Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith for November 27, 2015

Transcript:

Suppose you're in an out-of-control train. The train's path forks and you can either continue ahead or turn right. If you do nothing, you ram into Hitler. If you turn, you ram into ten Hitler's. You could argue that if you ram ten Hitler's, you've killed more evil people, and are therefore more ethical. Or, you could argue that by ramming only one Hitler, you achieve maximum remaining Hitler's. This will prevent any single Hitler from rising to power. And that is the difference between virtue ethics and consequential ethics. Maybe we should just try to find out who's cloning all these Hitler's. Pragmatism is not welcome in this classroom!