dreadrocksean

You conflate morality and legality.

"...initiates force against you to violate your rights" Incorrect. The force itself is the violation. The reason is irrelevant. However, I do agree with you. No force initiation exists in such a sport.

Your personal feelings of disgust or line drawing is not relevant to this discussion. Some find public nudity, for eg, disgusting while others see it as a right. Let's keep the arguments OBJECTIVE. Show evidence of rights violations, the definition of injustice.

That's not the topic though. The Trolley problem has, at its core, the fact that your action makes a difference - "minimize the casualties". "No matter what I do" - is incorrect.

That's awesome. I love how some don't get the 'problem' of the trolley situation is OTHER people.

It's not silly when many of the decisions we vote for are based upon studies such as this.

You assume that the society is significantly more than a million. You need to get your vision out of the Murica box for a min. So yes I can calculate in a split second what would happen to my culture should I allow 1 Million of us to be killed. No they're not just numbers as those other ones do not exist. Good on your last point. But then he'd just despise me.

Hahaha. I'm saying that at some point, which I arbitrarily measured at 1 Mil, a particular society's value rivals that of my offspring, whom I'm ironically raising to be a productive member of. Also, how would he feel, after he's grown up, when he finds out that 90% of his heritage and culture was sacrificed for him?

Those are irrelevant. All we require is the decision AS IF it were real. It was well thought out and it worked. Most did not switch the tracks and they claim to in all surveys.

This is a very good reply. To apply this to in first person, in that situation, I would know the difference between causation and choice. The first choice is - "Do I get involved or not?" Not - "Who should die?" After I correctly absolve myself from blame (should I choose not to get involved, I then embark on deciding the first choice. Here is where self interest enters the equation. If it were turned around and the train was naturally heading for 1 person, with 5 on the other track, but that 1 person was my child, I would get involved and I would switch. But not so fast. Is there a number above 5 that I would do nothing and let it remain on my child's track? 100? No. 1000? No. 10000? No. 100000? No. 1 Million? Maybe. Depends upon which country I'm in. America? No. My home country? Hmm. Now we're getting into serious grey area. Without skin in the game, and back to the original model - train headed toward 5 with 1 on the other track. If we increase it to 1 hundred thousand people (big train), would I switch? I very well might. People have nominal value. Society is valuable for traders. Humans are traders. To believe that there is no number that would cause you to get involved to rescue - is naïveté. ____ That being said, here are some interesting stats on the topic. Overwhelmingly, when asked about the trolley problem, most said that they would pull the lever. A real life trolley situation was designed (you can find it on youtube). The majority of test subjects did nothing at let the 5 die.

You action caused the death of an innocent person. Regardless of the reason. You intent was also to kill the innocent, so you cannot claim ignorance or accident.

I agree with A is A. Though a child does not legally own anything, ownership is the key to western civilization and a core of individual rights - property rights. This should be paramount as a concept to instill in our young from as early on as possible. The sharing instinct does not kick in until the ownership one has. One cannot share what one does not own. The closer we adhere to the Trader Principle in our relationships, the closer we come to World Peace. One cannot trade what one does not own. Keeping a toy just because, losing friends in the process, is just plain stupid and well within a parent's motivation to correct. But this must not be be done at the expense of the child's concept of ownership.

I think that you are mistaken. First of all, the 'conspiracy theory' is not rooted in the '50's but in 1910, 3 yrs before the Federal Reserve came into being. As long as our currency is controlled by the feds, the feds can control inflation (theft), by being the first in line to trade their money-out-of-thin-air at the current value, pre-circulation. The rest of us get that money after the circulation has devalued it (hence theft). If we all accepted shoes as currency, they would have no power over us via inflation. But we do not. In comes BitCoin. By widely accepting this medium of exchange, we now have the power to overthrow the hijack. After a while we will see stability. The rise and fall of the bitcoin value is only due to its youth and governments' attempts to dethrone it. Information and communication will always be our ally, thanks to the web - hence the reason ALL governments now see it as a threat, including ours. It has dethroned monopolies on the music industry, all forms of publications, hotels (airbandb.com), taxis (uber). No reason why it would stop at currency. Philosophically, it stands to absolute reason that a virtual form of mining would replace its physical counterpart - gold. Is it BitCoin? I don't know - but it would need to stand the test of what makes for a good currency. Rarity, endurance, work needed to attain it, easily divided, easily exchanged etc. Paper replaced gold ONLY because of weight and volume and therefore exchangeability. Bitcoin surpasses this requirement being weightless, volumeless with no limit to the distance of exchange. To me, the only 'if' area is in the mining. It needs to be rare with a substantial effort needed to acquire. But I do not know much about the mining of this technology.

I know that this is 7 years old but I don't like that. Dragon Lady took your questions seriously and engaged her mind fully in her reply to you. To belittle her or imply that she is in error by making a mountain out of a molehill, is quite unfair to her. Suppose you held this thread very important and her replies were flippant, would that have been acceptable to you?

Thank you for your thoughtful reply on this topic. In the end, you do differ in opinion to what she generally dismissed. This encourages me to believe that I am engaging in a rational discussion not plagued with Randian dogma - though I will state here than one is well advised to disagree with her with extreme caution. With regard to the 'physically impossible', that was my interpretation and I do not view it differently as a reference to her quote. The only proof she has for any artist's aiming to "disintegrate man's consciousness" is the art itself. That was her own personal deduction from the painting(s). One needs to ask 'where did she get that opinion from?' Well, from the painting of course. And what exactly in the painting did she use for her decision? By the fact that is was not perceptible in reality. Her quote "from several perspectives at once" was bracketed and therefore meant to be - simply one example. My own description, 'physically impossible', perfectly matches what she is saying within the context of this discussion. We all know what she is alluding to. Lets step outside Cubism for a moment. Do you think that Ayn Rand would have approved, as 'good' art, The Penrose Stairs?