The trolly problem doesn’t apply to Gaza and the commenter in the image isn’t really criticizing the image right.
In the trolly problem, throwing the lever is effectively choosing who gets to die. That’s the philosophical choice: you become the person choosing which lives are valuable. It’s not just about being a murderer or a bystander. Even by noticing the lever, your inaction is a choice. IMHO, pretending you can remain a bystander by not throwing the lever is just moralizing your lack of action. The real philosophical question in the trolly problem is about human life and how to even measure it. Is the problem the same if the single person is a mother of three, and the five people on the other track are proven murderers/rapists? Should you throw the lever if you don’t know the people on the track?
The trolly image in the meme doesn’t even make sense. You’d have to draw the Palestinian man across both tracks to make it match the real life situation. It has been demonstrated that neither party is interested in saving those lives. (That doesn’t mean it’s not worth pressuring Biden)
That may be true, but R politicians are actively pushing to punish and extinguish the groups on the R track. Not actively destroying those groups doesn't require D politicians to give up any power.
I live in a microcosm of what consequences look like when D's lose and R's have unrestricted power. In Louisiana, we lost our D governor's seat to an R for the first time in 8 years. Now we have laws that our majority R congress is revenge passing diminishing the rights of every minority group they can and we have a governor talking about rewriting the state constitution in order to outlaw the rights of even more.
It's not pretty. But having a Democrat governor kept all of that from happening back in 2016.
Saying "D politicians don't actually care" is missing the point that R politicians are out for blood.
Saying "D politicians don't actually care" is missing the point
It's true though that Democrats don't care about us. Regardless of how you feel about voting, it is important to understand that the party that's ok with killing children and torturing refugees does not care about us.
Solidarity means what is done to one marginalized group is done to me.
The problem with this assessment is that inaction also qualifies as an action and does not somehow exempt the bystander from the moral calculus. If you disagree you'd also have a difficult time arguing that people who don't participate in forms of other activism should as the retort could simply be they're just a bystander and that there's vanishingly little untouched by the Capitalist system so they just won't do anything proactive.
Unless you literally live in the woods and grow your own food, you're likely interacting with a mini Capitalist trolley problem every time you buy food or turn on a light switch. Being asked to stop another few genocides and not make the current one worse is just one more.
This is where most leftists who refuse to vote for Biden are coming from. Do they pull the lever and participate in the system even if their vote would lead to continued genocide? Or do they remain a bystander and let the chips fall where they may, knowing they did not vote for genocide in any form?
When we participate in a rigged system, doesn’t it just give the system legitimacy? When we don’t participate in a rigged system, are we complicit in what happens? The trolly problem says no: you didn’t put those people on the tracks; you don’t have the power to stop the train and save everyone. You only have a choice: participate and save more lives than you (personally) chose to take or don’t participate and remind yourself that the system put these people on the track to begin with.
Yes I understand this, and I also understand leftists who look at this from other angles. I'd greatly distrust anyone who considers it an easy choice to vote for someone who's actively making a genocide possible and who's imprisoning and deporting record numbers of immigrants and refugees. It's not something to be taken lightly, even if one does arrive at this conclusion.
And I really distrust people's motives who start barking orders to people about how to respond. If anything, I feel like such tactics only discourage people from voting, and it's unfortunately common, at least in online spaces.
In the realm of voting the trolley problem is accurate, but I agree that there is more than can be done outside of that. One can pull the lever and rush to try to get the person off the tracks.
Does the answer to that change anything? We should still do the best we can with what we can do. While saving 1 person and failing to save the rest is absolutely terrible, it's also better than saving 0 and so still worth doing
