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The article is arguing for inaction in the Trolley Problem [1]. In short: You have a choice between saving five people and letting one other person die, or doin

The article is arguing for inaction in the Trolley Problem [1]. In short: You have a choice between saving five people and letting one other person die, or doing nothing and letting five people die. Which is a controversial position, but not stupid exactly. I would call it misguided, and certainly not a very utilitarian position. And given the options I personally would vote for the utilitarian answer: Save five people even if the one who dies wasn't otherwise threatened. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

aetherson 10y ago
Do you similarly advocate that we should, right now, today, in real life policy, set up a program where we check people for matches to multiple people needing organs, and if one healthy person's organs can save the lives of 2+ people, murder that healthy person and take his/her organs?
- dalore 10y ago
  No, because the risk of surgery and transplant, plus the initial health of the person needing the organ, means it's not 100% certain it will succeed. But leaving the organ in the original person will.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    Obviously controllable for. Do you support the program if we kill only people that we believe are statistically likely to save more than 1 life?
  - billforsternz 10y ago
    You should have stopped at No.
- Strilanc 10y ago
  Kinda. I think it would fail utterly in practice. The per-person incentives are all wrong. You're less likely to get picked if you ruin one of your kidneys, for example. "Donors" are going to be unwilling in general, and that will cause a lot of trouble and turmoil. Lots of protesting. Not to mention any abuse of the system would be kind of horrifying. But the general idea of substituting "bad luck you got a disease" with "bad luck you lose the lottery", when there's only half as many lottery losers as there were disease losers... maybe that's not so bad. When it comes to trolley problems, you also have to imagine yourself on the track. Do nothing and there's a 5/6 chance you die. Throw the switch, and there's a 1/6 chance you die.
- SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
  Are you implying that the correct response is to let the five people die in the Trolley Problem, then? To avoid getting your moral hands dirty? No, obviously I don't advocate that we go around arbitrarily murdering people to potentially improve the lives of others. But there's a huge difference between searching out and selecting specific people and killing them and simply changing the number and identity of people who will be killed by random events. It's the difference between premeditated murder and a no-fault accident. Policy/law decisions must necessarily make choices like this, flipping the switch from tracks that typically have five or five hundred people standing on them to tracks that typically have one, for the good of the five or five hundred. Like air bags that kill some people but save thousands more. Or vaccines that kill (a very small number) of kids (typically with allergies) but save millions.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    What I'm implying is that the Trolley Car Dilemma is a toy example that is very divorced from actual life, which makes consequentialism seem more compelling than other examples closer to implementable policy do. The fundamental conceit that you can add and subtract lives, or happiness, or the like as though they were values in a formula is core to consequentialism, and I don't think that people are actually willing to follow through with the implications of that when it stops being at a safe remove. I don't understand the bright line you're drawing between "murder someone by pointing a runaway trolley that would otherwise absolutely miss them in their direction" and "murder someone by harvesting their organs." You can (and, I'd argue, should) believe that air bags are a good idea without believing that the reason that air bags are a good idea is that you can add and subtract lives. For example, you could say, "If YOU get into an accident, it is far more likely that an airbag will save you than it will kill you," which is a different thing than saying, "An air bag will kill YOU, but it will save two other people." And there are many other moral theories which would suggest that air bags are good for reasons other than that "I killed Bob but saved Alice and Charlie" is a generalizable rule for moral good.
    - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
      >I don't understand the bright line you're drawing between "murder someone by pointing a runaway trolley that would otherwise absolutely miss them in their direction" and "murder someone by harvesting their organs." The difference is key to understanding policy decisions like this. You absolutely use math with lives when you're making policy. Right down to calculating lives with dollars. If there is a fixed budget of $100M to apply to saving people's lives, you ideally will divvy the money around in such a way that the most people live. You don't extend one person's life by 1 month using extreme measures that cost $50M and let a hundred die who would could have had their lives extended by years for $50k each. To some degree the original question is a real-world policy example of the trolley problem: Do we allow companies like Tesla to save thousands of lives, possibly your own, in exchange for indemnifying them against the (ideally) few lives lost (also potentially your own) when the technology fails? That sounds identical to the air bag policy: In both cases the life saved could be yours. You might not even get into an accident if there were enough self-driving cars, so not only would you live where you might have died, you might even avoid an inconvenience. I'm not talking about seeking out people and killing them. That is committing murder for an alleged "greater good", and the ends don't justify the means. I'm talking about redirecting a trolley that is going to kill five random people and instead making it kill only one random person. And we can talk about focusing on further advances to make sure that one person doesn't die (statistically speaking) either, but I think that throwing the switch, in a policy sense, is always the right first step. I think the moral argument that flipping the trolley switch is wrong is bankrupt, and that it does map onto the real world and real world policy decisions like requiring mandatory air bags. Flipping the switch isn't murder. Not flipping the switch when you have the opportunity is murder.
Symmetry 10y ago
But in this case inaction is really taking no action and having things progress along their natural course to autonomous cars. This is more like a trolley problem where the car is headed at one person but you can throw a switch to have 5 people die instead.
madmax96 10y ago
I don't think this is correct. Each day when we drive we assume a certain degree of risk and implicitly acknowledge that we may be hurt. We make the decision to put ourselves in danger, whereas in the trolley problem we are led to assume that all parties are not responsible for their present situation. This distinction may be very important: if all parties in the trolley problem had entered into a covenant acknowledging that they may be killed, would more people opt to kill the one and save the five?
espadrine 10y ago
That logic ignores the current state. The logic is: "People are not able to drive. Thanks to X, they now are, but have probability Y of dying. Given that Y > 0, X should not be granted." With X = driving license, and Y = human car fatalities, that logic concludes that driving licenses should not be granted. The Trolley problem is an interesting ethical question because it is not a daily occurrence. This scenario, on the other hand, is. To me, the critical factor is that the risk of death is equal or reduced statistically, which so far seems to be the case.
branchan 10y ago
This sounds ridiculous. The car's job should always be to protect the occupant of the vehicle. Can you imagine what would happen to a car company if it was known that the car willfully choose to kill the customer if it meant that multiple other lives would be saved? Another scenario, imagine you are driving on a freeway but a couple people decide to hop onto the freeway and cross it on foot. Would you rather just run them over or ram your own car and kill yourself just so that 2 people aren't harmed?
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  I'm gonna take the issue with what you said. Ironically, I had exactly that problem when driving to Alps at night. Some guy drunk/high out of his mind ambled onto the freeway and just casually walked across while I was heading straight at him at 140 km/h. As soon as I saw him I instinctively dodged. Everyone fell about inside and woke up. Passed him harmlessly and we drove on. The car didn't even go out of control. I guess the moral of the story is there are often other options than dumb ideas. (Ramming people, really? What if bloody mangled mess comes through your windshield? Second moral of the story is to learn to drive better and maintain your car

aetherson 10y ago

Do you similarly advocate that we should, right now, today, in real life policy, set up a program where we check people for matches to multiple people needing organs, and if one healthy person's organs can save the lives of 2+ people, murder that healthy person and take his/her organs?

dalore 10y ago
No, because the risk of surgery and transplant, plus the initial health of the person needing the organ, means it's not 100% certain it will succeed. But leaving the organ in the original person will.
- aetherson 10y ago
  Obviously controllable for. Do you support the program if we kill only people that we believe are statistically likely to save more than 1 life?
- billforsternz 10y ago
  You should have stopped at No.
Strilanc 10y ago
Kinda. I think it would fail utterly in practice. The per-person incentives are all wrong. You're less likely to get picked if you ruin one of your kidneys, for example. "Donors" are going to be unwilling in general, and that will cause a lot of trouble and turmoil. Lots of protesting. Not to mention any abuse of the system would be kind of horrifying. But the general idea of substituting "bad luck you got a disease" with "bad luck you lose the lottery", when there's only half as many lottery losers as there were disease losers... maybe that's not so bad. When it comes to trolley problems, you also have to imagine yourself on the track. Do nothing and there's a 5/6 chance you die. Throw the switch, and there's a 1/6 chance you die.
SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
Are you implying that the correct response is to let the five people die in the Trolley Problem, then? To avoid getting your moral hands dirty? No, obviously I don't advocate that we go around arbitrarily murdering people to potentially improve the lives of others. But there's a huge difference between searching out and selecting specific people and killing them and simply changing the number and identity of people who will be killed by random events. It's the difference between premeditated murder and a no-fault accident. Policy/law decisions must necessarily make choices like this, flipping the switch from tracks that typically have five or five hundred people standing on them to tracks that typically have one, for the good of the five or five hundred. Like air bags that kill some people but save thousands more. Or vaccines that kill (a very small number) of kids (typically with allergies) but save millions.
- aetherson 10y ago
  What I'm implying is that the Trolley Car Dilemma is a toy example that is very divorced from actual life, which makes consequentialism seem more compelling than other examples closer to implementable policy do. The fundamental conceit that you can add and subtract lives, or happiness, or the like as though they were values in a formula is core to consequentialism, and I don't think that people are actually willing to follow through with the implications of that when it stops being at a safe remove. I don't understand the bright line you're drawing between "murder someone by pointing a runaway trolley that would otherwise absolutely miss them in their direction" and "murder someone by harvesting their organs." You can (and, I'd argue, should) believe that air bags are a good idea without believing that the reason that air bags are a good idea is that you can add and subtract lives. For example, you could say, "If YOU get into an accident, it is far more likely that an airbag will save you than it will kill you," which is a different thing than saying, "An air bag will kill YOU, but it will save two other people." And there are many other moral theories which would suggest that air bags are good for reasons other than that "I killed Bob but saved Alice and Charlie" is a generalizable rule for moral good.
  - SomeCallMeTim 10y ago
    >I don't understand the bright line you're drawing between "murder someone by pointing a runaway trolley that would otherwise absolutely miss them in their direction" and "murder someone by harvesting their organs." The difference is key to understanding policy decisions like this. You absolutely use math with lives when you're making policy. Right down to calculating lives with dollars. If there is a fixed budget of $100M to apply to saving people's lives, you ideally will divvy the money around in such a way that the most people live. You don't extend one person's life by 1 month using extreme measures that cost $50M and let a hundred die who would could have had their lives extended by years for $50k each. To some degree the original question is a real-world policy example of the trolley problem: Do we allow companies like Tesla to save thousands of lives, possibly your own, in exchange for indemnifying them against the (ideally) few lives lost (also potentially your own) when the technology fails? That sounds identical to the air bag policy: In both cases the life saved could be yours. You might not even get into an accident if there were enough self-driving cars, so not only would you live where you might have died, you might even avoid an inconvenience. I'm not talking about seeking out people and killing them. That is committing murder for an alleged "greater good", and the ends don't justify the means. I'm talking about redirecting a trolley that is going to kill five random people and instead making it kill only one random person. And we can talk about focusing on further advances to make sure that one person doesn't die (statistically speaking) either, but I think that throwing the switch, in a policy sense, is always the right first step. I think the moral argument that flipping the trolley switch is wrong is bankrupt, and that it does map onto the real world and real world policy decisions like requiring mandatory air bags. Flipping the switch isn't murder. Not flipping the switch when you have the opportunity is murder.

Symmetry 10y ago

But in this case inaction is really taking no action and having things progress along their natural course to autonomous cars. This is more like a trolley problem where the car is headed at one person but you can throw a switch to have 5 people die instead.

madmax96 10y ago

I don't think this is correct. Each day when we drive we assume a certain degree of risk and implicitly acknowledge that we may be hurt. We make the decision to put ourselves in danger, whereas in the trolley problem we are led to assume that all parties are not responsible for their present situation. This distinction may be very important: if all parties in the trolley problem had entered into a covenant acknowledging that they may be killed, would more people opt to kill the one and save the five?

espadrine 10y ago

That logic ignores the current state. The logic is: "People are not able to drive. Thanks to X, they now are, but have probability Y of dying. Given that Y > 0, X should not be granted." With X = driving license, and Y = human car fatalities, that logic concludes that driving licenses should not be granted. The Trolley problem is an interesting ethical question because it is not a daily occurrence. This scenario, on the other hand, is. To me, the critical factor is that the risk of death is equal or reduced statistically, which so far seems to be the case.

branchan 10y ago

This sounds ridiculous. The car's job should always be to protect the occupant of the vehicle. Can you imagine what would happen to a car company if it was known that the car willfully choose to kill the customer if it meant that multiple other lives would be saved? Another scenario, imagine you are driving on a freeway but a couple people decide to hop onto the freeway and cross it on foot. Would you rather just run them over or ram your own car and kill yourself just so that 2 people aren't harmed?

emp_zealoth 10y ago
I'm gonna take the issue with what you said. Ironically, I had exactly that problem when driving to Alps at night. Some guy drunk/high out of his mind ambled onto the freeway and just casually walked across while I was heading straight at him at 140 km/h. As soon as I saw him I instinctively dodged. Everyone fell about inside and woke up. Passed him harmlessly and we drove on. The car didn't even go out of control. I guess the moral of the story is there are often other options than dumb ideas. (Ramming people, really? What if bloody mangled mess comes through your windshield? Second moral of the story is to learn to drive better and maintain your car