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sketerpot comments on The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions - Less Wrong
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I get frustrated by this every time someone mentions the classic short story The Cold Equations (full text here). The premise of the story is a classic trolley problem (...In Space!), where a small spaceship carrying much-needed medical supplies gets a stowaway, which throws off its mass calculations. If the stowaway is not ejected into space, the ship will crash and the people on the planet will die of a plague. So the (innocent, lovable) stowaway is killed and ejected, and the day is saved. The end.
Whenever this comes up, somebody will attack the story as contrived, pointing out that it could have been prevented by some "Keep Out" signs and a few more door locks. This is usually treated as an excuse to dismiss the premise of the story entirely -- exactly what you describe as a common reaction to maximally inconvenient trolley problems.
(By the way, I searched on Less Wrong for previous discussions of The Cold Equations, and was pleasantly surprised that people around here seem much less inclined to use the story's plot holes as an excuse to dismiss the whole idea. The nits still get picked, but not to a facepalm-worthy extent.)
When you're writing an actual story, I feel like you have to maintain higher standards for plausibility than when you're writing a straight moral dilemma. I only know The Cold Equations by its reputation, but I can certainly understand how that sort of contrivance could hurt it on a literary level.
(Reply to old post)
The problem with "The Cold Equations" isn't just that it could have been prevented by signs and door locks. The problem is that the fact that it could have been prevented by signs and door locks turns it from "the laws of nature results in having to kill someone" to "human irresponsibility results in having to kill someone". Failing to take precautions to keep people out of a situation where they could die means the death is caused by negligence, not impersonal forces of nature.
What's frustrating about that? It doesn't make any sense, as if the fuel / weight had to be optimized that much, then they'd better damn well weigh the thing before takeoff, or whatever they need to do as a second-best option to detect stowaways / extra cargo / etc.
The frustrating thing is that people produce a specific criticism ("In this story, they could have thrown tables out the airlock, or put up more signs!") and presume they have shattered the premise of the story (there are situations where physical laws will require hard, horrifying choices, in these situations the physical laws will not bend no matter how immoral a decision it requires).
Ah. I don't think most folks would consider that very abstract notion "the premise of the story", though the author clearly thought it was the relevant detail. The characters behaved unrealistically, and shouldn't have been there in the first place. The same point is made very believably in many less contrived contexts, like stories about people trying to get on the Titanic's too-few lifeboats.
Well, the premise of the story was more to go directly against the grain of the current science fiction trend, which was clever-but-contrived escapes from seemingly physical-law-bound situations. So the author was restricted to science-fiction stories.
Actually, the author kept writing "clever-but-contrived escapes" and it was the editor, John Campbell, who wanted to go against the grain:
http://www.challzine.net/23/23fivedays.html