《知乎哲也》板块，由受到大家喜爱的哲学小哥TJ和主播璐璐一起探讨哲学那些事儿~ 公号【璐璐的英文小酒馆】可以搜索英语全文稿哦~
Hi, everyone. And welcome back to Let's Philosophize. 欢迎回来【知乎哲也】.
Hi TJ.
Hi Lulu. Thanks for having me back.
What's the question you’re gonna ask me today？
Lulu, do you think that we should kill people to save other people？
Okay! That is a rather strange question. Do you mean like killing bad people？
Well, I mean they might be bad people, but uh, it's hard to know, right？What I'm talking about is a philosophy problem called The Trolley Problem. I don't know if you've heard of it before.
电车问题, but enlighten us anyway.
So, it's from a 1967 philosophy paper by a philosopher called Philippa Foot, and she said I'll use her words and it's a little bit academic but I think it should be okay.
“it may rather be supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram [trolley] which he can only steer from one narrow track on to the other; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed.”
就是说有这么一个失控的有轨电车, 然后在这个司机现在有1个选择要做, 就是两边的这2个铁轨在他自己在的这条轨上有5个人, 然后另外1条轨上有1个人, 如果他不变轨, 他就会直接把这5个人弄死。如果他要做一步操作, 变到另外一条轨道上, 就会杀死另外一条轨道上的那个人。
So, this is the famous trolley problem. Well, if that is the question, you’re gonna ask me, I would say I will change track because killing one person is better than killing five people？
Right, and that's a very intuitive logic, right？That 90% of people that you ask, say that uh, they would do the same thing, that they would switch the track, kill five people. And of course, we assuming these men are all working on the tracks, they do the same job. We don't know about their families, right？They all have families but five families unless this one man has a very very big family, I think the odds are that similar numbers of people will be upset per person, so it seems to make sense that you pick 5 over 1.
Sounds like simple math, right？
But not all the philosophers agree with that.