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I’ll take their chances
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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You are counting your saved person twice, once as a 100% save and again when you consider a net count of 4.
You have a 75% chance of saving 1 person, and 25% of killing 4, which means you are still killing
0.25*4 - 0.75*1 = 0.25people.Now the logic of "only 25% of bad outcome" is the real gambler's fallacy here. How far would you push it ? Would you pull the lever if it was a 20% chance of killing 10 ? A 10% chance of killing 50 ?
At some number people seem to go "what are the odds it happens to ME" and happily pull a lever even if the consequences outweigh the odds.
This reminded me of one of the ways of explaining the Monty Hall problem (if there were 100 doors and 98 got revealed as empty would your switch). If there were 100 alternate tracks, 99 of them empty, and the other with 200 people tied to it, I would pull the lever.
I don't know if I would...
For obvious reasons, I could never forgive myself if I promptly got to watch 200 people get butchered by a trolley immune to the laws of physics.
But even if these fairly comfortable 99% odds turned out in my favor... During the years of mental health counselling following my abduction and forced participation in twisted ethics games, I would have to listen to people telling me I saved someone and did the right thing, while knowing that I objectively did not. That I put two times more lives at risk than by not pulling the lever.
If you have 10 000 train tracks, but at the end of one of them is a nuke blowing up a city of 10 million people, do you pull the damned lever ? I sure don't.
That's a fair point, a nuclear bomb is so disastrous it would be better to let one person die than a small chance the nuke will go off. However we have significantly changed the order of magnitude here, 10 million people is 1000x more than the number of tracks.
In regards to the original question: I don't think feeling responsible for 5 deaths would be 5 times worse than feeling responsible for 1 death. The emotional cost of going from 0 deaths to 1 death is much higher than the emotional cost of going from 1 death to 5 deaths. The "greater good" argument says do nothing, my ability to sleep at night says pull the lever.