I did the problems under the assumption that "pulling the lever" was an act, while doing nothing was not acting. Implied legal (and moral) liabilities made a difference in my choices.
Legally perhaps, but morally, I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference.
It's a binary decision with two outcomes, in my personal view it is irrelevant which of the outcomes is caused by physical action and which by inaction (at least, supposing that you have enough time to think about what to do - obviously, if you have to react in a split second, it's understandable to be biased towards inaction because you may need more time to make the right decision, but that's not the point of these problems in the way they are posed).
If you have enough time to think what to do, inaction is a conscious choice and if it does more harm than good, you are guilty of not choosing action.
+1, and "Implied legal (and moral) liabilities" is just one of the issues if you're viewing the Trolley Problem as a real-world, real-consequences situation. (Vs. something from the land of make-believe, which is cool / interesting / empowering to sit around & talk about.)
For starters, real-world railroad (RR) switches are more complex than what you would understand from model RR sets, cartoons, old movies, and philosophy books. They are not binary, are often less than well-maintained, and may required upper-body strength that you don't have to successfully throw. The trolley may be going too fast for the track that you divert it onto, resulting in a derailment that kills everybody you were looking at - plus some more inside the trolley. Plus extra bystanders. Your well-intentioned passerby's understanding of which way the switch is actually pointing may be wrong. RR history has some famous (& deadly) accidents where an experienced RR employee misunderstood the situation, and threw a switch the wrong way.
Real-world, I certainly would not be touching the switch.
That's interesting. I didn't consider any legal liabilities at all, and would easily break the law in order to sacrifice one person in trade for five people. I also didn't consider doing "nothing", not pulling the lever was also an act, and I didn't "see" any options doing nothing.
Fun to see how differently people approach these ones :)
> Implied legal (and moral) liabilities made a difference in my choices.
This is always my problem with the trolley problem. Are we supposed to take second order effects into account?
For example, if I destroy the trolley that is killing 5 people over 30 years with CO2, does another trolley get built to replace it?
Or ‘kill 5 people now or send the trolley into the future 100 years and kill 5 people then’. Is it 100% guaranteed the trolley kills them then? Or can I assume there is a tiny chance they figure out time travel and can make preparations?
Or the ‘stuck on an eternal loop’. Does this mean true eternity and are the people in the trolley immortal? Or just for 70 years?
Ideally, the problem would require two possible actions, and not allow inaction. Two possible avenues for such a formulation are
1) The lever is in an intermediate state, that will cause the trolley to set into effect some global catastrophe, and therefore must be pulled in one of two directions. This may be a rather unconvincing scenario.
2) Have two trollies, each running down their own track, and the operator has a choice which of two levers---only one of which can be reached in time---to pull to detour a trolley to a harmless side track.
I had to put the "legal repercussions" concept aside for this; because otherwise I'd never take an action that would involve someone being killed. No matter what the "if I did nothing" option was, you'd be in for a world of hurt in the courts if you took action that wound up killing someone; even if it was them or 1,000 other people dying. Someone would take you to court.
I take exception to the idea that the legal choice implies it being the moral one. Legality seems to me to be more of the bare minimum expectations and actively avoiding doing the wrong thing (don't kill people) rather than doing the right thing.
Yes. E.g.: I didn't choose to kill the lobsters instead of the cat. I chose not to act. If they'd been switched, the cat would have been greased instead. The statistics are presented after the fact like you had a preference for one over the other, when in most versions of this problem, I was deliberately choosing not to participate. I refuse to be complicit in this evil.
I maintain that the real answer to the trolley problem involves an overwhelming personal struggle that is so traumatizing that it transforms the hypothetical subject into a vigilante -- a hero who devotes themselves to carrying out personal justice against the nefarious evil-doers who keep setting up these trolley problems. The problem is the Joker, ergo the solution is Batman. Dismissed!
I've thought that too, and it's hard to believe you really could convince yourself that your level of responsibility/guilt for the outcome is significantly less in the case you choose not to intervene even when you easily could. If the lever was some distance away (and certainly if other people were just as able to reach it on time) then not running to and pulling it seem to be a less culpable choice.
> But what if you put the Do Nothing choice on a timer?
This is actually done in the game Dr. Trolly's Problem[0]. This technicality is interesting enough such that a streamer creates his own internal rule around it to handle issues of morality[1].
This gets at what is, to me, an extremely important distinction between "killing" and "allowing to die."
Death happens to everyone eventually. No way around that, at least not yet. The most I can do with a trolley switch is possibly affect the timing.
It seems to me that any time I pull the lever to direct the train toward a person (as opposed to toward other trains or lobsters or money), I'm causing the death of whoever is on the other track to happen sooner. I'm killing them.
But if I don't pull the lever, if I don't intervene, I'm allowing death, which was already coming, to come to whoever's on the original track.
As a principle, the distinction between killing and allowing to die really starts to make itself felt when we're talking about the difference between, say, turning off a respirator to allow someone to die, versus actively euthanizing someone by administering medication to stop their heart, even though in this case, both involve an action.
To me, those aren't the same act. There's no moral obligation to try to extend life as long as technologically possible. Death comes and that's OK. But there is an obligation not to cause death, and an obligation not to pursue it as its own end.
The problem is to pick a timeout long enough to allow the player to at least read through the description and understand the situation, but not so long that players gets impatient and pick the “action” because they don’t want to wait (and there are no real stakes on the website). A timeout could distort the results more than the current version.
Would be great if you had to actually pull a lever and hold it, being able to release it at any time. The cartoon figures' faces change depending on whether they're currently in danger or not. Then see how many people change their mind mid pull like with the best friend or the cat/lobster one.
As long as the trolley moves, you can switch back.
While I have mixed opinions on the game (literally mixed, i.e. both good and bad, not a euphemism for bad), it provides more uneasy emotion than any other trolley problem game I played.
The "bad" part is that it is a paid game, working only on Windows, while at the quality of a Flash game from the 2000s from Newgrounds. The good part is that it is at the creativity level of a Flash game from the 2000s from Newgrounds.
I've played some Japanese games where indecisiveness is represented as inaction and is one of the option, first time realising it definitely upped the ante
Ok, this is really interesting, is there some UX where inaction itself stops being the norm?
For example 2 buttons, with a timer to the side, which when it hits 0, rolls a dice and picks a random outcome.
Does the above now make someone want to choose?
If not is there any mechanism that does not forcibly require a decision (ie just stating you must make a choice or place the chooser in a situation where a choice is a functional requirement, such as you're in a locked room and cannot leave until you press a button).
2 mutually exclusive buttons/levers + everybody dies if you do nothing. This way inaction is still an option but strickly worse than each of the actions/buttons.
Another point is that a lot of these scenarios are easy for us to think through, but to be in the actual situation and physically push someone/something and potentially see someone die would make a lot more of us indecisive.
I only find this true when there's someone I know at stake. If the choice is between 1 or 5 random people, I'm going to save the 5 people 100% of the time. If that 1 person happens to be a family member or best friend, that choice is going to be a lot harder and potentially different in the actual situation.
And like why is the trolley about to run over five people? And why can't you personally jump in the way? Who designed the train track? Same person that wants you to scapegoat some fatty?
Level 20 was weird. It was a choice between letting a trolley run as normal ("emits CO2, kills 3 people in accidents over 30 years") or running it into a brick wall and decommissioning it. For some reason more people picked the latter. So, they just dislike public transit? What about the emissions and death rate when everyone switches to cars instead?
Goes to show how easily the context and exact wording of a question can sway people's opinions.
If you included "the trolley actually exists in a realistic world and is part of a public transport network" then sure, I won't decommission it, but trolley problems are weird zero-context questions about trade-offs and I assume they fully describe the consequences of choosing each leg when answering.
It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live, so I think of trolleys as philosophical constructs that don't have a real existence.
They aren't zero-context; all the value that you attach to a human life is context. If you don't grant anything else, you are just choosing one cartoon line-drawing over another. Certainly you are free to look at it this way, but it isn't really a useful point of view in a discussion about the hypothetical consequences.
But it's problematic to assume these problems are in a 0-context vacuum because that would mean your actions don't actually have consequences. If the world ends immediately at the end of the experiment, then your choices in the experiment don't have any meaning, imo.
> It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live
Does anyone really still call them that? A trolley is not a tram, it's a trolley, and harkens back from last century. In the US, some people call them trams, most of us call them trains. Portland does have a special version they like to call a streetcar, though. Functionally a light rail train, but runs in normal lanes of traffic.
> It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live
Yeah, when I clicked on the link I was hoping that finally someone had solved the problem of never having a pound coin to unlock trolleys at the supermarket.
> For some reason more people picked the latter. So, they just dislike public transit?
I mean, it seems like it's the same trolley that have run over a lot of people for the previous 19 levels, why wouldn't I want to decommission such bloodthirsty trolley?
Isn’t the trolly also reducing carbon emissions by killing so many people? With enough of these questions, it will be able to reduce the world’s population to zero, at which point there should be no carbon emissions from humans.
Keep existing public transit system that contributes to X deaths per year from pollution an accidents, or...
...pull the lever and...
Replace it with a public transit system of bloodthirsty trolleys. There is zero pollution! Only 1% of X deaths per year from accidents! Just one catch: all the accidents involve the trolley morphing into a scary mechanical beast and biting a random person's head off.
My logic on that particular question was that someone would probably get a new trolley to replace it (trolleys are insured, right?), no matter what I thought, so I let the trolley go.
Whether it's public or private property, the trolley is really not mine alone to destroy. We need to decide, together what to do with it. Maybe we could stop it, and put it in a museum. Maybe we could change its source of power and make it a green trolley.
My feeling was, if I let the trolley go, it can be destroyed later. It will be harder to undo the decision to destroy it. Who knows, maybe the transportation capabilities it offers can save lives by rushing people to hospital. I just don't believe that pulling the switch and destroying a vehicle is really the only possible opportunity to stop emissions that will get released over 30 whole years. So I didn't pull it.
Basically same for me. I wouldn't actively go out and destroy someone's car to reduce emissions. I'm not going to take an action to destroy something for the sake of making up for the shortcomings of our collective global leadership
I always assume trolley problems are in a vacuum without context. Otherwise for every one of them you have to ask, "what is the background of each person on each track" to make a proper choice.
I assume the information they have told me is the only thing relevant and everything else is equal.
In philosophy Kant would disagree with you with his Categorical Imperative[1]. Rawls also went that way, with the veil of ignorance[2]. The lack of state or context is not only desirable but is the whole foundation on why their theories are rational.
Of course many philosophers disagree and arguably terrible things were done with such mindset[3]. The point I am trying to make is that if you need context then you cannot have a universal rational decision, thus you will be imposing your own morals possibly over others. You might be fine with it, but now you relativized morals.
PS: I highly recommend the Great Lectures on Audible on philosophy. Specifically "Why Evil Exists" and "The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas".
The first one is more on the religious part, but provides great background on moral and ethical thought starting with the Gilgamesh all the way to XX century psychology.
The second is a great over view of western thought, with philosophical counter arguments on thinkers I never heard of, but which i find essential to help form one's thought on how Western society must progress. That book changed my life due to the sheer exposure of captivating ideas even sometimes conflicting. I loved Rawls but consider myself a freedom guy. Now my thought is clearer: How can we find a way to measure that further distribution would harm the most disadvantaged? This is still open but a more practical question, that i can use on evaluating certain concrete policies. Example:
In Portugal the minimum wage has been increased to the point it matches the average salary. A person who did not train to specialize and works in a coffee shop earns similarly to an engineer that spent his first 24 years studying. This is harmful because without differences in rewards, higher difficulty but needed professions will not have enough practitioners. Therefore society as a whole will suffer because it lacks trained specialists to improve the untrained coffee worker's life. "Bam, simple as that". It soothes me in the face of the torrent of events and ideologies pushed upon me all the time.
Yeah, that one made it clear how much context matters. These problems pretend there's no context, but we always look at them with some subconscious context in mind.
In this case, I did pull the lever, because it could be replaced by an electric trolley. But if killing the trolley means more cars and more car accidents and CO2, then of course we should keep the trolley. But if we ignore context and just look at kill 5 people or kill the inanimate object responsible for killing those 5 people, the answer is obvious. (But did I really ignore the context there?)
Others also have important subconscious context. Sacrifice 5 elderly people to save one baby. How elderly are they? Are they so elderly they're just waiting for death, or do they each still have more than 20 years of relatively healthy life left? And thanks to modern health care, that baby now has a very good chance to survive until adulthood, but 100-200 years ago, that chance was only 50%. Maybe not worth sacrificing 5 people for. I think that one was the hardest.
(My friends may be somewhat worried to learn that I had surprisingly little trouble sacrificing my best friend for 5 strangers. But really, I'd prefer to kill whoever keeps tying these people to the track.)
Eh, it doesn’t matter how old the people are, really. They have all already gotten to experience the joy of life. The baby hasn’t, so they have the most to lose.
Easiest one IMO. Spare an evil baby who would gladly sacrifice every single person on this planet for some ridiculous thing they feel entitled to or spare five diligent elders?
Right, you can run it in to a brick wall, ending the CO2 emissions and its usefulness as part of a transit network, and also, of course, depriving its owner of a valuable asset (the trolley)
The results on all the questions implied to me that most people answered more as if it was a quiz than a philosophical question. That is, they'd tried to select the most logical/utilitarian answer based on the wording of the question rather than necessarily thinking about what they personally would do in that situation, or any wider context that may exist.
Only to decide to recommission them in many places, increasing the heat-attack rate for those trying to get to work on time through the 6 year long construction zones.
This is a natural response, but I think it also misses a good opportunity. Philosophy setups like this are always massively unrealistic, but the same is true for almost all physics problems, especially so for first year undergrads. We usually accept the latter as, nonetheless, important pedagogical tools.
If you play along with the isolated premise (without adding in "nuance") of these Trolley Problems, I find they can act like little experiments on our moral intuitions that can illuminate one small, isolated facet of the full complex moral machinery. It's likely a bit like Michelson-Morely, though, where it takes work to digest the experimental results into a useful model of the underlying mechanism.
In that light, it's also interesting to start adding in the nuance you mention, piece by piece, and see how our moral intuitions change, vacillate, and even give simultaneous conflicting answers.
Agreed, they don't say anything about replacement trolley, maybe the new one will kill just slightly less people, maybe they won't replace it at all, way too many factors to consider and I am not really management of transport company to make these decisions.
My dad never grasped thought problems either. Same for riddles. He would always try to find a crack in the description or wording that he could exploit to find a solution you didn't expect, when in reality it just subverted the thought problem, transforming it into a different one that was easier to answer, but not useful to anyone.
If the choice was between 3 deaths over 30 years and something more than that, then the problem would have stated as much. But it didn't. You don't add extraneous details that you thought of to bend the problem to what you want it to be, you make the choice between two sides as they are presented.
I assumed that the trolly company would need to clean up the mess, with lots of construction equipment, and would replace the trolly, incurring the cost of building a new one. I guessed that the CO2 emissions from that result would dwarf the emissions of the extant one, so I left it alone.
Or people walk instead, emitting no carbon and killing zero people...
This is what's fascinating about the Trolley Problem, and philosophy in general, and how it applies outside of philosophy - most people struggle to answer questions based on the evidence available without bringing in some external justification for their answer. People wamt a 'logical' reason to justify their choice. They can't say "I don't know", or "I used the limited data I had" when the choice they'd make goes against the something they belive about the real world (eg 'public transport is good'). They bring in a "but what if <imaginary thing that supports their biases>!" and make a decision based on that instead. They even believe they made the right choice.
This applies to everything from choosing a tech stack to picking who to vote for. It's infuriating once you see it.
I prefer the emissions and death rate of people living in their own mostly self-sustaining little village, within walking distance of everything they need, and not needing to constantly travel around to other people's villages.
I was one of them: Somewhere around 10-15 I got bored and just wanted to see all the scenarios so I was mostly just going "Do nothing.. Do nothing.. Do nothing.." for the rest.
I hope not all the people took this seriously, hence (probably) some of the answers.
I knew I responded with "do nothing" to 100% of the questions, it's not my job to solve the problems of the Universe (and if that good person had been that good in real life then he/she wouldn't have ended up in front of an incoming trolley while the bad person was tied down on the other, "take action", line).
i wouldn't do it to a real world trolley as it would cost a lot to replace something that is better in many respects to the alternatives but i wasn't taking it too seriously and they only gave the trolley negative traits within the question
No one likes public transport, but people like motorized traffic even less. It's a relative choice.
The option should have been between decommissioning the train, saving 3 people and a few tons CO2, and decommissioning all motorized vehicles, saving millions of people every year and having a real impact on CO2 reduction.
"No one likes public transport" - if by that you mean almost anyone would prefer to have forms of transport that don't have all the disadvantages of PT (being crowded, limited routes, scheduling/timetabling issues) then sure, but it's also true almost anyone would prefer to have forms of transport that don't have all the disadvantages of private travel (cost, traffic, parking etc.). I'd still suggest there are plenty who'd choose much better public transport over much better private travel options. (Disclaimer: I'm in the latter camp - I get myself almost everywhere by bicycle where possible).
In Germany, a lot of the time, public transport is awesome. I love public transport here. You can always find something to complain about, and of course there will be exceptions, but compared to other places I've been to, public transport here is available, useful, and clean.
I have a anecdatum of one, that being myself, that I like public transport. Just, the US public transport is god awful and you may be thinking of the US style of public transport, or the lack thereof, and thus come to that conclusion. Which, fair enough. Just not representative of the wider world.
>Oh no! Due to a construction error, a trolley is stuck in an eternal loop. If you pull the lever the trolley will explode, and if you don't the trolley and it's passengers will go in circles for eternity. What do you do?
50% of people pull the lever?!?
I hereby declare that if I'm ever going to be stuck in a trolley for my entire life, I do NOT want the lever pulled. Toss me a smartphone charger and my life wouldn't even be that different, day to day.
On a serious note, it feels worse in every case that the end of your life is in the hand of an external actor.
Best case scenario you can do what you want and deal with whatever urge you have at your pace. Worst case scenario you don't have agency, and just stay stuck suffering instead of dying. Personally I'd take the chance.
My response, to leave them there was based on 1) not taking lives as a result of my decision, and 2) if they're alive, they might eventually find a way to stop the trolley and get off. My choice gives them that chance, in my opinion.
Would it change if you were stuck on the trolley with the type of people that seem to occupy my city's transit now that fare enforcement no longer happens and no one is asked to leave the trolley at the end of the line?
> stuck on the trolley quite literally for eternity
What "literally" means in this case? Am I completely certain that I'll be stuck on the trolley for eternity? I would think that I'm having a psychotic break and delay my decision.
If it were truly the one single opportunity I will ever have to choose to stop existing, it's a tougher choice for sure.
But on the other hand, I might be so curious about what in the heck happened in the world outside - the world that led to this universe where it will be impossible for me to die for eternity, and somehow I know this with absolute 100% certainty - that I still opt out.
I guess I may have misinterpreted this as a choice between forcing the passengers to go around in circles for literally eternity versus dying immediately. Figured that it'd get awful boring after the trillionth or so revolution, especially if there were no other options. At some point, I imagine the passengers would be begging for the sweet release of death and I didn't want to condemn anyone to that fate.
I pulled the lever. It said "eternity" and I couldn't possibly condemn the passengers to eternal life. Maybe it's because I read The Eyes of Heisenberg by Frank Herbert [0]
My reasoning was someone onboard might make a valuable contribution to the world even if they are stuck on the trolley, and the cost to the rest of society for letting it run seemed small.
I reasoned that the trolley is essentially just a scaled down earth, and plenty of people feel perfectly fine living their lives confined to that looping prison.
If you can communicate with the outside. Or maybe humanity exterminated itself besides the people in the magic trolley before you decided to get blown up.
1. Only pull the lever if you are sure. With an action you assume responsibility for the outcome.
2. Don't believe everything what you see or are told. If you doubt do nothing. Imagine you killed many people because you have been lied to and pulled the lever. In this case it is better you did nothing.
3. An action of yours might kill someone. This is a very heavy responsibility you assumed. You need to be very sure and the odds need to be extreme. None of the problems managed to tip the odds. So whenever I was afraid that pulling the lever kills someone, I didn't pull the levers.
4. If my life is at stake, I pull the lever to save myself.
5. If I am extremely sure that no lives are at stake and I am relatively confident that pulling the lever will avoid lots and lots of damage, then I pull the lever. If I am unsure, I do nothing.
6. In all other cases responsibility is too high and I won't do anything. The idea: don't touch the damn thing.
The website told me that I decided differently than the majority of people and finally that I "have solved philosophy"
EDIT: The top comment made a good point. I had to click a button to do nothing. This made me realize that I a had a silent assumption:
7. Time to decide is short. The trolley is already coasting. So I didn't think long and hard because I didn't have time and when I was unsure I would have let the trolley coast past without having pulled the lever.
I noticed I kept switching between several principles. Possibly triggered by the details of the problem. Some of the principles:
1. If you're able to act, you are already responsible for the outcome. Inaction is a choice too. There's no intrinsic moral difference between pulling the lever or not.
2. Acting from a position of ignorance is irresponsible. Better not to act than to take the risk of making the situation worse. (This contradicts #1.)
3. The person who tied these people to the track is the one who really carries the responsibility to this tragedy, not me.
All three of these are valid, and yet contradictory to some extent.
Apparently I solved philosophy at the cost of 59 lives. Not sure it was worth that sacrifice.
Imagine being at a railyard at the time of a crash and being seen throwing a switch in front of a moving train.
There’s no real-world case where that person is not considered responsible.
Not to mention that trains really cannot go over switches at speed. A runaway trolley would probably derail at the switch if it was set on the side track.
Only in the narrow situation where you know all possible outcomes and have a sufficient time to consider them. In the real world, given a limited amount of time and ignorance of many details, inaction is not even remotely the same as action.
Not sure why you state #2 contradicts #1. If you are in a position of ignorance, choosing inaction (unless and until said ignorance can be rectified, anyway) is the correct action.
> 4. If my life is at stake, I pull the lever to save myself.
I find this answer really interesting, because in the entire corpus, this was the most morally unambiguous question of all, and the answer is diametrically opposed to yours.
Would have I the courage to do so in real life, I don't know, and it's probable that I would not. But from a moral perspective it's damn clear: the only people I am unambiguously allowed to kill to save someone else is myself. Killing someone to save someone else is a moral dilemma as it makes me take someone's life, but killing myself isn't.
Interestingly, I had almost the opposite reaction. In the absence of information, I don't know how these people got here or why. Maybe they're being executed as criminals, maybe they are suicide attempts, maybe they are truly heinous people in the hands of a Just God.
But, I do know, if it's me on the track, I don't want to die. It's almost the only truly inarguable choice. With everything else, you think you know best for other people. With that one, you just know you don't want to die.
I also find it interesting. I wonder how extreme the parent comment would go? Would they sacrifice themselves to save, say, a million people?
A solipsistic view might say that those people are part of our own consciousness. If we let them die, we continue to exist. If we sacrifice ourselves, all of us cease to exist since they are just manifestations of our consciousness. As Christopher Hitchens once said, beware of solipsism...
This doesn’t seem morally unambiguous at all, and in fact society reached the opposite conclusion for many centuries in outlawing suicide but allowing some killing of others (e.g., the executioner tasked with killing the person convicted of attempting suicide).
An equally compelling principle might be that the only person I know to be worth saving is myself.
The ultimate trolley problem is one where you pull the lever to save a larger amount of people that have chosen a unsafe area while punishing a smaller amount of people that have chosen a safe area (unless someone pulls the lever)... Ultimately this is politics.
Morality is not math, but, as always, things might be more foggy: lack of free choice and a really skewed ratio (e.g. punish one to save 100 million) may test the limits of morality.
Please be explicit. Do you mean something like insurance: a small amount of people has insurance but someone decided to insure even the people who haven't paid insurance?
In that case it's clear that I won't pull the lever. It's not a question of life and death, and because I am not sure whether pulling the lever helps preventing lots of damage, I won't do anything, especially because perhaps it's just a vague and abstract story you made up.
Yeah one of the issues with the trolley problem is how literally you take the problem. If you take it perfectly literally and say "5 vs 1" (for the pure example) no other context I think you can very easily come to a conclusion that is the opposite of what you'd do in real life, where either due to lack of certainty, lack of perfect knowledge or some iterative game theory interpretation, you would act differently.
The problem is the responsibility. If you aren't willing to take over responsibility, it's better not to do anything. If you already have responsibility then it's a different matter.
re #4:
There are many instances of people sacrificing themselves to save others, Chernobyl workers, figher pilots not ejecting but steering the plane away flightshow visitors etc.
I expect these people to act this way routinely, give hazard pay to their entire profession to compensate for the risk, but likewise consider it my obligation to act likewise when the situation is clear (like in the Trolley Problem).
Isn’t choosing not to interact when you were able to still a form of interaction? I feel like once you’re exposed to the system and what it does depends on what you do (even if “doing” is nothing) you’re involved.
Nice to meet a reasonable man who solved philosophy as well. So many think that they have a right to project their idea to someone else’s reality without a doubt.
I found myself following a heuristic that is basically Asimov's laws:
- whenever possible, do no harm
- do not let harm occur due to inaction
- when given a choice, preserve the most amount of healthy lifespan in aggregate
- higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters)
- deferred consequence is better than immediate (since it opens the door to other later interventions)
It kind of really brings to bear how much of a thematic device the 3 laws are. There's no way to make them congruent with actual, messy, real-world situations. Also why the whole "self-driving car trolly problem" is a non-issue - there will never be a situation where the "AI" has nice neat consequences and a binary choice laid out in front of it. It's always going to be some collection of "preserve life as best as possible" heuristics.
There's a (famous?) quote from a google engineer Andrew Chatham who worked on self driving cars. When asked about the trolley problem, he said "It takes some of the intellectual intrigue out of the problem, but the answer is almost always ‘slam on the brakes’” [0]
> - higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters)
Choosing between preserving the life of one cat vs one lobster seems straightforward enough. But the trolley problem was asking whether one cat was more valuable than five lobsters. According to the stats, many people agreed, but how about one cat vs a million lobsters? Or one cat vs all the lobsters on earth? Most people would think that making lobsters extinct would be very bad (unless they really hate lobsters).
The difficulty is when we can no longer rely on intuition and have to come up with a precise exchange rate of when one being's life is more valuable than another's, which, like you say, is impossible to do in the complicated world we live in and our limited understanding of consciousness and neuroscience. In absence of that, deferring to the first law "whenever possible, do no harm" seems sensible.
I chose to kill the cat, because there are too many of them and they devastate natural ecosystems, killing birds for instance. Lobsters on the other hand are badly depopulated. In both cases undoing a wrong committed by humanity.
This is prominent in the elderly or children tests. Older people have gifts of experience that can be invaluable to the rest of us, especially when broadly shared. Children have great potential but through most of human history have been relatively cheap, easy to replace, and more of a value sink than generator.
Enough context is lacking. That's kind of what makes it all absurd. Take the cat vs. lobsters. Did you know felis catus is responsible for the extinction of some 37 species of birds world wide mostly due to colonization. They're not indigenous predators to the North Americas and enjoy the protections and long life afforded by their proximity to humans while killing for entertainment.
Lobsters on the other hand? Useful in their natural environments, have not become an invasive apex predator, could go on and feed many people too if properly managed and allowed to live their lives.
Yet the majority of people saved the cat thinking it's a "higher life form."
A bit absurd. Also the idea of trolleys without brakes and levers and cats that can't move off the track in the face of on-coming danger.
If we are to judge ethically, one particular cat should not be punished for the sins of the cat species. As far as we know this particular cat didn't do nothing.
Then we need to talk about criminal liability. In the sense that a cat can't stop itself from killing birds. We don't punish toddlers if they kill a bird, because they don't understand that they shouldn't.
Also, the whole idea of "native species" is highly subjective. What is "native species" today maybe it was an "invasive species" yesterday.
Soock was wrong — this is not how rational people behave. Rational people preserve their own life. If they die, the consequences of their choices can no longer matter to them. A cat isn't going to affect my longevity, but a cat is more likely to be a pet than five lobsters, and the emotional distress of the owner will have some greater expected impact on my longevity than the lesser distress of the lobster fisher who lost $60 from their catch.
Apparently I solved philosophy? Im gonna assume that title stays the same for everyone lol.
So, explanation for why so high.
Simply put; I don't believe 5 people really got tied to those rails each time. They are in on it somehow. If so, that is sick and twisted they would tie someone else to the rails purposely. So they deserve the trolley instead.
Now on the chance that they really are all innocent; I still have another problem with it.
How did they not overpower the person tying them up? The single person I can understand. Heck 2 people even. 3? 4? 5!?
no.
Something is up. That trolley is going over the 5.
(edit: Like seriously, these people would all have to have been knocked out with some drugged food or something at a party first... And that's assuming they stay asleep, don't struggle, etc...)
I am personally interrogating my response to this:
"Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people who tied themselves to the track. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, killing 1 person who accidentally tripped onto the track instead. What do you do?"
I save the 5 over the 1. Only 15% agree with me. Why?
This is the first Absurd Trolley Problem (I think) that explained WHY a person was tied to the track.
I think the value of this hypothetical is in establishing the value of cultural relativism versus Kantian ethics.
In that framing, I'm really surprised that, on Level 27, 70% would rather send a trolley into the future to kill 5 people 100 years from now, instead of 5 people now. In almost 11K votes, this seems significant.
My view is that this provides evidence for the Bentham "hedonic calculus". (And I'm sure there are better scholars of Kant and Bentham than I that can argue for or against this.)
Here's a "political" example: Do you want to deal with problems now, or defer? 70% will defer. (I think this checks out, and is truly hedonic.)
So, I think the data, and the utilitarian approach shows: don't expect any of our societal problems (politically agnostic) to be solved any time soon.
>A trolley is heading towards 5 people who tied themselves to the track.
My reading of this was that they were suicidal. If people want to kill themselves, that's not for me to decide if that's right, or wrong. But if i can save one person from misfortune, atleast i was ablee to do that.
>70% would rather send a trolley into the future to kill 5 people 100 years from now, instead of 5 people now.
Would you rather have $5 now, or $5 in the future? Humans are compounding, i'd rather pay you in the future when there is more abundance.
> In that framing, I'm really surprised that, on Level 27, 70% would rather send a trolley into the future to kill 5 people 100 years from now, instead of 5 people now. In almost 11K votes, this seems significant.
RIGHT?!?
I mean, who know's the potential reprecussions that portal might hold for us if we send that trolley through. Sure, 5 people might be saved today; but millions could be saved instead in 100 years when that portal isn't reopening to whoop our ass for killing 5.
100 years is a long time for humanity to look into ways to counteract time travelling trolleys! Sure it _says_ the future trolley will kill 5 people, but if I were in that situation I'm fairly sure I wouldn't be so certain.
In your "political" example: Do you want a guaranteed bad outcome now, or what we expect to be the same bad outcome later?
Wow! Like GP I got only 83. I must have messed up few things here and there!
My rationale was to result to default situations because that's how most of things work. Most of the general events are resulting to average behavior. This makes more sense when you realize world moves without your presence.
So by defaulting, I am ignoring my presence and seeing the result on what happens without me. It was fun decision to make.
In one case, I genuinely saved 5 sentient robots over a human.
There’s also the question of whether you should take responsibility for something that is not your responsibility, unless it es in fact YOU that tied them to the tracks.
The trolley situation is just meant to frame the "you have to choose" type decision without starting back and forth "whatabouts" that avoid looking into the actual question like "I simply wouldn't get into such a situation" or similar.
It's impossible to make some scenario 100% of people will find bulletproof so people just use the trolley scenario to convey the concept the question is about the balance of the decision not how the need for the decision came about.
Can't reply to the sibling directly so in reply to it:
The simplicity in the scenarios and the ambiguity of the scenario in this type of question is desired not a fault. The goal is to set up a stage for exploration of that nuance and "shades of gray" space just as you started exploring it in your comment. The goal is not to set up the question in some way that makes it so one of the answers or reasonings is right or appropriate. As such the stats only talk to which lever was pulled, if the question could have all of the reasonings laid out beforehand in a single page then it wouldn't have been a very good trolley type question.
As for talking about the reasoning freeform that's why it was posted here! For your particular example I chose the old people because of QALY. 5*<last 10 years of life> is fewer QALY than 50 years of life starting at a young age. There are probably a half dozen other reasonings I could think of and many more I can't and that's exactly what the goal of the question is, not about actually finding a most correct answer via rigid framing.
I'm surprised to see the popular answer to Question 3.
> Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, but then your life savings will be destroyed. What do you do?
Over 70% chose to pull the lever and destroy their life savings.
People die of preventable causes in developing countries today. By choosing not to donate your life savings today to help them, you are choosing not to pull the Question 3 lever.
According to Givewell, it takes $4500 to save a life in Guinea. So for every $4500 of your savings that you choose not to donate to Guinea, that's one person you are choosing not to pull the lever to save. Have $45,000 in savings? That's 10 people you're choosing not to pull the lever to save.
I doubt that over 70% of respondents are regularly donating anywhere close to their life savings.
My guess is that it is a question about responsibility. In the trolley problem it is my responsibility to pull the lever or not. If I don't lose my money people will die. In real life it is the responsibility of everybody. Maybe still very egocentric not to donate but at least your conscience can let you sleep at night.
An interesting take on it is that if, for example you have 90.000 in savings you could choose not to pull the lever and use your savings to save 20 people in Guinea, but also this would not be a popular choice I guess.
There's also a matter of proximity. In many of the other problems, people chose to sacrifice more people that they didn't know well over sacrificing someone (best friend, cousin, yourself) that you do know well. The charity problem isn't quite the same as the trolley problem, because it's saving someone outside of your tribe in a faraway land, vs. saving someone who is presumably local to you and about to die in front of your eyes. Also note that people frequently do give up their life savings (in medical bills, or GoFundMe) to save people close to them.
Not to mention a lot of people measure account their wealth in more than just money.
Reminds me of Richard Posner, former Chief Justice of the Seventh Appelate court. His essay on how poor people have no wealth so you need the threat of prison to keep them in line. And how middle class people you only need the threat of impoverishment to keep them in line. So you can just fine them. And wealthy people only need the threat of loss of reputation to keep them in line.
Which is to say Posner is an idiot that knows nothing of poor people. Because all an honest poor person owns is his reputation. Where Musk... when you are that wealthy someones always going to overlook your transgressions.
If five people in my immediate presence experienced such peril then watched me sacrifice my life savings to save their lives, I would expect their testimonies of admiration and relationships backed by a life-debt would end up being an asset of equal or greater value than a tremendous lot of liquid cash. I won't lie; I want to be whole-heartedly adored by them, even more than I want the rich man's $500,000 bribe.
It's a false comparison in my opinion, but I do get your idea.
With your scenario, there are two elements to consider:
1. Bystander Effect, i.e., someone else can help in this situation so I don't have to
2. People likely reason that Guineans still have some agency to try to subsist, so the threat is not as immediate
Compared to the Trolley problem proposed, there is a decision to be made _now_ that only you have control over and there will be an immediate effect in that people's lives will be saved in a situation where they have no option to help themselves or even get by at a bare minimum.
Ignoring the "I'm absolutely broke so who cares?" people (which while a fair point I think isn't quite the spirit of the scenario, which is will you sacrifice items of significance to you for the lives of others), I think that your scenario has too much distance and layers of abstraction as to how the money helps. Fundamentally, if we can't actually understand specifically what the charities do to save a life in Guinea, so it's harder for people to accept that the decision has any significant impact.
So I don't see any real inconsistency between your scenario and the trolley one. People aren't as accepting of the premise that the charitable donation immediately saves a life and count on the help of others whereas pulling the lever immediately has an observable effect.
I think a lot of people would pay money in the situation. You sending money to someone whose suffering you never even saw in Guinea and never hearing whether it helped is indeed a different thing than this trolly problem.
What did you answer for problem 6, where a rich man offers you money to pull the lever and kill someone else? Presumably, a rich man is likely to have more economic productivity than a random person.
Like most people, you probably drive a car from time to time. Collectively, cars kills 30-40k americans every year. By choosing to drive you are a fractional murderer - statistically responsible for some slice of a death. Not many people will decide not to drive on learning this…
I think many people would agree in the abstract that donating some amount of their savings to developing countries is the right thing to do -- many more people than actually do this in practice.
Saying something ought to be done is not the same as doing it, basically.
And of course, while donating to poor countries is fundamentally similar to Question 3, in practice it's obviously not the same; people do seem have a 'moral discount' for things that occur farther away (geographically, temporally, or otherwise).
Silly random thoughts that went through my head at this question
1) Many people's life savings is 0. A bargain!
2) If _I_ were one of the five people, I'd try and make it up to the lever puller. Lever-guy might even come out ahead.
3) If I pull this lever right away in question 3, if there are later questions about giving up my life savings, they'll be free. This might be the value lever pull! I might be kicking myself later for missing this deal.
Other people have worked a long, long time for their life savings, and it's very likely that, as appreciative as these people might be, it's just as likely that this person gets a sincere thank you but no financial compensation. In the right situation, I could see it leading to severe depression as the puller feels they gave up everything and nobody cares.
I took the Giving What We Can Pledge[1] and donate 10% of my income to effective charities for this reason. It barely makes a difference to me and it saves more than 1 life a year. They also have a really cool How Rich Am I calculator[2] to put it in context.
I still chose to pull the lever though because I don't have $18000 in my life savings yet.
By that logic, somebody defrauding a charity out of $4500 should be punished roughly the same as a homicide.
(Not saying that's necessarily wrong, just to give some perspective on the "fun" corners you get into when putting a monetary value on human life, and it's so much different from the value you get where you live).
Only if they defrauded one of the most effective charities (as opposed to $4500 raised to buy some new musical instruments for a school) and only if punishments should be determined by total harm caused.
Harm caused is usually one of several factors we use to determine punishments, which is why attempted murder is punishable even if the perpetrator failed to cause any harm.
(Not saying our current system for punishment is necessarily right.)
It depends on how much people's life saving is..
It can be even negative...
not everyone is in your situation.
There are pragmatic reasons as well. For me, people spend a lot to be happy like buying luxurious stuff or go to the movies/good restaurant. Saving people makes me happy. I am willing to pay for my own happiness.
I answered with the majority because I followed John Rawls' condition of the "veil of ignorance", which means that the only information I have to start with is:
1) an average person's life savings is less than 1 million
Well, once the event hits the news and it comes out that you sacrificed your saving to save some people, then it should be easy to set up a gofundme and recoup the costs, at least if you're like me and your life savings are paltry. You may even profit!
I picked that option. Based on the knowledge that it would take me around 6 years to regain my life savings at the moment and it would take me over 6 years to get over the decision of picking the savings.
If I very publicly save 5 people from a violent death I can easily play that off into much more than my life saving are worth with a couple of book deals and maybe a movie
Readit News
Part of the Trolley Problem is that the choice is between an action or inaction. But these problems, or the first one at least, have two buttons.
So you're making a choice. Yeah, some might argue it's a technicality. But what if you put the Do Nothing choice on a timer?
What if you made it an asynchronous "Problem of the Day". No action by the end of the day triggers Do Nothing, etc.
Lots of cool, interesting design choices. There's an unstated subtle ultimatum hidde. in these problems, but still cool.
Sorry, geeking out.
It's a binary decision with two outcomes, in my personal view it is irrelevant which of the outcomes is caused by physical action and which by inaction (at least, supposing that you have enough time to think about what to do - obviously, if you have to react in a split second, it's understandable to be biased towards inaction because you may need more time to make the right decision, but that's not the point of these problems in the way they are posed).
If you have enough time to think what to do, inaction is a conscious choice and if it does more harm than good, you are guilty of not choosing action.
For starters, real-world railroad (RR) switches are more complex than what you would understand from model RR sets, cartoons, old movies, and philosophy books. They are not binary, are often less than well-maintained, and may required upper-body strength that you don't have to successfully throw. The trolley may be going too fast for the track that you divert it onto, resulting in a derailment that kills everybody you were looking at - plus some more inside the trolley. Plus extra bystanders. Your well-intentioned passerby's understanding of which way the switch is actually pointing may be wrong. RR history has some famous (& deadly) accidents where an experienced RR employee misunderstood the situation, and threw a switch the wrong way.
Real-world, I certainly would not be touching the switch.
Fun to see how differently people approach these ones :)
This is always my problem with the trolley problem. Are we supposed to take second order effects into account?
For example, if I destroy the trolley that is killing 5 people over 30 years with CO2, does another trolley get built to replace it?
Or ‘kill 5 people now or send the trolley into the future 100 years and kill 5 people then’. Is it 100% guaranteed the trolley kills them then? Or can I assume there is a tiny chance they figure out time travel and can make preparations?
Or the ‘stuck on an eternal loop’. Does this mean true eternity and are the people in the trolley immortal? Or just for 70 years?
1) The lever is in an intermediate state, that will cause the trolley to set into effect some global catastrophe, and therefore must be pulled in one of two directions. This may be a rather unconvincing scenario.
2) Have two trollies, each running down their own track, and the operator has a choice which of two levers---only one of which can be reached in time---to pull to detour a trolley to a harmless side track.
Scored nearly 1k kills.
Because #FightThePremise
I maintain that the real answer to the trolley problem involves an overwhelming personal struggle that is so traumatizing that it transforms the hypothetical subject into a vigilante -- a hero who devotes themselves to carrying out personal justice against the nefarious evil-doers who keep setting up these trolley problems. The problem is the Joker, ergo the solution is Batman. Dismissed!
This is actually done in the game Dr. Trolly's Problem[0]. This technicality is interesting enough such that a streamer creates his own internal rule around it to handle issues of morality[1].
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/773830/Dr_Trolleys_Proble...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dabWpa-FwUo
For cases where you did nothing, you did not kill anyone. The trolley did.
Death happens to everyone eventually. No way around that, at least not yet. The most I can do with a trolley switch is possibly affect the timing.
It seems to me that any time I pull the lever to direct the train toward a person (as opposed to toward other trains or lobsters or money), I'm causing the death of whoever is on the other track to happen sooner. I'm killing them.
But if I don't pull the lever, if I don't intervene, I'm allowing death, which was already coming, to come to whoever's on the original track.
As a principle, the distinction between killing and allowing to die really starts to make itself felt when we're talking about the difference between, say, turning off a respirator to allow someone to die, versus actively euthanizing someone by administering medication to stop their heart, even though in this case, both involve an action.
To me, those aren't the same act. There's no moral obligation to try to extend life as long as technologically possible. Death comes and that's OK. But there is an obligation not to cause death, and an obligation not to pursue it as its own end.
Some people will accept the moral responsibility, while others will say their inaction absolves them of legal responsibility.
As long as the trolley moves, you can switch back.
While I have mixed opinions on the game (literally mixed, i.e. both good and bad, not a euphemism for bad), it provides more uneasy emotion than any other trolley problem game I played.
The "bad" part is that it is a paid game, working only on Windows, while at the quality of a Flash game from the 2000s from Newgrounds. The good part is that it is at the creativity level of a Flash game from the 2000s from Newgrounds.
For example 2 buttons, with a timer to the side, which when it hits 0, rolls a dice and picks a random outcome.
Does the above now make someone want to choose?
If not is there any mechanism that does not forcibly require a decision (ie just stating you must make a choice or place the chooser in a situation where a choice is a functional requirement, such as you're in a locked room and cannot leave until you press a button).
Dead Comment
Goes to show how easily the context and exact wording of a question can sway people's opinions.
It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live, so I think of trolleys as philosophical constructs that don't have a real existence.
Edit: On the other side, if you really decide to not take more context, you just destroyed the only existing trolley of the universe.
Does anyone really still call them that? A trolley is not a tram, it's a trolley, and harkens back from last century. In the US, some people call them trams, most of us call them trains. Portland does have a special version they like to call a streetcar, though. Functionally a light rail train, but runs in normal lanes of traffic.
Yeah, when I clicked on the link I was hoping that finally someone had solved the problem of never having a pound coin to unlock trolleys at the supermarket.
I mean, it seems like it's the same trolley that have run over a lot of people for the previous 19 levels, why wouldn't I want to decommission such bloodthirsty trolley?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Keep existing public transit system that contributes to X deaths per year from pollution an accidents, or...
...pull the lever and...
Replace it with a public transit system of bloodthirsty trolleys. There is zero pollution! Only 1% of X deaths per year from accidents! Just one catch: all the accidents involve the trolley morphing into a scary mechanical beast and biting a random person's head off.
However I did not take into account the CO2 emissions and possible industrial accidents at the trolly factory or trolly materials mines.
My feeling was, if I let the trolley go, it can be destroyed later. It will be harder to undo the decision to destroy it. Who knows, maybe the transportation capabilities it offers can save lives by rushing people to hospital. I just don't believe that pulling the switch and destroying a vehicle is really the only possible opportunity to stop emissions that will get released over 30 whole years. So I didn't pull it.
I assume the information they have told me is the only thing relevant and everything else is equal.
Of course many philosophers disagree and arguably terrible things were done with such mindset[3]. The point I am trying to make is that if you need context then you cannot have a universal rational decision, thus you will be imposing your own morals possibly over others. You might be fine with it, but now you relativized morals.
PS: I highly recommend the Great Lectures on Audible on philosophy. Specifically "Why Evil Exists" and "The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas".
The first one is more on the religious part, but provides great background on moral and ethical thought starting with the Gilgamesh all the way to XX century psychology.
The second is a great over view of western thought, with philosophical counter arguments on thinkers I never heard of, but which i find essential to help form one's thought on how Western society must progress. That book changed my life due to the sheer exposure of captivating ideas even sometimes conflicting. I loved Rawls but consider myself a freedom guy. Now my thought is clearer: How can we find a way to measure that further distribution would harm the most disadvantaged? This is still open but a more practical question, that i can use on evaluating certain concrete policies. Example:
In Portugal the minimum wage has been increased to the point it matches the average salary. A person who did not train to specialize and works in a coffee shop earns similarly to an engineer that spent his first 24 years studying. This is harmful because without differences in rewards, higher difficulty but needed professions will not have enough practitioners. Therefore society as a whole will suffer because it lacks trained specialists to improve the untrained coffee worker's life. "Bam, simple as that". It soothes me in the face of the torrent of events and ideologies pushed upon me all the time.
[1] "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Eichmann
In this case, I did pull the lever, because it could be replaced by an electric trolley. But if killing the trolley means more cars and more car accidents and CO2, then of course we should keep the trolley. But if we ignore context and just look at kill 5 people or kill the inanimate object responsible for killing those 5 people, the answer is obvious. (But did I really ignore the context there?)
Others also have important subconscious context. Sacrifice 5 elderly people to save one baby. How elderly are they? Are they so elderly they're just waiting for death, or do they each still have more than 20 years of relatively healthy life left? And thanks to modern health care, that baby now has a very good chance to survive until adulthood, but 100-200 years ago, that chance was only 50%. Maybe not worth sacrificing 5 people for. I think that one was the hardest.
(My friends may be somewhat worried to learn that I had surprisingly little trouble sacrificing my best friend for 5 strangers. But really, I'd prefer to kill whoever keeps tying these people to the track.)
If you play along with the isolated premise (without adding in "nuance") of these Trolley Problems, I find they can act like little experiments on our moral intuitions that can illuminate one small, isolated facet of the full complex moral machinery. It's likely a bit like Michelson-Morely, though, where it takes work to digest the experimental results into a useful model of the underlying mechanism.
In that light, it's also interesting to start adding in the nuance you mention, piece by piece, and see how our moral intuitions change, vacillate, and even give simultaneous conflicting answers.
If the choice was between 3 deaths over 30 years and something more than that, then the problem would have stated as much. But it didn't. You don't add extraneous details that you thought of to bend the problem to what you want it to be, you make the choice between two sides as they are presented.
This is what's fascinating about the Trolley Problem, and philosophy in general, and how it applies outside of philosophy - most people struggle to answer questions based on the evidence available without bringing in some external justification for their answer. People wamt a 'logical' reason to justify their choice. They can't say "I don't know", or "I used the limited data I had" when the choice they'd make goes against the something they belive about the real world (eg 'public transport is good'). They bring in a "but what if <imaginary thing that supports their biases>!" and make a decision based on that instead. They even believe they made the right choice.
This applies to everything from choosing a tech stack to picking who to vote for. It's infuriating once you see it.
I knew I responded with "do nothing" to 100% of the questions, it's not my job to solve the problems of the Universe (and if that good person had been that good in real life then he/she wouldn't have ended up in front of an incoming trolley while the bad person was tied down on the other, "take action", line).
The option should have been between decommissioning the train, saving 3 people and a few tons CO2, and decommissioning all motorized vehicles, saving millions of people every year and having a real impact on CO2 reduction.
I have a anecdatum of one, that being myself, that I like public transport. Just, the US public transport is god awful and you may be thinking of the US style of public transport, or the lack thereof, and thus come to that conclusion. Which, fair enough. Just not representative of the wider world.
A quarter probably did that, considering both options.
Dead Comment
https://neal.fun/size-of-space/
https://neal.fun/ten-years-ago/
https://neal.fun/lets-settle-this/
https://neal.fun/ambient-chaos/
https://neal.fun/spend/
https://neal.fun/who-was-alive/
https://neal.fun/life-checklist/
https://neal.fun/dark-patterns/
50% of people pull the lever?!?
I hereby declare that if I'm ever going to be stuck in a trolley for my entire life, I do NOT want the lever pulled. Toss me a smartphone charger and my life wouldn't even be that different, day to day.
* Study the science behind the infinitely reliable trolley. If the science is tractorable then humanity wins.
* How are the people prevented from leaving the trolley? New science?
* Is the trolley just a thought experiment? Then we can think about other solutions.
* Is the trolley somewhere inaccessible? How did the people get there? Science.
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https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305
Best case scenario you can do what you want and deal with whatever urge you have at your pace. Worst case scenario you don't have agency, and just stay stuck suffering instead of dying. Personally I'd take the chance.
What "literally" means in this case? Am I completely certain that I'll be stuck on the trolley for eternity? I would think that I'm having a psychotic break and delay my decision.
But on the other hand, I might be so curious about what in the heck happened in the world outside - the world that led to this universe where it will be impossible for me to die for eternity, and somehow I know this with absolute 100% certainty - that I still opt out.
50 more years to live? Okay. 50+? Kill me immediately!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_Heisenberg
I interpret that as the passengers would live their natural life-span and then their rotting bodies would go in circles for eternity.
Replace the trolley with planet Earth and it's no different from regular life. (approximating eternity with life of the Sun).
Amazing that 50% of people are nihilistic enough to just blow it up.
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I imagine I’d rather go insane from eternity than die for oblivion.
I’m also fairly certain I’ll change that opinion as time goes on, but that doesn’t affect my current decisionmaking.
This isn't a democracy and I hold all of the levers of power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqBtZNBL60
1. Only pull the lever if you are sure. With an action you assume responsibility for the outcome.
2. Don't believe everything what you see or are told. If you doubt do nothing. Imagine you killed many people because you have been lied to and pulled the lever. In this case it is better you did nothing.
3. An action of yours might kill someone. This is a very heavy responsibility you assumed. You need to be very sure and the odds need to be extreme. None of the problems managed to tip the odds. So whenever I was afraid that pulling the lever kills someone, I didn't pull the levers.
4. If my life is at stake, I pull the lever to save myself.
5. If I am extremely sure that no lives are at stake and I am relatively confident that pulling the lever will avoid lots and lots of damage, then I pull the lever. If I am unsure, I do nothing.
6. In all other cases responsibility is too high and I won't do anything. The idea: don't touch the damn thing.
The website told me that I decided differently than the majority of people and finally that I "have solved philosophy"
EDIT: The top comment made a good point. I had to click a button to do nothing. This made me realize that I a had a silent assumption:
7. Time to decide is short. The trolley is already coasting. So I didn't think long and hard because I didn't have time and when I was unsure I would have let the trolley coast past without having pulled the lever.
1. If you're able to act, you are already responsible for the outcome. Inaction is a choice too. There's no intrinsic moral difference between pulling the lever or not.
2. Acting from a position of ignorance is irresponsible. Better not to act than to take the risk of making the situation worse. (This contradicts #1.)
3. The person who tied these people to the track is the one who really carries the responsibility to this tragedy, not me.
All three of these are valid, and yet contradictory to some extent.
Apparently I solved philosophy at the cost of 59 lives. Not sure it was worth that sacrifice.
There’s no real-world case where that person is not considered responsible.
Not to mention that trains really cannot go over switches at speed. A runaway trolley would probably derail at the switch if it was set on the side track.
Only in the narrow situation where you know all possible outcomes and have a sufficient time to consider them. In the real world, given a limited amount of time and ignorance of many details, inaction is not even remotely the same as action.
I find this answer really interesting, because in the entire corpus, this was the most morally unambiguous question of all, and the answer is diametrically opposed to yours.
Would have I the courage to do so in real life, I don't know, and it's probable that I would not. But from a moral perspective it's damn clear: the only people I am unambiguously allowed to kill to save someone else is myself. Killing someone to save someone else is a moral dilemma as it makes me take someone's life, but killing myself isn't.
But, I do know, if it's me on the track, I don't want to die. It's almost the only truly inarguable choice. With everything else, you think you know best for other people. With that one, you just know you don't want to die.
A solipsistic view might say that those people are part of our own consciousness. If we let them die, we continue to exist. If we sacrifice ourselves, all of us cease to exist since they are just manifestations of our consciousness. As Christopher Hitchens once said, beware of solipsism...
An equally compelling principle might be that the only person I know to be worth saving is myself.
Morality is not math, but, as always, things might be more foggy: lack of free choice and a really skewed ratio (e.g. punish one to save 100 million) may test the limits of morality.
In that case it's clear that I won't pull the lever. It's not a question of life and death, and because I am not sure whether pulling the lever helps preventing lots of damage, I won't do anything, especially because perhaps it's just a vague and abstract story you made up.
Letting people die just because I don't feel super comfortable assuming the responsibility sounds pretty close to the definition of evil to me.
I guess it displays that to everyone, I chose to kill someone to get my amazon package sooner, I don't think that's solving philosophy
I expect these people to act this way routinely, give hazard pay to their entire profession to compensate for the risk, but likewise consider it my obligation to act likewise when the situation is clear (like in the Trolley Problem).
(if you don't click on the link though, you're fine)
But exactly that's the case in point!
That damn lever is way too dangerous to touch. Only touch if you are extremely confident.
- whenever possible, do no harm
- do not let harm occur due to inaction
- when given a choice, preserve the most amount of healthy lifespan in aggregate
- higher lifeforms are more valuable than lower ones (cat vs lobsters)
- deferred consequence is better than immediate (since it opens the door to other later interventions)
It kind of really brings to bear how much of a thematic device the 3 laws are. There's no way to make them congruent with actual, messy, real-world situations. Also why the whole "self-driving car trolly problem" is a non-issue - there will never be a situation where the "AI" has nice neat consequences and a binary choice laid out in front of it. It's always going to be some collection of "preserve life as best as possible" heuristics.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/22/self-driv...
Choosing between preserving the life of one cat vs one lobster seems straightforward enough. But the trolley problem was asking whether one cat was more valuable than five lobsters. According to the stats, many people agreed, but how about one cat vs a million lobsters? Or one cat vs all the lobsters on earth? Most people would think that making lobsters extinct would be very bad (unless they really hate lobsters).
The difficulty is when we can no longer rely on intuition and have to come up with a precise exchange rate of when one being's life is more valuable than another's, which, like you say, is impossible to do in the complicated world we live in and our limited understanding of consciousness and neuroscience. In absence of that, deferring to the first law "whenever possible, do no harm" seems sensible.
> - do not let harm occur due to inaction
Trolley problems, of course, are designed to bring these into direct conflict.
Lobsters on the other hand? Useful in their natural environments, have not become an invasive apex predator, could go on and feed many people too if properly managed and allowed to live their lives.
Yet the majority of people saved the cat thinking it's a "higher life form."
A bit absurd. Also the idea of trolleys without brakes and levers and cats that can't move off the track in the face of on-coming danger.
Then we need to talk about criminal liability. In the sense that a cat can't stop itself from killing birds. We don't punish toddlers if they kill a bird, because they don't understand that they shouldn't.
Also, the whole idea of "native species" is highly subjective. What is "native species" today maybe it was an "invasive species" yesterday.
Untie the cat and it'll, likely, be a-ok.
Yep, I sent that trolley into the future just in case some time in the future they invent a cure for getting run over by trolleys
Apparently I solved philosophy? Im gonna assume that title stays the same for everyone lol.
So, explanation for why so high.
Simply put; I don't believe 5 people really got tied to those rails each time. They are in on it somehow. If so, that is sick and twisted they would tie someone else to the rails purposely. So they deserve the trolley instead.
Now on the chance that they really are all innocent; I still have another problem with it.
How did they not overpower the person tying them up? The single person I can understand. Heck 2 people even. 3? 4? 5!?
no.
Something is up. That trolley is going over the 5.
(edit: Like seriously, these people would all have to have been knocked out with some drugged food or something at a party first... And that's assuming they stay asleep, don't struggle, etc...)
I am personally interrogating my response to this:
"Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people who tied themselves to the track. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, killing 1 person who accidentally tripped onto the track instead. What do you do?"
I save the 5 over the 1. Only 15% agree with me. Why?
This is the first Absurd Trolley Problem (I think) that explained WHY a person was tied to the track.
I think the value of this hypothetical is in establishing the value of cultural relativism versus Kantian ethics.
In that framing, I'm really surprised that, on Level 27, 70% would rather send a trolley into the future to kill 5 people 100 years from now, instead of 5 people now. In almost 11K votes, this seems significant.
My view is that this provides evidence for the Bentham "hedonic calculus". (And I'm sure there are better scholars of Kant and Bentham than I that can argue for or against this.)
Here's a "political" example: Do you want to deal with problems now, or defer? 70% will defer. (I think this checks out, and is truly hedonic.)
So, I think the data, and the utilitarian approach shows: don't expect any of our societal problems (politically agnostic) to be solved any time soon.
My reading of this was that they were suicidal. If people want to kill themselves, that's not for me to decide if that's right, or wrong. But if i can save one person from misfortune, atleast i was ablee to do that.
>70% would rather send a trolley into the future to kill 5 people 100 years from now, instead of 5 people now.
Would you rather have $5 now, or $5 in the future? Humans are compounding, i'd rather pay you in the future when there is more abundance.
RIGHT?!?
I mean, who know's the potential reprecussions that portal might hold for us if we send that trolley through. Sure, 5 people might be saved today; but millions could be saved instead in 100 years when that portal isn't reopening to whoop our ass for killing 5.
I saved the one because the 5 presumably want to die anyway.
If there is a hell, I guess I'll be going there.
My rationale was to result to default situations because that's how most of things work. Most of the general events are resulting to average behavior. This makes more sense when you realize world moves without your presence.
So by defaulting, I am ignoring my presence and seeing the result on what happens without me. It was fun decision to make.
In one case, I genuinely saved 5 sentient robots over a human.
I sometimes also assigned blame to those tied up, or at least agency; they could have prevented this situation, somehow, probably.
The trolley situation is just meant to frame the "you have to choose" type decision without starting back and forth "whatabouts" that avoid looking into the actual question like "I simply wouldn't get into such a situation" or similar.
It's impossible to make some scenario 100% of people will find bulletproof so people just use the trolley scenario to convey the concept the question is about the balance of the decision not how the need for the decision came about.
The simplicity in the scenarios and the ambiguity of the scenario in this type of question is desired not a fault. The goal is to set up a stage for exploration of that nuance and "shades of gray" space just as you started exploring it in your comment. The goal is not to set up the question in some way that makes it so one of the answers or reasonings is right or appropriate. As such the stats only talk to which lever was pulled, if the question could have all of the reasonings laid out beforehand in a single page then it wouldn't have been a very good trolley type question.
As for talking about the reasoning freeform that's why it was posted here! For your particular example I chose the old people because of QALY. 5*<last 10 years of life> is fewer QALY than 50 years of life starting at a young age. There are probably a half dozen other reasonings I could think of and many more I can't and that's exactly what the goal of the question is, not about actually finding a most correct answer via rigid framing.
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> Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, but then your life savings will be destroyed. What do you do?
Over 70% chose to pull the lever and destroy their life savings.
People die of preventable causes in developing countries today. By choosing not to donate your life savings today to help them, you are choosing not to pull the Question 3 lever.
According to Givewell, it takes $4500 to save a life in Guinea. So for every $4500 of your savings that you choose not to donate to Guinea, that's one person you are choosing not to pull the lever to save. Have $45,000 in savings? That's 10 people you're choosing not to pull the lever to save.
I doubt that over 70% of respondents are regularly donating anywhere close to their life savings.
An interesting take on it is that if, for example you have 90.000 in savings you could choose not to pull the lever and use your savings to save 20 people in Guinea, but also this would not be a popular choice I guess.
Reminds me of Richard Posner, former Chief Justice of the Seventh Appelate court. His essay on how poor people have no wealth so you need the threat of prison to keep them in line. And how middle class people you only need the threat of impoverishment to keep them in line. So you can just fine them. And wealthy people only need the threat of loss of reputation to keep them in line.
Which is to say Posner is an idiot that knows nothing of poor people. Because all an honest poor person owns is his reputation. Where Musk... when you are that wealthy someones always going to overlook your transgressions.
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And while yes, some good charities do exist apparently; I can't name any.
Edit: and no one better try to say 'WE' is a good charity.
With your scenario, there are two elements to consider:
1. Bystander Effect, i.e., someone else can help in this situation so I don't have to
2. People likely reason that Guineans still have some agency to try to subsist, so the threat is not as immediate
Compared to the Trolley problem proposed, there is a decision to be made _now_ that only you have control over and there will be an immediate effect in that people's lives will be saved in a situation where they have no option to help themselves or even get by at a bare minimum.
Ignoring the "I'm absolutely broke so who cares?" people (which while a fair point I think isn't quite the spirit of the scenario, which is will you sacrifice items of significance to you for the lives of others), I think that your scenario has too much distance and layers of abstraction as to how the money helps. Fundamentally, if we can't actually understand specifically what the charities do to save a life in Guinea, so it's harder for people to accept that the decision has any significant impact.
So I don't see any real inconsistency between your scenario and the trolley one. People aren't as accepting of the premise that the charitable donation immediately saves a life and count on the help of others whereas pulling the lever immediately has an observable effect.
A rather hilarious example is asking if they are against bestiality. Pretty much everyone is.
Asking why in more liberal circles gets you an answer along the lines of "it hurts the animals" a lot of the time.
Then asking if it hurts animals more than eating them usually results in a ban.
The cost of the lives of 5 first-world people in terms of economic productivity is like an order of magnitude greater than my savings.
But that's fine because and and I bad drivers are not.
Saying something ought to be done is not the same as doing it, basically.
And of course, while donating to poor countries is fundamentally similar to Question 3, in practice it's obviously not the same; people do seem have a 'moral discount' for things that occur farther away (geographically, temporally, or otherwise).
1) Many people's life savings is 0. A bargain!
2) If _I_ were one of the five people, I'd try and make it up to the lever puller. Lever-guy might even come out ahead.
3) If I pull this lever right away in question 3, if there are later questions about giving up my life savings, they'll be free. This might be the value lever pull! I might be kicking myself later for missing this deal.
I still think you need to pull the lever.
I still chose to pull the lever though because I don't have $18000 in my life savings yet.
[1]: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge
[2]: https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i
(Not saying that's necessarily wrong, just to give some perspective on the "fun" corners you get into when putting a monetary value on human life, and it's so much different from the value you get where you live).
Harm caused is usually one of several factors we use to determine punishments, which is why attempted murder is punishable even if the perpetrator failed to cause any harm.
(Not saying our current system for punishment is necessarily right.)
There are pragmatic reasons as well. For me, people spend a lot to be happy like buying luxurious stuff or go to the movies/good restaurant. Saving people makes me happy. I am willing to pay for my own happiness.
1) an average person's life savings is less than 1 million
2) an average person's life is worth ~10 million
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out of sight out of mind.