I dunno, but he was the greatest of them all.
Exactly - he had two things he felt were “right” and he had to choosse between them.
Personal codes are very flexible that way.
Trolley problems kinda force those decisions on one no matter how flexible their personal codes are or aren’t.
TIL that Liberty Valance was played by Lee Marvin and not Jack Palance.
Bravest. That is all.
It wasn’t a trolley problem involving two groups of innocent people. It was the decision between stopping a murder or allowing one to occur.
I fail to see the distinction. Somebody is going to die and whether you act or choose not to act you will determine who. Morally and ethically those are identical choices. And identical to trolley problems.
Most of which are about how people mistakenly distinguish between acting and not acting, as if one is somehow nobler or safer than the other.
Trolley problems are about choosing between the lesser of two evils. This one is about stopping one evil or letting it happen. If the choice is to have the trolley change to an empty rail I’d have no problem making that decision. There’s nothing clear here about why Doniphan would not have acted as he did unless he himself was a coward. The story even presents the situation as one where Doniphan’s choice is between saving the life of someone who is his rival in romance or letting him die. Casablanca managed to make a sensible ending for that situation, this movie was senseless from beginning to end.
That’s one characterization. Not one I agree with.
IMO Doniphan faces a binary choice with a death on both tracks:
- Shoot Valance and Valance dies.
- Don’t shoot Valance and Ranse dies.
Either way somebody is dead and Doniphan chose who. The other actors, be they inhuman trolleys or psychopathic gunmen, are assumed to be automata who are going to do what they’re going to do unless stopped by an outside force. In this case a force named “Doniphan.”
Tom Doniphon knows that statehood and governance is the future, and that Hallie will be much better off with Ranse. He says this explicitly in his speech to Ranse after the latter initially walks out of the convention, and conveying this is the entire point of the extended coda.
The less said about the “sensible ending” of Casablanca and all the gyrations over the “letters of transit” that proved to be completely worthless the better.
Stranger
They are not. They would all have a trivial answer if that were the case. Instead, they’re about the tension between action and inaction and how it relates to morality. You can throw the switch and one person dies, or not throw the switch and ten people die. Throwing the switch is obviously best from a utilitarian perspective, but does it make you a murderer? A person died that otherwise wouldn’t have as a direct result of your actions. Along with other moral quandaries.
The difference beteeen this situation, however, and Foot’s classic trolley problem, is that here the actors on the two tracks have an interaction. That’s different from five in one track and one on the other track, where neither the five nor the one are posing a risk to the other.
Here, the actor on one track is posing a risk to the actor on the other track, threatening to kill him.
I don’t see how that matters from Doniphan’s perspective. There are two outcomes as LSLGuy described. The details don’t matter; only the end state where one person or the other is dead. Doniphan has to make a choice between letting a good person die vs. committing “murder” and killing a bad person.
I think many in that era would not have considered Valance shooting and armed Ranse as murder under the law. Immoral, wrong, unfair, sure, but maybe not a crime.
Side note, in the original short story, Ranse is an asshole.
Okay then. Bravest. 