3 ms·

This is, of course, exactly correct and gets at the essence of what always bothered me about the trolley problem. The problem is usually presented with the idea

by gajomi 11y ago

This is, of course, exactly correct and gets at the essence of what always bothered me about the trolley problem. The problem is usually presented with the idea that it offers some insight into how typical human behavior is seemingly at odds with utilitarian concept of the "value" of an individual or groups of human lives. The fact that the switch puller might be subject to some kind of judgement for their actions is typically ignored, but this is almost certainly a huge part of any effective hedonistic calculus that humans may or may not be engaged in.

hugh4 11y ago
Not just the social judgment, but also the judgment of your own conscience. Whether it's rational or not, I'm going to spend less time awake at night for the rest of my life worrying about the multiple people I allowed to get run over by a train than I'm gonna spend worrying about the one person I actively caused to get run over by a train. Come to think of it, I suppose that heavily discounting the possibility of future regret is also something that drunk people tend to do.
- ant6n 11y ago
  This problem is kinda contrived anyway. Why would I be sitting in front of that switch? Do I actually know for sure that flipping that switch will have the described outcome? If I'm some sort of passerby who happens to be there, then I certainly wouldn't know that for sure, and I would just be futzing around with railway operations I'm not trained to engage in. I could make matters worse! So it's probably better to leave the switch alone rather than potentially causing even more harm. Try to yell at the people on the tracks to get out of the way, and call it a day. If you do know operations, and you are at the right place operating machinery you're trained to do; then part of your training may have involved how to deal with this hypothetical situation. So it's probably best to keep on your railway operations hat and defer to your training, rather than putting on your philosopher's hat and think deeply about the implications of your actions.
  - VLM 11y ago
    >So it's probably better to leave the switch alone rather than potentially causing even more harm. More formally there's two cultural issues that the philosophers more or less refuse to deal with and instead claim inherent biological instinct or whatever. One is we've been indoctrinated for better or worse with a deference toward specialists via all kinds of morality tales and drama. You shouldn't tell a doctor how to doctor, or a laborer how to labor, according to a zillion dramatic morality tales. Its deeply hardwired into the culture itself. Therefore its culturally wrong to mess with a railway workers switchgear unless you're a railway worker, which you probably are not. You can daydream all you want about possibly knowing how to operate railroad gear, but according to doctrine if you were a railworker, you're supposed to be pretty pissed off if some random member of the general public disrespects your entire field of employment by flipping switches. No matter your real or theoretical employment, we're indoctrinated to leave those switches alone. The next deeply indoctrinated belief is people are conservative about what they know best. Obviously you know nothing about railway operations, or at least less than the guy assigned to operate that switch. Clearly someone who knows what they're doing set the switch that way for a reason, so if I operate that switch I'm almost certain to be doing something wrong because the guy assigned to it felt he was doing right. In part two of the classic telling, clearly the fat guy knows he's not fat enough to stop the train by lying on the tracks so he didn't jump on them by himself therefore pushing him on the tracks is just going to increase the death toll. The only people who want to upend the cart are actual experts, arrogant, or insane, at least according to cultural myth. Its possibly in a different culture we'd get totally different results. Maybe in a video game where its "make believe" and not in our culture, you'd get different results. Someone should try these scenarios in minecraft and then compare/contrast results.
  - scrumper 11y ago
    It's not supposed to be about railway switches or some concrete scenario, it's a model of a problem designed to gain some understanding about how people make moral decisions. By saying all that, you're refusing to engage with it at all.
    - ant6n 11y ago
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
You'll see this behavior in government with far less drastic results. A lot of bureaucratic cruff that builds up is recognized by workers as being such. The government workers do realize just how silly and time consuming the policies are. And many have ideas on how to improve them and speed things up. But no one wants to do anything because any wrong that happens will then be blamed on them. So if there are 10 issues a day caused by bad policy, and you can change it to only be 5 incidents a day, no one is going to push for changing it because then they would be viewed as responsible for the 5 incidents instead of being viewed as reducing the incident count by 5. You pull the switch to kill one to save 5, you have now directly acted to kill a person. You are a killer, and while perhaps not legally a murderer, some will still view you as such. That you save 5 is irrelevant. To see an even strong example of this behavior, consider some action that is even more offensive to the common sensibilities that killing someone, such as certain forms of child abuse. Now imagine a situation where by doing that to one child, you can stop it being done to N others. (Worry not about the details of how such a situations could occur, I'm sure some creative individual could find a back story.) Now imagine how someone who chooses the utilitarian choice is going to be viewed. Perhaps we should be doing tests not about what the subject would choose, but about how the subject would view another's choices.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >To see an even strong example of this behavior, consider some action that is even more offensive to the common sensibilities that killing someone, such as certain forms of child abuse. Now imagine a situation where by doing that to one child, you can stop it being done to N others. (Worry not about the details of how such a situations could occur, I'm sure some creative individual could find a back story.) Use this thing: http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-231 http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-231

by gajomi 11y ago

hugh4 11y ago

Not just the social judgment, but also the judgment of your own conscience. Whether it's rational or not, I'm going to spend less time awake at night for the rest of my life worrying about the multiple people I allowed to get run over by a train than I'm gonna spend worrying about the one person I actively caused to get run over by a train. Come to think of it, I suppose that heavily discounting the possibility of future regret is also something that drunk people tend to do.

ant6n 11y ago
This problem is kinda contrived anyway. Why would I be sitting in front of that switch? Do I actually know for sure that flipping that switch will have the described outcome? If I'm some sort of passerby who happens to be there, then I certainly wouldn't know that for sure, and I would just be futzing around with railway operations I'm not trained to engage in. I could make matters worse! So it's probably better to leave the switch alone rather than potentially causing even more harm. Try to yell at the people on the tracks to get out of the way, and call it a day. If you do know operations, and you are at the right place operating machinery you're trained to do; then part of your training may have involved how to deal with this hypothetical situation. So it's probably best to keep on your railway operations hat and defer to your training, rather than putting on your philosopher's hat and think deeply about the implications of your actions.
- VLM 11y ago
  >So it's probably better to leave the switch alone rather than potentially causing even more harm. More formally there's two cultural issues that the philosophers more or less refuse to deal with and instead claim inherent biological instinct or whatever. One is we've been indoctrinated for better or worse with a deference toward specialists via all kinds of morality tales and drama. You shouldn't tell a doctor how to doctor, or a laborer how to labor, according to a zillion dramatic morality tales. Its deeply hardwired into the culture itself. Therefore its culturally wrong to mess with a railway workers switchgear unless you're a railway worker, which you probably are not. You can daydream all you want about possibly knowing how to operate railroad gear, but according to doctrine if you were a railworker, you're supposed to be pretty pissed off if some random member of the general public disrespects your entire field of employment by flipping switches. No matter your real or theoretical employment, we're indoctrinated to leave those switches alone. The next deeply indoctrinated belief is people are conservative about what they know best. Obviously you know nothing about railway operations, or at least less than the guy assigned to operate that switch. Clearly someone who knows what they're doing set the switch that way for a reason, so if I operate that switch I'm almost certain to be doing something wrong because the guy assigned to it felt he was doing right. In part two of the classic telling, clearly the fat guy knows he's not fat enough to stop the train by lying on the tracks so he didn't jump on them by himself therefore pushing him on the tracks is just going to increase the death toll. The only people who want to upend the cart are actual experts, arrogant, or insane, at least according to cultural myth. Its possibly in a different culture we'd get totally different results. Maybe in a video game where its "make believe" and not in our culture, you'd get different results. Someone should try these scenarios in minecraft and then compare/contrast results.
- scrumper 11y ago
  It's not supposed to be about railway switches or some concrete scenario, it's a model of a problem designed to gain some understanding about how people make moral decisions. By saying all that, you're refusing to engage with it at all.
  - ant6n 11y ago

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

You'll see this behavior in government with far less drastic results. A lot of bureaucratic cruff that builds up is recognized by workers as being such. The government workers do realize just how silly and time consuming the policies are. And many have ideas on how to improve them and speed things up. But no one wants to do anything because any wrong that happens will then be blamed on them. So if there are 10 issues a day caused by bad policy, and you can change it to only be 5 incidents a day, no one is going to push for changing it because then they would be viewed as responsible for the 5 incidents instead of being viewed as reducing the incident count by 5. You pull the switch to kill one to save 5, you have now directly acted to kill a person. You are a killer, and while perhaps not legally a murderer, some will still view you as such. That you save 5 is irrelevant. To see an even strong example of this behavior, consider some action that is even more offensive to the common sensibilities that killing someone, such as certain forms of child abuse. Now imagine a situation where by doing that to one child, you can stop it being done to N others. (Worry not about the details of how such a situations could occur, I'm sure some creative individual could find a back story.) Now imagine how someone who chooses the utilitarian choice is going to be viewed. Perhaps we should be doing tests not about what the subject would choose, but about how the subject would view another's choices.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>To see an even strong example of this behavior, consider some action that is even more offensive to the common sensibilities that killing someone, such as certain forms of child abuse. Now imagine a situation where by doing that to one child, you can stop it being done to N others. (Worry not about the details of how such a situations could occur, I'm sure some creative individual could find a back story.) Use this thing: http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-231 http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-231