= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
David_Gerard comments on The Trolley Problem: Dodging moral questions - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (129)
I've used the trolley problem a lot, at first to show off my knowledge of moral philosophy, but later, when I realized anyone who knows any philosophy has already heard it, to shock friends that think they have a perfect and internally consistent moral system worked out. But I add a twist, which I stole from an episode of Radiolab (which got it from the last episode of MASH), that I think makes it a lot more effective; say you're the mother of a baby in a village in Vietnam, and you're hiding with the rest of the village from the Viet Cong. Your baby starts to cry, and you know if it does they'll find you and kill the whole village. But, you could smother the baby (your baby!) and save everyone else. The size of the village can be adjusted up or down to hammer in the point. Crucially, I lie at first and say this is an actual historical event that really happened.
I usually save this one for people who smugly answer both trolly questions with "they're the same, of course I'd kill one to save 5 in each case", but it's also remarkably effective at dispelling objections of implausibility and rejection of the experiment. I'm not sure why this works so well, but I think our bias toward narratives we can place ourselves in helps. Almost everyone at this point says they think they should kill the baby, but they just don't think they could, to which I respond "Doesn't the world make more sense when you realize you value thousands of complex things in a fuzzy and inconsistent manner?". Unfortunately, I have yet to make friends with any true psychopaths. I'd be interested to hear their responses.
The answer that almost everyone gives seems to be very sensible. After all, the question: "What do I believe I would actually do" and "What do I think I should do" are different. Obviously self modifying to the point where these answers are as consistent as possible in the largest subset of scenarios as possible is probably a good thing, but that doesn't mean such self modifying is easy.
Most mothers would simply be incapable of doing such a thing. If they could press a button to kill their baby, more would probably do so, just as more people would flip a switch to kill than push in front of a train.
You obviously should kill the baby, but it is much more difficult to honestly say you would kill a baby than flip a switch: the distinction is not one of morality but courage.
As a side note, I prefer the trolley-problem modification where you can have an innocent, healthy young traveler killed in order to save 5 people in need of organs. Saying "fat man", at least for me, obfuscates the moral dilemma and makes it somewhat easier.
...weighted by the likelihood of those scenarios, and the severities of the likely consequences of behaving inconsistently in those scenarios.
Most problems of this sort are phrased in ways that render the situation epistemicly unreachable, which makes their likelihood so low as to be worth ignoring.
Re: your side note... am I correct in understanding you to mean that you find imagining killing a fat man less uncomfortable than imagining killing a healthy young traveler?