In that case, no, and you’re not responsible anymore. Those people working on switching out the trolley parts had every available opportunity to fully stop the trolley, more-so than you. You diverted it to save a life immediately, that crew maintaining this Trolley of Death are the real murderers.
What if the maintenance crew themselves didn’t know that the trolley was going to hit the tied down person 1000 miles away?
I blame the trolley company’s CEO and shareholders for allowing a random person to divert the trolley’s path in the first place.
I blame whoever tied the people down.
I detect a hidden analogy of capitalism.
How?
Well it’s like my grandmother always used to say: “Capitalism is like a death trolley barrelling down 1000 miles of track towards you”
Can’t you just say the same thing about life in general?
After a few miles down the tracks, I won’t see or hear the trolley anymore, therefore i can not be certain it even exists anymore. It may have run over someone, it may have derailed, it may have exploded, it may have run out of fuel and stopped, a black hole might have opened up in its path and swallowed it whole.
The lack of object permanence solution to the trolly problem.
Problems like this aren’t unsolved, it’s just that these problems have different answers depending on the context.
Is it the same trolley that kills the man? Yes because repairing the trolley doesn’t change it’s name.
Is it the same trolley that kills the man? No because it is physically not the same trolley.
Humans divide their cells until the original cells are gone. Are they a different person?
Yes they are.
No they aren’t.
Depends on what you’re measuring or what problem you’re trying to solve. But both perspectives are simultaneously true. Wait until you get to math and find out there’s different lengths of infinity. It’s all tools used to solve problems.
depending on the context
This is exactly why these trolley problems don’t work. When we strip away all context and ask simplified questions the nuance disappears and the question becomes almost meaningless.
That’s why I think these are mostly nonsense. These types of questions aren’t philosophical, they’re psychological. They don’t teach anything, they just test what you value, and they’re not the best types of questions for doing that either.
