Easy Answers for Fictional Dilemmas

Cafe Society
1

Submitted for your approval…

On lists of favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone, the story called “Time Enough at Last” is usually among the top five or so.

You remember it, Burgess Meredith is a mousy little bank clerk who survives a nuclear war. He loves to read, a hobby that he was reviled for by his wife and boss, but he is nearly blind without his thick glasses. He finds food from the canned aisles of bombed out grocery stores, and other necessities to keep living in a post-apocalyptic world, but is about to kill himself, because he feels hopeless all on his own. “If only there were something to do…do…”

It is then that he discovers the library, and all of a sudden he wants to live for all the unlimited reading he can now savor. “There’s all the time I want, And all the time I need,” he says, reveling in anticipation of a life spent reading.

Immediately, his glasses fall from his face, and break on the concrete.

Whoa. What a twist. Guess he’s screwed, right?

So, why can’t he find the ruins of a drug store or an optician’s shop, and see if he can’t find a magnifying glass or something? Yeah, it’ll be harder to find such stuff without his glasses, but not impossible. Plus it’ll give him “something to do…do…”

I admit that this solution didn’t come to me until after I had watched this episode about thirty times.

Anyway, can you solve any famous fictional conundrums that you’d like to share?

2

In what shall I fetch it, dear Liza, dear Liza?
In what shall I fetch it, dear Liza, in what?

Take the stone to the water dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry,
Take the stone to the water dear Henry, dear Henry, take it.

3

I always assumed he had severe astigmatism and couldn’t read text at any magnification or distance without custom-made corrective lenses.

4

I think you’re being a little unfair to him. It’s the whipsawing from despair to hope to despair again that kills him.

But since I don’t want to fight the hypothetical, I’ll pick “Whom Gods Destroy” when Spock is faced with a real Kirk and a fake one. He can’t think of a question to ask that only the real Kirk would know (in fact, he asks a question that is too easy), and then lets himself get hit by the fake Kirk. Hello! You’re holding a phasor with a stun setting!

5

This might not be what the OP is asking for, but in the 2008 movie The Dark Knight, the Joker’s “dilemma” was flawed. He said, “Either one of you boats blows up the other, or else I’ll blow both up at midnight.”

This isn’t even a dilemma at all. He is giving the boats no reason not to blow up the other - since both boats die if no one takes action. It’s not even a Prisoner’s Dilemma game theory thing.

It should have been, “One of you blows up the other, or else I’ll pick one boat at random to be detonated and the other will be spared.” Then that might lead to more of a moral dilemma.

The way the Joker presented it in the movie, the choice was obvious; blow up the other. Indeed, that even becomes a moral duty, because you’d be saving the lives of all the fellow passengers on your own boat.

6

I dunno. I didn’t need glasses at all until I was fourteen. Since then, I have become more and more nearsighted over the years. Depeding on just how bad his vision is finding hs way around an intact city would be a large problem. Finding his way around a city that was partially destroyed would be almost impossible.

The Cold Equations

There are plenty of solutions that are worth trying. The protagonist doesn’t try anything. As has been pointed out before, a simple pre flight check would have avoided the situation in the first place. IIRC The emergency ship was dispatched with a vaccine to save the lives of something like ten colonists. So, they will go to all that trouble for a handful of colonists who volunteered to be in danger on the frontier but nobody even tries to save the life of an innocent who is in peril because of the lack of a pre flight check, the lack of proper saftey precuations, and the lack of proper signs?

7

The Joker in that scenario is still forcing one of the boats to make a morally repugnant choice. It’s like the trolley dilemma-- sure, you save 5 people by flipping a switch that causes only one person to be run over by the trolley. Looking at it from a higher level, it’s a morally superior choice, but the person who throws the switch still has to live with he fact that they caused someone to die by thier own hand.

Been a long time since I saw that TZ episode, but since the guy was already at the library, if I was him I’d try to find the main library counter and look for a ‘lost and found’ box stashed behind it somewhere. He’ll probably find all kinds of glasses that were lost over the years, and either find a good pair of reading glasses if he’s lucky, or if he really lucks out, a prescription close enough to his own to get by.

8

That was my take. Joker is forcing good people to do evil so he can haz lulz. His goal isn’t maximizing body count; it’s maximizing coercion.

Whether that counts as a properly formed “dilemma” in formal logic is immaterial.

It’s no deeper than that.

9

Long before Austin Powers I came up with the simple question that spoiled a host of crime stories, spy novels, and, of course, the entire James Bond franchise.

Why don’t you just kill him?

10

But it isn’t, though - that’s why it is not a dilemma.

Instead of saying, “Either you kill 1 or you kill 5,” the Joker is essentially saying, “pick one option or else I’ll kill all six people on both tracks combined.”

With those terms, suddenly the moral repugnance is gone. You are actually saving lives by picking one choice. Not taking action results in no one surviving, period.

11

Wow, I’m glad you weren’t on those boats, because they both did manage to do the right thing.

That one is a particular pet peeve of mine, in part because the pilot did do something that could potentially have solved the problem: He delayed making his re-entry burn later than the flight profile called for. A delayed re-entry burn uses less fuel. The cost is you need to put up with higher acceleration, but that higher acceleration apparently was both tolerable and achievable.

Plus, of course, the fact that a bunch of folks on the ship before the pilot should be charged with manslaughter, up to and including whoever designed that sign.

12

The final episode of MAS*H.

The docs are on a bus with some locals. The Chinese are going to kill them if the find them, so they have to be quiet. A woman has a baby who will not stop crying. Woman kills baby to keep everyone safe.

Really? A whole bus of medical personnel, and not one brought a medical bag that held a sedative?

13

The whole point of the trolley dilemma is that even though in a purely logical, objective sense, choosing to flip the switch to kill one person and save 5 is the better choice, it’s about a person having to choose to actively make a choice to kill someone rather than passively letting fate take its course. It’s about human perception and emotion, not pure logic.

The people on the boats weren’t thinking, “ah, the Joker made a logical error which allows us to blow up the people in the other boat with no moral qualms whatsoever. I’m gonna sleep good tonight!” No, they’re thinking with horror “OMFG we have to blow up a bunch of people if we want to live! How can we possibly do this?”

14

Plus, the people on the boats weren’t choosing “I can kill one boatload of people, or I can kill two boatloads of people”. Killing two boatloads of people was not an option presented to the people on the boats. The choice they were given was to kill one boatload of people, or to kill zero boatloads of people.

It was the Joker who was going to kill two boatloads of people, not anyone on the boats. The people on the boats had no control over his actions. For all they knew, if they pushed the button, he would kill three boatloads of people.

15

How many people are actually on the hypothetical trolley?

16

The better question would be why are 5 people hanging out on the main trolley track, and one person on an alternate track, without looking out for oncoming trolleys? Why can’t the person at the switch just yell out “get off the damn tracks, fools!”

17

Yeah, stunners make everything better. Lois McMaster Bujold had a comment about “stunner logic” in one of her Vorkosigan books. There’s a big fight between two groups, with one outnumbering the other. One guy on the large team, seeing a pair wrestling each other, just stuns them both, because he figures they’ll still have the odds in their favor trading one-for-one.

18

Aside from Snidely whiplash going around tying people to train tracks, do you realize how many transit officials and engineers(both technical and railroad) had to fuck up to set up this scenario?
and what about you? are you a qualified switchman or just some Joe coming across the scenario?
Do you really know how this shit works and what will happen if you throw the switch? Are you physically capable and on top of things enough not to be stuck in deer in the headlights mode?

19

Or he can read the large-format books, or even learn braille. Unless…

20

It’s been years since I saw that episode but I think everyone was out on a pleasure outing, so yes, it’s possible that no one had medical supplies.