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taw comments on The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions - Less Wrong
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The messy complicated real world never contains situations where you can sacrifice a few people to benefit many people?
Or if it does, in such situations we'll figure out the optimal action using completely different considerations from those we would use in the idealized case?
I don't believe either of those.
In messy complicated real world always contains people with different agendas, massive uncertainty and disagreement about likely outcomes, moral hazard, and affected people pushing to get their desired result by any means available.
If assume them away, trolley problem has nothing to do with the real world.
Exactly. The central problems of real-world morality center around dealing with the uncertainty, bias and signaling issues of realistic high-stakes scenarios. By assuming all that complexity away trolley problems end up about as relevant as an economics problem without money or preferences.
A more useful research program would focus on probing the effects of uncertainty and socal issues on moral decision-making. But that makes for poor cocktail party conversation.
Trolley problems may be useful if you're e.g. an extremely smart person doing Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford and you're destined for a career in politics where dealing with real-life lose-lose hypotheticals is going to be part of the job. Or if you want to understand such people, e.g. because you're on one of the metaphorical tracks.