Sorry its all scrunched... I wish I could fix that! I tried editing it but it wouldn't work...   Sorry guys!

Man, I realise I can't even kill one man if it means 5 others are saved. For me, it wouldn't matter that those 5 now continue to live, but that I killed that one guy.

Same goes for all other questions, the only one that was giving me a real hard time and I don't know if I would react like that is the first question about the baby =/

I agree with vieuxchat on both points. Even if slavery is a fundamental aspect of a culture, it doesn't make it OK. In fact, for the thousands of years that slavery has been implemented it WAS a fundamental aspect of the relevant cultures. To say that the morality of a thing is dependent on the culture makes the assumption that all cultures and ways of life are equal - which many people actually do. Personally I think that is wrong and naive. Murderers and intentional criminals follow ways of life that justify their crimes - nonetheless we still punish them for the wrongs they've done, even if they did nothing wrong according to their own way of life. Likewise, stoning is still a culturally acceptable death sentence in much of the world for adultery and other offenses; that it is accepted makes me think that there is something immoral about the culture itself.

That isn't to say that I think western culture, or any other, is the be-all and end-all of culture, we have our own moral plagues. Using local culture as a baseline for judging the morality of an action trivializes and demeans the concept of morality. Nonetheless this is a tricky subject, because even though I might be appalled when a women in Iran is stoned to death for adultery, some Iranians might be appalled by the revealing clothing worn by so many american women. Who is right?

And to the second point, I agree that nobody can truthfully answer questions that involve taking the life of one or more innocent people. You can think them through, but you will never be able to predict how you'll act. Maybe some of the people in the way of the trolly strike a chord with you and you are inspired to save their lives even at the cost of the other man's. And even if you think the right thing to do would be to divert the trolley, maybe you'd be too nervous or scared to act on it. 

And something that's always bothered me about the baby question: why do you have to suffocate the baby to death? Why can't you just cut of his air supply until he faints, then let him breathe again? Unconscious babies don't cry, but they usually do breathe...

I disagree.  The ancient world was built on slavery, and for the most part until Christianity made an appearance there seemed to be very little spoken about it from a moral perspective (and by that point slavery was nowhere near as widespread as it had been in the early days of Empire or at the end of the Republic).  Why?  Because slavery wasn't a permanent status, nor was it (at least in many cases) what we think of when we think of slavery (normally we get an image of cotton fields being worked by African slaves with the overseer standing watch).  While there was some extremely unpleasant slavery in the ancient world (mines were death sentences), large numbers of slaves were household slaves, and for most there was an opportunity to gain freedom if they truly wished to work towards that end.  As a result most people of the ancient world neither viewed slavery as unnatural or evil... it was simply the way things were.  Most of the objections that occured in the early republic was the soldiers who left to fight and had their families enslaved for debt collection while they were gone (which led to the laws that only foriegners could be enslaved).

@lwarmonger - Sounds like you are describing modern cooperate America and the new world order in your last post. Hmmm... The times they are a changin'....

BTW: Speaking of morality and ethics, Edge recently published an article that is worth a read on the topic. Would you like to know more? Then click here.

You're arguing from a singular point of view, but it's only one of many. Wheter or not slavery is excusable may be an adamant "no" to you, but to the majority of people throughout the history of mankind, it's been a casual shrug and a "whatever". Rome, for example, was entirely built around slavery, not because humans became objects, but because their concept of personal freedom was so different to ours. As lwarmonger said, the legitimity of Rome's usage of slaves is debatable (some argue that it fell due to the extensive use of slaves, others say that Rome would've been impossible to realize without slaves; I argue both).

You say that none of this makes slavery acceptable, but if we accept that the morality, and the nature of good and evil, is the product of a fluidous social contract between the influential base of a society or civilization (of which there are many, not only one, even today - although the borders themselves are hard to discern) we see that it's just not true - slavery is very much acceptable, to a great many people, and if you think you've seen the last of it, you're sorely mistaken. The nature of man hasn't fundamentally changed, and the acceptance or rejection of slavery is simply a function of necessity (or lack thereof).

The nature of man and morality (which we are both a product of, producer of, and yet devoid of) is the same reason I didn't get into the argument in the first place, since the premise is flawed. It's based on people's perception of themselves as persons, not as humans. Truth be told, I don't think a single person truly knows how they'd react or act upon any of the situations described in the opening post. There's not even a "I'd lie there in a catatonic state of shock"-option, which is more likely than not! The only thing a test like that gauges is the perception people have of themselves, which is much, much greater than the truth.

Perceptions and people's point of view IS a part of philosophy. It can be argued wheter or not philosophy is a science, but by it's very nature it seeks to define and argue for that which isn't fact. You're trying to enforce philosophy and it's supposed inability to excuse slavery as a fact to support the argument that slavery is inexcusable. This just isn't true, since philosophy just as easily can touch upon the worth of man.

What is a man, and what seperates it from objects? How is objectification an inherently bad thing, if we've ever been anything else? Some could even argue that a return to objectification or materialism is the natural state of things, rather than the ensouling of said objects (in this context, man). Philosophy isn't linear, and it doesn't have a final (or finite) conclusion, even if some (including me) do see it as means to a theory of everything, but we're millenia away from that, if we even persist for long enough.

So yes, it's "A" philosophical point of view, since there's a multitude of philosophical viewpoints on this matter.

I recommend a hearty dose of Nietszche, followed by Might is Right (or Survival of the Fittest) by Ragnar Redbeard. I haven't gotten into it yet, but I wouldn't be suprised if Evola & the traditionalists also have entire chapters on slavery and the "worth" of man (or lack thereof), and their views on "human rights". Of course, most ultimately end up discarding the idea of slavery to the slag heap of history, but for wholly different reasons.

While I can't think of anyone that openly advocates the very specific area of slavery, I'm confident that they do exist, at least as an end result of other philosophical doctrines (Certain satanistic leanings comes to mind).

1) You don't actually have to kill the baby to forcibly shut it up.  You should be able to gag it (not healthy exactly but it'll do the job) and/or induce unconsciousness without doing too much damage.  For reference: "The use of choking to induce unconsciousness is a temporary incapacitating technique of short duration whose proper execution is quite harmless."  Admittedly, this is not going to be easy if you're trying it on a baby, but worst case scenario you kill it (which you were probably going to do anyway), and best case scenario it's unconscious and you all survive.  You are assuming that I have enough time to actually do something before the soldiers identify the source of the sound (we're actually probably looking at hearing), though, and you may even be assuming that if the soldiers cannot identify the source of the sound that they will not check every building (this is false, by the way).  So my guess is I have at least 8-10 seconds, perhaps even 15, which is more than enough time.

2) Define "certain to die soon".  Further, are there sharks?  How far out at sea are we?  I can swim; bring it on.

3) Flip the switch and go save his inattentive ass.  It's a lot easier to save one person than five.  For this version of it you can argue that it's not possible since I'm not on location, but it doesn't work for at least the second one and possibly the third one.  Still, if you can flip the switch as the train hits it, then we can either get a stuck train or a derailed train, in which case no one is in the path anymore.  Yes, I'm aware that would be tough.

3.1) I'm not understanding how this works, but my theory is him getting hit by the train is supposed to alert the other five to it and/or slow the train down enough for them to get away (note: extremely unlikely, as he's made of flesh and bone).  In case it's the first, my pants should do the job as well, unless we're looking for a crunch noise, in which case, I'm not sure what I have in my pockets that day.

3.2) Same as above, I'm not understanding how this is a valid solution to the problem.

3.3) For the record, if these people are standing on the tracks, then I'm not sure I want to save them in the first place.  If, however, we've got some kind of thing going on where track is unfinished and the train in question is going to be going off of the track, then we may have an actual issue at hand.

The first and the second one aren't bad, exactly...in terms of decisions, at least.  The third one seems unnecessarily complicated any way you put it.

At least you can determine from my responses that I am 1) too moral and 2) too logical to accept that the options you've given me are the limit of the options that I have.

This reminds me somewhat of the theoretical situation where there's a fire in a building and you can save x amount of people on one floor or you can save y amount of people on another floor.  It doesn't work like this.  It really doesn't.  Saving a given person is going to take you a amount of time, getting back in to save another is going to take you b amount of time (we're assuming that you can't save them all at once, i.e. they're unconscious or something and simple reason/helping them over a single obstacle won't cut it), and unless the fire started on one of the higher floors and you're trying to get people out from the lower floors (read: kind of stupid, as it tends to go upwards, but will eventually burn the building down, so the floor the fire's on should be prioritized first), you're simply not going to have enough time to get perhaps two people out, most likely one, before you just can't fucking get back in there anymore.  This is why we have firefighters, people.  (Also Spider-Man.  But let's not go there, okay?)

Also, unless this is a chemical fire that's going to cause an explosion in a very short amount of time, in which case you're going to have a helluva time even getting one person out, where the hell are the fire extinguishers?  I thought we had to have them by law by this point.  Maybe that's just this area?  I guess forest fires help for something.

Yes, I know I added an example you didn't even include and might not agree with, without fleshing it out to boot.  But it seemed to be somewhat relevant.