this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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You're missing the point. The trolley problem represents a moral dilemma. The question should instead be: is any further derivation of this meme ethical? Is responding in a comment immoral in itself?
A concrete example of this is doctors and hospitals creating guidelines about how to triage care when ICUs were/are full because of unmitigated spread of COVID.
It is definitely an "interesting" phylisophical question to ask:
"If a long term ventilator user comes into the ICU, with the ventilator they own and brought from home, and they are less likely to survive than an otherwise healthy young man who needs a respirator due to COVID infection, is the morally best choice to steal the disabled person's ventilator (killing them) and use it to save the young man's life?"
The policy question that should be asked instead, and never really ways, is "How do we make sure that we never get to the point where we have so many people in the ICU from a preventable disease that we run out of respirators and need to start choosing who to let die?"
This is not just a hypothetical question:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/long-term-ventilator-users-lose-bid-revive-suit-over-ny-emergency-guidelines-2022-11-23/
Disabled people continue to plead with us for the bare minimum, like requiring doctors who work with immunocompromised patients to wear N95 respirators while treating those patients.
We continue to chose to stack more people on both sets of tracks instead.
My critique of the meme is because it basically says "What if we just never had the ICU full at all?"
But like, much more glib.