Description du poste
Eleven years ago I was on the Red Line (not the
section that's a
trolley), and found myself in a variant of the
classic moral
dilemma. I
wrote about it on
Reddit at the time:
Hi! I'm the person who pulled the brake. What I saw:
The train starts pulling out of the station. Someone begins shouting
that their arm is caught in the door. I look over, see that the door
is closed somewhere between their elbow and wrist, but it's not clear
exactly where with their jacket on. People, including me, start
shouting to pull the brake, but no one does. The train keeps
accelerating, and it looks to me like once we get to the end of the
station they're going to lose their hand. I get to the back of the car
and pull the brake.
After the train stops, the man manages to pull his arm into the train,
with his bag still on the outside. If he'd let go of his bag I think
he would have been able to do this sooner, but he was panicking as I
suspect most people would with their arm half out of the train like
that.
I was pretty shaken up, and didn't end up blogging about it, but it
came up again at one of our effective altruism dinners. This
got me thinking about ways that philosophical problems do and don't
translate into real life.
In this situation the stakes were lower than in the traditional
trolley problem, and the situation is closer to Scanlon's Transmitter Room
(What We Owe to Each
Other, quoted jokingly here). The
worst case was someone's arm being badly injured, maybe permanently.
On the other side was delaying the whole line for an hour,
perhaps losing ~4 years of waking life in total (~25k people * 1hr /
16 / 365 = 4.3y). But were these the real stakes?
I now think his arm probably wasn't caught in the door. That's what
it looked like to me, and I was very sure at the time, but people who
were closer disagree:
I was in the car too -- I could tell that it was just his bag in the
door, but in a split second, I was having a hard time telling how big
his bag was, a