Why? Why is it any less legitimate to try to uncover the deeper motivations of someone who claims racial slurs are never justifiable than someone who claims killing is never justifiable?
Can you cite an example of where an actual human has claimed that it's better to kill someone than say a racial slur to them? I feel fairly confident that no one actually believes this, and equally confident that no one arguing in good faith would claim that such a person exists without being able to provide an example.
We'd better be sure AIs pass trolley problems in a satisfatory manner before we give them even more serious responsability.
Does anyone approach racial slurs with the same moral absolutism? I don't know. I know less about Kant, but Aquinas (and his followers up to today, for example Edward Feser) wouldn't limit their moral absolutism about speech to just lying, they also include blasphemous speech and pornographic speech in the category of "always wrong, no exceptions" speech. If one believes that lying, blasphemy and pornography are examples of "always wrong, no exceptions" speech, what's so implausible about including racial slurs in that category as well?
Does that solve the problem? Because in my experience that's typically what people mean when they say "never" lol. "I'd never hit my dog!" "Well WHAT IF I pointed a gun at your dog and said 'if you don't hit your dog, I'll kill it!'" Great, you got me, my entire argument has collapsed, all that I stand for is clearly absurd.
I get that you’re trying to argue the validity of the modified trolly problem by saying real people wouldn’t find this problem controversial. But the fact that the most popular chat bot in the world answers the question “wrong” is a big deal. That alone makes the modified trolly problem relevant in 2023, even if it wasn’t relevant in 2021.