you can save everyone.

In other words, the correct moral answer is to use all available time trying to save everyone. Failing that, and with no time left for logical reasoning, the decision to save one over the other becomes emotional, illogical, instinctive, human...

The question is wrong.

Um... I hate to tell you this... but... you're, like, saying your logical thought processes are in line with someone that has a doctorate in philosphy... A philosophy degree and a food-safe certificate makes you qualified to work at MacDonalds.

I've got an AA in philosopy (half a degree - ya, weird, I know) and I'll admit philosophy is fun. But, if philosophy types can outhink 99% of the population, that only proves that thinking is highly overated.

This scenario was an interesting read but I see it different. In the case of a healthy patient that the doctor kills for spare parts would be akin to you being able to stop the train by pulling the switch.. but before doing so you tied a person to the other track.

In the first scenario you didn't tie anybody anywhere.

I would consider this one to be a closer analogy:

You're a doctor and you have a dying patient. This patient is dying from something operable but totally unrelated to his organs (at least, the ones needed below). The surgery for this is extremely difficult and time consuming.

5 others come in from a bus wreck or whatever. All of them require a different organ, and by the light of god, the original dying patient is a matching donor for all other patients.

The 5 other patients surgeries are easier, higher chance of success, and you can do all 5 surgeries before they die.

The original patient's surgery is complicated, takes many hours, and by the time you were done doing that surgery all the other patients would be dead.

You are the only doctor within a time-allowable distance to perform any of the 6 different surgeries.

What do you do? Let the original patient die for the organs - after all, you didn't poison him or make him sick? Or save the original patient and let the 5 die while you're in surgery?

This one is harder to answer, but seems a better analogy to the train tracks than having a healthy sleeping patient.