What is a political issue that you want to understand the opposite viewpoint more?

[palou]

Zkuq said:

palou said:

Think train dillemma. 

 

On a more political note: Suppose someone is dying of a fairly preventable disease somewhere near by, helping them would make you lose around 500$ (due to lost time), you decide that it's not worth it. That, to many, is not an action, and while assholish - in the right of the person. On the contrary, suppose you kill the for a prime of 500$. That, to many, is seen as an action, and should definitely send you to jail.

Looking at the 2 situations, there seems to be an equivalent choice, in terms of a decision tree based on outcome. They both chose a situation in which they came out with 500$ more, at the cost of a life.

The train dilemma forces it to be a conscious choice. Most of the time, inaction isn't a conscious choice. Instead, it's something that pretty much happens because of the way a person thinks. Choices happen all the time in life, but we don't really think about most of them. There are definitely cases where action and inaction are quite similar, but in the general case, I don't think that's the case.

Ah yes, sorry, I was thinking, more specifically, of conscious inaction - which I see simply as 1 action among many others. There are a lot of people that choose not to touch the lever in the standard train dilemma - that's something I have difficulty finding a logical explanation for.

 

However, as said (in the second example), these conscious decisions *not* to act at detriment of another person happen all the time, in society, and are generally accepted as lesser than what people would describe as an action to detriment of a person.

 

Of course, I distinguish between what we know and do not know. That's why I was talking about probability space.