The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions

It appears that we live in a world where not only will most people refuse complicity in a disaster in order to save more lives, but where many people reject outright the idea that they should have any considered set of moral standards for making hard choices at all.

Er, you're attaching too much value to hypothetical philosophical questions.

I'd have thought it obvious that they're dodging the question so as to avoid the possibility of the answer being taken out of context and used against them. Lose-lose counterfactuals are usually used for entrapment. This is a common form of hazing amongst schoolchildren and toward politicians, after all, so it's a non-zero possibility in the real world. It's the one real-world purpose contrived questions are applied to.

tl;dr: you have not given them sufficient reason to care about contrived trolley problems.

Ultimately, when provided with optimally inconvenient and general forms of the dilemma, most of those who rejected the question will continue to make excuses to avoid answering the question on its own terms. They will insist that there must be superior alternatives, that external circumstances will absolve them from having to make a choice, or simply that they have no responsibility to address an artificial moral dilemma.

Of course we do. It would be crazy to answer such a question in a social setting if there is any possibility of avoiding it. Social adversaries will take your answer out of context and spin it to make you look bad. Honesty is not the best policy and answering such questions is nearly universally an irrational decision. Even when the questions are answered the responses should not be considered to have a significant correlation to actual behaviour.

Rather than choosing to flip the switch, push the fat man, or remain passive, many people will reject the question outright.

Counterfactual resistance is pretty common with all thought experiments, indeed it is the bane of undergraduate philosophy professors everywhere. We have no evidence that resistance is more common in ethical thought experiments or the trolley problem particularly than in thought experiments in other subfields: brain-in-vat hypotheticals, brain-transplant/hemisphere transplant, teleportation, Frankfurter cases etc. Which is to say most of this post is in need of citations. Maybe people just don't like convoluted thought experiments! I'm not even sure it's the case that many people do refuse to answer the question- how many instances could you possibly be basing this judgment on?

Ultimately, when provided with optimally inconvenient and general forms of the dilemma, most of those who rejected the question will continue to make excuses to avoid answering the question on its own terms.

How do you know this? I'm not demanding p-values but you haven't given us a lot to go on.

The purpose of thought experiments and other forms of simulation is to teach us to do better in real life. Obviously, no simulation can be perfectly faithful to real life. But if a given simulation is not merely imperfect but actively misleading, such that training in the simulation will make your real performance worse, then rejecting the simulation is a perfectly rational thing to do.

In real life, if you think the greater good requires you to do evil, you are probably wrong. Therefore, given a thought experiment in which the greater good really does require you to do evil, rejecting the thought experiment on the grounds of being worse than useless for training purposes, is a correct answer.

I've used the trolley problem a lot, at first to show off my knowledge of moral philosophy, but later, when I realized anyone who knows any philosophy has already heard it, to shock friends that think they have a perfect and internally consistent moral system worked out. But I add a twist, which I stole from an episode of Radiolab (which got it from the last episode of MASH), that I think makes it a lot more effective; say you're the mother of a baby in a village in Vietnam, and you're hiding with the rest of the village from the Viet Cong. Your baby starts to cry, and you know if it does they'll find you and kill the whole village. But, you could smother the baby (your baby!) and save everyone else. The size of the village can be adjusted up or down to hammer in the point. Crucially, I lie at first and say this is an actual historical event that really happened.

I usually save this one for people who smugly answer both trolly questions with "they're the same, of course I'd kill one to save 5 in each case", but it's also remarkably effective at dispelling objections of implausibility and rejection of the experiment. I'm not sure why this works so well, but I think our bias toward narratives we can place ourselves in helps. Almost everyone at this point says they think they should kill the baby, but they just don't think they could, to which I respond "Doesn't the world make more sense when you realize you value thousands of complex things in a fuzzy and inconsistent manner?". Unfortunately, I have yet to make friends with any true psychopaths. I'd be interested to hear their responses.

"Remember, you can't be wrong unless you take a position. Don't fall into that trap." - Scott Adams

An implicit assertion underlying this post seems to be that the sorts of people who answer trolley problems rather than dodge them are more likely to take action effectively in situations that require doing harm in order to minimize harm.

Or am I misunderstanding you?

If you are implying that: why do you believe that?

I get frustrated by this every time someone mentions the classic short story The Cold Equations (full text here). The premise of the story is a classic trolley problem (...In Space!), where a small spaceship carrying much-needed medical supplies gets a stowaway, which throws off its mass calculations. If the stowaway is not ejected into space, the ship will crash and the people on the planet will die of a plague. So the (innocent, lovable) stowaway is killed and ejected, and the day is saved. The end.

Whenever this comes up, somebody will attack the story as contrived, pointing out that it could have been prevented by some "Keep Out" signs and a few more door locks. This is usually treated as an excuse to dismiss the premise of the story entirely -- exactly what you describe as a common reaction to maximally inconvenient trolley problems.

(By the way, I searched on Less Wrong for previous discussions of The Cold Equations, and was pleasantly surprised that people around here seem much less inclined to use the story's plot holes as an excuse to dismiss the whole idea. The nits still get picked, but not to a facepalm-worthy extent.)

Morality is in some ways a harder problem than friendly AI. On the plus side, humans that don't control nuclear weapons aren't that powerful. On the minus side, morality has to run at the level of 7 billion single instances of a person who may have bad information.

So it needs to have heuristics that are robust against incomplete information. There's definitely an evolutionary just-so story about the penalty of publically committing to a risky action. But even without the evolutionary social risk, there is a moral risk to permitting an interventionist murder when you aren't all-knowing.

This looks just like the bayesian 101 example of a medical test that is 99% accurate on a disease that has 1% occurance rate. If you say that I'm in a very rare situation that requires me to commit murder, I have to assume that there are going to be many more situations that could be mistaken for this one. The "least convenient universe" story is tantalizing, but I think it leads astray here.

Having posted lots in this thread about excellent reasons not to answer the question, I shall now pretend to be one of the students that frustrates Desrtopa so and answer. Thus cutting myself off from becoming Prime Minister, but oh well.

The key to the problem is: I don't actually know or care about any of these people. So the question is answered in terms of the consequences (legal and social) to me, not to them.

e.g. in real life, action with a negative consequence tends to attract greater penalties than lack of action. So pushing one in front to save five is right out. Actively switching to kill one instead of leaving the switch to five, that one would be tricky - I might feel it was a less bad response and hence do it, despite possible penalties for having dared take an action instead of just floundering. (There, an actual answer.)

If I actually know and like any of these people, the problem gets more complicated. If all the friends are on one branch, they win, everyone else loses. If there's options of which friends I kill (and that phrase popped into my head as "which friends I kill" rather than "which friends die" - I seem not to be shirking responsibility), then I have some tricky calculation to do.

Whatever happens, I do expect I would be extremely upset and not fully functional for a little while afterwards.

There. Is that enough not to fall at the first hurdle in Philosophy 100?

As an ethicist who routinely rejects trolley problems, I feel I must respond to this.

The trolley problem was first formulated by Philippa Foot as a parody of the ridiculous ethical thought experiments developed by philosophers of the time. Its purpose was to cause the reader to observe that the thought experiment is a contrived scenario that will never occur (apparently, it serves that purpose in most untrained folks), and thus serves as an indictment of how divorced reasoning about ethics in philosophy had become from the real world of ethical decision-making.

When I hear a trolley problem, I immediately try to start filling in details. Who are the five people, and who is the one? Why are they on the trolley tracks? Why am I the only person who can do something about it? Are there really no other alternatives, and if so, how is this known to me?

And if the best "least convenient possible world" ends up being one which doesn't even remotely resemble reality, then I don't mind if my moral compass outputs an undefined value in those spaces; my morality is built for the real world.

I think you are overly generalizing against people who don't like or don't understand philosophy.

even when it is posed in its most inconvenient possible forms, where they have the time to collect themselves and make a reasoned choice, but no possibility of implementing alternative solutions.

I am a conscientious "third-alternativer" on trolley problems, and to me this seems like an abuse of the least convenient possible world principle. If there is a world with no possibility of implementing alternative solutions, I will pick the outcome with the best consequences, but I don't believe there actually is a world with no possibility of alternatives - I reject the "possible" part of your least convenient possible world.

It would be like arguing to an atheist: "The least convenient possible world is one where the Christian God exists with probability 1."

I'd honestly find the far more plausible answer to be that people just have trouble with truly direct, unambiguous communication. My own experience is that either I'm very bad at such communication, or else other people are very bad at receiving it. When I ask extremely specific questions, people will usually assume a more generalized motive to asking it, and try to answer THAT question. I've had conversations with very smart people who kept re-interpreting my questions because they assumed I was trying to make a specific point or disprove some specific detail.

I'd actually find it very interesting to study how wording affects this question. You have the improbable scenario of the trolley, you have the far more realistic scenario of the crying baby, and then you have the simple and direct question "would you kill a person to save five others?"

Lastly, I'd say I have a very strong objection to this passage: "However, trolleylike dilemmas are actually quite common in real life, when you take the scenario not as a case where only two options are available, but as a metaphor for any situation where all the available choices have negative repercussions"

The Trolley scenario is a strong binary decision with perfect information and absolutely no creative thinking or alternate solution possible. Do you really think that comes up frequently in real life? If not, why not use an exercise that accommodates and praises creative solutions instead of rejecting them as being outside the binary scope of the exercise?

The top 10% of humanity accumulates 30% of the worlds wealth. 20% of the humanity dies from preventable, premature death (and suffers horribly)

The proposition...

10% of the top 10% had all their wealth taken from them (lottery selection process) They are forced to work as hard and effectively as they had previously and were given only enough of the profits they produce to live modestly. They lose everything and work for 5 years and recieve 10% of original wealth back The next 10% of the top 10 % is selected The wealth taken is used to ensure the survival of the 20% dying from preventable premature death.

In this scenario 1% of people are forced to live modestly in order to save up to 20% of humanity. No-one need to kill or be killed.

It would probably be reasonable to say the top 20% of earners would be against this proposal. The majority of the bottom 40% would be in favour. If your reading this you are likely on of the other 40% of humankind who can choose to support or reject the proposal. What would you say?

I am aware there are many holes in the proposition (unintended consequences etc) however this is a hypothetical that is based on a real situation that exists now that we are all contributing to in one way or another.

It appears that we live in a world where not only will most people refuse complicity in a disaster in order to save more lives, but where many people reject outright the idea that they should have any considered set of moral standards for making hard choices at all.

We live in a world where most people refuse complicity in a disaster in order to "maintain a certain quality of life even though it costs many lives".

Perhaps this is the reason for opting out of answering the question, acting is just to hard. The decision and its consequences is for someone else. For most people this is the life they live. The power to think about and decide what to do in a disasterous situation is always in someone elses hands and is therefore not needed to be considered or contemplated at all.

I see this as one of the worst aspects of centralized power arrangements in communities because "complicity" of all citizens in man made disasters either through direct actions or inaction should be understood and acknowledged by all. Perhaps then prevention or a change in behaviour would produce better outcomes.

Then again, probably not.

This is still true:

• Trolley problems make a lot of sense in deontological ethics, to test supposedly universal moral rules in extreme situations.
• Trolley problems do not make much sense in consequentialist ethics, as optimal action for a consequentialist can differ drastically between messy complicated real world and idealized world of thought experiments.

If you're a consequentialist, trolley problems are entirely irrelevant.

I think there have posts about this before. Well, this and the "if it's not my responsibility, it's not my problem" mindset, which the trolley problem also touches on.

It dawns on me that there is a much more general tendency among most people to try to bail out of moral dilemmas or other hypotheticals. I personal experience sometimes I wish it was socially accepted to shout "Stop making up alternate courses of action in my thought experiments!" but alas we all have to deal with the single inference step.

(Is there a generalization of that "take a third option" tendency on dilemmas and hypothetical situations?)

Excellent post. Seems to me that your points about how people react to moral problems apply to decision problems as well.