Thats actually a really good dilemma if you think about it. Like if everyone doubles it you basically don’t kill anyone. But you’ll always risk that there’s some psycho who likes killing and then you will have killed more. And if these choices continue endlessly you will eventually find someone like this. So killing immediately should be the right thing to do.
2^33 is approximately 8.5 billion, which is roughly the population of the world.
Some day it reaches a person that thinks…
Well, 4 billion people less is better than someone being able to wipe out humanity…
(it would also solve many problems lol)
(and that point would be after 32 people had the choice…)
This is really the only answer. The only thing that makes it “hard” is having to face the brutality of moral calculus
Now, what if you’re not the first person on the chain? What if you’re the second one. Or the n one? What now? Would you kill two or n knowing that the person before you spared them?
The thing to do is kill now even if it’s thousands. Because it’s only going to get worse.
The best time to kill was the first trolly. The second best time to kill is now.
But you’ll always risk that there’s some psycho who likes killing and then you will have killed more.
I disagree. The blood is not on your hands.
Suppose you see someone walking towards a bank with a gun. You have an opportunity to steal their gun. If you don’t, and they go on to kill 5 people in an armed robbery, is the blood on your hands?
Suppose you see a hunter in the woods with a gun. You have an opportunity to kill them. If you don’t, and they go fire on a city street and kill 5 people, is the blood on your hands?
Suppose you see a juvenile delinquent on the path to being a serial killer. You have an opportunity to kill an old lady in front of them to scare them straight. If you don’t, and they go on to kill 5 people, is the blood on your hands?
Suppose you see a newborn baby. You have an opportunity to kill them. If you don’t, and they grow up to become a terrorist and kill 5 people, is the blood on your hands?
If I have to kill a person to stop a chance that a random person will be evil or misguided enough to choose to kill millions, it’s not worth it.
Murder is wrong, and that’s an absolute. And then someone’s gonna come in with the “what if you have to kill someone to stop nuclear war from destroying the earth, and you can’t just get the authorities for some reason?”
That leads to another interesting split path. Maybe it’s best to just kill the one right away. Assuming this goes on forever, it’s basically inevitable that someone somehow will end up killing an obscene number of people eventually. But maybe it’d be like nukes, and eventually reach a point where flipping the lever is just mutually assured destruction, and no one would ever actually do that
Assuming of course that it goes on forever. Which admittedly seems like what one is intended to think, but the graphic doesn’t actually show or state that, and realistically, if actually given this scenario, it shouldn’t, because eventually some limit will be encountered that makes it impossible for the problem to physically exist (like running out of people to tie to the tracks, running out of space for them, having such a large amount of stuff in one space that it undergoes gravitational collapse, the finite size of the observable universe making fitting an infinite dilemma impossible, etc.)
Ok, let’s take a finite but very long track, such as a million long and instead of having the amount of people on the track double it increments.
Do you trust 999 thousand other people to not decide to pull the lever? Remember each one has to also trust all the people in front of them
