Comparison's The Trolley Problem By Judith Jarvis Thomson

Ethical dilemmas exist everywhere around us in everyday situations. Something as simple as picking up a piece of trash off the floor to whether you should use a previously written paper from a separate class for a current assignment in this class. It exists in reality and even on television shows. How, then, do people resolve these ethical dilemmas and how do they defend their decisions? Nurse Jackie is a television series impregnated with ethical dilemmas, especially in medical care. In this paper, I will discuss the ethical issues found in the “Tiny Bubbles” episode of Nurse Jackie. I will further discuss the ethical reasoning with support of ethical principles. In addition, I will discuss how patient’s autonomy and non-maleficence principle of bioethics plays a role in decision making. Overall, there was a difficult struggle on the ethical theory of and utilitarianism, with ethical relativism playing a huge factor.

The Trolley Dilemma is a scenario where a train heading straight toward five men working on the tracks, have no idea the train is heading toward them, and nowhere to go. It would appear that death is inevitable. On another track, there is another worker all working alone. He too has no idea the train is coming. You are standing next to the lever that can switch the tracks. What would you do? Would you do nothing, resulting in killing five people, who might not know what hit them, or do you pull the lever, diverting the train, killing only one which allows the five to survive?

The dilemma for ethics committees brought up by the story of Patrick is a question of how much is too much. As technologies in the medical field continue to advance, people can live substantially longer lives, but are they lives worth living? Some people, like Patrick, don’t think being paralyzed is a quality of life worth living. Others, like Armando, refuse to be made DNR and cling to life even if it consists of communicating by blinking of the eye. The questions raised in this book are awful decisions that nobody should ever have to make. Whatever the committees and doctors choose to do can keep patients alive and allow them to have a low quality of live, be in constant pain and be a burden to society, or keep a terminally ill patient comfortable until he or she has said their good-byes and let nature take its course.

In this paper, I will explicate how a Utilitarian and a Kantian would understand the Trolley Problem and describe why I consider the Utilitarian approach to fare better in the case of the Trolley Problem. On one hand, a Utilitarian, a believer in the philosophy of Utilitarianism, believes that a morally admirable action is one that helps the maximum number of people. A Kantian, on the other hand, is a believer and follower of the Kantian ethics, which fundamentally preach that the correctness or wrongness of one’s actions depends on if one carries out one’s duty, and not on the consequences of one’s actions. In order to further understand the perspectives of these two philosophies, I will explain how they would comprehend the Trolley Problem, which is, essentially, a theoretical moral predicament where a trolley is speeding down a railway track and five people are tied to the track and a bystander has two options: either pull a lever, divert the train to an alternate railway track with one person on it and kill that one person and save five people, and thus intentionally commit homicide, or the bystander doesn’t pull the lever and lets five people die, therefore submissively allowing five deaths.

The Trolley Dilemma is a scenario where a train heading straight toward five men working on the tracks, have no idea the train is heading toward them, and nowhere to go. It would appear that death is inevitable. On another track there is another worker all working alone. He too has no idea the train is coming. You are standing next to the lever that can switch the tracks. What would you do? Would you do nothing, resulting in killing five people, who might not know what hit them, or do you pull the lever, diverting the train, killing only one which allows the five to survive?

In Peter Singer’s essay “The Singer Solution to World Poverty”, published on September 5th, 1999 in The New York Times Magazine, Singer claims that the solution to world poverty is for Americans to donate excess income to aid organizations. His article consists of a gathering of exaggerated situations which he uses to engage readers, while also adequately supporting an argument of moral duty by comparing the hypothetical scenarios to Americans who do not donate. Singer exhibits an appeal to pathos to a substantial amount throughout his article. The provided situations set an outline for the reader to feel certain, appealing emotions.

Drivers who are aware of the abusive cameras are constantly caught up trying to avoid getting an outrageous ticket; therefore, in attempt to avoid them, drivers are unexpectedly and furiously coming to abrupt stops. In result of the urgent and sudden stop of driver A (the first one to cross the intersection), braking quickly doesn’t give driver B neither enough time or physical room to move out of the way, consequently resulting in a rear-end collision, sometimes involving more than just two drivers. The driver’s panic to evade the ticket ends up caught up in the misfortunes of an even sadder circumstance. Leading reasons for this is thanks to the intentional decrease of yellow-light length times. Studies have shown that since the installment of the cameras there has been intentional scheming to cut the period of yellow light to catch as many victims as possible. It has been verified that increasing yellow-lights to at least one second more would decrease the number of accidents by over 45%. (Maass). An extra reason for which there is

Introduced by Oxford University Philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967 the trolley problem stays a very controversial topic with no conclusive answer being presented .Many philosophical theorists decided to make use of reason as philosopher

This assignment will discuss a case involving an individual known to me. It centres on the real and contentious issue of the “right to die”, specifically in the context of physician-assisted death. This issue is widely debated in the public eye for two reasons. The first considers under what conditions a person can choose when to die and the second considers if someone ever actually has a ‘right to die’. The following analysis will consider solutions to the ethical dilemma of physician-assisted death through the lens of three ethical theories. It will also take into account the potential influence of an individual’s religious beliefs

Throughout life people face countless decisions; however, making the wrong choice may lead to a catastrophic consequence. As a woman was being brutally stabbed in Kew Gardens near Austin Street, numerous bystanders did not help or act upon calling the police. The choice of the bystanders to not phone the police lead to the death of an innocent woman. Had just one of the thirty-eight people called the police, that innocent woman would still have breath in her lungs. In the article “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police,” Martin Gansberg expresses his anger and disapproval toward those who left a poor woman to die. If the thirty-eight people took immediate action and did not make excuses, the precious life of Catherine Genovese would have been rescued.

Would you put your own life at risk to save someone else? What if they had a low chance of survival, and it was likely that the both of you would die? Many people would say yes. Ultimately, one has to look at this situation through the lense of an ethics approach, and which one is best for the situation. The short story “Bread” by Margaret Atwood describes different ethical dilemmas in which the reader is given different scenarios in which they must make a choice that can only come by deciding what their ethics are. Five different ethical approaches are described in the article “A Framework for Thinking Ethically”, which describes the meaning of ethics and the different viewpoints surrounding the topic. Out of these different approaches highlighted in “A Framework for Thinking Ethically”, the utilitarian approach along with the virtue approach would be best for solving the dilemmas presented in “Bread”.

The Trolley Car Problem demonstrates the difficulty of using utilitarian ideal as the basis for ethical action, but in many real-world situations, innocent people must be sometimes be sacrificed for the sake of saving other lives. If you flip the switch you are saving 5 people, rather than not doing anything and saving only one. Furthermore, all people in this situation are innocent. If you are to flip the switch only one innocent person would die rather than five innocent people. This means that you will be killing innocent people either way, so the least casualties possible would be the best outcome. In addition to my last point, all outcomes of the Trolley Car Problem Result in deaths. This means that if you flip the switch or not, both actions will have consequences. However, the choice to flip the switch, only causing one casualty, has lesser consequences. A utilitarian ideal is the most logical outcome of the Trolley Car Problem.

The Trolley Problem is a scenario possessing two similar versions that begs the question of whether or not it is ethical to kill a person in order to save five. In both versions of this problem, there is a trolley approaching a track with people tied down. In the first version there are two tracks; the first with five people tied down and the other with one person tied down, as the train is approaching the five people. Beside the track there is a switch

1 Explain the Trolley Driver, Bystander at the Switch, Fat Man, Transplant, & Hospital scenarios discussed in the "The Trolley Problem" reading. In doing so, address what the ethical issue(s) are in each of these scenarios.

It must be noted that cars are dangerous vehicles which can cause fatal damage. Individuals responsible for a vehicle are expected to be more alert than pedestrians walking down the street or crossing the road, this is known as “destructive disparity”. This