Hiya J,
I did mean pro-choice, but I poorly worded the sentence. I’ve rephrased things to hopefully make it clearer. (We do find that pro-choice people can be anti-disconnecting from the violinist because of the agency and full human being-ness of the violinist, and we find that anti-choice people often place more emphasis on the personal rights violation of the woman who was kidnapped, and too bad so sad for the violinist.)

Heya Sherry,
In general the trolley problem is set up to be gruesome death scenarios—”the fat man” is always a fun one to run through undergraduates*—but there are other thought experiments that are somewhat overplayed that hope to tease out other choices. For example, most people think that kidnapping and chloroforming a woman then hooking her up to a famous violinist who needs another person to function as living dialysis is a bad no good thing to do to the woman, and she should be able to unhook herself if she doesn’t want to support and sustain that famous violinist for any period of time. Yet we find that many folks will say that it’s wrong to unhook yourself identify as pro-choice—they place emphasis on the fact that the violinist is a sentient, self-aware being—and other people who identify as anti-choice will say the woman should unhook herself as a matter of personal liberty, even though the situation is analogous to abortion.

You might have to sweet talk me to get me to voluntarily read any more Stephenson (I’ve dented more than one wall throwing his books in frustration), but I’m always up for a chat—you know my (gmail) address! 🙂

*The Fat Man generally starts out by saying that instead of being able to flip a lever when you’re next to the tracks, you’re above the trolley tracks. The first version stays the same: you can push a lever to move the trolley away from the five victims towards the single, often infant, victim. The second version changes things: you have a single track that you’re above, and a fat man is next to you. The trolley is racing along towards a person, often a baby. The only way to stop the trolley is to put something really big and heavy in front of it. There’s a lever next to you that will open a trap door and drop the fat man in front of the trolley, killing him but saving the baby. Do you push the lever? The next scenario removes the lever but suggests pushing the fat man off the overpass and on to the tracks. Etc and so forth.

What I recall about those few instances of protective out-flung arm move is that I was simultaneously breaking, while only my left hand was on the wheel. Had I needed to swerve — I don’t remember if I did ”” swerving to my right would have been more difficult and dependent upon the position of my hand on the wheel. I do know I was reacting and not thinking through a set of options.

In Neal Stephenson’s newest novel ”” SevenEves ”” he writes about a number of choices people make and the values that underlie them. I recommend it and would love to talk with you about one set in particular, involving child bearing in his speculative fiction narrative, where he seems to have overlooked a bunch of risk factors.