And that's precisely why supertasks are impossible. — Michael

And that’s precisely why the question of whether the lamp will be on or off at two minutes will never present itself.

If you want to talk about how lamps and intervals of time work in an alternate universe why are we using any premises from this universe about lamps and so on?

The three stooges were hungry and looking for ideas on what to eat. Larry says, “if we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.” Mo hits him on the head.

If we want to ponder what a lamp will be doing at two minutes time, we could just hook it up to a switch that switches every half of the interval of time prior, if we had a universe where such a switch existed.

This conversation (and not your fault) is starting to feel like a descent on a bottomless staircase.

Given that the lamp must be either on or off after two minutes — Michael

How is that? How is it on or off at or after two minutes?

It cannot be a function of a switch that operates by switching every half of the prior interval. Some other function needs to be introduced into the picture to ask about the state of the lamp at 2 minutes or beyond.

Why is it given by this switche’s function that the lamp will be anything in particular at or after 2 minutes? You are just assuming something exterior to the premise about time and lamps.

In that case, if the lamp must be on, or off, at two minutes, is that state caused by the switch?

So what are we disagreeing about?

Whether this is paradox, or whether there is an answer to question 3?

I don’t think there is an answer to question 3. Because the switch is not designed to ever present the question.

Is the lamp on or off after 2 minutes?

In all three scenarios the switch is "designed to function within two minutes." — Michael

Not if you want to answer the question in scenario three. Or more precisely, not designed to function at or after two minutes.

If you are talking about these terms in a moral sense, I think they need to be explained in more detail. When is one morally culpable? Negligence implies a failure to do a duty - what duty are we talking about here, and when can one be said to be morally negligent? — Tzeentch

Exactly the point I am trying to make. The moral questions in the trolley problem are more about the trolley builder, the trolley driver who abandoned his post, the person who rigged the whole scene, the story of the five guys tied to the tracks, the circumstances that thrust someone to make this awful choice - not the person who picks one or five deaths. In the person who picks the one or five deaths, I think the moral question is, should he or she do anything at all - is it right for them to trust someone teaching them about levers in the moments before certain death around the corner?

This isn’t about whether it is better to let one person die or let five people die, or put another way, to kill one person or kill five - that’s easy. And none of that can be murder under these circumstances, and the single lever puller or ass sitter should not be the first held accountable in this scenario. They might be last to be held accountable. Where are the brakes anyway? It’s the big trolley corporation’s fault! This is basically a James Bond villain scenario. It’s all practical considerations here. The ethics is not on the table.

My take is the most ethical thing to do would be to refuse to participate. You can call that choosing to kill five, but that’s not what I said. That is choosing to leave the responsibility for creating this scenario where it lies before you were told about the lever.

There is no duty here.

The same is true if the lamp switches just the once — Michael

No, that’s a different equation. That switch is more easily predicted. The switch on Thompson’s lamp requires some serious calculation to determine its state after say one minute fifty-nine seconds. It can be calculated though. But it can’t be calculated at 2 minutes time, because it was designed to function within two minutes. Once two minutes lapse, the switch’s function has no relationship to whatever would be the state of affairs (which I’m telling you would likely be a fire, so in a sense, I’m guessing the lamp would be on).

So we resolve the paradox by accepting the metaphysical impossibility of supertasks. — Michael

I’d say we never had a paradox. There is no paradox at 2 minutes, because by the time we get to 2 minutes, the initial switch and algorithm it functioned by are no longer in play, unable to be held at odds with whatever might be the case at 2 minutes.

That's how the world works. — Michael

Haha! Ok, so the switch clicks at 1 minute, then it clicks again at 30 seconds more, then it clicks again at 15 seconds more, then again at 7.5 seconds, etc.

What will the switch and light be doing at 2 minutes?

Nothing in relation to the switch as described above. Something beyond the parameters the initial scenario set in motion.

It may be on. It may be off. It will probably be broken or melted. But in relation to the switch described above those possible outcomes have no bearing because the switch was designed to serve a function before two minutes time can elapse.

If the light clicks on at two minutes, or off, either the switch malfunctioned, or it can do more then switch itself at half intervals of the prior lapsed time.

“When the clock shows 12:02 I turn around. Is the lamp on or off?”

Whichever it is, it wouldn’t be a function of a switch that operates by waiting half the time to switch and then half of that time to switch again, and then half of the half, etc, because such a switch would have no direction or programming to follow at two minutes, because it is designed to operate before two minutes could pass.

It is not just the case that whether the lamp is on or off after two minutes — Michael

I don’t understand. How do you ever arrive at the two minute mark?
1 minute, half a minute later, quarter minute later than that, etc., infinitely…you never arrive at the two minute mark.

Like the endless bottomless staircase that for some reason had a bottom with a dead guy.

??? Two minutes and a bottom step subvert the issue and banish infinity from the math of it.

These are manufactured conundrums mixing what is an actual occurrence (walking down a step, turning a light on or off) with what is not an actual occurrence but a conceptual/mathematical idea that has no weight or influence on walking or flicking light switches.

There no paradox because the lamp can’t be on or off. There is just an endless motion (invented in a mind that can invent things and objects that can’t actually be built and tested).

If you are going to ponder whether the light is actually, physically on, you have to ponder whether a switch can be switched as rapidly as you would have to switch it as you approached two minutes. The light might be off because you broke the switch. I know, to a mathematical/logical student I am missing the point, but then, if we can assume functioning switches to lay out the mathematical intrigue, why can’t we assume the mathematical intrigue of never reaching two minutes and therefore never able to determine an on/off state at the two minute mark? And conclude that such a scenario builds a lamp that will endlessly turn on and off at ever increasing speeds with no limit or single state thereby enlightening or darkening said limit.

As you approached 2 minutes with really small fractions (but never got there if you are being consistent), would the speed between switching the light on and off eventually approach and then exceed the speed of light? (That’s one solid switch!). So how would we be able to tell whether the light we saw was the light from the latest switching motion or light from a few switches ago? We’d need a new measure besides our eyes, and could not watch the experiment in real time anymore.

We can’t mix real things with infinity as a limiter. Real things always include finite limits. The positing of infinite physical steps, or infinite half steps, pose logical perplexities, but not actual paradoxes.

Suppose someone walking by a lake sees a child fall, hit his head on a rock, and start floating face down in the water. They only have to get a little bit wet to save the kid's life. If they don't, can't we judge them? Wouldn't it be wrong to let the kid drown? — RogueAI

Not helping a kid floating face down can easily be wrong morally/objectively, even if they have to get soaked.

That’s not comparable to being given instructions on how to work trolley levers, told people are (for some reason) tied to train tracks, told another person is standing on the other track, and being told you alone have to take responsibility for the outcome.

Does anyone think the people on the tracks (or their families of the deceased) could blame the person who pulled the lever for the death? There is much more to it than the decision to pull levers or not. The ethics lies in those places, not in the lever predicament.

It’s more immoral to ask a person to make this decision than it is for the person to kill 1 or kill 5. The rigging of the outcome - death or more death - that is where the wrong doing occurs.

Nothing which is intended can come about by omission. — Leontiskos

That’s not what I am saying about omission. I am saying there must be an affirmative duty prior to there being an intentional omission of acting on that duty.

If you intend to kill five you can sit still, but you are committing an act of sitting still.

If you see you have a duty to save five and you sit still intentionally, you are committing a wrong because of your duty by your act of omission.

Everyone knows that the death of five is worse than the death of one, ceteris paribus. If it were that simple then there would be no disagreement over the trolley problem. — Leontiskos

Exactly.

So ethics arises not in the practical facts, but in the intentions behind them.

So you are saying the scenario is asking us whether, in these circumstances, a duty arises to act at all, and then complicates it by then asking if you fail to act at all, or pull the lever, are you culpable for committing murder, or culpable by omission for committing the murder of five?

One of the central aspects of the trolley problem gets at the question of whether one is equally responsible for omissions and commissions:

To not-pull-the-lever is an omission. [...] Whether such an omission is wrong will depend on the analysis. — Leontiskos

It just does a poor job of highlighting the omission.

So the other guy on the trolley who is just sitting there unaware of anything, omitting to do anything at all, does he have a duty to choose a lane and save some people? Is he omitting his duty of vigilance over what lane the trolley should be in?

The whole reason there might be a duty to save the right people is because you were given the responsibility to do anything at all. Or you take responsibility to do anything at all. But the raw facts of the scenario don’t address any duties at all. There is no reason to blame someone for failing to act when they had no duty to act.

So if we are allowed to bring in exterior facts, like a duty to save anyone, we can rework the scenario any way we want. The scenario as it stands, to me, doesn’t present a moral question about saving or killing human lives, it presents a moral question about whether there is a duty to make any decision at all, to take any action at all, to participate and consent to one or the other committed acts (5 or 1) dying.

not-pull-the-lever is an omissio — Leontiskos

It’s not an omission if you intend to kill five people. It’s how you carry out your intention. It’s a physical act to stay seated in order to kill five.

You said you can omit pulling the lever. If you omit pulling the lever, are you omitting everything then, or choosing and physically enacting the killing of 5? If you can omit pulling the lever, are you committing to staying seated? Or are you merely omitting all acts? Which goes to participating in the whole rigged experiment.

Yes, it is. Just as you can be culpable for an omission, so too can you effect some outcome via an omission. Your claim that because someone can achieve an intended outcome by not-doing something does not invalidate the fact that not-doing-something is an omission. — Leontiskos

If I had a duty to save the most people when riding a trolley that had no proper conductor, than sitting still would be an immoral act of omission.

But do I have any duty to participate in this situation at all? That has to be addressed first.

To not-pull-the-lever is an omission. — Leontiskos

No it’s not. What if in this situation I want to kill five people? My choice is killing five people. How do I actively effect that choice - by actively refusing to pull the lever, but intentionally sitting still. These are not omissions.

There is stuff to ponder in the trolley problem but the difference between a wrong of omission and a wrong of commission is tough to find here. There is first, the act of the trolley trap builder who commits an act of murder of either five or one person. You can’t build this scenario to be a moral problem without knowing the intention (or negligence, or just life’s predicaments) behind it.

If the whole situation arose innocently, and for some innocent reason five men were tied to the trolley tracks, and one standing on the other, and you innocently knew how the lever worked the tracks, and you innocently knew no one else was going to take responsibility for what happens, then you might be forced to decide whether your own participation in things will help improve the outcome, and quicker save five and kill one. But I don’t see how given the innocence of every other aspect of this scenario we have to all of a sudden focus on the morality of the person thrust into that fast moving scene. It’s not a moral question - it’s a practical one, and whatever happens isn’t the driver’s fault whether he chooses to switch lanes or chooses to stay in one lane.

So, you reframe the problem to be not about making what is best for others, but about what is best for your self-image. — SophistiCat

Not self image.

Just trying to locate where the moral question really is, where the moral issue really arises.

The moral question is why does ANYONE have to die here? Did someone rig the whole situation intentionally? The driver certainly didn’t. They are just forced to pick a lane. Is this a case of negligent brakes on the trolley and no trained trolley driver to make the decision? How is a bystander any more responsible than any other person in this situation?

If it is wrong to kill people, it is wrong first and foremost to build this situation. Period. Whoever rigged the whole scenario is doing the intentional killing. The driver forced to pick a lane is incidental to the trap builders intentional act.

So when the driver intentionally chooses one lane or the other, they are probably going to recognize that mathematically, saving five is better than saving only one. But I don’t see holding them responsible for killing anyone.

for caring itself is transcendental, mystical, as Wittgenstein would say. — Constance

Could caring instead, or also, be the most immanent, most intimate expression of the one who is being religious (or just being)? The place where instead of finding the essence of religion, you find the one being religious. By caring for something, one brings that transcendent thing (the “world”) into one’s immanent care. Still maybe mystical, but a mystery buried inside instead of beyond.

Little confused here, "I must consent to the choice as I act. That consent, can only be freely given. Home of radical freedom. Maybe?" if you care to, could you expand any more on this? what do you mean when you say that consent can only be freely given? Consent is the voluntary agreement or approval of what is done or proposed by another...I dont think consenting or approving the choice is necessary BUT IF ONE HAS TO BE MADE, (extremeness in this manner make the problem not realistic (to me),BUT I find this problem can be wildly interesting) — Kizzy

I may have gotten ahead of myself a bit. So we distinguished between the choices (1 or 5, good or bad) and the consent (I pull the lever, or I stay seated), and then I say consent can only be freely given.

I don’t know if that is right. But I am interested in considering it further.

You said “Consent is the voluntary agreement or approval of what is done or proposed by another.”. That is true, but I also think when I have a choice between at least two things, those two things are the other, they are what is to be done (kill one or five); those choices are what are proposed by circumstances (save 5 or let them die). I still have to consent to one among this other in order to act and MAKE the choice.

Consent it seems to me is part of the picture in every choice.

I think whether it is only freely given is a tangent that I’m not even sure how to address.

what if i dont feel forced, just scared? — Kizzy

That’s why I think it would take courage to do the truly moral thing on the trolley and not participate at all. I guess fear is a kind of force that might also diminish the ability to consent and therefore the ability to commit a moral act.

Those who chose the lever everytime to "save lifes" offer an interesting perspective — Kizzy

I agree with that, and that it highlights the difference between the choice “to save lives” and the consent to make that choice, by pulling the lever. Pulling the lever to save lives shows both aspects of ethics - the choice of five over one, and the willing consent to that choice by acting, by pulling the lever.

It’s right to turn over that perspective to move on to good versus bad in the one or in the five living or dying, as well as turning over the person who acted upon the world to bring about the one or the five or the good or the bad.

But the act of sitting there and doing nothing is not doing nothing - if your will is to kill the five, and if the scenario will permit the enacting of this will (which it does) then sitting there not letting anyone touch the lever is just as affirmative an act as pulling the lever.

The trolley case, for me, just doesn’t set up a strong question of whether your act was one of omission.

To your question (that has no real answer, im afraid), "Who is forcing the choice?" I offer another one: What if the chooser is the force? — Kizzy

You mentioned the person just sitting there, keeping a justifiable distance.

So what do you mean there is no real answer to the question who is forcing the choice? It’s a hypo. Someone has built a hypo. If it was a real trolley, someone else set the whole thing in motion, and put you in control of 1 or 5 deaths. They are the ones forcing you. That is where we search for ethics - between the trolley trap maker and really all the unwilling participants (willing ones would be on the trap maker’s side).

↪Apustimelogist - :up: Essential to the trolley problem is the possible distinction between an act and an omission, and ↪Fire Ologist excluded that distinction from the problem. Regardless of what the trolley problem was to begin with, it has now become a stock argument for consequentialism. It is essentially the cultural reaction to deontology. — Leontiskos

I did address that above but probably badly. But I’ll do better.

Sometimes when you are driving you take your foot off the gas, maybe down a small hill; that doesn’t mean you aren’t driving the car forward because you need not push the gas pedal to move forward. So doing nothing is moving forward at just the right speed..

Or better, sometimes on your Xbox controller you press A and sometimes B or sometimes nothing at all, but yet you are in total control.

Sitting on the trolley may as well be button A and pulling the lever may as well be touching nothing at all on the controller; whether one or five die is completely in your control.

This scenario does not include a sin of omission if you will. Sitting there is enacting the death of five people. You have the simple choice of what outcome, what effect you can choose to bring about.

A wrong by omission occurs when you already recognize an affirmative good deed (saving a baby that falls in a fountain) and omit the action, choose not to act. You might be able to fabricate a trolley scenario where there is a wrong of omission (maybe with babies and pedophiles on the tracks or something), but choosing to stay seated is choosing not to pull the level, as much as pulling the lever is choosing not to stay seated. I only see acts of commission in leaving 5 alive or leaving 1 alive. No acts of omission.

This highlights what I was talking about with .

The trolley case here is a bit more simple and cuts off the element of consent. 5 or 1 will die. There no other options. But in addition, you must give your consent by either staying seated, or pulling the lever. You do not have a choice but to consent to one or the other, unless you can protest the whole thing, denying any and all responsibility.

If we are able ever, to take any responsibility, we are able to take none. So there is no way to judge the one who stays seated ethically, because they could be either participating by actively avoiding the lever, or they could not give a damn what anyone else thinks is going on, they have nothing to do with this.

The trolley example has to judge what the person is consenting to in their act.

If you strip away everything of their consent and tell them: “

to either watch five people be killed or pull a lever so that only one person gets killed. — Captain Homicide

, then there is nothing to consider of their consent behind either choice.

I actually think the moral choice here is to confront the trolley trap maker and say “I choose neither so all that follows remains your doing.” You could say that I am choosing not ro pull the lever, but no - if we are to judge my lever pulling as good or bad, we have to know what I would consent to, am consenting to as I act.

If I choose to pull the lever, I am choosing to save five people, and I am consenting to this as exemplified in my physical act of pulling the lever. So I am also consenting to participate in the experiment.

If I choose to stay seated, I may be consenting to kill five to save the one, or consenting to kill five with no concern about the one, or consenting to save the one, with little concern about the five, but if I choose to stay seated I might also not be consenting to any of this at all. This heart, my consent, that I alone can generate, must be considered in ethics.

Maybe consent is in the trolley case, by omission. And I’ve been remiss in failing to give it credit for spurring the conversation.

Speeding trolley and you have kill five arguments in favor of the trolley case or kill just one argument, what would you do …go!

On the other hand, does forcing really exempt you from moral responsibility? — Apustimelogist

I don’t know about exempting, so it’s a good question, but force certainly creates a distance for responsibility to cover.

I'm inclined to think that framing it this way makes the situation different to a simple choice of 1 vs. 5. Viewed this way you could also argue that there is not so much a forcing element here. — Apustimelogist

Maybe I did over simplify. Well, I see there is a choice between 1 and 5, “I can save or kill five or one” and in that sense am not forced. And after giving me the instructions about the pulling the lever or not, no one forced anything further to happen, the rest is up to me. And that’s where the trolly case starts.

But isn’t there still a third element in any situation like the trolly vital to the conversation? There is also my willing participation in the choice and its effect enacted (as with the one person being hit by the trolley). The choosing act, about which we say “I am responsible.” And it is in that willingness, that consent, that we find something vital to ethics, but greatly diminished in the trolley case.

The trolly has clarified for me that, my consent, and my choice are two different pieces; I can choose to kill the five or kill the 1, and we can debate goodness among those choices, but to do either, to act, to kill 5 for instance, I must consent to the choice as I act. That consent, can only be freely given. Home of radical freedom. Maybe?

Only in a world of willing consent, (better, a world of many willing consenting ones), can there emerge an ethics. Not just a world of choices and options like one and five.

Now we look for freedom in this, freedom versus forcing a choice (by controlling the options) or forcing your consent (by commanding participation).

But mixing up actual stairs with models of stairs just produces a confusion, so the paradox is just an illusion - in my opinion. — Ludwig V

Exactly. There is no paradox caused by an infinite staircase, because an infinite staircase is a square circle, barely conceivable if conceivable at all.

What if every time I bit an apple and ate it, in the time I chewed the bite, the apple grew in size bigger than the bite I just took? Do I need to figure out the math here to see how to prevent the apple from eating me?

Despite the staircase being endless, he reached the bottom of it in just a minute. — keystone

Staircases are always, and only, actually, finite, as any object is. The endlessness of the staircase is brought to an end at the bottom, so it is not endless, so there is no sense to the word “despite”.

This is not a paradox, but a confusion of concepts (like the number 1 or infinitely) with actual things (like a one step down one stair, and never reaching the bottom or doing so in a minute).

The heart of the trolley problem is this:
“Without any context or explanation, if you were forced to kill either 1 person or 5 people with no other options, which would you do?”

Everything else is a distraction. Trolleys, levers, instructions given to force you to make a decision, no brakes or time for brakes, etc) allow you to start to picture the scene, but these facts introduce the real world, which introduces many new questions. These questions influence what the basic hypo actually is, so they have to be answered before one could say whether they killed 1 or 5 people was right or wrong.

So to avoid the creeping presence of real world questions, and stick to the hypo, the question becomes: is it worse to kill one person or five people.

Depends on what you think of people. If it’s bad to kill a person, then, since you are forced to kill either one person or five people, it seems a no brainer. And since you are FORCED to kill one or five, neither choice is immoral or moral for you. One might be better or more practical, but it’s not your fault someone has to die.

Who is forcing the choice?

there's much better ethical considerations to be had than which 'choice' one would make. The focus ought be upon how we ever got to that point to start with... — creativesoul

Exactly the point of my last post. :ok:

mathematical modelling of movement is infinitely divisible — Heracloitus

Modeling is not physical, so the models built with infinity will never pose a problem when descending stairs. There is no paradox because the paradox seeks to mix actual stairs with modeling.

where there are no other options. — Philosophim

Kill 1 or kill 5. In this scenario, I choose whether the trolly stays left and kills 5 or goes right and kills one. I have the same control in my choice whether 5 or 1 dies, so sitting there and doing nothing is making the this one choice one way (by selecting left towards the five), as pulling the lever and selecting right and killing one. It’s one choice and to effectuate the one choice I either leave the lever alone or pull it. So the fact that I can sit there changes nothing about the responsibility for either choice. If I sit there, I can’t say “it was not because of me that the five died, I just sat there.”

It’s one choice with me responsible for it. That is a very poor scenario (sitting still or pulling lever) to analyze the issue of taking responsibility.

Now 1 or 5. Obviously kill 1 instead of 5.

But, is that a moral choice? Did I choose rightly? Could I have chosen wrongly?

But here is the moral question: did I know which was the wrong choice and yet choose it anyway? Did I act immorally in making my choice?

In order to judge whether choosing to kill 1 or 5 was immoral or good, I need more facts. There is no morality inherent in this choice. Why did I choose to kill 5? Why did I choose to kill 1? Because 5 is greater than 1, killing 1 equals saving 5 which is greater than killing 5 to save 1? So I am moral now?

We need reality here.

In reality, I would hope I would have the courage to say “I refuse to participate at all. If you think that means I am choosing to kill 5, I ask you who set this trolly in motion, who won’t let me stop the trolly, who is trying to force me to participate? Who chose the 5 and the 1 man? Who is giving me this choice of who dies, but made all of those other choices without me?? THEY are killing 5 people and forcing me to see it. They have arranged to save the one person.”

You can’t ignore all of that and seek the morality of me playing along and thinking for a couple seconds, do I sit still or pull the lever? The only morality to question in me is any participation in the trolly ride.

We can try to play along to see if killing one person to save 5 is the right and moral choice, but not in these circumstances.

But if I didn’t think of the sickness of the situation and recognize all of the apparatus and planning that had to be in place to put me here, and I just played along, that doesn’t make me a hero or murderer for pulling the lever. It makes me quick at math under some pressure. It demonstrates the immorality of telling someone to make that choice in that fabricated situation. It doesn’t make me any better or worse if I made a choice that someone else would have made differently.

Truly, anyone in that circumstance could not be held responsible for any outcome. (Sitting versus pulling is how the trolly goes / that remains true. But responsibility for the outcome here, sitting versus pulling is one small act in what is happening here, like the trolly wheel turning is another small act, and the engine racing is another.)

So it produces very little understanding of ethics and morality to think about whether choosing to kill 5 or 1 says something good or bad about the person forced to ride that trolly. Despite the confines of the scenario, I would not be responsible for any outcome. I am a cog in a wheel someone else put in motion. And if you thought about the trolly engine starter who gave the instructions about the lever or the sitting, don’t you think we’d have more to discover about ethics there than in the person nail-biting over whether 5 is greater than the number 1?

Is was just told not to add anything by Philosophim.

So the trolley driver thought that the single person was the son of his neighbor and he hates his neighbor so he intended to hurt his neighbor by pulling the lever.

And he was thrilled that he woke up and found himself in this situation.

Some people are just interested in morality just because they are interested in morality, regardless of practical application.
— Apustimelogist

Ok, but I don't understand. Moral philosophy describes how we should treat other people. How can you talk about that without talking about how it works in the real world? — T Clark

Completely agree. That’s what makes these thought experiments of such limited value. It’s an unreal scenario and doesn’t factor in intent, which is essential to defining an ethical act between people.

Morality has to do with intent.

So is the variable here inaction of watching people die, or affirmative action pulling the lever to kill one of them? Is this inaction versus action?

Or is the question whether it is better to kill one person or five people in this scenario?

The trolley problem is a thought experiment where you’re asked to either watch five people be killed or pull a lever so that only one person gets killed — Captain Homicide

All of the variables and so many more facts are important to understand before we can judge morality from this.

Did I just wake up and find myself at the controls of the speeding trolly somehow knowing what levers are for and immediately I’m also aware that I had a few seconds to act? Or am I a seasoned trolly driver, responsible for whatever happens on either track and just having a bad day at work as a seasoned trolley driver. How did I get to be in this predicament?

Are there passengers on the trolly?

If the trolly driver thought I am less likely to derail if I hit one person, and I have to protect the passengers and other people standing near the tracks, so I’ll pull the lever, would that make the driver more moral for affirmatively killing the one person? Or did they affirmatively avoid the five people?

If I found out someone was magically transported into the driver’s seat of a trolly and within seconds of arriving they killed somebody or five people or twenty, the thought of blaming that person for any of their decisions, or making that person responsible for any outcomes, wouldn’t even occur to me.

Who put that person in that position? Who rigged the experiment? Find that person and we can start to analyze what may have been moral and immoral. Or add all variables that would enable us to pass judgment or right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral regarding that trolly driver.

And we all have to assume we all think people are valuable and good, and that we know what good means, and what immoral means, and that our judgment of this scenario has any value or itself could be a good judgment or an immoral judgment.

I’m just saying the notion of an infinite staircase is impossible to conceive as steps and groups of steps are unitary wholes, and infinity never unifies or finishes multiplying. You can’t apply infinity to finite things. There is no infinite number of steps between the 1 yard line and the 2 yards line. There is a single yard. You can mathematically take the single yard and mathematically divide it in half, and take one of the halves and divide it…infinitely. But that has nothing to do at all whatsoever with taking a one yard physical step on a football field.

Yes, but once you have defined your half, you can treat it as a unit and define a half of a half... and repeat indefinitely — Ludwig V

Exactly! You have to take the thing you call a “half” as a single whole unit before you can take some measure again. A half is just a measure conceived of after there is a unit. Only unitary whole things can be touched or stepped on, like a step.

You need to grab that finite whole thing first from the physical world to then posit the concept of half of that whole. The half wasn’t grabbed from the physical world.
— Fire Ologist
"Grabbed" from the physical world is a completely inappropriate metaphor. Nothing is grabbed. Something was defined. In any case, if the whole thing was "grabbed from the physical world", it follows that both halves of it were "grabbed". If they weren't, nothing was "grabbed". — Ludwig V

A single thing that can be grabbed is defined as you say as a unit. A single thing. Like one whole step.

So now we have conceived of the unit. We’ve defined it as 1. As a whole.

Only now can we posit or “define” infinity. Only now can you keep the conception of the unitary whole and define half. Only once you have a single unit can you add to that unit more units infinitely. But at each step, if you refer to the physical thing, you have a finite number of units. And you can’t posit or define or conceive of half without reference to half of some other defined, conceived thing, and that thing must be a whole unit.

There is no infinity apart from the mind that conceives it. There are things apart from the mind that conceives of the unit.

There is no infinite thing to begin with. Only unitary wholes. And infinite staircase is an infinite finite unit - a square circle. There is no infinite thing, so pondering the paradoxes that arise from traversing an infinite distance, or descending and infinite staircase misapplies infinity to unitary whole, single, definable things.

Infinity applies to numbers. Numbers aren’t physical things, like stairs.

But if you think of the distance between my eyes, you can certainly divide that by 1/2 or 1/4 — Ludwig V

The distance between your eyes is a whole. You need to grab that finite whole thing first from the physical world to then posit the concept of half of that whole. The half wasn’t grabbed from the physical world. Otherwise it would have been a smaller whole distance to start again. The half-distance comes after a whole is firmly in hand. Let’s say it’s two inches between eyes. You can’t identify half that distance by referring to your face. You call some smaller distance half, numerically, in reference to the numerical value the refers to the whole distance. The whole distance refers to your eyes.

Imagine someone says in order to walk from the goal line to goal line in football, you first have to walk one-hundredth of a distance, but before that you have to walk one-third of the distance to that first one-hundredth mark, etc. etc. infinitely.

Calling these smaller distances fractions is semantics with reference to mathematical concepts. No fraction ever exists. What exists would be one whole distance from goal to goal, one whole yard, one whole foot… we can rename the measures fractions by referring them to some greater whole, but then we need to have the greater whole first before we can measure a fraction. We must walk the entire football field first before we can conceive of a whole yard being 1/100th.

Infinity is like that. It can’t refer to a physical, identifiable thing or be contained in an object. It can only refer to numbers, which are concepts. There are no infinite series of steps.

He lingered on the first step, marked "1," for 30 seconds, soaking in the enchanting energy coursing through his veins. Moving to step "2," he paused for 15 seconds, feeling lighter and quicker, like a feather in descent. Driven by an irresistible urge, he continued to step "3," then "4,", and so on, each time halving his rest period. — keystone

The rest periods at step 1, instead of being 30 seconds long, is that really just 2 times as long of rest than at step 2? Or is it 4 times as long as step 3, or is it 6 times as long as step 4? In which case, this story has as much to do with increasing speed between steps as it does shortening rests on each step. So rest and motion are needed to place steps in flight beneath you. Is it the increasing speed that shortens the rest, or the shorter rests that increase the speed? How can any rest cause motion to increase?

And why not a bottomless pit if you are to reach an impossible bottom?

This whole image is that of a square circle. I don’t see what there is to resolve.

There can exist no infinite anything. Thingness, such as a step or a series of steps, is finitude. Infinity is not a thing to which you can add 1 or subtract from, certainly not when describing actual steps. Calling a thing or a series of things infinite, removes the thing or things from your sight, removes them from the chalkboard, and shows you the same infinity as imagined in the infinite series of fractions between step 1 and step 2. There is no such thing as a half step. Not is there a such thing as an infinite series of steps. There is only a whole distance later conceptually halved, as when you conceive of halving some existing whole step infinitely.

“The infinite” or “infinity” as a noun, is best used for dramatic effect. It’s not a thing, like a noun is best employed. “Infinitely” as an adverb, sets out some activity that, by definition, cannot conclude. Thereby banishing all finitude, which marks conclusion, such as a step, or a series of steps, or a noun.

“Halving” as a verb, like “stepping” as a verb, can be conceived of as continuing infinitely. But you never find the infinite. There need be no infinitely small fraction. Saying the stars and the atoms in the multiverse are infinite in number means you don’t know how to count them, so for dramatic effect, we invoke “the infinite”. But the infinite finds no home, no place in the physical world, in the form of the finite, save the mind that conceives of some activity that can continue infinitely.

We might as well start this by saying, “there were three steps to the basement, but before he took the first one Icarus had to get off the couch, but as he did so, he realized he had to first sit up, and then realized he had to move his legs to the floor, and increasing his effort between each new realization, he realized he had to move his first leg, by first turning his foot, after ending his knee… etc. infinitely, as he turned his eye and saw a corpse on the couch with him….

The infinite staircase appears to only allow one to traverse it in one direction. It simultaneously exists… — keystone

No it doesn’t. There is no infinite “it” that could simultaneously do anything, such as exist.

Imagine some world of the future where people are picking up the pieces from some cataclysm and they develop a collective. No one owns anything. Everything that's produced is pooled and shared. — frank

Trying.

It’s communism. We don’t have to imagine that. — Fire Ologist

I can imagine some states of affairs where property is not an issue, and yet people have physical and emotional integrity, autonomy, personal possessions and amicable relations — Vera Mont

Good example. That’s a realistic conception of communism. No ownership, the theory or imagination, applicable in reality.

Yes, we do have to imagine it, because we don't know any real life examples, only grotesque travesties and caricatures. — Vera Mont

I agree, the real life examples of communism, certainly all of the ones on a large scale, have failed. But I believe there have been smaller groups who lived in a close knit and communal fashion who could imagine a realistic goal “where property is not an issue, and yet people have physical and emotional integrity, autonomy, personal possessions and amicable relations.” That’s as close as I can get to the OP notion of “no ownership.”

But absolutely “no” ownership? Seems impossible to imagine.

You (Vera at least) admit “personal possessions” are part of the picture. Which is the right admission from my view. Maybe such property is “not an issue” (which is also fine), but all I was saying is the fact you included personal possessions in the picture sort of justifies my simple point that I can’t imagine a world where there is no ownership, no possessions. You imagined a realistic world where possession was not coveted, and shared freely, and received gratefully, etc. But possession is still an integral part of this world. No one can share what they don’t possess; no one can borrow someone’s shoes, for instance, in a world without any ownership. No one can demand an equal share of what belongs to the community except when demanding it from the community, who possesses and own it.

I guess it’s a small point.

Why did you quote me?

I am physically trying to imagine a society of people where there is no concept of ownership. The best I can do is imagine a society of naked people who live on an island where cheeseburgers and soy milk grow on trees, and there are warmly lit caves everywhere to sleep in peacefully, no concept of work or labor, no concept of privation or awareness of satisfaction, so no concept of need or want so that one might invent the concept of labor to obtain the need or want or the concept of possessing the object of need or want.

Otherwise, show me how you could make any commune where no one has a concept of ownership. Can anyone imagine it?

Just saying “Imagine no concept of ownership, where everyone shares everything” creates no clear picture to me, other than fantasy world, or chaos, and an immediate need for ownership to regulate resources.

Communal ownership takes individual decisions out of ownership, but it doesn’t take away ownership. It just creates a committee and voting process behind every allocation of resources. I can imagine that easy. It’s communism. We don’t have to imagine that. But it’s not a world where there is no concept of ownership or a world where everything is shared.

Physical individuation.
In humans becomes identity formation.
Which becomes a “mine” by the time anyone can speak.

Maybe.

I think we have to resist and overcome the concept of ownership when we get old enough to provide for others and give away ourselves and the things we labor over. Charity, giving to others what is owned by me, is a more realistic goal to temper the inequities of ownership, not communal pooling and sharing (which is bound to simply move inequity and ownership around as opposed to eliminate it).

Problem solved.