The Problem With Trolley Problems

There are psychologists, following in the foot steps of Stanley Milgram who set up situations, candid camera style, to see what people actually do. This is very different from asking hypothetical questions.

Taking the trolley problem at face value, we recognise it as the problem of military command. Five regiments are encircled. Staring at the map the general realises that if he commits a sixth regiment to battle at a key point the first five regiments will break-out and survive to fight another day, but the sixth regiment will be trapped and annihilated. Of course the general sends the sixth regiment into battle. The trolley problem is set up to be unproblematic. Sacrifice one to say five? Yes!

So what is it probing? Why do we have difficulty with the pencil and paper exercise when the real life answer is clear cut? We are not in fact generals, chosen for our moral courage and licensed to take tough decisions. We are middle-class wankers playing a social game. If we are answering the trolley problem, rather than asking it, we have been trapped into playing a game of "Heads I win, tails you lose."

The way the game works is that the hypothetical set up is unreasonable, so the social aggressor gets to vary the hypotheses after the victim has answered. If you don't throw the fat man in front of the trolley you have murdered five and are bad. If you do throw the fat man in front of the trolley then you are being over-confident in thinking that you know the outcome, in thinking that the five men are really in mortal peril and in thinking that throwing the fat man under the trolley is the only way to save them. You murder the fat man out of arrogance and are evil.

The trolley problem probes how well the players dodge verbal blows in social combat.

Your argument could be phrased as:

1. trolley problems are a philosophical tool to help in debate about moral beliefs.
2. people sometimes use these tools out of context
3. therefore trolley problems are "a waste of time at best" This doesn't follow. They're only a waste of time at best if they are never used in context or are inefficient then and you didn't discuss that at all.

You should have phrased that as: Even if trolley problems are good at testing moral intuitions in theory, discussing them might make people prone to these errors in real life moral thinking.

I think trolley problems suffer from a different type of oversimplification.

Suppose in your system of ethics the correct action in this sort of situation depends on why the various different people got tied to the various bits of track, or on why 'you' ended up being in the situation where you get to control the direction of the trolley.

In that case, the trolley problem has abstracted away the information you need (and would normally have in the real world) to choose the right action.

(Or if you have a formulation which explicitly mentions the 'mad philosopher' and you take that bit seriously, then the question becomes an odd corner case rather than a simplifying thought experiment.)

The thrust of your argument appears to be that: 1) Trolley problems are idealised 2) Idealisation can be a dark art rhetorical technique in discussion of the real world. 3) Boo trolley problems!

There are a number of issues.

First and foremost, reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Even if you are granted the substance of your criticisms of the activists position, this does not argue per se against trolley problems as dilemmas. The fact that they share features with a "Bad Thing" does not inherently make them bad.

Secondly, the whole point of considering trolley problems is to elucidate human nature and give some measure of training in cognition in stressful edge cases. The observation that humans freeze or behave inconsistently is important. This is why the trolley problems have to be trued in the sense that you object to - if they are not, many humans will avoid thinking about the ethical question being posed. In essence "I don't like your options, give me a more palatable one" is a fully general and utterly useless answer; it must be excluded.

Thirdly, your argument turns on the claim that merely admitting trolley problems as objects of thought somehow makes people more likely to accept dichotomies that "justify tyranny and oppression". This is risible. Even if the dichotomy is a false one, you surely should find one or the other branch preferable. It is perfectly admissible to say:

"I prefer this option (implicitly you presume that will be the taxation), but that if this argument is to be the basis for policy, then there are better alternatives foo, bar, etc., and that various important real world effects have been neglected."

Those familiar with the trolley problems and general philosophical dilemmas are more likely to be aware of the idealisations and voice these concerns cogently if idealisations are used in rhetoric or politics.

Fourthly, in terms of data, I would challenge you to find evidence suggesting that study of trolley problems leads to acceptance of tyranny. I would note (anecdotally) that communities where one can say "trolley problem" without needing to explain further seem to have a higher density of the libertarians and anarchists than the general population.

So in rough summary: 1) Your conclusion does not follow from the argument. 2)Trolley problems are idealised because if they aren't humans evade rather than engage. 3) Noting and calling out dark arts rhetoric is roughly orthogonal to thinking about trolley problems (conditional on thinking). 4) Citation needed wrt. increased tyranny in those who consider trolley problems.

I don't think trolley problems are used to argue for policies. Rather, the point of trolley problems is to reveal that the way humans normally do moral reasoning is not shut-up-and-multiply utilitarianism.

Activist says, "We've got to take from this rich fat cat and give it to these poor people, or the poor people will starve and die. If you take the money, the fat cat will buy less cars and yachts, and the poor people will become much more successful and happy."

While activists may try to trot out utilitarian justifications for their political arguments, nothing about trolley problems can be seen as bolstering their claims (either that redistribution is utility-maximizing, or that utilitarianism is itself the "correct" moral theory.) Trolley problem research isn't normative, it's descriptive.

I think you are looking at the Trolley Problem out of context.

The Trolley Problem isn't suppose to represent a real-world situation. Its a simplified thought experiment designed to illustrate the variability of morality in slightly differing scenarios. They don't offer solutions to moral questions, they highlight the problems.

This is actually very similar to an intuition I've had about this problem. The difference is that I compare it to a different scenario, and regard it as a reason, not to reject the trolley problem, but a reason to justify the optimality of not pushing the innocent bystander onto the tracks.

You compared it to wealth-redistribution attempting to optimize total utility, while I think a better comparison is discrimination law, something that matters close to me. (Edit: sorry for awkward phrasing, keeping it there because it was quoted.) In short, just as milking the cow makes it waste effort avoiding being milked, discrimination law simply makes employers drastically revise hiring practices so that they don't use the one that counts under the law as a "job posting".

So they rely more heavily on network hires and indirect signals of employee quality, and, ironically, make it much harder for people outside these networks -- usually the "protected" classes -- to even get a chance in the first place, no matter how good they could demonstrate their work to be!

People think they can just shove these "surprise" costs onto agents with "too much utility", ignoring the long-term ways they'll react. As I said before about the problem, one non-obvious result of shoving the guy onto the track is that drastically shifts around the risk profiles of various activities. Previously, standing on a track was riskier than staying off it. But a policy of switching this risk around makes it harder overall for people to ascertain risks, which makes them spend wasteful effort avoiding risks (since they have to assume they're understated).

Generally, it really bothers me when people talk in terms of policies that attempt to shift utility from privileged group A to pitiable group B, not realizing that A will still gets its privileges and exclude B -- it'll just become a more complex dance for B to figure out.

I believe trolley problems are fundamentally flawed - at best a waste of time, and at worst lead to really sloppy thinking. Here's four reasons why:

1. It assumes perfect information about outcomes.
2. It ignores the global secondary effects that local choices create.
3. It ignores real human nature - which would be to freeze and be indecisive.
4. It usually gives you two choices and no alternatives, and in real life, there's always alternatives.

Note that these properties are characteristic of most thought experiments, not just the trolley problem.

Take (3), for example. It talks about descriptive adequacy of a thought experiment, while the goal of the enterprise is to figure out what should be done. By analogy, asking "How much is 233*4945?" shouldn't be faced with an argument that since real human beings are unlikely to give a correct response in a few seconds, trying to answer this question leads to sloppy thinking, as it doesn't reflect what really happens when people try to answer it on the spot.

Related - Philippa Foot, renowned philosopher and unknown anthropologist. Foot died earlier this month. She was the originator of the trolley problem, in 1967.

Related: By The Power of Stipulation: I Have The Power!

The point of using perfect information problems is that they should be simpler to handle. If a moral system can't handle the perfect information problems then it certainly can't handle the more complicated problems where there is a lack of perfect information. In this regard, this is similar to looking at Newcomb's Problem. The problem itself will never come up in that form. But if a decision theory can't give a coherent response to Newcomb's then there's a problem.

Trolley problems appear not just in philosophy - some psychologists are using them in experiments as well. Here is one recent example.

In this case, at least, I think that many of your objections to the trolley problem don't apply. The researchers really are not interested in the ethics of deciding to sacrifice a fat man, they are interested in how the decision to sacrifice might change when the decision maker is on various drugs. And they already have brain imaging results for the trolley problem - so of course they would want to use the same problem in this experiment.

Isn't The Least Convenient Possible World directly relevant here? I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned yet.

1. It assumes perfect information about outcomes.
2. It ignores the global secondary effects that local choices create.
3. It ignores real human nature - which would be to freeze and be indecisive.
4. It usually gives you two choices and no alternatives, and in real life, there's always alternatives.

I broadly agree with this, but there's another reason trolley problems are flawed. Namely; it is hard to deconvolute one's judgment of impracticality (a la 4) from one's judgment of moral impermissibility. Pushing a fat guy is just such an implausibly stupid way to stop a trolley, and my intuition is going to keep shouting NO at that problem, no matter how much you verbally specify that I have perfect knowledge it will work.

Yes, trolley problems are simple and reality is complex. We know this. The point of a trolley problem is not to provide a complete model for decision making in general, but to extract single data points about our preferences. imperfect information must be dealt with using probability distributions and expected utility; secondary effects must be included in our expected utility calculations. Indecision is irrelevant, in the same sense that someone facing Omega's problem with a time limit might leave someone with zero boxes. And of course, we do have to spend resources looking for third options, but that doesn't mean every problem will ultimately provide one.

Also, this would be better without the example from politics. If you want to face a mind-killing problem, face it directly, taking special care to defuse the mind-killing aspects. If you just need an example for an unrelated point, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution.

Here's better shorter version of your post:

• 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.

Also, politics is the mind-killer, don't use examples like that if you can help it.

No vote; post was at +2 and that seems appropriate to me.

Trolley problems have four weaknesses: true.

It's bad that trolley problems have weaknesses: sure, but you didn't propose an alternative way of forcing people to reason about thorny moral problems. Criticizing trolley problems without proposing an alternative is like criticizing liberal democracy without proposing an alternative -- easy, valid, and pointless.

Trolley thinking seeps into politics: highly unlikely; most people-thoughts about politics are had by people who remember nothing from any philosophy class they ever had. To the extent that people assume perfect information, deal in extremes, etc., it's because of generic human biases, and not because people's rationality is being hijacked by long exposure to trolley contemplation.

Biases in political thinking are bad: true, but trivial.

I think that trolley problems contain perfect information about outcomes in advance of them happening, ...

True.

... ignore secondary effects, ...

Depends on what you mean. The problem is stated with a simple question: do you push the lever / fat man? You are not instructed to ignore whatever effects it may have. A trolley problem may be stated with some additional remark like "nobody will ever learn about your choice" which can implicitly suggest to ignore some possible real-world effects, but that isn't inherently present in every trolley problem.

... ignore human nature, ...

No. Some answers to the dilemma tend to ignore human nature, but the problem itself doesn't. And of course, there are many moral questions whose answer is both natural and correct with respect to whatever ethical theory we use, but those wouldn't make a good material for interesting and non-trivial discussions about morality.

... and give artificially false constraints.

True.

Now, I think that's bad. Agree/disagree there?

Disagree. You object to the fact that the trolley problem is an idealised scenario. I see that objection about as equally valid as an argument that formal logic is bad because it ignores biases and heuristics that all real people use.

... I think this kind of thinking seeps over into politics,

Any kind of thinking about decisions and morality can seep into politics. I don't think that too much reductionism is a frequent problem in politics, but even if it is, it is a problem of any formalised decision theory, or social science in general.

If you can come up with better hypotheticals, please do present one. The trolley-one is used so often most likely because there are no good alternatives.

Also, you seem to have missed the point of the trolley problem as it has been presented. The main point in thinking about it is that you notice that a), you have ethical intuitions, and b), they can change to polar opposite if the starting position is altered even a bit. That's just healthy experimentation that's supposed to provoke thoughts. I can't see how changing this example would prevent people from justifying their thoughts in politics by misguided simplifications.

An obvious third alternative to the trolley problem: If you yourself are fat enough to save the 5 people in the trolley, then you jump on the tracks yourself, you don't push the other guy.

But if you're not fat enough, then yes, of course you push the fat guy onto the tracks, without hesitation. And you plead guilty to his murder. And you go to jail. One person dying and one person going to jail is preferable to 5 people dying. Or, if you're so afraid of going to jail that you would rather die, then you can also jump onto the tracks after pushing the fat man, to be extra sure of being able to stop the trolley.

Technically, you should jump onto the tracks if by doing so you think that you can increase the probability of saving the 5 people by more than 20 percent.

Here is an interesting blog post on the topic of third alternatives to philosophical puzzles like these: http://tailsteak.com/archive.php?num=497

I still consider myself a "Classical Utilitarian", by the way, even though I am aware of some of the disturbing consequences of this belief system.

And I agree with the main point of your post, and upvoted it. But the real purpose of trolley problems is to explore edge-cases of moral systems, not to advocate or justify real life policy.

Well, if the point of trolley problems is to gain some insight as to how we form moral judgments, I don't necessarily do even that particularly well. I suspect they don't even do that particularly well, since I suspect many respondents are going to give what they think is the approved answer, which is possibly different from what they would actually do. At best they provide insight as to why we might think of certain actions as moral or immoral.

But I sometimes see things like trolley problems used argue that there is something wrong with peoples' decision making processes, based on apparent inconsistencies in their responses. I think this is a crock. The fact is, we often have to make decisions very quickly based on woefully incomplete information. Yes we use heuristics, and yes sometimes which heuristic gets applied (and thus which choice we make) depends on how the problem is phrased, and that means sometimes we will give "inconsistent" answers. This is not a defect, it is the inevitable result of not having the luxury of infinite time to consider one's response.

Your "ignore secondary effects" claim is weak - trolley-type situations would happen very rarely and there'd be no point in responding.

It's bad but necessary to get to the fundamental moral issue.

I don't think it seeps into politics. Similarity does not imply causation.

Couple of typos:

1. It the global secondary effects that local choices create.

Your sentence no verb.

We've got to take this rich fat cat and give it to these poor people

Give the cat to the poor people?

I also think that you've misunderstood the significance of the trolley problem. As it happens, I was already intending to write a new post on the trolley problem when I came across this looking for related articles, so here it is, and I hope it explains why I find this post to be a worrying type of response to the dilemma.

Ceteris paribus, I cannot imagine what number of people stupid enough to be sitting about on a train track (probably violating property rights for a start) it takes before saving them becomes worth the sacrifice of the average bystander.

I voted up. Post makes good sense to me.

You make the claim that trolley problems ignore human nature and are thus conducive to sloppy thinking. It is claimed that people who know of trolley problems are more likely to be "anarchists and libertarians" and less likely to accept tyrrany. Ignoring the fact that this is orthogonal to your point, I would endorse the stronger claim that people who know of trolley problems are in general better thinkers.

On the other hand, people who know trolley problems have probably taken a university philosophy class and are thus in a totally different demographic than the general population. And just because people who have taken a class about thinking clearly think more clearly doesn't mean that the tools we use in those classes are very good. Or that they are any good at all.

When you say that trolley problems ignore human nature, I think there is a deeper truth to that. When you ask people to decide between letting people die and pushing someone in front of a train; well first off magnitude bias kicks in and they see it as "passive bad vs active bad." Then virtue ethics kicks in and they may see the situation as "me being bad" versus "something bad happening elsewhere."

When a general makes this decision for his troops, he is already in a position of having made decisions for five platoons which put them in danger, in order to have his virtue ethics of being a good person kick in he has to rescue the people he put in danger.

It has been brought up that humans may operate more naturally in virtue ethics; the standard trolley problem seems to me to be about times when virtue ethics and consequentialism will have unpleasant conflicts.

People have mentioned that the trolley problem specifically comes up rarely. I agree; I think that it is perfectly possible to pursue the virtues which make you a better consequentialist. So why spend time focusing on the conflict, as trolley problems do, rather than looking for a better set of philosophical tools?

I think that trolley problems contain perfect information about outcomes in advance of them happening, ignore secondary effects, ignore human nature, and give artificially false constraints. Do you agree with that part?

"false constratins" carries a negative connotation. Here you setup your emotional argument later. This site is about rationality and you made a mistake here. Even if it is understandable and common human thinking it is that which is "sloppy thinking". Otherwise this premise is more or less correct.

Now, I think that's bad. Agree/disagree there?

Disagree. With the same argument you could say that animal testing is bad because it doesn't recognize the differences between humans and animals. The point is, it does. As long as you know the limits of the results of animal testing, they still serve as a pointer towards how humans will react to substances. And as long as you are aware that trolley problems are not real life problems they still serve as a pointer towards what a rational morality needs to answer.

Okay, finally, I think this kind of thinking seeps over into politics, and it's likewise bad there. Agree/disagree?

Except for the likewise. If people make choices based on thought experiments without thinking about whether they really apply, that is bad. But you have only shown how people could do that and not that they actually do. If your post was meant as a general warning against mindlessly reducing real life situations to thought experiments it would be a valid point, however the structure of your post doesn't make that point clear.

Tangent - is there any way, like Reddit, to see how many upvotes and downvotes this has gotten? I see it yo-yoing back and forth, people don't seem neutral about this one. I'd be curious to see the exact numbers.

Northern europe is really nice, though...