Up till the third millennium, it was okay to philosophize ethical conundrums and suggest every kind of summary options whereas being absent to their sensible repercussions. A typical philosophical situation that may be touched on alongside the strains of this argument is known as the Trolly Downside.
Right here’s the way it goes:
“There’s a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Forward, on the tracks, there are 5 folks tied up and unable to maneuver. The trolley is headed straight for them. You’re standing a long way off within the practice yard, subsequent to a lever. For those who pull this lever, the trolley will swap to a special set of tracks. Nevertheless, you discover that there’s one individual on the sidetrack. You’ve gotten two choices:
- Do nothing and permit the trolley to kill the 5 folks on the principle monitor.
- Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the aspect monitor the place it should kill one individual.
Which is the extra moral choice? Or, extra merely: What’s the proper factor to do?”
Now convey a driverless automobile into the image and rapidly this grueling philosophical downside turns into an engineering downside. How?
Our world has superior a lot as to achieve a degree the place the one means we will additional that progress is by offering sensible solutions to the arduous philosophical questions we have now been shunning for thus lengthy.
Think about a situation the place our driverless automobile is heading in the direction of a harmful collision with an harmless passer-by. The one technique to save him is to make a fast flip and drive the automobile off a cliff, killing the passenger on board. Who’s to be sacrificed and why? The driverless automobile has to decide now.
To reply such a morally loaded query basically means to implement morality into our applied sciences. In different phrases, any proposition we make, we can’t make it with out the data that we must dwell with its penalties.
That’s a tough sensible downside proper there — arduous sufficient to show a forward-thinking engineer into a realistic thinker.
“Spirituality will not be the renunciation of life; it’s the artwork of residing absolutely” – Acharya Prashant
How Spirituality matches into this equation
For those who have a look at it from a restricted viewpoint of particular person happiness, spirituality could not relate a lot as a software that may demystify issues of ethical and philosophical nature. However in case you widen its boundaries and let it form the thought processes that concern a world past your individual, then spirituality can play an unprecedentedly necessary function.
You simply can’t arrive at a universally acceptable ethical resolution with out the assistance of a transparent, all-embracing, and least prejudicial thoughts. And spirituality, so far as the human expertise is aware of it, seems to be the one software we will use to assist us attain these uncommon increased qualities.
What’s extra, there’s a reasonably normal software of spirituality within the lives of contemporary people. We’re surrounded by and immersed within the instruments, units, and mechanisms which will have given us the fabric comforts we wanted, however have additionally made us sacrifice one thing of a lot better worth: our spirituality.
Within the presence of all these trendy innovations — the communication units, the web, leisure instruments, digital video games, and all other forms of mechanical instruments/apparatuses — we will hardly follow the nice outdated train of meditation and self-reflection. It’s solely via considering and observing the stream of our personal inward ideas that we will give you sensible solutions to the ethical questions — questions that concern the entire of humanity and our world at massive.
This, I imagine, is a time in historical past the place we’re confronted with elusive emotional, psychological, and bodily issues that may solely be squared off with a mixture of intelligence and religious drive.