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[MaxTheFox]

I don't see a thread that has anything like this, and the random questions thread doesn't seem to quite fit... but here you may ask a hypothetical question ("would you rather", "what would you do if", etc), and others may answer it and discuss what answer would be better.

Rules:
1. Don't intentionally cause angry screaming matches. This should be a given, but if an argument that started with "would you rather live forever or be able to resurrect others" devolves into a discussion about anarchism that mostly has nothing to do with the question itself, that goes against the thread's purpose.

2. Nothing outright gross or otherwise breaking forum rules. We're not children here.

So I'll start.

Say, a kitten is being slowly lowered into a fluorosulfuric acid bath behind glass. In front of you there is a button. If you press it, the kitten will be saved but 10 billion flies will die (randomly picked from the entire fly population). There are about 17 quadrilion flies so you shouldn't do any real ecological damage. However it would be likely the largest single human-engineered loss of multicellular life.

Would you press the button? I would because for me it's downright impossible to empathize with flies. But I can empathize with kittens, especially those about to have a very painful death.

[scriver]

Only if the flies are randomly selected but still respected relative numbers of individual fly species and so forth.

But most likely I wouldn't make time to think of that in the moment.

[ShinQuickMan]

I'd just walk away, leave things as is. Neither is worth my attention.

EDIT: Gonna respect the OP and refrain from shitposting.

[Starver]

What if the person who could engineer such a large scale dipterocide were on one branch of a trolley track..?

Apart from the immediacy issue (you would see the kitten's fate, but the flies die out of sight and you don't get to see a rare, beautiful flower whose once in a lifetime pollination you may possibly prevent) and the all too human bias towards the cute and away from the ugly (unless you're a certain type who despises the cat-massacre of garden wildlife and closely studies brachycera, etc, in which case you might swing the other way), this question leads to:
a) So, you'd save the kitten? What if it was twice as many flies?  Twice as many as that? Twice as many as that?(→"all of them!")
b) So you wouldn't save the kitten? What if it was two kittens/had a little bow on it/you knew it had been named "Mr Fluffles" by its 3yo 'owner'/Who needs an operation and plenty of relaxing bed-rest? Or only half/quarter/one small matchbox-full of flies?

This question leads on to far too many questions. Could we have skipped straight to "how many flies are equal to a kitten?"? I'd also be worried about that glass (though at least you didn't go for fluoroantimonic acid, or the like).


(I don't think I'm shitposting, but I don't think the question is any better than any other trolley-pro lem one, with quite a few more loose ends. I don't think I'd just walk away, if only because ofthe fascinating horror of encountering such a setup.)

[MaxTheFox]

(I don't think I'm shitposting, but I don't think the question is any better than any other trolley-pro lem one, with quite a few more loose ends. I don't think I'd just walk away, if only because ofthe fascinating horror of encountering such a setup.)

Nah you aren't, this isn't a shitpost, this is healthy discussion.

"how many flies are equal to a kitten?"?

Oh for me this is easy. "As many as it is possible without causing major and irrecoverable damage to the ecosystem". If it was killing ALL the flies, or such a large amount of them that they can't repopulate quickly enough to not cause problems (and thus kill less... disgusting animals)? Honestly I would walk away and then probably be anxious for a very long time if I did the right thing or not.

[Maximum Spin]

I would kill all the flies. I don't even care about the ecosystem damage. I mean, it would be fun to watch, and Life Finds A Way. Well, technically I would still do this regardless of the kitten, just to see what happens, but I definitely like kittens because they also kill things.