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The Trolley Problem Problem

77 points by Hooke 6y ago

smitty1e 6y ago
TTPP seems to be suspension of disbelief. If the audience cannot enter into the problem, then its value as a tool is diminished. Case studies are also fraught with peril, but the analysis of where the particulars end and the general principles begin seems the bulk of the exercise anyway.
- Natsu 6y ago
  More than that, they reduce too much of the problem away. It reminds me of the two capacitor paradox [1] which (spoiler alert) only arises because that configuration isn't actually possible to realize in terms of ideal circuit elements. In particular, we spend a lot of time thinking about what would have to be, in most formulations of the problem, a quickly-decided act (otherwise, why not simply untie the people?) and we have absolute certainty given us as to the consequences, vs. all the uncertainty in real life. The problem is used to get rid of those elements as distractions, but they're essential features of people's reasoning (and reasoning ability) so they're not so easily discarded. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_capacitor_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_capacitor_paradox
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I'm stunned that this article was published just a few days ago, because recent events have illustrated just why it can be important to think about strange, unrealistic hypotheticals. How much easier would lockdown debates have been, if we had the conceptual frameworks in place to talk frankly about how many lives must be saved to justify suspending certain freedoms?
- sukilot 6y ago
  How does that help. "By my weightings, freedom is more important than public health." "My weightings say the opposite." That's where we are today. Putting numbers on it, numbers that can't be determined except by our personal biases, doesn't help. Here's a fun story about cost benefit analysis in the real world, a bureaucrat deciding which kinds of rape hurt enough to be worth preventing: Criticism: https://gulcfac.typepad.com/georgetown_university_law/ https://gulcfac.typepad.com/georgetown_university_law/ Defense: https://www.theregreview.org/2013/09/13/13-sunstein-cost-benefit/ https://www.theregreview.org/2013/09/13/13-sunstein-cost-ben...
  - darawk 6y ago
    The value in these things is being able to consistently extrapolate from weightings, and to understand all of the consequences of different weights. Most people just have vague moral intuitions that lack consistency.
- downerending 6y ago
  I've been thinking about the Trolley Problem these days as well. It's not just "How many lives must be saved to justify suspending certain freedoms?". More importantly, it's "How many lives must be forfeit to save someone from dying of COVID-19?". Based on the collateral damage estimates I'm seeing, we might be forfeiting five or ten for each save. And if one switches to quality-life-years as a measure, the picture might be even worse. Anyway, long live the Trolley Problem.
post_below 6y ago
Maybe a little off topic... Ethics thought experiments are interesting and sometimes fun and you can't deny the value of getting people thinking about choices and behavior. But it's always seemed to me that they, along with ethics in general, miss the point. I don't think absolute right and wrong, or even absolute "lesser of two evils" is a particularly useful goal. It's the contextual framework that matters... Values, priorities, fears, desires, needs, the things that comprise a person's identity and worldview. Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made. IMO there's a lot more value in exploring those things, as opposed to ethics, if the ultimate goal is to impact the behavior of a individuals in a society.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made. And the point of the thought experiment is to uncover those things, and they make up that person's personal ethics. Maybe their ethics are "I'll always save my family, fuck everybody else", maybe their ethics are "I only save people who share my skin color", or maybe they are "I always maximize the damage, I hate people", using hypothetical situations allows you to figure that out without taking that person on daily walks and sacrificing lots of people on the train tracks to find out.
- adjkant 6y ago
  The irony here is you just pigeonholed "ethics" and then made several ethical arguments yourself while saying you don't care about ethics! To add some formal language: > I don't think absolute right and wrong, or even absolute "lesser of two evils" is a particularly useful goal. This sounds like a metaethical argument - what underpins ethics is a very important question that a lot of people miss, but that argument is actually the base of ethical stances. The formal metaethical belief here is objectivism. Some other options are things like subjectivism, cultural relativism, error theory, and non-cognitivism.[1] [1] A video alternative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOoffXFpAlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOoffXFpAlU > It's the contextual framework that matters... Values, priorities, fears, desires, needs, the things that comprise a person's identity and worldview. Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made. Ethics (once you get past metaethics) is almost always around a framework, and focuses exactly on everything you listed. Aristotle explicitly focused on values to built his ethical framework. Foucault talks a lot about fear and power. Most of consequentialism and utilitarianism focuses on needs and desires. Rawls and egalitarianism is an example of talking about priorities. -------------------------------------------------- To me, it sounds like you have a gripe with the impracticality of philosophers talking about ethics but care quite a lot about ethics itself. If so, I'd be with you strongly on both accounts.
msla 6y ago
The problem here is reminiscent of the classic short story "The Cold Equations": A young woman is fooling around near a space ship and ends up accidentally stowing away on a craft needed to move serum to a colony in the grips of disease. The mass on the ship is accounted for to the gram (the gramme, even!) so her excess mass means the ship no longer has the fuel to make it to the colony. The dashing space hero has to jettison the innocent young woman in order to save untold numbers of people. OK, what's blindly, blisteringly wrong here? First, the idea that a space ship small enough its fuel would be rationed out by the gram would have enough room in the crew compartment for someone to hide in is ludicrous. Second, launching without a checklist? Are you out of your tiny little mind? Third, allowing unknown people to bring unknown contaminants into a space ship? Having a "KEEP OUT" sign doesn't save the colonists from another plague, now, does it? The moral of the story is that it's hard to keep your mind on the supposed lesson when the flaws jump up and down and yell at you. Taking a different tack, by thinking too hard about the consequences of the thought experiment instead of the lead-up to it, there's the Jew in the attic. You know how it goes: A Jewish family is hidden in your attic or guest bedroom or someplace and the Nazis come knocking. Do you lie to save the Jews? "Of course", you say, and come up with a nice logical argument for why your ethical system demands you lie in this instance. All functional ethical systems can come up with such an argument with minimal fuss. However: The Nazis were not very nice, you know. If they thought a town was holding out on them, they'd initiate reprisals. They'd kill a whole town in a fit of fascist pique. Saving a half-dozen Jews could doom a few thousand innocents, likely including the original Jews. But that's out of scope for the thought experiment.
- sukilot 6y ago
  You reject science fiction for being too unrealistic in its imperfect space travel engineering, meanwhile NASA blew up two crewed Space Shuttles by launching shuttles that they knew had failed components.
  - msla 6y ago
    The point is less that I find it unimaginable that space organizations have flaws, and more that those flaws spoil the supposed lesson by diffusing the responsibility: The story only works if the young woman is entirely responsible for her own death, by placing herself in a position where the laws of physics and morality dictate she has to die to save many others. If she died because the NASA-equivalent was run by buffoons, the moral lesson is lost and she becomes a murder victim as opposed to an inadvertent suicide.
sukilot 6y ago
Absolutely bizarre to see a philosopher writing at some length that some questions are bad because they are hard to answer cleanly. Does he know what his profession is? It's also poor form to sling broad accusations about what "some" philosophers do without citing any examples.
- mc32 6y ago
  Why? Why is questioning presumptions bad? If the accusations end or weak then it proves philosophy still has it right. On the other hand it could cause a rethinking and perhaps fine some merit in the criticism,
- logicchains 6y ago
  >Absolutely bizarre to see a philosopher writing at some length that some questions are bad because they are hard to answer cleanly. It's hardly bizarre. Wittgenstein, one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century, wrote that most philosophy was incorrect because philosophers failed to clearly define their terms. "The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other — he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy — but it would be the only strictly correct method".
- bigfoot675 6y ago
  I would think it worse to operate under the "principles of his profession" without questioning them at all, no?
Sophistifunk 6y ago
The trolley problem is a non-problem. I don't know about you guys, but nobody I know is ever going to buy a car that might decide to kill them to save some stranger(s).
- baddox 6y ago
  That seems overblown. Would you ever ride in a car with a driver that might sacrifice the lives of everyone in the car to save 1,000 people? I suspect that lots of people have actively made decisions while driving their own car that endangers their own life in order to potentially save the life of someone else.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I'm not sure I'd make that assumption. I'm sure lots of people have made a split-second reflexive decision to avoid hitting a person/people/deer in a collision that still carries some danger to themselves. I wonder how many have made a deliberate decision to drive off the road to considerable hazard (e.g. off a cliff) in order to avoid hitting someone at no danger to themselves.
  - leghifla 6y ago
    Well, I would not want to get into the car of someone with a driving habit of risking the live of 1000 people in the first place. The real solution to this is to avoid situations where such choice must be made, by keeping safe distances and speed. Good drivers do this naturally. AI must do this too.
    - baddox 6y ago
      That’s never part of the thought experiment. The trolley problem isn’t asking whether you should risk one life or risk 100 lives. It’s asking what you would do in a situation that you were placed into.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  The trolley problem in regards to autonomous cars is a total sideshow when the cars we do have cant reliably tell people from bicycles from other cars. Its often used as a sort of backdoor to squeeze in the argument that we should let X people die to autonomous cars because in the future they will definitely be safer, for sure. (some very shaky priors there) These arguments are usually introduced with massive assumptions about the applicability and reliability of statistics gathered from cars that basically give up when even slightly challenged with anything remotely ambiguous or difficult (how many people live where there is perfect weather almost every day?), and then are applied to the entire gambit of circumstances human drivers deal with every day, by the millions.
dereferenceddev 6y ago
There just seems to be a misunderstanding on the intention of a though experiment here. There is a subtle implication that because the thought experiment is "contrived" that its less valuable. When thinking about philosophy, a core part of philosophy is to reduce concepts, ideas, or beliefs into abstractions (or a "spirit" or "essence" of what their intention is), the thought experiment presents itself as a perfectly useful tool to help challenge those concepts. Ethics is not about absolutes, but really about sussing out where gray areas exist in what some might believe are black and white situations. Additionally, most of the scenarios are presented as a thought experiment, because conducting a real experiment with those conditions would be wildly _un_ethical. How are we supposed to determine the nuance of valuing human life if we were bound to doing actual experiments? Also, who in their right mind would conduct such as experiment? Zimbardo faced enough flack testing the limits of obedience and authority in the Standford Prison Experiement.
- mc32 6y ago
  Instead of conceptual people you could experiment with real fish or chickens.
  - dereferenceddev 6y ago
    If you train a chicken to pull a trolley lever, does it weigh on the conscious of the chicken whether they killed 1 chicken vs 5 chickens? I'm not a chicken so I don't really know.
    - ls612 6y ago
      I think he meant with humans pulling the lever and chickens dying.
      - dereferenceddev 6y ago
        I was trying to be silly in pointing out the real reason why the trolley car experiment is supposed to have some challenge to it.
viburnum 6y ago
It’s not just philosophy. So much of economics education is getting students to narrow their vision down to the something that somebody else wants them to see. Force the assumptions on people and then tell them how smart they are when they draw the inevitable conclusions. It’s a trap. Normal people forget about the assumptions and walk away believing the conclusions. It’s a technique for reshaping people’s intuitions.
- 6510 6y ago
  haha, yes! Why is everyone relevant in philosophy dead? The answer to the trolley problem is that it doesn't matter if you pull the lever or not. You should figure out who or what created the situation and truly eliminate the problem at its source.
  - juped 6y ago
    Killing Philippa Foot is a common joke solution to trolley problems, but few consider it seriously ethical.
DangitBobby 6y ago
I was in just such a conversation the other day, where we were discussing the implications of the second amendment with regards to tyranny in the US. A participant would not allow the conversation to continue without a description of how tryanny would take hold, and no hypothetical was realistic enough. They could not have brought the conversation to a halt faster if it were deliberate. Ultimately, they didn't agree with the point (which was sound) because they believe that our "democracy" is sufficient to prevent tyranny now and forever. The point of discussions about scenarios whose parameters cannot be known is to find a useful way to elide the unknowns and come to conclusions that we can agree to and understand. Failing to see the forest for the trees is not a problem with the exercise; it's a problem with the participant.
- mjevans 6y ago
  It is sad that I am far more willing to believe those events plausible. There is a saying about attributing to stupidity before malice, and I think that also applies to the foundation of how such an outcome could occur.
- Traster 6y ago
  The problem is that there's nothing inherent about a hypothetical that elides irrelevant details, it elides only whatever the author of the hypothetical wants to elide. Hypotheticals can let us agree on one aspect of a situation, but it can't make us agree on how relevant that aspect is to the situation we're actually interested in. This is why the trolley problem as applied to autonomous driving is so problematic, whilst it's an interesting thought experiment, its totally irrelevant to the person actually designing a self-driving car. It's a perfectly valid position to take that a situation is complex enough that hypotheticals aren't ever going to be helpful in reasoning about it.
efitz 6y ago
One challenge that I have always had with the trolley problem is that in general solutions are not symmetrical. By this, I mean that as an observer, I might conclude that several different choices made by the subject of the experiment were ethical. For instance, if the subject threw the switch and caused one person to be killed (instead of multiple), I would see that as ethical. I would also see it as ethical if the subject did nothing, either out of shock or out of refusal to actively participate in anyone’s death. So I guess the problem is that I’m not convinced that the thought experiment generates objectively ethical outcomes, only subjective ones.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > So I guess the problem is that I’m not convinced that the thought experiment generates objectively ethical outcomes, only subjective ones. But that's also literally what it's supposed to do. It's a device to poke around and figure out your positions, e.g. are you into consequentialism or do you prefer deontology, are there circumstances that can change your position etc. I often find people (not you, people in general) rejecting thought experiments, because they are not comfortable with their intuitive decisions and they feel that it will be exposed when they're forced to apply it to a hypothetical situation that does not leave them an easy out ("this wouldn't happen, I don't walk near train tracks, ever").
dannykwells 6y ago
Could this be due to the rise of pure mathematics in influencing philosophers? In pure math, counter examples play a very important role: show once counter example, disprove an entire claim. The violinist in the article is clearly trying to be a pure math- like counter example, but to me, misses the emotional aspect of pregnancy (at the least) - a fetus is not a random person, it is you (partly), and furthermore, many would say society (and the species) depend on having babies, whereas the society and the species do not depend on violin players. Not saying I agree with these arguments only that the real world is substantially messier than pure math, and thus, pure math thinking may stumble when applied to real world problems. Tl;dr: humans are not rational in our beliefs and the continued attempts on all disciplines to assume we are, are well, irrational.
- dereferenceddev 6y ago
  I've rarely heard someone make the counter-point that a fetus is technically half "you", which really does fundamentally change the violinist example. The violinist experiment does have a lot of holes it it, but I think that one in particular almost turns it on its head, particularly because it circumvents the crux of the problem around consent (which I think is at the core of the problem). It would seem you would have to change the thought experiment to have the violinist actually be related to you (say a sibling). Now, would a person feel _as_ upset that they had to allow their sibling to use their kidneys for nine months in order to stay alive? That really changes it.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    A fetus is half another person, whose "selfish genes" would benefit by the fetus taking an excessive share of resources. So there's an inherent tension that isn't determined by culture or moral theories.
- implements 6y ago
  > society [...] depend on having babies, But civilisation doesn’t depend on maximising births, and actually probably would benefit from more resource intensive to produce artists, musicians, dancers, etc - is the other side of that argument.
castratikron 6y ago
Stallman said it better: The Trolley Problem poses this question: if a trolley is about to run over and kill five people standing on the tracks, and you can shunt it to a different track where it would only kill one person, should you do it? Or what if you could save those five by throwing a person near you onto the tracks; should you do it? Many people feel intuitively that it would be wrong to throw that person onto the tracks, and an argument attributes this to a supposed essential difference between killing someone and deciding to let that person die. I disagree. I too believe it would be wrong to throw that person onto the tracks, in real life, but not in the hypothetical trolley problems. There is no ethically significant difference between killing a person and letting the person die, if (as supposed in the trolley problems) there is no doubt that the death will occur. The reason, in real life, why killing someone is ethically different from letting someone die is that real life is full of surprises: the person might not really die. If you kill him, his death is pretty certain (though not totally; just recently a man was hanged in Iran and survived). If you merely don't take action to save him, he might survive anyway. He might jump off the track, for instance, or someone might pull him off. All sorts of things might happen. Likewise, throwing the one person onto the track might not succeed in saving the other five; how could you possibly be sure it would? You might find that you had done nothing but cause one additional death. Thus, in real life it is a good principle to avoid actively killing someone now, even if that might result in other deaths later. The trolley problems invalidate the principle because of the unlikely certainty that they assume. Precisely for that reason, they are not a useful moral guide for most real situations. In general, difficult artificial moral conundrums are not very useful guides for real-life conduct. It's much more useful to think about real situations. In the free software movement I have often decided not to propose an answer to a general question until I had some real cases to think about. For real driverless cars, the trolley problem never arises: the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible. More generally, the goal is to make sure to avoid any trolley problem. https://stallman.org/articles/trolley-problem.html https://stallman.org/articles/trolley-problem.html
- luckylion 6y ago
  I did not expect Stallman to offer such lame thinking. > The reason, in real life, why killing someone is ethically different from letting someone die is that real life is full of surprises: the person might not really die. Just like a cancer patient might always spontaneously get cured and you'd be an ass for cutting them open. Life is full of surprises, don't take action, ever! > For real driverless cars, the trolley problem never arises: the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible. Wow, why didn't anybody ever think of making the car just stop? Like, have we tried talking to the car and asking it not to have malfunctioning brakes? What if we offer the car a nice oil change later in exchange for behaving and not running people over?
brodouevencode 6y ago
This must be in the gestalt. https://brodoyouevencode.com/the-problem-with-the-trolley-problem.html https://brodoyouevencode.com/the-problem-with-the-trolley-pr...
- mindtricks 6y ago
  The trolley problem came up a lot in The Good Place, which may be why discussions around it have suddenly become a bit more mainstream.
- NoPicklez 6y ago
  I think its a silly response to the problem, yes if you were near the lever and you so happened to know one of the groups then you might argue pulling the lever one way or the other. But is that simply you justifying your actions? The problem isn't absurd when posed to humans because, how about the scenario where you don't know either person and you need to make a decision in a matter of seconds. That's the point. If my mother was on one of the tracks, I might justify my actions to pull the lever and have it veer into the other group, but that isn't necessarily a morally correct decision. The author in the article says that the problem is absurd when posed to humans, then goes onto applying the same principles of the problem to AI and cars but does not say that the problem is also absurd with regards to AI, despite coming to the same conclusion.
  - brodouevencode 6y ago
    > necessarily a morally correct decision This is where the problem is: life is way more complex and nuanced to distill down to such a simplistic scenario. Measuring morality is not an instantaneous action.
yogrish 6y ago
This video summarises trolley problem well for driverless cars. https://youtu.be/ixIoDYVfKA0 https://youtu.be/ixIoDYVfKA0
kwhitefoot 6y ago
> Had the context been one in which a hitman was preparing to take a hidden shot at a target, and the target then died of a sudden cardiac arrest as the hitman remained out of sight, it’s far from clear that killing and letting die would be equally bad. But the two situations are not equivalent. The hitman is almost certainly not in a position to save his intended victim so he is not in any meaningful sense letting him die.
imtringued 6y ago
I dislike these types of thought experiments because they always involve a preexisting problem where a random bystander has to become a hero that has to save everyone. There are a lot of situations in which fate is just playing out and you can't do anything about it and struggling will only make everything worse. In reality, the hero doesn't actually know which lever will actually save lives and he also doesn't know if the people he is saving are actually in danger.

77 points by Hooke 6y ago

TTPP seems to be suspension of disbelief. If the audience cannot enter into the problem, then its value as a tool is diminished. Case studies are also fraught with peril, but the analysis of where the particulars end and the general principles begin seems the bulk of the exercise anyway.

Natsu 6y ago
More than that, they reduce too much of the problem away. It reminds me of the two capacitor paradox [1] which (spoiler alert) only arises because that configuration isn't actually possible to realize in terms of ideal circuit elements. In particular, we spend a lot of time thinking about what would have to be, in most formulations of the problem, a quickly-decided act (otherwise, why not simply untie the people?) and we have absolute certainty given us as to the consequences, vs. all the uncertainty in real life. The problem is used to get rid of those elements as distractions, but they're essential features of people's reasoning (and reasoning ability) so they're not so easily discarded. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_capacitor_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_capacitor_paradox

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I'm stunned that this article was published just a few days ago, because recent events have illustrated just why it can be important to think about strange, unrealistic hypotheticals. How much easier would lockdown debates have been, if we had the conceptual frameworks in place to talk frankly about how many lives must be saved to justify suspending certain freedoms?

sukilot 6y ago
How does that help. "By my weightings, freedom is more important than public health." "My weightings say the opposite." That's where we are today. Putting numbers on it, numbers that can't be determined except by our personal biases, doesn't help. Here's a fun story about cost benefit analysis in the real world, a bureaucrat deciding which kinds of rape hurt enough to be worth preventing: Criticism: https://gulcfac.typepad.com/georgetown_university_law/ https://gulcfac.typepad.com/georgetown_university_law/ Defense: https://www.theregreview.org/2013/09/13/13-sunstein-cost-benefit/ https://www.theregreview.org/2013/09/13/13-sunstein-cost-ben...
- darawk 6y ago
  The value in these things is being able to consistently extrapolate from weightings, and to understand all of the consequences of different weights. Most people just have vague moral intuitions that lack consistency.
downerending 6y ago
I've been thinking about the Trolley Problem these days as well. It's not just "How many lives must be saved to justify suspending certain freedoms?". More importantly, it's "How many lives must be forfeit to save someone from dying of COVID-19?". Based on the collateral damage estimates I'm seeing, we might be forfeiting five or ten for each save. And if one switches to quality-life-years as a measure, the picture might be even worse. Anyway, long live the Trolley Problem.

post_below 6y ago

Maybe a little off topic... Ethics thought experiments are interesting and sometimes fun and you can't deny the value of getting people thinking about choices and behavior. But it's always seemed to me that they, along with ethics in general, miss the point. I don't think absolute right and wrong, or even absolute "lesser of two evils" is a particularly useful goal. It's the contextual framework that matters... Values, priorities, fears, desires, needs, the things that comprise a person's identity and worldview. Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made. IMO there's a lot more value in exploring those things, as opposed to ethics, if the ultimate goal is to impact the behavior of a individuals in a society.

luckylion 6y ago
> Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made. And the point of the thought experiment is to uncover those things, and they make up that person's personal ethics. Maybe their ethics are "I'll always save my family, fuck everybody else", maybe their ethics are "I only save people who share my skin color", or maybe they are "I always maximize the damage, I hate people", using hypothetical situations allows you to figure that out without taking that person on daily walks and sacrificing lots of people on the train tracks to find out.
adjkant 6y ago
The irony here is you just pigeonholed "ethics" and then made several ethical arguments yourself while saying you don't care about ethics! To add some formal language: > I don't think absolute right and wrong, or even absolute "lesser of two evils" is a particularly useful goal. This sounds like a metaethical argument - what underpins ethics is a very important question that a lot of people miss, but that argument is actually the base of ethical stances. The formal metaethical belief here is objectivism. Some other options are things like subjectivism, cultural relativism, error theory, and non-cognitivism.[1] [1] A video alternative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOoffXFpAlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOoffXFpAlU > It's the contextual framework that matters... Values, priorities, fears, desires, needs, the things that comprise a person's identity and worldview. Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made. Ethics (once you get past metaethics) is almost always around a framework, and focuses exactly on everything you listed. Aristotle explicitly focused on values to built his ethical framework. Foucault talks a lot about fear and power. Most of consequentialism and utilitarianism focuses on needs and desires. Rawls and egalitarianism is an example of talking about priorities. -------------------------------------------------- To me, it sounds like you have a gripe with the impracticality of philosophers talking about ethics but care quite a lot about ethics itself. If so, I'd be with you strongly on both accounts.

msla 6y ago

The problem here is reminiscent of the classic short story "The Cold Equations": A young woman is fooling around near a space ship and ends up accidentally stowing away on a craft needed to move serum to a colony in the grips of disease. The mass on the ship is accounted for to the gram (the gramme, even!) so her excess mass means the ship no longer has the fuel to make it to the colony. The dashing space hero has to jettison the innocent young woman in order to save untold numbers of people. OK, what's blindly, blisteringly wrong here? First, the idea that a space ship small enough its fuel would be rationed out by the gram would have enough room in the crew compartment for someone to hide in is ludicrous. Second, launching without a checklist? Are you out of your tiny little mind? Third, allowing unknown people to bring unknown contaminants into a space ship? Having a "KEEP OUT" sign doesn't save the colonists from another plague, now, does it? The moral of the story is that it's hard to keep your mind on the supposed lesson when the flaws jump up and down and yell at you. Taking a different tack, by thinking too hard about the consequences of the thought experiment instead of the lead-up to it, there's the Jew in the attic. You know how it goes: A Jewish family is hidden in your attic or guest bedroom or someplace and the Nazis come knocking. Do you lie to save the Jews? "Of course", you say, and come up with a nice logical argument for why your ethical system demands you lie in this instance. All functional ethical systems can come up with such an argument with minimal fuss. However: The Nazis were not very nice, you know. If they thought a town was holding out on them, they'd initiate reprisals. They'd kill a whole town in a fit of fascist pique. Saving a half-dozen Jews could doom a few thousand innocents, likely including the original Jews. But that's out of scope for the thought experiment.

sukilot 6y ago
You reject science fiction for being too unrealistic in its imperfect space travel engineering, meanwhile NASA blew up two crewed Space Shuttles by launching shuttles that they knew had failed components.
- msla 6y ago
  The point is less that I find it unimaginable that space organizations have flaws, and more that those flaws spoil the supposed lesson by diffusing the responsibility: The story only works if the young woman is entirely responsible for her own death, by placing herself in a position where the laws of physics and morality dictate she has to die to save many others. If she died because the NASA-equivalent was run by buffoons, the moral lesson is lost and she becomes a murder victim as opposed to an inadvertent suicide.

sukilot 6y ago

Absolutely bizarre to see a philosopher writing at some length that some questions are bad because they are hard to answer cleanly. Does he know what his profession is? It's also poor form to sling broad accusations about what "some" philosophers do without citing any examples.

mc32 6y ago
Why? Why is questioning presumptions bad? If the accusations end or weak then it proves philosophy still has it right. On the other hand it could cause a rethinking and perhaps fine some merit in the criticism,
logicchains 6y ago
>Absolutely bizarre to see a philosopher writing at some length that some questions are bad because they are hard to answer cleanly. It's hardly bizarre. Wittgenstein, one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century, wrote that most philosophy was incorrect because philosophers failed to clearly define their terms. "The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other — he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy — but it would be the only strictly correct method".
bigfoot675 6y ago
I would think it worse to operate under the "principles of his profession" without questioning them at all, no?

Sophistifunk 6y ago

The trolley problem is a non-problem. I don't know about you guys, but nobody I know is ever going to buy a car that might decide to kill them to save some stranger(s).

baddox 6y ago
That seems overblown. Would you ever ride in a car with a driver that might sacrifice the lives of everyone in the car to save 1,000 people? I suspect that lots of people have actively made decisions while driving their own car that endangers their own life in order to potentially save the life of someone else.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I'm not sure I'd make that assumption. I'm sure lots of people have made a split-second reflexive decision to avoid hitting a person/people/deer in a collision that still carries some danger to themselves. I wonder how many have made a deliberate decision to drive off the road to considerable hazard (e.g. off a cliff) in order to avoid hitting someone at no danger to themselves.
- leghifla 6y ago
  Well, I would not want to get into the car of someone with a driving habit of risking the live of 1000 people in the first place. The real solution to this is to avoid situations where such choice must be made, by keeping safe distances and speed. Good drivers do this naturally. AI must do this too.
  - baddox 6y ago
    That’s never part of the thought experiment. The trolley problem isn’t asking whether you should risk one life or risk 100 lives. It’s asking what you would do in a situation that you were placed into.
throwaway2048 6y ago
The trolley problem in regards to autonomous cars is a total sideshow when the cars we do have cant reliably tell people from bicycles from other cars. Its often used as a sort of backdoor to squeeze in the argument that we should let X people die to autonomous cars because in the future they will definitely be safer, for sure. (some very shaky priors there) These arguments are usually introduced with massive assumptions about the applicability and reliability of statistics gathered from cars that basically give up when even slightly challenged with anything remotely ambiguous or difficult (how many people live where there is perfect weather almost every day?), and then are applied to the entire gambit of circumstances human drivers deal with every day, by the millions.

dereferenceddev 6y ago

There just seems to be a misunderstanding on the intention of a though experiment here. There is a subtle implication that because the thought experiment is "contrived" that its less valuable. When thinking about philosophy, a core part of philosophy is to reduce concepts, ideas, or beliefs into abstractions (or a "spirit" or "essence" of what their intention is), the thought experiment presents itself as a perfectly useful tool to help challenge those concepts. Ethics is not about absolutes, but really about sussing out where gray areas exist in what some might believe are black and white situations. Additionally, most of the scenarios are presented as a thought experiment, because conducting a real experiment with those conditions would be wildly _un_ethical. How are we supposed to determine the nuance of valuing human life if we were bound to doing actual experiments? Also, who in their right mind would conduct such as experiment? Zimbardo faced enough flack testing the limits of obedience and authority in the Standford Prison Experiement.

mc32 6y ago
Instead of conceptual people you could experiment with real fish or chickens.
- dereferenceddev 6y ago
  If you train a chicken to pull a trolley lever, does it weigh on the conscious of the chicken whether they killed 1 chicken vs 5 chickens? I'm not a chicken so I don't really know.
  - ls612 6y ago
    I think he meant with humans pulling the lever and chickens dying.
    - dereferenceddev 6y ago
      I was trying to be silly in pointing out the real reason why the trolley car experiment is supposed to have some challenge to it.

viburnum 6y ago

It’s not just philosophy. So much of economics education is getting students to narrow their vision down to the something that somebody else wants them to see. Force the assumptions on people and then tell them how smart they are when they draw the inevitable conclusions. It’s a trap. Normal people forget about the assumptions and walk away believing the conclusions. It’s a technique for reshaping people’s intuitions.

6510 6y ago
haha, yes! Why is everyone relevant in philosophy dead? The answer to the trolley problem is that it doesn't matter if you pull the lever or not. You should figure out who or what created the situation and truly eliminate the problem at its source.
- juped 6y ago
  Killing Philippa Foot is a common joke solution to trolley problems, but few consider it seriously ethical.

DangitBobby 6y ago

I was in just such a conversation the other day, where we were discussing the implications of the second amendment with regards to tyranny in the US. A participant would not allow the conversation to continue without a description of how tryanny would take hold, and no hypothetical was realistic enough. They could not have brought the conversation to a halt faster if it were deliberate. Ultimately, they didn't agree with the point (which was sound) because they believe that our "democracy" is sufficient to prevent tyranny now and forever. The point of discussions about scenarios whose parameters cannot be known is to find a useful way to elide the unknowns and come to conclusions that we can agree to and understand. Failing to see the forest for the trees is not a problem with the exercise; it's a problem with the participant.

mjevans 6y ago
It is sad that I am far more willing to believe those events plausible. There is a saying about attributing to stupidity before malice, and I think that also applies to the foundation of how such an outcome could occur.
Traster 6y ago
The problem is that there's nothing inherent about a hypothetical that elides irrelevant details, it elides only whatever the author of the hypothetical wants to elide. Hypotheticals can let us agree on one aspect of a situation, but it can't make us agree on how relevant that aspect is to the situation we're actually interested in. This is why the trolley problem as applied to autonomous driving is so problematic, whilst it's an interesting thought experiment, its totally irrelevant to the person actually designing a self-driving car. It's a perfectly valid position to take that a situation is complex enough that hypotheticals aren't ever going to be helpful in reasoning about it.

efitz 6y ago

One challenge that I have always had with the trolley problem is that in general solutions are not symmetrical. By this, I mean that as an observer, I might conclude that several different choices made by the subject of the experiment were ethical. For instance, if the subject threw the switch and caused one person to be killed (instead of multiple), I would see that as ethical. I would also see it as ethical if the subject did nothing, either out of shock or out of refusal to actively participate in anyone’s death. So I guess the problem is that I’m not convinced that the thought experiment generates objectively ethical outcomes, only subjective ones.

luckylion 6y ago
> So I guess the problem is that I’m not convinced that the thought experiment generates objectively ethical outcomes, only subjective ones. But that's also literally what it's supposed to do. It's a device to poke around and figure out your positions, e.g. are you into consequentialism or do you prefer deontology, are there circumstances that can change your position etc. I often find people (not you, people in general) rejecting thought experiments, because they are not comfortable with their intuitive decisions and they feel that it will be exposed when they're forced to apply it to a hypothetical situation that does not leave them an easy out ("this wouldn't happen, I don't walk near train tracks, ever").

dannykwells 6y ago

Could this be due to the rise of pure mathematics in influencing philosophers? In pure math, counter examples play a very important role: show once counter example, disprove an entire claim. The violinist in the article is clearly trying to be a pure math- like counter example, but to me, misses the emotional aspect of pregnancy (at the least) - a fetus is not a random person, it is you (partly), and furthermore, many would say society (and the species) depend on having babies, whereas the society and the species do not depend on violin players. Not saying I agree with these arguments only that the real world is substantially messier than pure math, and thus, pure math thinking may stumble when applied to real world problems. Tl;dr: humans are not rational in our beliefs and the continued attempts on all disciplines to assume we are, are well, irrational.

dereferenceddev 6y ago
I've rarely heard someone make the counter-point that a fetus is technically half "you", which really does fundamentally change the violinist example. The violinist experiment does have a lot of holes it it, but I think that one in particular almost turns it on its head, particularly because it circumvents the crux of the problem around consent (which I think is at the core of the problem). It would seem you would have to change the thought experiment to have the violinist actually be related to you (say a sibling). Now, would a person feel _as_ upset that they had to allow their sibling to use their kidneys for nine months in order to stay alive? That really changes it.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  A fetus is half another person, whose "selfish genes" would benefit by the fetus taking an excessive share of resources. So there's an inherent tension that isn't determined by culture or moral theories.
implements 6y ago
> society [...] depend on having babies, But civilisation doesn’t depend on maximising births, and actually probably would benefit from more resource intensive to produce artists, musicians, dancers, etc - is the other side of that argument.

castratikron 6y ago

Stallman said it better: The Trolley Problem poses this question: if a trolley is about to run over and kill five people standing on the tracks, and you can shunt it to a different track where it would only kill one person, should you do it? Or what if you could save those five by throwing a person near you onto the tracks; should you do it? Many people feel intuitively that it would be wrong to throw that person onto the tracks, and an argument attributes this to a supposed essential difference between killing someone and deciding to let that person die. I disagree. I too believe it would be wrong to throw that person onto the tracks, in real life, but not in the hypothetical trolley problems. There is no ethically significant difference between killing a person and letting the person die, if (as supposed in the trolley problems) there is no doubt that the death will occur. The reason, in real life, why killing someone is ethically different from letting someone die is that real life is full of surprises: the person might not really die. If you kill him, his death is pretty certain (though not totally; just recently a man was hanged in Iran and survived). If you merely don't take action to save him, he might survive anyway. He might jump off the track, for instance, or someone might pull him off. All sorts of things might happen. Likewise, throwing the one person onto the track might not succeed in saving the other five; how could you possibly be sure it would? You might find that you had done nothing but cause one additional death. Thus, in real life it is a good principle to avoid actively killing someone now, even if that might result in other deaths later. The trolley problems invalidate the principle because of the unlikely certainty that they assume. Precisely for that reason, they are not a useful moral guide for most real situations. In general, difficult artificial moral conundrums are not very useful guides for real-life conduct. It's much more useful to think about real situations. In the free software movement I have often decided not to propose an answer to a general question until I had some real cases to think about. For real driverless cars, the trolley problem never arises: the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible. More generally, the goal is to make sure to avoid any trolley problem. https://stallman.org/articles/trolley-problem.html https://stallman.org/articles/trolley-problem.html

luckylion 6y ago
I did not expect Stallman to offer such lame thinking. > The reason, in real life, why killing someone is ethically different from letting someone die is that real life is full of surprises: the person might not really die. Just like a cancer patient might always spontaneously get cured and you'd be an ass for cutting them open. Life is full of surprises, don't take action, ever! > For real driverless cars, the trolley problem never arises: the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible. Wow, why didn't anybody ever think of making the car just stop? Like, have we tried talking to the car and asking it not to have malfunctioning brakes? What if we offer the car a nice oil change later in exchange for behaving and not running people over?

brodouevencode 6y ago

This must be in the gestalt. https://brodoyouevencode.com/the-problem-with-the-trolley-problem.html https://brodoyouevencode.com/the-problem-with-the-trolley-pr...

mindtricks 6y ago
The trolley problem came up a lot in The Good Place, which may be why discussions around it have suddenly become a bit more mainstream.
NoPicklez 6y ago
I think its a silly response to the problem, yes if you were near the lever and you so happened to know one of the groups then you might argue pulling the lever one way or the other. But is that simply you justifying your actions? The problem isn't absurd when posed to humans because, how about the scenario where you don't know either person and you need to make a decision in a matter of seconds. That's the point. If my mother was on one of the tracks, I might justify my actions to pull the lever and have it veer into the other group, but that isn't necessarily a morally correct decision. The author in the article says that the problem is absurd when posed to humans, then goes onto applying the same principles of the problem to AI and cars but does not say that the problem is also absurd with regards to AI, despite coming to the same conclusion.
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  > necessarily a morally correct decision This is where the problem is: life is way more complex and nuanced to distill down to such a simplistic scenario. Measuring morality is not an instantaneous action.

yogrish 6y ago

This video summarises trolley problem well for driverless cars. https://youtu.be/ixIoDYVfKA0 https://youtu.be/ixIoDYVfKA0

kwhitefoot 6y ago

> Had the context been one in which a hitman was preparing to take a hidden shot at a target, and the target then died of a sudden cardiac arrest as the hitman remained out of sight, it’s far from clear that killing and letting die would be equally bad. But the two situations are not equivalent. The hitman is almost certainly not in a position to save his intended victim so he is not in any meaningful sense letting him die.

imtringued 6y ago

I dislike these types of thought experiments because they always involve a preexisting problem where a random bystander has to become a hero that has to save everyone. There are a lot of situations in which fate is just playing out and you can't do anything about it and struggling will only make everything worse. In reality, the hero doesn't actually know which lever will actually save lives and he also doesn't know if the people he is saving are actually in danger.