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Comment by dereferenceddev | Hacker News Reader

If you train a chicken to pull a trolley lever, does it weigh on the conscious of the chicken whether they killed 1 chicken vs 5 chickens?

I'm not a chicken so I don't really know.

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If one could train a chicken to pull or not pull a lever to save x amount of chicken lives, does it weigh on the conscience of the trainer that they’ve compelled a self-aware creature to kill one of its own kind?

(I’m not asking this to refute your point, it’s well met, I just found the opportunity to poke at the imaginary ethical elephant too much to resist, and no I’m not proud of it-those were good hens)

He could simply argue it was all dereferenceddev's idea.

Touche

I think he meant with humans pulling the lever and chickens dying.

I was trying to be silly in pointing out the real reason why the trolley car experiment is supposed to have some challenge to it.

There are animals people have deep affection for and you’ll find great resistance to these experiments, never the less, I think you can get valid data from experimenting on “lower” animals.

The whole point of using a thought experiment is to gain intuitions about the "but what if it wasn't a person, but a chicken instead? Would that be equivalent? Why?" Ie, the value of the experiment is in the experiential learning of the attempt to arrive at the answer. At least, imho

Sure, you can do things that you consider evil just to see how you would really react to being presented with such an unpleasant binary choice, but if you chose to do it, was it in fact not evil to you, are you just pathological, or are you perhaps in toddlerhood, where you don't yet really have an intuition for your own relationship with causality, such as it is?

I think the ethics of humans dying vs delicious chickens dying are pretty incomparable.

Of course, but I think you can still surface those ethics without people as the experimental subject. Get pacifists, vegans, what have you.

What if the human is hungry?

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