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The Trolley Problem is a good example of the status quo bias and the opt-in/opt-out framing bias, and it shows how our moral reasoning can be driven by cheap he

The Trolley Problem is a good example of the status quo bias and the opt-in/opt-out framing bias, and it shows how our moral reasoning can be driven by cheap heuristics. Someone else (in this case, the experimenter) has chosen that A (5 people dying) is the default, and so most just go along with that default choice. If the experimenter instead chose NOT(A) (1 person dying) as the default, everyone would go along with that instead. The usual excuse for going along with the default choice (in this case, to kill 5 people instead of 1), is that opting out of the default is "an active choice that leads to death", and that doing "nothing" isn't anything like it morally speaking. I believe this to be a figment of people's imagination used to justify their decision after the fact. They can either choose A or NOT(A). Either way they've made a choice and acted upon that choice, and there's a causal reality that follows from either choice that they made.

anaerobicover 6y ago
That should be straightforward to check up on, by randomly choosing which one to present as the default to a large number of people.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ghodith 6y ago
  Why? Do you really think we need to check if people would switch the track from hitting one person to hitting five?
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    You are incredulous because to you it seems obvious that 1 death is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths. But have you considered the possibility that doing nothing means the actor (or the non-actor in such a case) is then not actively responsible for any death? She is then plausibly just an innocent bystander. What you would be testing if you changed the default would be to test the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility i.e. getting involved in a moral choice, versus not getting involved. You are correct that the total number of deaths is going to be what it is, but by not getting involved, the test subject's personal culpability is reduced to zero rather than [1,5]. In practice, the friction is even higher than in theory, because the rules of the game are not so clear and obvious in the field. There is a cognitive overhead to parsing the circumstances and understanding what choices are available. It's easier to not parse the emergency and just turn away.
    - ghodith 6y ago
      I am not incredulous because "it seems obvious that 1 death is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths." I am incredulous because it seems obvious that 1 death and no responsibility is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths and the responsibility. You ask if I have "considered the possibility that doing nothing means the actor (...) is then not actively responsible for any death." You've gotten this all backwards. The way the trolley experiments are run by default already tests the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility. You are presented with either the option of taking moral responsibility and saving four lives, or not taking moral responsibility and not saving four lives. If you change the default to be a choice between either taking moral responsibility and not saving four lives or not taking moral responsibility and saving four lives, not only is everyone going to choose the second option, you haven't successfully distinguished whether this is because they don't want the moral responsibility or because they wanted to save four lives. Changing the default in this case actually does the opposite of what you want, it emphatically changes the experiment from one that would "test the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility" (friction that acts against the instinct to save four lives) to one that does not! In this new case the "friction involved" works to act against what? People's predisposed instinct to switch the train from the track with one person to the track with five? I don't quite see much friction here, and it turns what was once a task where the 'relatively superior' outcome required a difficult choice into a task where the 'relatively superior' outcome requires no choice at all. You don't actually end up testing anything! (except I suppose, whether the test taker is a psychopath)
atq2119 6y ago
The thing is, the trolley problem presents a very theoretical dichotomy. In real life, such dichotomies are usually false. At the very least, the underlying facts are usually less clear. Therefore, "do nothing" is a very good heuristic in practice: it gives the subject more time to try to find a third solution. So yes, not acting is in a sense a choice, but evaluating the usual presentation of the trolley problem is unsuitable for judging whether that choice is moral, or even whether it is optimal in a utilitarian sense.
NickM 6y ago
The bias doesn't seem entirely wrong, though, if you look at it outside of these kinds of contrived situations. If you truly believe that not saving a life is equivalent to killing someone, then you have to start accepting some pretty controversial things. For example, if you can statistically save one life by donating a few thousand dollars to a charity that buys mosquito nets for people, does that mean everyone who can spare that money and chooses not to donate is morally equivalent to a contract killer? In both cases, you have one person who ends up richer in exchange for someone else dying, no? Or to take it a step further, what about people who can't afford to donate that money, but could've had enough money to donate more if they'd chosen a different career path? Does that make them less guilty, just because the "opt-out" decision is farther removed from the result? I think most people would say yes, but if you really believe that action is equivalent to inaction then it doesn't seem any different.
- rfw300 6y ago
  The rough answer is that we have a duty to help to a degree that is reasonable enough that we'll keep doing it. So organizations like Giving What We Can, for example, ask members to pledge to donate 10% of their annual income to effective charities, which is a fairly reasonable amount for middle-class people in a developed nation that won't sacrifice much quality of life. Yes, there is always some subtext that a life could've been saved had you given that much extra. But I think it's a mistake to view moral failure as a binary rather than a scalar; every life saved is that much better and we ought to keep that in mind rather than embracing a kind of nihilism that we're not doing everything we can and therefore we should do nothing.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  I think you're begging the question. The more steps between an action & an outcome, the more other people need to be involved, etc the less guilty you are. If someone is beaten as a child & then turns into a child predator, we don't convict the parents as guilty for the child predation act. One person killing another is a crime. One country choosing to wage war isn't generally considered to be such. With a charity, the inaction is offset by those that _are_ taking action. The inaction is also mitigated by an awareness of the impact of diminishing returns (there could be other things more worthy of investment in the long term). The trolly example artificially makes the outcome solely dependent on your action, which is extremely rarely/never how things work in reality.
skizm 6y ago
> so most just go along with that default choice. Wait, but in the trolley problem the vast majority (over 90%) of people opt to pull the lever and kill the one person. Almost no one goes with the default option unless you tinker with the parameters (the one person is a loved one or something).

anaerobicover 6y ago

That should be straightforward to check up on, by randomly choosing which one to present as the default to a large number of people.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ghodith 6y ago
Why? Do you really think we need to check if people would switch the track from hitting one person to hitting five?
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  You are incredulous because to you it seems obvious that 1 death is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths. But have you considered the possibility that doing nothing means the actor (or the non-actor in such a case) is then not actively responsible for any death? She is then plausibly just an innocent bystander. What you would be testing if you changed the default would be to test the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility i.e. getting involved in a moral choice, versus not getting involved. You are correct that the total number of deaths is going to be what it is, but by not getting involved, the test subject's personal culpability is reduced to zero rather than [1,5]. In practice, the friction is even higher than in theory, because the rules of the game are not so clear and obvious in the field. There is a cognitive overhead to parsing the circumstances and understanding what choices are available. It's easier to not parse the emergency and just turn away.
  - ghodith 6y ago
    I am not incredulous because "it seems obvious that 1 death is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths." I am incredulous because it seems obvious that 1 death and no responsibility is a relatively superior outcome to 5 deaths and the responsibility. You ask if I have "considered the possibility that doing nothing means the actor (...) is then not actively responsible for any death." You've gotten this all backwards. The way the trolley experiments are run by default already tests the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility. You are presented with either the option of taking moral responsibility and saving four lives, or not taking moral responsibility and not saving four lives. If you change the default to be a choice between either taking moral responsibility and not saving four lives or not taking moral responsibility and saving four lives, not only is everyone going to choose the second option, you haven't successfully distinguished whether this is because they don't want the moral responsibility or because they wanted to save four lives. Changing the default in this case actually does the opposite of what you want, it emphatically changes the experiment from one that would "test the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility" (friction that acts against the instinct to save four lives) to one that does not! In this new case the "friction involved" works to act against what? People's predisposed instinct to switch the train from the track with one person to the track with five? I don't quite see much friction here, and it turns what was once a task where the 'relatively superior' outcome required a difficult choice into a task where the 'relatively superior' outcome requires no choice at all. You don't actually end up testing anything! (except I suppose, whether the test taker is a psychopath)

atq2119 6y ago

The thing is, the trolley problem presents a very theoretical dichotomy. In real life, such dichotomies are usually false. At the very least, the underlying facts are usually less clear. Therefore, "do nothing" is a very good heuristic in practice: it gives the subject more time to try to find a third solution. So yes, not acting is in a sense a choice, but evaluating the usual presentation of the trolley problem is unsuitable for judging whether that choice is moral, or even whether it is optimal in a utilitarian sense.

NickM 6y ago

The bias doesn't seem entirely wrong, though, if you look at it outside of these kinds of contrived situations. If you truly believe that not saving a life is equivalent to killing someone, then you have to start accepting some pretty controversial things. For example, if you can statistically save one life by donating a few thousand dollars to a charity that buys mosquito nets for people, does that mean everyone who can spare that money and chooses not to donate is morally equivalent to a contract killer? In both cases, you have one person who ends up richer in exchange for someone else dying, no? Or to take it a step further, what about people who can't afford to donate that money, but could've had enough money to donate more if they'd chosen a different career path? Does that make them less guilty, just because the "opt-out" decision is farther removed from the result? I think most people would say yes, but if you really believe that action is equivalent to inaction then it doesn't seem any different.

rfw300 6y ago
The rough answer is that we have a duty to help to a degree that is reasonable enough that we'll keep doing it. So organizations like Giving What We Can, for example, ask members to pledge to donate 10% of their annual income to effective charities, which is a fairly reasonable amount for middle-class people in a developed nation that won't sacrifice much quality of life. Yes, there is always some subtext that a life could've been saved had you given that much extra. But I think it's a mistake to view moral failure as a binary rather than a scalar; every life saved is that much better and we ought to keep that in mind rather than embracing a kind of nihilism that we're not doing everything we can and therefore we should do nothing.
vlovich123 6y ago
I think you're begging the question. The more steps between an action & an outcome, the more other people need to be involved, etc the less guilty you are. If someone is beaten as a child & then turns into a child predator, we don't convict the parents as guilty for the child predation act. One person killing another is a crime. One country choosing to wage war isn't generally considered to be such. With a charity, the inaction is offset by those that _are_ taking action. The inaction is also mitigated by an awareness of the impact of diminishing returns (there could be other things more worthy of investment in the long term). The trolly example artificially makes the outcome solely dependent on your action, which is extremely rarely/never how things work in reality.

skizm 6y ago

> so most just go along with that default choice. Wait, but in the trolley problem the vast majority (over 90%) of people opt to pull the lever and kill the one person. Almost no one goes with the default option unless you tinker with the parameters (the one person is a loved one or something).