this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024
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This reminds me of the trolley problem. One candidate wants to kill five people, the other "only" wants to kill one person. No matter what you do, it is guaranteed that one of them will get elected and kill at least one person - but if you try to use your vote to make the lesser evil slightly more probable - you are suddenly complicit.
Even worse - if the kill-one-person wins and kills that person, the kill-five-people candidate' supporters will be the ones to hold the kill-one-person voters accountable for it. Their candidate would have killed more people, but because he lost the elections he was not able to kill anyone, which somehow makes voting for him more ethical?
You fail to mention the economic status or skin color of the potential victims.
Realistically the kill-five-people Candidate would have explicitly stated that they'd select the "correct" victims for their supporters to rally behind.
Whereas the kill-one-person Candidate would deny wanting to kill anyone in particular, so when it happens everyone is mad, even if their victim is a member of the "other" their opponent explicitly said they'd kill.
Wow that is a mess, but I can't think of a better way of putting it.
I did not fail to mention - I chose not to do it. The point of the trolley problem is not to find reason why killing the one person is not really that bad and why killing the five people is so much more terrible than what a simple multiplication implies. The point is to ask if its worth to end up with the greater evil just so that you can tell yourself that you are not complicit.
Something I've come to realize in the past few years is that blame and responsibility are just lies that we tell ourselves and each other. There are only our actions, what we can reasonably expect the results to be, and what the actual consequences are. Even if you're not "responsible" for something, if you know you can prevent it, and choose not to, you have chosen for that thing to happen.
That's an excruciatingly tortured metaphor. Are you implying that killing only one person instead of five could be worse depending on everyone's skin color or economic status? Or that it's worse to kill one person if the candidate tries to deny killing them?
Rereading your post. You're either saying that or adding nothing to the conversation.