-        Provide a follow-up question that you still have about this particular topic. What would you like to know more about?

-        Provide a link to a source that addresses your follow-up question. In other words, look up a source that might help you answer your question.

-        Describe how this source explains or illuminates the topic. 

-        Respond to the Padlet posts of three of your classmates. You can respond to their question or you can respond to the source they provide for follow-up. Your response should be two to three sentences in length. Your responses do not count toward the length requirement of your own post. 

Question: “How so do people believe that we are born knowing right from wrong”? Is it true that when a woman is pregnant that whatever she is around most, the child becomes immune to it?” 

Link: https://www.philosophytalk.org/shows/babies-and-birth-morality

This source explains and illustrates the topic by stating that a baby as young as 21 month old knows right from wrong. This necessarily doesn’t mean that the person is born with it. Some of morality is innate and some is developed.

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The trolley car dilemma is something we have all discussed in the past. Some said that we should pull that lever to save the most people. Others believe touching the lever is actually committing the crime. What I realized is that the truth is in the person behind the lever in the situation. I do not believe it is wrong to pull the lever but I also do not believe it is wrong no to pull it. We discussed that intuition is that gut feeling you get when you make a decision of any importance. I’m in school to be an engineer and I hate these “what if” type discussion because I am used to wrong and right. Aaron had the most intelligent answer to the Trolley Car Dilemma. Pull the lever half way, maybe the trolley car will derail either killing no one or everyone. Obviously the “right” answer is hidden behind the person with the option. 

 

The other part of our discussion involved voluntarily pushing a man off of a bridge that would stop the trolley car. The proximity problem comes into play here. Being the person flipping a switch is easy but when you are the foot soldier things change. 

 

Question: How do we feel about autonomous automobiles? Is there an ethical dilemma around technology playing a bigger part in our lives?
https://www.recode.net/2016/4/13/11644890/ethics-and-artificial-intelligence-the-moral-compass-of-a-machine

 

Question: 

If a baby’s parent hinted to picking the bad character, would the baby choose it, or would they go with their gut feeling of picking the good character?

Link:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/parents-peers-children/

 

This link goes into the psychology behind parenting. It explains The Nurture Assumption, and what the effect parents have on babies. Kids learn a lot of behaviors at home, so it would make sense that a baby would go with what their parent is telling them. 

 

This article discusses that concept after asking the question to a group of Buddhist monks. 

 

This article discusses how the monks find no fault in pushing the larger person due to the intentions of the act being pure. Yet ordinary folks would be hesitant simply because the action of taking the person’s life because they would have to do so with their own hands rather than just pulling a switch. What does that say about a person’s morals once the problem is more personal or requires a more hands-on approach? (pun not intended)

 

 

            If a person decides to not take any action in a situation it is known as negligence. This link describes how every citizen has the responsibility to act in an appropriate manner. There are various aspects of a situation that help determine whether there was a duty to act. In a legal situation there are elements required to establish a prima facie case of negligence.

Question:  Why do most people think it is right to pull the lever? Why kill one person over five people? Do you think the situation would be different if the one person being killed was someone close to you? 

This link goes into the thinking behind killing one versus five.  We rationalize this decision as contributing to a greater good. We override the ingrained rules of “Thou shalt not kill” and kick into our intuition which realizes that we need to take action. 

This discussion has left one question in my mind regarding the grayer areas of morality.

Does one’s inner desire to survive affect their sense of morality based on the circumstances brought upon the environment/society they were raised in?

Link: http://www.nomoredependence.com/2011/02/morality-survival/

The link explains that morality is completely gray when it comes to making decisions regarding your own survival.  Decisions that test your ability to make moral decisions is completely dependent on whether you value your moral value more than the well-being of people around yourself.  Morality in itself is never set in stone since everyone in the world is different which we are more likely to have dissimilar moral values from each other.

The most interesting part of the discussion was that most people would rather pull the lever to switch the train to hit and kill one person. Everyone was saying that saving 5 people is better than saving one. The same people would also not push one person off the bridge to save the same five people and kill only one. I think that people felt that pulling a lever vs physically pushing someone kept them less involved in the death of the one person. Most people looked at the situation as saving one person vs saving 5 people. I looked at the situation as killing a person or not saving people. My thinking is that I would rather not save people instead of kill someone. Is there a better solution than my own that I agree with that may change my viewpoint. In the post from http://www.organizingcreativity.com/2014/03/a-more-or-less-creative-solution-to-the-trolley-problem/, the person has a different approach to their answer of why they switch the track, but don’t push the person off the bridge. Their answer is that they would not commit murder by pushing someone onto the tracks, but would have no problem switching the track to kill the one person. The reason is that the workers on the track know the risk of working on the tracks, so killing the one person is not a problem. The reason they say pushing the man off the bridge is wrong is because he is uninvolved with the train yard, so he has no idea of the risk of standing on that bridge. 

Is dehumanization training in the military moral?

https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8848015

This former soldier describes how they were taught to use demeaning language in order to dehumanize the enemy. This helped them assert their supremacy and have less guilt about killing them. 

I enjoyed the discussion we had in class. I believe this a scary topic to talk about because it questions a person’s morals. In the both situations, I would have tried to save everyone but no matter what I would have done, someone would have had to die. If I really had just a few seconds to react, I think in both sequences, I would have tried to save the five people. I would have a huge burden on my heart knowing I took I life. But I would know more people would be alive. I wouldn’t really know what I would do unless it actually happened. I might have been too scared to do anything.  This got me wondering on how people think in tragic situations. My question was would multiple people react to a situation at once to a situation or would they freeze up? I did some research and at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect it explains that this type of scenario would be called the Bystander Effect. The Bystander Effect describes the phenomenon in which such individuals are less likely to seek help or give assistance when others are present. This does not mean that bystanders are apathetic to the plight of others, for bystanders often show signs of distress, anxiety, and concern if they delay responding or fail to respond at all. It also does not necessarily mean that a victim will be less likely to receive help as the number of bystanders present increases. The greater the number of other people present, the greater is the likelihood that at least one of them will intervene. A good show I found about this is called “What would you do?” by John Quiñones. I watched an episode on YouTube ( https://padlet.com/jacobsonl1/trolleycarethic215003) and it’s crazy how these situations happen all the time.