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shokwave comments on The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions - Less Wrong
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I am a conscientious "third-alternativer" on trolley problems, and to me this seems like an abuse of the least convenient possible world principle. If there is a world with no possibility of implementing alternative solutions, I will pick the outcome with the best consequences, but I don't believe there actually is a world with no possibility of alternatives - I reject the "possible" part of your least convenient possible world.
It would be like arguing to an atheist: "The least convenient possible world is one where the Christian God exists with probability 1."
I am an atheist, and I have no problems in answering questions of type "if creationism were true, would you support its teaching in schools" or ''if Christian God exists, would you pray every day" (both answers are yes, if that matters). What's the problem with those hypotheticals? The questions are well formed, and although they are useless in the sense that their premise is almost certainly false, the answers can still reveal something about my psychology. I don't think answering such questions would turn me into a creationist.
IAWTC in principle, but have noticed in practice that similarly formed questions almost always segue into an appeal to popularity or an appeal to uncertainty. Since dealing with these arguments is time-consuming and frustrating (they're clearly fallacious, but that's not obvious to most audiences), it usually works better to reject the premises at step one.
Same goes for most trolleylike problems posed in casual debate.
The least convenient world for the purposes of what argument? The point of the least convenient world principle is to prevent yourself from taking outs on dilemmas that will prevent you from learning anything about your actual moral principles.
The relevance of the trolley problem is not, for the most part, to situations where there are only two alternatives (of which there are few,) but situations where there are no options without negative repercussions (of which there are many.)
And in that case I pick the option with the least negative repercussions. I guess that shows that I am consequentialist in my morality.
I expressed concern in the other trolley problem thread that there are in fact many situations that appear to have two negative options and no obvious alternatives; when faced with these problems people may attempt to solve them with "trolley-problem logic" rather than looking for third alternatives, which leads to them systematically performing worse on these kinds of moral problems.
Talking to people about philosophical thought experiments seems extremely unlikely to affect their problem solving abilities in the real world. The trolley problem is a transparently unrealistic scenario, convoluted so that answers reveal part of the structure of someone's moral code. It isn't presented the way real-time crises are presented nor are participants encouraged to "solve it". Obviously looking for third options is a good idea in seemingly lose-lose scenarios but something is wrong with people if they are, in fact, incapable of accepting that for the purposes of a philosophical thought experiment there are only two choices and then making a decision between the two.
With all the literature on priming and pattern-matching (the common case of people presented with the real-world cryonics option pattern-matching it to Pascal's Wager and rejecting it), I don't think this possibility can be rejected out of hand. I don't think trolley problems are in need of censoring, I know what the purpose of trolley problems are, I can give you that information without having to accidentally prime myself to harm one friend to stop em from harming the entire friendship group.
Also,
The field of decision theory seems somewhat predicated on this not being the case.
Something about it mustn't be all that obvious - or maybe, it's obvious in hindsight.
I don't think any trolley-problem-rejector is actually incapable of accepting that. I think wedrifid is right, what happens is they come up with their answer (push the fat guy), they attempt to phrase it in a way that doesn't sound like murder (stop the cart with his ... body ...), they realise that no matter how they say it, the obvious answer is going to make them look like a cold-blooded killer (hey everyone! e just said e'd push a fat guy in front of a runaway cart!), and so they reject the question. Saying their rejection shows there's something wrong with them is the spinning-it-badly they were worried about in the first place (hey everyone! e can't even answer a simple question!).
I'm sure it isn't surprising that most people lack the typical Less Wrong poster's ability to articulate the abstract. The trolley problem is important precisely because it lets us get this information from people who aren't so articulate.
Even if people aren't capable of answering a question without it priming them (which, loosely speaking is probably true for all questions), thats a bad reason not to answer the question unless they think they're about to face some kind of crisis with a lot riding on their decision.
The field of decision theory is predicated on philosophical thought experiments priming the decision making of those who engage with them?
It's obvious in abstract.
I'm not convinced there are many trolley-problem-rejectors but certainly the kind of trolley-problem-rejector the OP talks about is easily explained by wedrifid's comment (and by several other explanations probably). The thesis that all trolley-problem-rejectors are pushers who realize they're in the minority is really interesting though. When I was saying something was wrong with the problem-rejectors I meant the idea of a principled rejection, not a rejection based on peer pressure, social fears and signaling.
Incidentally, I have trouble answering the problems on an object level, I think because I've spent too much time on the meta level questions the object level question no longer has a meaningful answer to me. I'd say both switching and pushing are acceptable but non-obligatory or supererogatory; but thats just an expression of my value pluralism. If you ask what I personally would do, I guess I wouldn't push the guy in front of the train but that doesn't feel like it communicates anything meaningful about my moral intuitions.
Sorry, I meant that the field of decision theory is based on the idea that philosophical thought experiments (like the prisoner's dilemma, stag hunt, etc) can affect your real-world problem solving skills (ie improve them).
If I could develop it, I would probably say something along the lines of "The trolley problem is a cage match, deontological ethics against consequentialist. Rejectors are consequentialists who have a large weight on the consequences of breaking with deontological prescriptions. Rejecting the question is preferable to lying about one's own ethics, or breaking with one's ethical environment."
I think it's more generally explicable by lose-lose counterfactuals being in common use in the real world (politics, schoolyard) for purposes of entrapment - a rejection of lose-lose counterfactuals in general, rather than of the trolley question in particular. This would also explain why philosophy lecturers have such a hard time getting many people not to just outright reject counterfactuals, because a philosophy class will for many be the first time a lose-lose-counterfactual wasn't being used as a form of entrapment.
Edit: TheOtherDave below nails it, I think: it's not just lose-lose counterfactuals, people heuristically treat any hypothetical as a possible entrapment and default to the safe option of refusing to play. If they don't know you, they aren't just being stupid.
IME this is a special case of a more general refusal to answer "hypothetical questions", even when they aren't lose-lose.
I used to run into this a lot... someone says something, I ask some question about it of the form "So, are you saying that if X, then Y?" and they simply refuse to answer the question on the (sometimes unarticulated) grounds that I'm probably trying to trick them. (Tone of voice and bodyparl is really important here; I started running into this reaction less when I became more careful to project an air of "this is interesting and I'm exploring it" rather than "this is false and I am challenging it".)
This also used to infuriate me: I would react to it as an expression of distrust. It helped to explicitly understand what was going on, though... once I recognized that it actually was an expression of distrust, and that the distrust was entirely reasonable if they couldn't read my mind, I stopped getting so angry about it. (Which in turn helped with the bodyparl and tone issues.)