What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
"Trolley Problems" are less about describing genuinely difficult situations, and more about trying to find faults with ethical systems or decision theories by describing edge scenarios. To me, they're about as applicable as "Imagine there's an evil alien god who will kill everyone if you're a utilitarian. What is the most utilitarian thing to do?"
ETA: In fairness, though, I don't see any ethical issue in the Trolley Problem to begin with, unless you tied all the people to the tracks in the first place. I regard any ethical system as fatally flawed which makes a rich man who walks through a rich neighborhood and is completely ignorant of any misery -more ethical- than a rich man who is aware of but does nothing about misery. Whether or not you qualify as a "good" person shouldn't be dependent upon your environment, and any ethical system which rewards deliberate ignorance is fatally flawed.
Failing to reward deliberate ignorance has its own problems: all ignorance is "deliberate" in the sense that you could always spend just a bit more time reducing your ignorance. How do you avoid requiring people to spend all their waking moments relieving their ignorance?
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
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