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JGWeissman comments on Far & Near / Runaway Trolleys / The Proximity Of (Fat) Strangers - Less Wrong
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Comments (46)
I think you missed this part:
Silas is saying that the Least Convenient World to illustrate this point requires lots of caveats, and is not as simple as the scenario presented.
This is still not inconvenient enough. They are still responsible for being on the track, whether by ignorance or acceptance of the risks.
I usually assume that they were kidnapped by crazed philosophers and tied to the tracks specifically for the purpose of the demonstration.
Okay, but that would be a fundamentally different problem, with different moral intuitions applying. The question becomes, "should five kidnapped people die, or one fat kidnapped person die?"
Silas, you're right: the problem was poorly stated in the lecture referenced by the original post. The trolley car problem is in fact usually written to make it clear that the five people did not assume any risk. The original intent of this kind of problem was to explore intuitions dealing with utilitarianism.
NB: "The trolley problem" does not uniquely describe a problem. While it does refer to Foot's version from 1978, it also refers to any of the class of "trolley problems", hundreds of which have been in published papers since then.
Much like "Gettier case" does not uniquely identify one thought experiment.
Okay, that's actually the first time I'd seen the Trolley problem involve a "mad philosopher" (or equivalent concept) having tied them to the track, and that includes my previous visits to the Wikipedia article!
And even the later expositions in the article involving a fat man don't mention people being kidnapped.
Well, I didn't edit the article! I think you're right about the assumption of risk version.
I do prefer the "mad philosopher" versions, because they make the apparently contradictory preferences very clear. That way, you're weighing 5x against x. Most people have an intuition that it would be wrong to push the fat man, yet right to change the course of the trolley, which seems strange.
I was curious, so I went to look. The 'mad philosopher' phrase was added in April, by an unnamed contributor. [Link]
I would still think that it would be bad for people to have to worry about being drafted as sacrificial lambs because other people could not avoid being kidnapped by crazed philosophers.
One of the implications of the crazed-philosopher setup, though, is that there are well-enforced laws against tying people to railroad tracks, so that should be a rare occurrence, not something that people should have to take into consideration in their day to day lives. (So should 'workers on a section of track that's not protected from trains', actually - OSHA would have something to say about it, I'm sure. I still prefer the crazed philosophers, though. They're funny.) You do have a point, but that's an issue that we as a society have already resolved in many cases.
I have a different interpretation of the LCPW here, though. The LCPW is supposed to be the one that isolates the moral quantity of interest--in this case, the decision to push or not, or to switch tracks--and is specifically designed to exclude answers that consider factors (realistic or not) that sidestep the issue.
I'd say the LCPW is one in which nobody will ever hear about the decision, and thus in which any ancillary effects are neutralized.