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.
Actively making a real life or death decision is quite a lot different than reasoning though a game.
If you are in a burning, sinking ship and all going to die for sure, it's still immoral to rape someone.
So the argument still stands, the difference in the consequences, when considered outside of any context, is simply not worth the mental effort to figure out if the lever should be pulled. The exercise is only interesting because it provokes to think about real life scenarios.
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...
The gist is that we design our streets in such a way that people drive dangerously fast on them when they’re not slowed down by congestion, and during the pandemic that’s exactly what happened. Some other countries (particularly in Western Europe) take a safe systems approach to street design and did not have the same uptick in fatalities that we did.
"“They were just sick and tired of kids being killed in the streets,” says Jason Slaughter"
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.
But more seriously, I just realised that this is actually an argument that's often used against various environmental measures. People argue against wind turbines because they kill birds, ignoring the fact that pollution from fossil fuel kills far more, and birds are killed in larger numbers by other causes (cars, windows, cats). But somehow inaction seems more moral to some people if that action still leads to some deaths. Same with a multitude of other social issues.
More people were in favor of pulling the lever than there were in favor of pushing someone onto the tracks. This indeed hints that the more direct action, the harsher the judgement.
However I did not take into account the CO2 emissions and possible industrial accidents at the trolly factory or trolly materials mines.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/aug/17/car-scra...
Taking into account future discounting, it's probably almost never a good idea.
I would argue that it shouldn't factor into the equation. The polluting trolley will be replaced sooner or later, anyway. You're just moving the date forward.
The catch is that the argument could be made every year, with a new, more efficient trolley replacing the previous. In which case the construction costs obviously need to be considered, and it wouldn't be worth to spend 100 CO2 to save 10.
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 my opinion, people who would like to study engineering would do so not so because of what they are paid (the situation today), but because of their genuine interest.
On further reflection, it seems ludicrous to believe that that hardest professions are the most paid. The average CS job pays obscenely well, but is relatively trivial. Primary healthcare providers, essential services workers and so on are severely underpaid.
I understand the willingness to not discredit someone's hard work, but some skills are legitimately more complex than others.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the hardest professions are the most paid.
Training takes time, and often unpaid. A coffee shop worker will immediately get rewarded while the engineer will not. If they will be equally compensated then the engineer is at a disadvantage.
> In my opinion, people who would like to study engineering would do so not so because of what they are paid (the situation today), but because of their genuine interest.
Marx said the same. If the people would be free they would produce out of their heart's desire. As it did not turn out that way the party needed to force the worker's desire into them. Literally to free them by force (freedom by force is another concept in itself :)).
In fact, I don’t see why the ability to have a good standard of living should be predicated on your profession in the first place.
The fact that engineering training is… unpaid as you say seems to put people who cannot afford to not make money for rent, food, etc. at a clear disadvantage. Those already rich (and able to afford unpaid training) would just get richer if they are paid more than an “untrained” worker.
Because the lack of payment is the trainee's quid-pro-quo. It makes the trainee a counterpart in the training investment. In several countries in Europe to varying degrees and forms, the state pays for the training. It pays the professors, facilities and can even pay scholarships so that a disadvantaged background is not an impediment to such training(tackling the inequality issue you mention). I am not aware of any institution/state paying even a minimum wage up to master level.
Then there is the issue of difficulty, where it is clear that learning to serve a coffee mug requires less effort than learning advanced calculus. If you pay/reward the student engineer the same as the coffee waiter, you will likely still have fewer engineers[1]. Fewer engineers will produce fewer useful infrastructure or wealth to redistribute that the coffee waiter could benefit from. Therefore according to Rawls having them earning the same would be unfair.
> In fact, I don’t see why the ability to have a good standard of living should be predicated on your profession in the first place. It is not. It is predicated on the the value the profession generates.
[1] The reward/base-line ratio feels like the reaction coefficient, where you use a higher reward to make an unlikely reaction become possible :)
PS: It took me a good while and rewrites to come up with a satisfactory answer. Thanks for the comment.
High minimum and median salaries are usually good for engineers as it requires more productive companies which requires more engineers. When workers are cheap few wants to pay for expensive systems.
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.)
also, you can easily flip it: elderly cannot be saved from the torture of existence, having lived so long, but the baby has barely suffered anything yet - we can save it!
Actually streetcars are kind of a bargain because they use mostly existing infrastructure. But that’s the downside too, because they can easily get stuck in traffic. The LA Red Car system died in the end because without its own right-of-way, it was worse than cars, less convenient than buses.
After some deliberation, my muncipality recently decided against a streetcar-system and for a bus-based system with electric buses, right-of-way everywhere and dedicated bus-lanes where possible (nearly everywhere).
It worked out really well.
https://bathtrams.uk/the-most-energy-efficient-mode-of-publi...
Still, I feel that trams will be dying soon. The improved efficiency is simply not enough to justify the extra infrastructure and inflexibility. Modern battery electric buses have a range of 500+km and can thus be used for an entire day, and charged at times when electricity is cheap and green (ie overnight on wind energy).
I don't see existing trams and light rail disappearing soon. Not in cities that have well-functioning networks, like Amsterdam. But I can imagine that for new projects, electric buses are preferable.
That isn't their only advantage, but it's one which is often overlooked.
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.
Many "fun" surveys are built to help collect data to better profile you. There are many techniques here, from asking a mixture of innocuous and profiling questions, to looking for correlations. With a few, you can extrapolate a person's age, political leanings, etc.
This is snowballing, and it's hard to predict how data collected today will be used, or what inferences will be possible. It's safer not to do a threat analysis every time, but just to click one button each time and not risk letting profilers know your value system.