Week 0: The Ethics of Murder?
February 16, 2024
Hey everyone! I’m Heeya, a senior at BASIS Independent Fremont, and I’m so excited to be sharing my project with you all!
My project is more of a personal query, an intriguing idea I had– analyzing the ethics of murder (hypothetical murder). I’m sure you’ve all heard of the Trolley Problem— a moral dilemma in which the subject is prompted to choose between two paths for a train, each containing a certain number of people waiting for their inevitable death. My project tweaks the problem slightly so that each path contains a certain chance of having people tied. For example, an example track could have either a 50% chance of 2 people or a 10% chance of 10 people on either track.
To put people in this position is to ask them to balance risks of death. I’m excited to analyze the differences which drive the different decision-making patterns, specifically through the lenses of gender, age, and socioeconomic status.
I could bore you with all the reasons I’m qualified to pursue this project, but at the end of the day all that matters is that this project is asking a genuine question I’d like answered, and that’s a curiosity that will drive me to the end.
So until next time, which track would you lead the train onto?
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