[ncallaway]

I don't think it's supposed to apply immediately and directly to real life. But it's supposed to use moral intuition to highlight the balance of various philosophical frameworks (mostly consequentialism vs deontologicalism).

One common real-life debate where these moral trade-offs often comes up in real life is voting choices in our first past the post system.

A consequentialist might say that you should vote for the lesser of two evils that has a serious prospect of winning. That, while they might not be someone you support in the abstract, in the interest of harm mitigation you might give them your vote to deny victory to the greater of two evils.

Whereas a deontologicalist might say that voting for a candidate that you actively dislike and consider evil is a harm in and of itself, and that you should not cast a vote for someone you wouldn't want to see in office. Even if that means the greater of the evils ends up winning.

When I was younger and struggling with this question, the trolly problem was informative to me, and has generally lead me to a harm reduction strategy when it comes to voting (while also advocating for a reform of the voting system).

[imtringued]

That question is actually really easy. No party represents the population. There aren't any meaningful choices to be made. Thq as weere is no such thing as a wasted vote if there is no party worth voting for.

They all suffer from the same flaw. Especially the ones near the left are particularly hypocritical. My hunch is that they depend on poor and angry voters so there is no way they would ever try to achieve prosperity for them while risking to lose their voters.