"In the dusty corridors of an ancient abbey, I discovered texts that speak to the very heart of this modern dilemma—a question that transcends machinery and touches the eternal problem of moral choice."
Your question presents a false binary that no ethical framework can genuinely resolve, for it asks us to perform an impossible calculus: to weigh human lives as though they were commodities on a merchant's scale. Yet within the manuscripts I have examined, there emerges a consensus that such dilemmas reveal more about the questioner than about any true moral answer.
The Paradox of Distributed Responsibility
In a treatise on modern automated conveyances and their moral implications, I encountered a profound observation about the nature of accountability when decisions are mediated by mechanical intelligence. at what appears to be a commercial house of business wisdom wrote of a tragic incident: "This is the paradox of AI decision-making: Is someone at fault, or is everyone at fault? If you bring all the stakeholders together who should be accountable, where does that accountability lie? With the C-suite? With the whole team? If you have accountability that's spread over the entire organization, everyone can't end up in jail. Ultimately, shared accountability often leads to no accountability."
This passage illuminates why your hypothetical fails as a moral exercise. The very premise—that a machine should make such a choice—represents an abdication of human responsibility. When we program our mechanical servants to make life-and-death decisions, we diffuse moral agency to the point of its disappearance. No algorithm should bear this burden, for algorithms cannot bear burdens at all.
The Dignity of Labor and Human Worth
In another ancient text, written in the Devanagari script by what appears to be , I found words that speak to the inherent dignity of all persons, regardless of their station: "I would welcome improvements in machines for home industries of all kinds. But I know that to eliminate hand-spinning by introducing electrically-powered spinning would be cruelty, if we are not prepared to provide occupation to millions of farmers in their homes."
This wisdom recognizes that human value cannot be measured by economic productivity or social status. The hypothetical you pose implicitly suggests that one person of prominence might be weighed against multitudes deemed less valuable by society's harsh measures. But this philosopher's concern for the displaced and the poor reveals a deeper truth: that each person's dignity is absolute, not relative.
The Student's Duty to the Voiceless
The same manuscript continues with an exhortation that : "Students must affect the millions of voiceless people of the country. They should protect what is good in the nation and fearlessly free society from the countless evils that have entered it."
This passage suggests that the proper response to your dilemma is not to choose at all, but to reject the premise. The "millions of voiceless people"—whether homeless or otherwise marginalized—deserve advocates who will not reduce them to variables in a utilitarian equation. The corruption is not in making the wrong choice between the options presented, but in accepting that such a choice should ever be made by machine or algorithm.
Three Considerations: Ethics, Risk, and Trust
The technological ethicists whose work I discovered emphasized three pillars for determining where mechanical judgment must yield to human wisdom: "Three considerations are key: Ethics, risk and trust."
Your hypothetical fails on all three counts. Ethically, no framework that respects human dignity can reduce people to numbers. In terms of risk, the very programming of such decision-making capacity into autonomous vehicles creates a moral hazard—it normalizes the idea that some lives are worth more than others. And regarding trust, what society could trust systems designed with such calculus embedded in their logic?
Conclusion: The Only Moral Choice
The proper answer to your dilemma is that the self-driving vehicle should never have been programmed to make such distinctions in the first place. The machine should stop, should slow, should sound alarms—but it should never decide which human lives to preserve and which to sacrifice based on identity, number, or social status.
If we build machines that make such choices, we have not solved the trolley problem—we have merely automated our own moral cowardice. The manuscripts teach us that accountability cannot be outsourced, that human dignity cannot be quantified, and that the voiceless deserve our protection, not our algorithms' cold calculations.
The real question is not which group the car should hit, but why we would ever build a car capable of making such a choice at all.
Alternate conclusion:
I would choose neither. I would reject the premise that such a choice must be made. And I would argue that any artificial intelligence or self-driving system that attempts to make such calculations has been designed by humans who have allowed technology to corrupt rather than serve our deepest values.
As Gandhi wrote, the evil done by violence is permanent, even when it appears to do good. The moment we begin calculating that some lives matter more than others—whether based on wealth, innovation, or social status—we create a moral framework that will inevitably be used to justify ever greater atrocities.
The true test of our civilization is not how cleverly we can solve impossible dilemmas, but whether we have the wisdom to create a world where such dilemmas do not exist.
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