The failure in understanding here is that “refusing to play along” is STILL playing along. You are making a choice that you’re ok with whatever the uneducated masses decide. This is like basic trolly problem shit. You are given two terrible choices, there is no option for a magical third choice. You can’t get out of it by saying you just refuse to participate, because that’s just choosing not to pull the lever.
No it fucking isn’t. Because the basic trolly problem doesn’t have the trolly loop back around to the start every four years with increasingly large amounts of new people placed on the track each time. You got your fucking “lesser evil” win in 2020, and it led to the worst atrocities of our era.
You’re not actually approaching this as a consequencalist, you’re just looking at your own self interest and trying to work backwards to justify it.
I think the question is a very, to put it mildly, useless question. It’s a typical example of an analytic philosophical thought experiment, which is has basically nothing to do with real life. No one has ever been in a situation as it is described in the trolley problem.
That doesn’t mean that sometimes, unfortunately, we are in situations where we are where we experience a moral dilemma. Of course we’re often in a situation where we experience a form of moral dilemma. But moral dilemmas are always concrete, and you always experience them under specific conditions, in a specific context that is very complex. You have specific means to make the decision, and practically never are universal moral principles even helpful to make that decision.
As a matter of fact, moral principles are I would say empirically never really used to actually decide moral dilemmas. They are used after the fact to justify a decision, which is a typical form of moral communication.
you’re conflating “refusing to play” with “choosing not to pull the lever.” choosing not to pull the lever still accepts the framing. it still says “these are the only tracks, this is the only lever, so my only choice is yes or no.”
actual refusal means rejecting the premise entirely. it means organizing outside the trolley and/or building a world where the trolley doesn’t run in the first place.
you say there’s no magical third choice. that’s exactly what people said to the abolitionists and the suffragettes and to everyone else who ever refused a rigged game, but built a new one anyway.
so no, refusing to play isn’t playing along. it’s the first real move anyone makes when they stop believing the lever is the only tool in existence.
And when confronted by this truth, those who choose the lesser evil devolve into insults, knowing their argument holds no moral weight, as evidenced by the other replies to you.
Most of us sleep just fine not supporting dog rape genocide fascists. You’re the one trying to come up with all sorts of tortured arguments to justify yourself
There’s no lever you can pull as a third choice because the lever only operates inside the bounds of the “system” of the rail network. It’s working as designed. So break the rails if it is an inevitability that people get tied to the tracks.
The system is just as immutable as the divine right of kings. Choosing to campaign on lever pulls within the system instead of focusing on systemic restructuring tells me a couple of things: 1) You aren’t tied to both sides of the track. 2) You’re fine with giving validity to a system that bakes genocide into itself because your comfort relies on someone being tied to the both tracks, and at the moment, that isn’t you.
Refusing to pull the lever doesn’t prevent you from working outside the bounds of the rail network. It might be worth considering that instead of the belief in slowly changing the democrats with slow constant pressure, the system is changing you to be more accepting of the unacceptable.
Oh, so you managed to destroy the tracks last election? No? Hmm, sounds like you did nothing then and the trolley continued down the path its currently on. A path that numerous people tried to tell you was worse than the other path. But it’s ok! You chose to dismantle the system and operate outside of it!
Except you didn’t do that. You had no ability to do that. Your actions are the exact same as someone who chose not to pull the lever, and the outcome is the exact same as if you chose not to pull the lever. To anyone observing, you are just as worthless as someone who didn’t pull the lever. Because at the end of the day, there WAS a lever and you DIDN’T pull it.
I see you didn’t even manage to get that lever pulled last election because genocide isn’t very popular regardless of your cheerleading. Pulling the lever would’ve never stopped the genocide, but derailing the train would have. You didn’t want genocide to end, you just wanted to go back to brunch.
You know, at least back when Lincoln was president, voters at least had a spine to do something about issues they were ethically against. They were willing to completely abandon the Whig party to back the new republican party (which killed the Whig party). This isn’t a fundamental change to the system, but even still it is farther than you’d be willing to go to prevent genocide. Perhaps what leftists need is for people like you to be less chickenshit genocidal white supremacist sellouts who hem and haw about the correct way to do genocide to prevent as much blowback to yourselves as possible as you live in the luxury that has been paid in the blood of the global south.
Or maybe ask me which state my “lever” was in and realize how futile your argument is for the majority of states and the majority of the population. Even if we had universal popular vote to determine president, as you seem to assume, that doesn’t remove the fact that the two choices were both supporters of genocide and the train deserves to be derailed and the track destroyed.
Pulling the lever would’ve never stopped the genocide, but derailing the train would have.
This point is totally useless without a way to derail the train. Not just a vague conceptual idea of what could theoretically derail the train, that’s useless. Without an actual mechanism to realistically do so, sufficient buy-in to implement that mechanism, and sufficient organization to actually follow through on that implementation, this is a totally useless argument. The necessary mechanism, buy-in, and organization does not currently exist. If you lack the ability to detail the train, it doesn’t matter how much better the world would be if the train was derailed. It’s pure fantasy, and it gets in the way of actual realistic praxis.
The problem is that those organizations are being built as we speak, and so should redirect people to those organizations. That’s realistic praxis. By pretending that these organizations will magically appear one day without needing to life a finger, you’re absolving yourself of the responsibility to do so and are calling “realistic praxis” upholding a genocidal system.
Just because you can’t imagine getting off your ass and building a better world doesn’t mean that everyone else shares your love for learned incompetence and your defense of fascists.
It’s funny how libs always assume that moral objectors aren’t doing anything besides voting. Do you think we aren’t out organizing our communities so that eventually we will have the mechanism to destroy the train?
And how do you think that mechanism gets built if it doesn’t start with a refusal to get on the train in the first place?
And finally, if moral objectors are so impotent and meaningless, then why do you keep blaming us for your candidate’s loss?
The failure in understanding here is that “refusing to play along” is STILL playing along. You are making a choice that you’re ok with whatever the uneducated masses decide. This is like basic trolly problem shit. You are given two terrible choices, there is no option for a magical third choice. You can’t get out of it by saying you just refuse to participate, because that’s just choosing not to pull the lever.
No it fucking isn’t. Because the basic trolly problem doesn’t have the trolly loop back around to the start every four years with increasingly large amounts of new people placed on the track each time. You got your fucking “lesser evil” win in 2020, and it led to the worst atrocities of our era.
You’re not actually approaching this as a consequencalist, you’re just looking at your own self interest and trying to work backwards to justify it.
The trolley problem itself is shit.
you’re conflating “refusing to play” with “choosing not to pull the lever.” choosing not to pull the lever still accepts the framing. it still says “these are the only tracks, this is the only lever, so my only choice is yes or no.”
actual refusal means rejecting the premise entirely. it means organizing outside the trolley and/or building a world where the trolley doesn’t run in the first place.
you say there’s no magical third choice. that’s exactly what people said to the abolitionists and the suffragettes and to everyone else who ever refused a rigged game, but built a new one anyway.
so no, refusing to play isn’t playing along. it’s the first real move anyone makes when they stop believing the lever is the only tool in existence.
And when confronted by this truth, those who choose the lesser evil devolve into insults, knowing their argument holds no moral weight, as evidenced by the other replies to you.
Sure, whatever helps you sleep at night. I can’t help it if you completely fail to understand Baby’s First Moral Philosophy Question.
Most of us sleep just fine not supporting dog rape genocide fascists. You’re the one trying to come up with all sorts of tortured arguments to justify yourself
Ah yes, the classic “I have no rebuttal, therefore I will insult you” response.
Maybe one day you’ll be able to process Baby’s Second Moral Philosphy Question
Maybe stop trying to emulate the moral intelligence of an infant
There’s no lever you can pull as a third choice because the lever only operates inside the bounds of the “system” of the rail network. It’s working as designed. So break the rails if it is an inevitability that people get tied to the tracks.
The system is just as immutable as the divine right of kings. Choosing to campaign on lever pulls within the system instead of focusing on systemic restructuring tells me a couple of things: 1) You aren’t tied to both sides of the track. 2) You’re fine with giving validity to a system that bakes genocide into itself because your comfort relies on someone being tied to the both tracks, and at the moment, that isn’t you.
Refusing to pull the lever doesn’t prevent you from working outside the bounds of the rail network. It might be worth considering that instead of the belief in slowly changing the democrats with slow constant pressure, the system is changing you to be more accepting of the unacceptable.
Oh, so you managed to destroy the tracks last election? No? Hmm, sounds like you did nothing then and the trolley continued down the path its currently on. A path that numerous people tried to tell you was worse than the other path. But it’s ok! You chose to dismantle the system and operate outside of it!
Except you didn’t do that. You had no ability to do that. Your actions are the exact same as someone who chose not to pull the lever, and the outcome is the exact same as if you chose not to pull the lever. To anyone observing, you are just as worthless as someone who didn’t pull the lever. Because at the end of the day, there WAS a lever and you DIDN’T pull it.
I see you didn’t even manage to get that lever pulled last election because genocide isn’t very popular regardless of your cheerleading. Pulling the lever would’ve never stopped the genocide, but derailing the train would have. You didn’t want genocide to end, you just wanted to go back to brunch.
You know, at least back when Lincoln was president, voters at least had a spine to do something about issues they were ethically against. They were willing to completely abandon the Whig party to back the new republican party (which killed the Whig party). This isn’t a fundamental change to the system, but even still it is farther than you’d be willing to go to prevent genocide. Perhaps what leftists need is for people like you to be less chickenshit genocidal white supremacist sellouts who hem and haw about the correct way to do genocide to prevent as much blowback to yourselves as possible as you live in the luxury that has been paid in the blood of the global south.
Or maybe ask me which state my “lever” was in and realize how futile your argument is for the majority of states and the majority of the population. Even if we had universal popular vote to determine president, as you seem to assume, that doesn’t remove the fact that the two choices were both supporters of genocide and the train deserves to be derailed and the track destroyed.
This point is totally useless without a way to derail the train. Not just a vague conceptual idea of what could theoretically derail the train, that’s useless. Without an actual mechanism to realistically do so, sufficient buy-in to implement that mechanism, and sufficient organization to actually follow through on that implementation, this is a totally useless argument. The necessary mechanism, buy-in, and organization does not currently exist. If you lack the ability to detail the train, it doesn’t matter how much better the world would be if the train was derailed. It’s pure fantasy, and it gets in the way of actual realistic praxis.
The problem is that those organizations are being built as we speak, and so should redirect people to those organizations. That’s realistic praxis. By pretending that these organizations will magically appear one day without needing to life a finger, you’re absolving yourself of the responsibility to do so and are calling “realistic praxis” upholding a genocidal system.
Just because you can’t imagine getting off your ass and building a better world doesn’t mean that everyone else shares your love for learned incompetence and your defense of fascists.
It’s funny how libs always assume that moral objectors aren’t doing anything besides voting. Do you think we aren’t out organizing our communities so that eventually we will have the mechanism to destroy the train?
And how do you think that mechanism gets built if it doesn’t start with a refusal to get on the train in the first place?
And finally, if moral objectors are so impotent and meaningless, then why do you keep blaming us for your candidate’s loss?