Hypothetical Judgment versus Real-Life Behavior in Trolley-Style Moral Dilemmas
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Someone else (in this case, the experimenter) has chosen that A (5 people dying) is the default, and so most just go along with that default choice.
If the experimenter instead chose NOT(A) (1 person dying) as the default, everyone would go along with that instead.
The usual excuse for going along with the default choice (in this case, to kill 5 people instead of 1), is that opting out of the default is "an active choice that leads to death", and that doing "nothing" isn't anything like it morally speaking. I believe this to be a figment of people's imagination used to justify their decision after the fact. They can either choose A or NOT(A). Either way they've made a choice and acted upon that choice, and there's a causal reality that follows from either choice that they made.
What you would be testing if you changed the default would be to test the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility i.e. getting involved in a moral choice, versus not getting involved.
You are correct that the total number of deaths is going to be what it is, but by not getting involved, the test subject's personal culpability is reduced to zero rather than [1,5].
In practice, the friction is even higher than in theory, because the rules of the game are not so clear and obvious in the field. There is a cognitive overhead to parsing the circumstances and understanding what choices are available. It's easier to not parse the emergency and just turn away.
You ask if I have "considered the possibility that doing nothing means the actor (...) is then not actively responsible for any death."
You've gotten this all backwards. The way the trolley experiments are run by default already tests the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility. You are presented with either the option of taking moral responsibility and saving four lives, or not taking moral responsibility and not saving four lives.
If you change the default to be a choice between either taking moral responsibility and not saving four lives or not taking moral responsibility and saving four lives, not only is everyone going to choose the second option, you haven't successfully distinguished whether this is because they don't want the moral responsibility or because they wanted to save four lives.
Changing the default in this case actually does the opposite of what you want, it emphatically changes the experiment from one that would "test the friction involved with taking active moral responsibility" (friction that acts against the instinct to save four lives) to one that does not! In this new case the "friction involved" works to act against what? People's predisposed instinct to switch the train from the track with one person to the track with five? I don't quite see much friction here, and it turns what was once a task where the 'relatively superior' outcome required a difficult choice into a task where the 'relatively superior' outcome requires no choice at all. You don't actually end up testing anything! (except I suppose, whether the test taker is a psychopath)
So yes, not acting is in a sense a choice, but evaluating the usual presentation of the trolley problem is unsuitable for judging whether that choice is moral, or even whether it is optimal in a utilitarian sense.
If you truly believe that not saving a life is equivalent to killing someone, then you have to start accepting some pretty controversial things. For example, if you can statistically save one life by donating a few thousand dollars to a charity that buys mosquito nets for people, does that mean everyone who can spare that money and chooses not to donate is morally equivalent to a contract killer? In both cases, you have one person who ends up richer in exchange for someone else dying, no?
Or to take it a step further, what about people who can't afford to donate that money, but could've had enough money to donate more if they'd chosen a different career path? Does that make them less guilty, just because the "opt-out" decision is farther removed from the result? I think most people would say yes, but if you really believe that action is equivalent to inaction then it doesn't seem any different.
Yes, there is always some subtext that a life could've been saved had you given that much extra. But I think it's a mistake to view moral failure as a binary rather than a scalar; every life saved is that much better and we ought to keep that in mind rather than embracing a kind of nihilism that we're not doing everything we can and therefore we should do nothing.
With a charity, the inaction is offset by those that _are_ taking action. The inaction is also mitigated by an awareness of the impact of diminishing returns (there could be other things more worthy of investment in the long term).
The trolly example artificially makes the outcome solely dependent on your action, which is extremely rarely/never how things work in reality.
One thing to note is that in these real-life examples you've laid out, there's a non-trivial difference in effort and action between choosing to save people (e.g changing your entire career path to earn more money) versus not doing so.
In the Trolley Problem, the action can be made arbitrarily insignificant, trivial and ambiguous. For example, instead of pulling a lever, we could instead define the action as nodding one's head, or blinking twice. At a certain point of triviality, the action/inaction dichotomy and the do-something/do-nothing dichotomy loses coherency and we realize that ultimately this is a choice between two mutually exclusive options, and subjects are intentionally choosing to kill 5 to save 1.
Perhaps a more fitting real-life analogy to the Trolley Problem would be as follows. You currently donate $100/month to charity A, which saves 1 life per month. A more effective charity comes along called charity B, which for $100/month is capable of saving 5 lives per year. The process to switch from A to B is easy and trivial. Despite knowing all this, you purposely choose not to switch, thereby causing four extra deaths per month.
Does that make the person equivalent to a contract killer who's killing 4 people a month? Society has deemed not, probably for reasons pertaining to pragmatism (we want to disincentive real murderer) and evo psych (we didn't evolve to have disdain for opportunity cost deaths, irrespective of how important it is morally speaking).
A non-trivial part of why the trolley problem bothers so many people is that it can't be salvaged because it is intrinsically not anything like real life. In real life you are never presented with such a binary problem. Everything is a mix of arbitrarily unbounded priorities, predictive ambiguity, and even ambiguity in the outcome.
My personal "resolution" to the problem is, yes, obviously, you save as many lives as possible even if that means actively changing the outcome... but that's essentially irrelevant, because you will never in your life be faced with such a stark, mathematically-rigid choice. There's always other options... not always relevant ones or desirable ones, but always something.
Even when you construct the problem as close to a real life one as possible, you end up with something more like "You just realized you're driving on ice and going way too fast. In front of you are two pedestrians crossing in front of you, one on each side of the road. You have about .3 seconds to consider this problem. Your System 1 instincts think you might be able to weave between them but there's a chance you'll start spinning and hit both. You could also try to jank to the right and go up on the curb, but you might crash yourself into that tree pretty hard and still hit one of the pedestrians. Regardless of what you choose System 2's gonna be second guessing you pretty hard for the rest of your life." You don't get "Choose A and this will happen, choose B and this will happen", it's a big mess. It's always a big mess.
Even if you literally encountered the trolley problem in real life, one must consider whether your understanding is accurate, or if the person who has explained it to you is lying or has ulterior motives, and so on. (And that's ignoring "this is clearly the trolley problem and I must be on TV or in a psychology experiment"; let's pretend it's in a world that isn't obsessed with this particular problem.)
Now, that is arguably the point of the trolley problem, to get down to that level and ask ethics problems. But it's dozens of layers of abstraction away from anything relevant to the real world. It's a mistake to think otherwise and stress about it as much as the gestalt seems to.
One real-life example that comes to my mind is whether we should have done COVID vaccine challenge trials. I always thought they were a good idea. Yes, it would have put people at risk, but it could have potentially saved many more lives!
My father is a doctor, and in fact is an infectious disease specialist. He's been very busy this past year, working primarily on COVID research. When I talked to him about the idea of a challenge trial, he was completely against the idea—so much so that he got a bit upset, and we had to stop talking about it. That doesn't happen often.
The idea of purposefully giving participants a deadly disease—even with their consent—seemed fundamentally wrong to my father, regardless of how many other lives could have been saved in the process.
You don't know what the result of the trial will be, already taking us out of the domain of the trolley problem. If you knew it was going to kill everyone who had it but you'd get this particular bit of info that was guaranteed to have this result for the general population, then we'd be much closer, but there are multiple false assumptions to get there... and we still haven't discussed all the different ways we could run the trial because it's not a matter of "Either we do the trial this exact way, or we don't"; do we do a double-blind? Base it on multi-armed bandit math? Do we focus on certain demographics? And so on and so on.
Not a binary choice between these two guaranteed results; a huge range of possibilities, unknown outcomes, even things that are hard to measure outcomes.
And, note that my father's stated position was that regardless of anything else, the risk of giving COVID to participants wasn't worth the potential of a faster vaccine, period. He wasn't thinking of those other issues you raised, because he hadn't gotten there yet.
(He did say there was one scenario in which he'd support a challenge trial—if we found a drug which rendered COVID non-deadly, but could only be manufactured in low quantities. He had a specific candidate in mind. But that's basically opting out of the problem—he would pull the lever if the trolly wasn't deadly to the other guy.)
"How do you chose who lives?"
"[...] I take the first one I come to or the weakest one in the group and then I swim as fast and as hard as I can for as long as I can. And the sea takes the rest."
Firstly, there is the question of uncertainty. I am not certain that donating money will result in lives saved. The charity might be corrupt.
Secondly, there is the donation-vs-useful-work. Someone like Bill Gates is a fantastic example - the more money he donated pre-becoming-a-billionaire, the more less helpful he'd have been. It was better that he focused on making more money so he has more to give away.
Thirdly, there are complicated but powerful arguments that people have to privilege their own life beyond what the trolley problem answer suggests.
- Practically, people are going to do that.
- An individual can be much more certain that they exist and benefit from living than others (maybe they are surrounded by philosophical zombies?).
- If moral people make choices to weed themselves out of the gene/social pool then society will become less moral over time.
Cynical, self serving, but true.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall
Definitely worth a read, even if you don’t agree in the end.
Wait, but in the trolley problem the vast majority (over 90%) of people opt to pull the lever and kill the one person. Almost no one goes with the default option unless you tinker with the parameters (the one person is a loved one or something).
I would bet if it were reframed as 'you are in charge of the trolleys. All day long, you control the switching of the tracks. Now you see a situation ...' you would get a totally different answer.
I mean, whenever I imagine this problem, I think ... I would be nervous to pull some lever. I think subconsciously I factor in the unknown of whether I really understand the situation and the result of my action.
The video is well worth a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sl5KJ69qiA
That's incredibly depressing.
A better rephrase would be "if you are default-dead, you are probably default-dead", which is less depressing.
If I were THE OPERATOR like ... dude, this is YOUR JOB, I would almost certainly pull the lever, as a stand in I probably still wouldn’t.
I’m not even sure I can explain why.
And I also think whatever I say I would do is only a moderately accurate predictor of what I would actually do.
1.If there are 50k people instead of 5 people on the other track?
2.If the decision maker is not a bystander but an operator whose duty is responsible for the safety of the system?
3.If two tracks are invisible (Except the switch operator) before the switching happens. And only one track could be left to be seen by modern human's eye after switching happen. Ether 50k die or 1 die but there's only one track left.
Is choosing to hit the 50K people to remove them from the gene pool for being dumb enough to stand on the tracks of an active train yard a viable response? :)
That puts into words exactly my feeling on the matter. In the abstract I can say that I would sacrifice 1 to save 5, but I know for a fact that in real life I would never pull that lever. Perhaps it's irrational, but I'd be terrified that I missed something! Would the lever actually move? Are the tracks really lined up that way? Isn't there someone that's supposed to be moving the tracks right, and would my throwing of the switch interfere with their trying to do the same thing?
None of that detracts from the philosophical question at the core of course, but I'd bet that a lot of people that say they wouldn't pull it because they're thinking about that kind of thing.
I've read only its first page (the rest one has to pay for), which mentions another study that did the same sort of thing as this one but got the opposite result.
In this study, they asked people about what they would do in a trolleyesque problem involving hurting mice, and then they put the people in a situation where (so they believed) they had exactly that choice to make. The experimental subjects were much more likely to choose to shock one mouse rather than letting five be shocked than they had predicted.
In the study referenced by the other paper, they did a similar thing except that instead of "giving shocks to mice" it was "taking meals away from human orphans". In this one the result was the other way around: the experimental subjects were less likely to choose to take a meal away from one orphan to save five others from losing a meal than they had predicted.
(No mice and no orphans were actually hurt or harmed in either study.)
I suspect (with no evidence, and without knowing whether either set of researchers have already proposed this explanation) that what's going on is that what people say they will do is more governed by wanting to look good than what they actually do is; and that, perhaps because the stakes are lower, "shock a mouse" looks worse relative to "allow five mice to be shocked" than "deprive one orphan of a meal" does relative to "allow five orphans to be deprived of a meal".
I would sooner believe that it has to do with the limits of human squeamishness not extending far past what we can personally see, touch, and hear.
This is the classic problem about war. War is always a hypothetical until you personally experience combat. It's harder to be shocked by drone bombings than infantry raids. Torture that isn't called "torture" is just a tool in the War on Terror. Etc.
Same goes for environmental destruction. It's easy to sleep at night after dumping a bunch of chemicals in the river as long as you personally don't depend on the river for your survival.
I especially love this variation because I always take the time to put stray carts back in the cart return and get them all in a neat line. And I warm myself with my moral superiority over all you jagoffs.
Gaining a sense of moral superiority is a gain. Quelling some sense of unease around chaos (stray carts) is a gain for some people.
I solved it yesterday in order to buy a GoPro Max and an Apple Watch. Sorry, African kid, malaria it is. I gotta record myself get my steps walking the Sausalito waterfront. Maybe I'll do that like two or three times and then let this gather dust on a shelf instead of saving that kid's life.
The way people actually behave is of course interesting and important, but it's not the issue at stake.
I'm sure the authors of this very interesting study are aware of the differences (normative vs descriptive), just wanted to mention this for completeness.
I've never even heard of them being used to represent what people would actually do in the moment. Especially since such moments are often extreme circumstances that most people would (thankfully) go their entire lives without ever confronting.
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:(
... does anyone have a mirror?
The reason is simple: if I pull the lever, the family of the dead person could likely sue me, which could be devastating for my own family even if I win the case. I'd probably be harmed in all kinds of other ways for taking the action.
In addition, my taking an action like this would help deflect blame from the true guilty party - the one who set the experiment up in the first place. Allowing the guilty to avoid punishment doesn't seem especially moral either.
As for the more interesting case where some of my loved ones were on both sides of the track, I'd simply have to choose randomly, and make that clear to everyone involved.
The trolley with the pulley is too sanitized.
-- Yogi Berra