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ciphergoth comments on The Preference Utilitarian’s Time Inconsistency Problem - Less Wrong
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The kind of thought experiments (I think) Matt is referring to are so basic I don't know of any papers that go into them in depth. They get discussed in intro level ethics courses. For example: A white woman is raped and murdered in segregation era deep south. Witnesses say the culprit was black. Tensions are high and there is a high likelihood race riots break out and whites just start killing blacks. Hundreds will die unless the culprit is found and convicted quickly. There are no leads but as police chief/attorney/governor you can frame an innocent man to charge and convict quickly. Both sum and average utilitarianism suggest you should.
Same goes for pushing fat people in front of runaway trolleys and carving up homeless people for their organs.
Utilitarianism means biting all these bullets or else accepting these as proofs by reductio.
Edit: Or structuring/defining utilitarianism in a way that avoids these issues. But it is harder than it looks.
Or seeing the larger consequences of any of these courses of action.
(Well, except for pushing the fat man in front of the trolley, which I largely favour.)
I'm comfortable positing things about these scenarios such that there are no larger consequences of these courses of action- no one finds out, no norms are set etc.
I do suspect an unusually high number of people here will want to bite the bullet.(Interesting side effect of making philosophical thought experiments hilarious: it can be hard to tell if someone is kidding about them) But it seems well worth keeping in mind that the vast majority would find a world governed by the typical forms of utilitarianism to be highly immoral.
These are not realistic scenarios as painted. In order to be able to actually imagine what really might be the right thing to do if a scenario fitting these very alien conditions arose, you'll have to paint a lot more of the picture, and it might leave our intuitions about what was right in that scenario looking very different.
They're not realistic because they're designed to isolate the relevant intuitions from the noise. Being suspicious of our intuitions about fictional scenarios is fine- but I don't think that lets you get away without updating. These scenarios are easy to generate and have several features in common. I don't expect anyone to give up their utilitarianism on the basis of the above comment-- but a little more skepticism would be good.
I'm happy to accept whatever trolley problem you care to suggest. Those are artificial but there's no conceptual problem with setting them up in today's world - you just put the actors and rails and levers in the right places and you're set. But to set up a situation where hundreds will die in this possible riot, and yet it it certain that no-one will find out and no norms will be set if you frame the guy - that's just no longer a problem set in a world anything like our world, and I'd need to know a lot more about this weird proposed world before I was prepared to say what the right thing to do in it might be.