Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for June 09, 2021

Maybe you can post the choice you will make on Tik-Tok.

wait what is candy crush again?

Flip the switch and yell at the idiot who’s standing on the other track to get the hell off it NOW!

What Rat should do is throw himself in front of the train; that way, no matter what else happens, he’ll have performed a public service.

Cyanide & Happiness have a game called “Trial by Trolley” that does just this.

The current trolley problem seems to be:

Divert it to an empty track, or let it keep killing people because it already killed many people (aka student loans).

Fortunately for most of us, it’s a thought experiment. My brother in law, though, was an engineer for most of his career, and he’s been in charge more than once when someone committed suicide using HIS train. Do NOT ask him this question!

I was sitting as a judge pro tem in traffic court once and the defendant had been ticketed for walking across a train crossing when the gate was down. He argued that he should be able to take the risk. I pointed out that it wasn’t just his life at stake. It was the mental health of the engineer if he hit him, and passengers could fall and get hurt if the engineer slammed on the brakes. I fined him the maximum amount.

Thank you, Sharp, Foot, and Thomson.

Challenging!

I’ve never understood this. Why would you rather kill five people instead of just one? I must be missing something…

Is it the guy who tied the five people to the first track?

Priorities.

‘Depends on how I get the highest score.’

Depends on their political affiliation.

f8 @ 125th

Deadpool 2 moment ;-)

Since the guy standing on the other track isn’t tied up anywhere, he’s free to runs away. And if he’s such a marooon that he doesn’t run away when he see the train coming towards him, then it’s his own stupidity that kills him.

Goat’s mistake is in thinking Rat has any ethics.

Who plays Candy Crush anymore?

is the guy a lawyer?

https://i.imgflip.com/35bqa3.png

I do nothing. I did not tie the people to the track nor did I tell some idiot to stand on the other set of tracks. If I do anything, suddenly I’m culpable for 5 deaths or 1 which means I’m likely getting sued. Plausible deniability means I can always claim that I do not know how to operate a train switch. At best, I call 911. At worst I hope I have a bag of popcorn cause one way or another, it’s gonna be a show.

As someone else pointed out when this strip first ran, Goat didn’t ask you to answer the question, he just said to listen.

Rat is the wrong person to ask anything of, even about the weather.

The premise here is a variation on the theme of do you intervene to save x number of lives even if it means causing the death of another.

Failing to do anything, you are not directly responsible for anyone’s death. Allowing an event to occur, even if you have the power to stop it, is not the same as deliberately acting in a way that causes someone else’s death. But we’re meant to think that saving more lives is worth the sacrifice of one, an argument I don’t agree with.

Ahh, the old Trolley Problem. I loved when they tackled this on “The Good Place.”

It’s also why we’re not getting fully autonomous vehicles anytime soon.

Too much responsibility for me, I’ll let someone else make the decision while I go to my happy place.

Throw the switch and tell the other guy to move.

Maybe? Yeah, he’s definitely the wrong guy to ask.

Don’t flip the switch. Dudley Do-Rght will come along in time to save the five people (well, it works with Nell).

It is the “God’s Will” dilemma that beleaguers our small minded courts. You can do nothing and allow the death of 10000, but if you act and one person is inconvenienced you will face consequences.

RAT can’t be bothered with such matters…he’s truly a rat

Why is the guy standing on the other track? Why isn’t he helping untie the five on the one track? Very suspicious…

Why, I ask why are you trying to ruin MY life? How many people would die if I stopped the train on a dime?

I’d say WWGD? What would Gomez do? Blow the track, of course!

Wait! “And then along came Jones; Tall, thin Jones, Slow-walkin’ Jones, Slow-talkin’ Jones, Along came lonely, lanky Jones”

Do we know the political affiliation of these various individuals?

I’d reprogram the test. Worked for Capt. Kirk.

To those who posted advocating no action. How do you live with yourself if you do nothing?

The fact of the matter is that if you do nothing, the five people will die, but it is not your fault. It was going to happen if you never went to the front of the train to see what was going on. If you purposely switch the train to the other track you are deciding to kill the one person so you are a murderer and would be arrested, go to trial and probably sent to prison, even if it was just for manslaughter.

The real dilemma of the situation is do you let “nature take its course” or do you intervene and murder one person to save five others.

Ah yes the Kobayashi Maru – or in this example, why you should have a really sharp pocket knife to free the first 5.

Truth is that every time you see someone playing with their phone while they are driving, you know how they answered this question.

I mean, its candy crush….

So who are the people?

Which person has me in their will? That could be a major deciding factor.

do en meany mo

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few … or the one.

Maybe Rat isn’t so far off the track (so to speak).

When faced with an insoluble Moral Dilemma, bugger it all and move on….

I guess asking who the 5 people are and who the one person is would be a bad choice?

Modified rerun.

Wow, this is not only the same art as 1/22/2020, it’s almost the same gag. Rat’s dialogue differs in panels 3 and 4, but all other dialogue is the same. (How do I remember that? Because I’m a philosophy professor and I have shown the 1/22/2020 strip in classes, so I have it in my file of class-related comics.)

Now imagine that there’s a train barreling down towards five people, and you and a fat guy are on a bridge over he tracks. If you push the fat guy off, his weight will be enough to stop the train, but he’ll die. What do you do?

Wait for the train to get close, then detonate a bomb I hid on it.

Go on neal.fun there is a lot of variations of this.