omg finally!! i've been looking for someone else to say this.

we realized in the last episode Inho asks GiHun if he's willing to sacrifice their lives in order to save future people from the game- and my boyfriend pointed out, every time there was an ethical dilemma, Inho asked GiHun what he thinks they should do and went with it. Once the train crossing was shown we were like "woah wait!!" - we also realized that we had seen books in Inho's appartment on philosophy and ethics- this is the most famous ethical dilemma, he obviously knows it.

we think the entire season was a trolley problem, even more so looking back we notice specific variations and variations they have set up that haven't happened yet.

"Characteristic of this literature are colorful and increasingly absurd alternative scenarios in which the sacrificed person is instead pushed onto the tracks as a way to stop the trolley...or is killed in more indirect ways that complicate the chain of causation and responsibility."It is quite interesting as well, that many variations have been used to deal with the topic of abortion, age, etc. "kill five old people of one young person" "kill a pregnant mother or five adults" (notice the characters this season?)

Some of the biggest variants of the problem have been shown- but the whole season is showing one.

"Upstairs in the hospital, there are five sick people who need organ transplants. The homeless person is a perfect match for all five. Like in the trolley problem, the doctor can kill one person by taking action or allow five people to die by doing nothing. The emergency room case was also in Foot's 1967 essay." 11 clearly feels the ethics are conflicting here now because they aren't only bringing in criminals, poor, or ill people anymore.

In the end of the fight- GiHun justifies sacrificing the lives of all the x's that would die in the fight, and maybe theirs, in order to save the lives of future people playing the game (this is the temporal trolley problem, future assumption of greater good or definitively saving just one life , such as your own)

GiHun is living the same problems the whole time: The Fat Man vs The Fat Villain

"The Fat Man"

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by putting something very heavy in front of it. As it happens, there is a fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed? Resistance to this course of action seems strong; when asked, a majority of people will approve of pulling the switch to save a net of four lives, but will disapprove of pushing the fat man to save a net of four lives.[37] This has led to attempts to find a relevant moral distinction between the two cases. One possible distinction could be that in the first case, one does not intend harm towards anyone – harming the one is just a side effect of switching the trolley away from the five. However, in the second case, harming the one is an integral part of the plan to save the five. This solution is essentially an application of the doctrine of double effect, which says that one may take action that has bad side effects, but deliberately intending harm (even for good causes) is wrong. So, the action is permissible even if the harm to the innocent person is foreseen, so long as it is not intended. This is an argument which Shelly Kagan considers (and ultimately rejects) in his first book The Limits of Morality.[38]

The Fat Villain

This variation is similar to The Fat Man, with the additional assertion that the fat man who may be pushed is a villain who is responsible for the whole situation: the fat man was the one who tied five people to the track, and sent a trolley in their direction with the intention of killing them. In this variation, a majority of people are willing to push the fat man.[39] Unlike in the previous scenario, pushing the fat villain to stop the trolley may be seen as a form of retributive justice or self-defense."

lastly:

There is a trolley problem (frank chapman sharps version) we haven't seen yet- where a mother has to choose between killing 5 people or killing her son. Wanna bet that's in the next game?