A Moral Paradox: The Trolley Problem

“Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that it’s enough” Robert Haller. This quotation suggests that instinctive judgment is not enough to draw conclusions, ways of knowing need to verify our gut feelings before we can actually jump to conclusions we require ways which we can use to understand the world around us, these are ways of knowing. Sometimes we need to make sure that what our innate feelings portray is true, so we require something to justify and verify our feelings; that is why we have a check on or examine these feelings or sentiments as to establish our own satisfaction. Instinctive judgments are natural and impulsive responses to current situations. Hence this title implies that ways of knowing seek to authenticate our

The scenario is; a man decides to take a walk along trolley tracks that crisscross his town. As he walks, he hears a trolley behind him so he steps away from the tracks, but as the trolley gets closer, he hears sounds of panic- five people are shouting for help. The brakes of the trolley are not functioning and it is gathering speed. Between this man and the track, there is a fat man within arm’s reach; he is large enough to stop the runaway trolley. This man can save the five passengers by pushing the fat man onto the tracks, stopping the runaway trolley, but the fat man will die if he is used to stop the trolley. What should he

Paul Rozin and his colleagues found that many people tend to become increasingly reluctant to put on, and in some cases even touch laundered sweaters if they are told that the previous owners had committed some extreme moral violations such as murders . Instinctive judgments obviously come about as a result of our immediate responses to current situations so in this experiment, people’s intuitions could not let them wear the sweaters as they probably felt as though they too would end up doing unscrupulous acts since the sweaters were associated with immoral people. A sweater cannot make one do something bad as the evilness does not rub off onto the sweater. Intuition is based on innate knowledge, so it cannot tell us whether our instinctive judgments are right or wrong as no empirical evidence is provided to support it. However, I cannot help but ponder whether there is an existence of such a thing as an instinctive judgment or if other ways of knowing are simply working with such speed in making a judgment that we consider it to be immediate or