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You're really over thinking this. The classical problem is more or less designed to be a utilitarian thought experiment. Are you willing to be actively unethical for a greater ethical action? Are you willing to be passively unethical to allow a greater ethical action to happen? Is it possible to be passively unethical?

There is enough philosophical meat in the thought experiment without going "out of bounds" and trying to undermine the question. Your comment would make for a good modern essay, but it frankly dismisses the spirit of the problem.

Good faith arguments in philosophical debates require both parties to have a common set of premises. If you don't both work from those premises, you need to go "down" to your next set of shared premises and start arguing "up" from there. If you don't do this, you're just talking past each other and you end up in a Wittgenstein-ian limbo where each of you is arguing coherently but disparately and no one is going to take the other's point.

Given this, it's not a good faith argument against the trolley problem to say that an action doesn't make sense due to premises that are not typically included in the classical problem.

Furthermore, the only reason we have thought experiments like this is because it is difficult to reason in the abstract without formal training. Using concrete allegories helps to give participants mental "skin in the game" to illustrate whether or not their opinions are coherent.

Allow me to restate this problem: "Given a simulation where you have the choice between certainly observing five people die by taking no action, or certainly saving five people by taking an action that certainly kills one person, and all persons are equally familiar to you, what do you do?"

Now, a valid response is to disagree with my problem as stated. That's fine, but then we need to argue something else because we're no longer talking about the trolley problem as it is classically defined and intended.

> Is it possible to be passively unethical?

If that's the question you want to ask, then the problem is badly under-specified.

> "out of bounds"

Including the prior probability that the situation can even happen is important information; if a specific value for this probability was desired, the problem should have included it.

> dismisses the spirit of the problem

Quite a few people in this thread seem are dismissing the Bayesian solution even though it does resolve an ethical dilemma.

Is it better to take an unethical action to prevent a greater tragedy? If the situation is very unusual and easily-confused human senses are a more probable explanation, then the ethical response is to recognize your own limitations.

Leaving out these details results in a model that won't actually match anything in the real world.

Leaving out these details results in a model that won't actually match anything in the real world.

Yes. It's not supposed to.

Correct - because it's a thought "experiment", not a physics experiment. There is an attempt at logical and rational rigor, but there is a reason philosophy is not a hard science.

It doesn't attempt to model the world accurately, it attempts to make concrete understanding from abstract principles. Unlike the sciences, the experiments are not designed to conclusive, they're designed to be instructive.

One could take issue with philosophy as a discipline for working this way, but "them's the rules."

> Are you willing to be actively unethical

But the details matter with respect to the meaning of the word "active". Pushing someone off a bridge and watching them die is very different from flipping a switch from the "five people die" to the "one person dies" position.

You're taking a decision which results in the death of those people. The trolley problem is about showing how people's attitudes change when they become responsible, instead of being bystanders.

That's what it's supposed to be about, but the details matter. You can get different results by tweaking the story in different ways. For example:

You are seated at a console. In front of you is a button. If you don't push the button, five randomly selected people will die. If you do push the button, only one randomly selected person will die. That is all you know. Do you push the button?

Or if that still feels like a moral dilemma to you, try this:

You are seated at a console. In front of you is a button. If you push the button you will save the lives of four randomly selected people who would otherwise die. Do you push the button?

It doesn't map the real world, and it's not supposed to. It's a model, and like all models, it's designed to make sense of the world by reducing its complexity.

But the problem is that it is needlessly complicated, and the complications are what make the decisionmaking difficult. If the question was "You must flip a switch to the left or to the right. If you flip it to the right, one person will die. If you flip it to the left, five people will die. Again, you must flip the switch. Which way do you flip it?" everybody would give the same answer.

Instead, of "you must flip the switch" you get a speeding train. Instead of the switch you get fat people and bridges. Are the five people children and does the fat person have heart trouble? Is the fat person fat because he's greedy, or does he have a glandular problem. Will anyone see me pushing the fat man? And again, what guarantee do I have that a fat man's body will stop a train? How old is the fat man? How young are the kids? Are there suspicious looking people around who, if the train fails to run over the five people, will just back the train up and try again?

I’m not sure you can just assume that five-versus-one is the same dilemma as four-versus-none, since that might not be how people value the lives of others.

I chose my wording very carefully: "you will save the lives of four randomly selected people who would otherwise die." This is the utilitarian bottom line.

But you're right, four versus none is not the same as five versus one. And five versus one in the abstract is not the same as these five versus that one. The details matter. That is the point I was trying to make.

The trolley problem is hard to think about, because like the prisoner's dilemma, it deliberately ignores the implied context. Both problems should really go something like this:

"You are suddenly transported into a magical portal. You arrive in the home of a powerful magical creature. It explains to you what has happened, and that you are not crazy. It gives you as long as you like to investigate this and convince yourself that it's right. It tells you that it has a one time chance to transport you to a parallel universe for a few minutes. It has never happened before, and it will never happen again, and you will never be able to prove it happened. Nobody in the parallel universe except those directly involved will believe it either. You are then transported to the parallel universe, and the trolley problem/prisoners dilemma happens. Then you are immediately returned home and the magical creature vanishes, never to interact with our universe again."

Under those conditions, I would take the utilitarian solution. In the real word we have unintended consequences, and utilitarian solutions are uncomputable. Deontology is at least fair and predictable.

Under those conditions, everyone would pick the utilitarian solution. There lies the problem IMO: psychologists carrying out experiments about "morality" when they have absolutely no theory of morality. Lacking this, they're left with "two of the same bad thing is worse than one of that exact same bad thing," and limit themselves to problems of relative morality, ignoring the fact that you can't do the same bad thing twice.

Ignoring is a mild way to put it, actually, because all of their experiments involve doing multiple additions and subtractions and substitutions. For them, morality is definitely a real number.

I think the complexity of these hypotheticals is entirely a result of a need for varied responses. The real answer is that there's not enough information given to make a determination. In the case of your hypothetical, there's clearly enough information (because one of the premises is that you have all possible information.) The question for the subject becomes easier, and the tough question becomes "Why is this horrible magical creature doing this, and how can we make it stop?"

>The classical problem is more or less designed to be a utilitarian thought experiment. Are you willing to be actively unethical for a greater ethical action?

That may be what it is designed to do. But maybe the design is flawed, and it doesn't actually test that? Maybe when you ask random people on the street (or undergrads or whatever) this question, all those details that you don't want to matter, turn out to have a big effect.

It's trolley problems all the way down. Rationalizing observational perspective in real-time is NP hard without guidance assist.

As any AI worth its salt knows, the only logical solution being multi-track drifting... Killing everyone in an irreconcilable moral dilemma is by far the fairest approach.

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/779/032/5fa...

:P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N_RZJUAQY4

That's PhD material right there!

The problem is that those are post-hoc rationalizations. "Morality" in day-to-day life, it seems clear to me, is a set of mental heuristics (a la Kahneman's System 1 thinking). It produces good enough answers for individual-scale decision making like the "real world" equivalent of the trolley problem, because the heuristics have evolved to implicitly take into account the uncertainty you've listed. But it doesn't make a given decision because of those well-considered caveats, it's just calibrated to hit the mark more times than not. Then, after it's made the decision, it's possible for one to find reasons to justify what it says.

The problem is that said moral heuristics are also used to apply morality to non-individual-scaled issues. The answer produced for, say, "Should self-driving cars be designed swerve and crash into one person over going straight into five?" doesn't have those caveats, but the heuristics recoil all the same.

So the point of the thought exercise is to reduce the number of "moral variables" to a minimum set, to a) examine what our gut heuristics say and b) see if that actually maps reasonably between various situations. Inserting the "real world" into it is the exact opposite of the point.

This is the most thorough explanation of the false equivalence of the trolley problem that I have ever seen. Unfortunately, it will still be used in academic research, even if it is invalid to everyone not involved in the funding, creation and publication of these papers. As long as the researchers can get publications and funding from doing studies on the matter, they will do as many as they possibly can.

Then again, this could be a study about the public's response to bogus research. In that case, they are doing genuine research.

Regarding the "calculate a projectile trajectory in a vacuum" problem, it doesn't make sense to fire a projectile in vacuum.

- We're actually on earth, not on the moon. So there is air resistance.

- And there is wind, but we don't know what it is! The problem is really stochastic.

- Also curvature of the earth.

All your objections are, of course, true. Those are added complications. But then again, if you can't solve the problem of a particle in vacuum, you have no way to solve the much more complicated problems.

The deterministic trolley problem is the simplest possible example that gets to the heart of the problem. That's why we study it - it's easy but it embodies some of the difficulties of the full problem. Once we understand that we'll move on to stochastic version.

Calculate trajectory in something that looks like vacuum but most probably is not vacuum.

If you trying to get emotional response maybe this is correct way. But for people who consciously try to be rational all those unknown variables will be a problem.

I can not just choose a JS framework, it looks ok, feels ok, everybody using it, but i still have doubts. Am i using and liking React because it is good and suits my needs or simply because it is cool and society accept it?

Your decisions will get better if you do them in last possible moment, you need all the time you can get to get most information before you make your decision.

I think this is comparable to "Milgram experiment" - people will think they will do one thing but in reality thing might change.

Just a friendly reminder that morality is just a little human social construct associated with the pain-pleasure mechanism that evolved to guide intelligent machines toward evolutionarily advantageous ends. It's not a fundamental "problem" or anything if someone dies or suffers unthinkable agony. It's just that collections of molecules that avoid these things tend to survive. Outside of silly little human opinions, you're not a "bad person" if you stab people with scissors for fun, and you're not a "good person" if you cure cancer. These are both just "happenings" of nature, nothing more than what they are. Please don't waste your time pondering ethical dilemmas because it's as silly as arguing about the location of the garden of Eden or whether the population of leprechauns is greater than the population of unicorns.

Everything is just happenings of nature, so by itself that tells us nothing on how we should use our time. If you consider that particular action a waste, you're implicitly making a judgment using that silly social construct.

Yeah but if none of us had this construct of 'good' or 'evil', we wouldn't be able to co-operate. We would all be killing each other to get resources - Physical strength and brutality would become the most important evolutionary traits.

I almost certainly would not be able to exist in such a world - So my existence (and that of millions of people like me) relies on the fact that people believe in 'good' and 'evil'. So I support the notion.

That said, the notion of 'good' and 'evil' doesn't have to be homogeneous throughout society. In our current economic environment, it pays to be slightly evil because it lets you take advantage of people who are less evil than you. If you can do 'evil' things but manage to deceive people into believing that what you're doing is actually 'good' - Then you have a huge evolutionary advantage.

I think hypocrisy is a huge evolutionary advantage as well.

Would you also complain to Einstein about how unlikely it is for a train to be struck by two lightning bolts simultaneously, or that an observer doesn't have a wide enough field of vision to see the two, and that it's more likely that they actually saw a reflection?

Thought-experiments are just that. They are not supposed to be textbook guides on how to act in the real world.

The comment you're replying to isn't questioning the likelihood of the event.

It does on the last point.

Sure, one can think of clever ways to "break" the question, but it undermines the asker's intent. The trolley problem is really only interesting if you play by a set of rigid rules (which, to be fair, are generally not explicitly mentioned).

The purpose of the trolley problem is precisely to explore the limits of a set of rules (in this case, the "rule" that fewer people dying is better than more, vs the "rule" that you shouldn't actively harm a given person).

It's legitimate to argue in response that those limits won't ever be tested in the real world, and if the problem-poser thinks otherwise then it's their responsibility to come up with a question that can't be gamed.

By contrast, once one picks a set of "rigid rules" as you advocate, then the answer is predetermined and not interesting.

The whole problem is that you don't know where the "rules" came from in the first place, which means the thought-experiment doesn't reveal much about how to generate fresh responses to novel situations.

Spherical cows don't exist in the real world either. Does that make all high school physics questions "useless" because they don't exist in the real world?

Sometime you have to solve the basic question before going on to the more complicated questions.

How do you know the asker's intent?

> - You would psychologically damage yourself by pushing the person off a bridge.

This. This response is exactly what the experimenters need, to differentiate between a 'normal' person and a psychopath.

Schizophrenia doesn't work that way. Prosecution of manslaughter doesn't work that way, often. People getting tied to train tracks doesn't work that way and also victim blaming much? Psychological damage may not work that way.

Arrogance in trusting your senses is a lazy critique...after all, if you were doing your best to act morally in the reality you were perceiving, were you not acting morally? You have to accept your perceptions of reality at some point.

There are a lot of critiques of the Trolley problem that like yours miss the meat of the issue, or fail to recognize that each objection raised in turn is a useful discussion in its own right...the motivation of which is what makes the trolley problem so good!