politics

The trolley problem is a philosophical thought experiment designed to examine differences in schools of moral philosophy and of people's moral intuitions. It's not necessarily about demonstrating that you have to live with the consequences of the choice.

The problem with it comes when people assume that the act utilitarian answer is objectively correct, and that it is broadly applicable to real world problems even when there are huge differences. At that point the trolley problem stops serving as a tool to explore moral philosophy and becomes a rhetorical tool to justify and feel better about throwing people under the bus.

Another thought experiment designed to critique this perspective is as follows: while travelling through the woods, you come across a group of armed men holding prisoner a group of people who were protesting their regime. The leader of the armed men says that if you take a gun and kill one of them yourself, he'll let the rest go, but otherwise, he'll kill all of them. From the perspective of act utilitarianism, or trolley problem thinking, taking the offer is morally obligatory.

The problem with that is that you can be manipulated into causing harm by a malevolent actor. All they have to do is threaten some greater harm, and you become their tool, which can increase their power and their ability to threaten larger harm. "You must go out and kill one person, or I will command another of my agents to go out and kill three." This essentially precludes standing up to any powerful entity in any meaningful way.

Refusing to kill one of the hostages, or pull the lever to run over Palestinians, leaves open the possibility of forming a united front to defeat the people forcing us into such situations in the first place. Keeping one's own hands clean is not simply a matter of "moral purity," but rather, an intentional strategy of avoiding actions taken against a particular group.

We can imagine a trolley problem where on the switched track is a foreign diplomat who, if killed, will cause an alliance between two countries to fail, leaving them both vulnerable to a third, and making it essential to save them. This is the hidden cost of pulling the lever to sacrifice Palestinians. But it goes beyond their specific value as allies, it also tells other allies that they can be sacrificed in the same way. In this case, it is better to accept a future where an external force commits a greater immediate harm than to commit a smaller immediate harm ourselves but which jeopardizes alliances and solidarity.

I think you're overstating the prevalence and influence of "don't bother voting". This feels more like trying to misplace blame on your fellow socialist who don't believe in "electorialism" instead of blaming plutocrats and propaganda and the ideology of greed and individualism. Or blaming the party that had Harris run.

There is a real danger in this heated rhetoric about voting. Like if you just vote harder it will work out this time. We must resist that lie. And don't be surprised about some trolling if you try to sell that lie to a bunch of gnarly socialists. Imagine someone came to your house and told you something like "Yes, Trump is a bit bad, but he is with the angels and the power of religious faith surrounds him on all sides and just believing in Christ and praying will lead to an untold utopia!" I mean what would you say to such nonsense?

But I don't think it actually discourages a single progressive from running if they want to. Which means having to play a corrupt game if you want to actually gain power and rise to the top.

If you want to actually do something I recommend some autonomous action.

If the LGBTQA+ community and leftists and DSA aren't invited in, it's not a very big tent.

That would require 50+ people cooperate, which the left famously is extremely bad at.

Hierarchical leadership styles might have a tendency to lean towards authoritarianism, but we can't deny that they're effective at organizing large numbers or people efficiently.

The left tends to be allergic to even the idea of leadership, so it's harder for someone to say "I need fifty people at this meeting, and a hundred people at that one" because most people would just be like "You can't tell me what to do."

I know there's a tendency to think of leadership as a cushy do-nothing position of privilege, and bad leadership can certainly be like that, but examples of good leadership exist even though they're more rare in our current system.

Coordinating and delegating large groups of people is a job in its own right, even if they're not the ones swinging hammers and doing gruntwork. There needs to be a mind behind it all who sees the big picture and can follow a plan, receive reports and feedback and adjust as necessary. Leftists reallllly don't like that idea. They'd be more likely to say "Oh yeah, why don't you show up to all those meetings yourself?", ignoring the fact that one person can't be in multiple places at once, let alone participate as dozens of people at even one meeting.

If the left wants to take over the Democratic party the way maga took over the GOP, we need to learn how to do central coordination in order to organize organize ourselves for large-scale and efficient mobilization.

And we need to unify beyond everyone's individual pet issues and stop competing for relevance as if anyone's oppression is more important than anyone else's. We're all oppressed, it doesn't matter who's the most oppressed. We need to work together to fix this system, not fight each other over who gets the gold medal in the oppression olympics.