By "rules" I meant what the parent comment referred to as trying to "algorithmize" moral feelings.
Moral philosophers are presumably trying to answer some class of questions. These may be "what is the morally right choice?" or "what moral choice do people actually make?" or some other thing. But whatever it is, they should be consistent. If a philosopher might give a different answer every time the same question is asked of them, then surely they can't accomplish anything useful. And to be consistent, they must follow rules, i.e. have a deterministic decision process.
These rules may not be explicitly known to themselves, but if they are in fact consistent, other people could study the answers they give and deduce these rules. The problem presented by the OP is that they are in fact giving inconsistent answers; either that, or they all happen to disagree with one another in just the way that the presentation bias would predict in this case.
A possible objection is that the presentation is an input which is allowed to affect the (correct) response. But every problem statement has some irrelevant context. No-one would argue that a moral problem might have different answers between and 2 and 3 AM, or that the solution to a moral problem should depend on the accent of the interviewer. And to understand what the problem being posed actually is (i.e. to correctly pose the same problem to different people), we need to know what is and isn't relevant.
In this case, the philosophers act as if the choice of phrasing "200 of 600 live" vs. "400 of 600 die" is relevant to the problem. If we accepted this conclusion, we might well ask ourselves what else is relevant. Maybe one shouldn't be a consequentialist between 2 and 3 AM?
You haven't shown that they are producing inconsistent theories in their published work. The result only shows that, like scientists, individual philosophers can't live up to their own cognitive standards in certain situations.
Imagine someone finding out that "Physics professors fail on basic physics problems". This, of course, would never happen. To become a physicist in academia, one has to (among million other things) demonstrate proficiency on far harder problems than that.
Philosophy professors, however, are a different story. Cosmologist Sean Carroll tweeted a link to a paper from the Harvard Moral Psychology Research Lab, which found that professional moral philosophers are no less subject to the effects of framing and order of presentation on the Trolley Problem than non-philosophers. This seems as basic an error as, say, confusing energy with momentum, or mixing up units on a physics test.
Abstract:
We examined the effects of framing and order of presentation on professional philosophers’ judgments about a moral puzzle case (the “trolley problem”) and a version of the Tversky & Kahneman “Asian disease” scenario. Professional philosophers exhibited substantial framing effects and order effects, and were no less subject to such effects than was a comparison group of non-philosopher academic participants. Framing and order effects were not reduced by a forced delay during which participants were encouraged to consider “different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case”. Nor were framing and order effects lower among participants reporting familiarity with the trolley problem or with loss-aversion framing effects, nor among those reporting having had a stable opinion on the issues before participating the experiment, nor among those reporting expertise on the very issues in question. Thus, for these scenario types, neither framing effects nor order effects appear to be reduced even by high levels of academic expertise.
Some quotes (emphasis mine):
When scenario pairs were presented in order AB, participants responded differently than when the same scenario pairs were presented in order BA, and the philosophers showed no less of a shift than did the comparison groups, across several types of scenario.
[...] we could find no level of philosophical expertise that reduced the size of the order effects or the framing effects on judgments of specific cases. Across the board, professional philosophers (94% with PhD’s) showed about the same size order and framing effects as similarly educated non-philosophers. Nor were order effects and framing effects reduced by assignment to a condition enforcing a delay before responding and encouraging participants to reflect on “different variants of the scenario or different ways of describing the case”. Nor were order effects any smaller for the majority of philosopher participants reporting antecedent familiarity with the issues. Nor were order effects any smaller for the minority of philosopher participants reporting expertise on the very issues under investigation. Nor were order effects any smaller for the minority of philosopher participants reporting that before participating in our experiment they had stable views about the issues under investigation.
I am confused... I assumed that an expert in moral philosophy would not fall prey to the relevant biases so easily... What is going on?