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Many if not most discussions of Trolley problems are about eliciting "intuitive" moral judgments and possibly identifying conflicting principles people might us
by 13415 6y ago
Many if not most discussions of Trolley problems are about eliciting "intuitive" moral judgments and possibly identifying conflicting principles people might use when coming up with those judgments, not to muse about how people would actually react.
I'm sure the authors of this very interesting study are aware of the differences (normative vs descriptive), just wanted to mention this for completeness.
- crazygringo 6y agoI came here to comment the same thing. Trolley problems are thought experiments to probe where different moral models (e.g. fair procedure vs. fair outcome) conflict. I've never even heard of them being used to represent what people would actually do in the moment. Especially since such moments are often extreme circumstances that most people would (thankfully) go their entire lives without ever confronting.
- ravi-delia 6y agoI suppose the interesting thing about looking into how people would react in the real world is that some actual ethical systems are attempts to formalize exactly that intuition. Virtue ethics, for instance, fit well into the mold of 'the world is very hard, the best way to avoid screwing up is to stick to the script'. Given that the world is, in fact, very hard, it's pretty tempting.