Part of the Trolley Problem is that the choice is between an action or inaction. But these problems, or the first one at least, have two buttons.

So you're making a choice. Yeah, some might argue it's a technicality. But what if you put the Do Nothing choice on a timer?

What if you made it an asynchronous "Problem of the Day". No action by the end of the day triggers Do Nothing, etc.

Lots of cool, interesting design choices. There's an unstated subtle ultimatum hidde. in these problems, but still cool.

Sorry, geeking out.

It's a binary decision with two outcomes, in my personal view it is irrelevant which of the outcomes is caused by physical action and which by inaction (at least, supposing that you have enough time to think about what to do - obviously, if you have to react in a split second, it's understandable to be biased towards inaction because you may need more time to make the right decision, but that's not the point of these problems in the way they are posed).

If you have enough time to think what to do, inaction is a conscious choice and if it does more harm than good, you are guilty of not choosing action.

Now, you might think that it isn't given enough time, but it's easy to argue that you're currently letting kids die in Africa by your inaction (or Ukrainians or homeless people etc.). Being slightly at fault for someones death is basically a permanent state of affairs, whereas actively killing someone is something few people would be willing to do. It definitely makes a difference.

If I were a professional rail operator, I could take action. I know how to operate the switch, I know where both of the lines go, I can contact the trolley operator to let them know what happened. As a bystander, I would not take action. Maybe it would save that person, but dooms all the passengers on the trolley. Maybe someone had it under control and I'm throwing a wrench in their plans. In general, we probably don't want random bystanders to be messing with the operation of heavy machinery.

Sometimes there is a duty to act: if I am babysitting a child and they are suffering in the cold, I better bring them somewhere warm. I may have some responsibility if I see someone suffering in the cold and I have an extra blanket that I could give them. But I am not responsible for buying blankets to give out every time it is cold, nor am I responsible for throwing railroad switches. In those cases, I am more culpable for my actions than my failure to act.

It only makes a difference in the eyes of the beholder, not for those actually dying

Not thinking too hard about reality because reality is nasty is something of a huge bug in the human cognition. Trying hard to not know anything is even desirable from that point of view: it's not neglect if you never bothered getting to a state where you are capable of being responsible for anything

Unfortunately, that's the one (not) making the decision in this case.

> Not thinking too hard about reality because reality is nasty is something of a huge bug in the human cognition.

Is, though? I mean, in general we should strive to improve the world, but does getting overwhelmed by all the bad things that you should be doing something about really doesn't help.

If we are already talking about changing the human cognition, might as well add an ability to function while being aware of the issues

And that's just pants. Hell, even in math -- the most rigorous subject ever -- there are undecidable problems. Asking me to decide squishy issues of who lives and dies, who I should spent resources helping (including myself), etc...that's so many orders of magnitude more complex, so many immediate and cascading future consequences, of unimaginable import. It's crushing, and maybe without a correct (or even good) answer! It's pants ultra out there. If you make me internalize all the issues, then the only decision I'll make is which corner to lay by in the fetal position.

The only idyllic "human cognition" fix here is basically omniscience. And that kinda feels like cheating, y'know?

The trolley problem does not extend readily to systems involving incomplete information or some kind of inaccess to enacting a solution. That is why moral philosophers despise it as an illustrative example -- armchair ponderers apply it with gross negligence to the context and nuance present, so it ends up illustrating nothing much except ignorance for the details of the thought experiment.

By pulling the level, one is intentionally killing a person, to save five. In more general terms, a life is taken away for the greater good of society.

A foundation of societies (modern ones, and I guess, some more than others) is that taking a life away has highly specific restrictions, which are usually justified by the person doing harmful acts (representing a danger to other people). To put it in another way, any citizen has the guarantee that, unless they do something harmful, they're safe. It's a contract between the citizen and the society.

By pulling the lever to save one, the contract is broken. To be consistent with the societal principle, it should be the person on the alternate track to decide whether the lever should be pulled, not an observer.

(The above reasoning is based on a very generic vision of the law. If anybody has some details, they're very welcome :))

But if I pull the lever (or pushed a fat man onto the track that would halt the train), I am the one who is responsible for the resulting death, which makes me the one who broke the contract.

That's the major dilemma here, because pulling the lever is the utilitarian-correct choice that saved more lives, but whoever pulled the lever went from being innocent to being a murderer.

(Do you 'pull the lever' and instruct the surgical team to kill one stranger to save five strangers?)

The trolley problem is meant precisely to highlight these differences, and I think it's one of the best arguments for consequentialism. In my less charitable moments, I like to refer to the concept of privileging inaction as an informal fallacy. It's not really, though; it's just that folks have different philosophical starting points.

Consider: Who knows what happens? It's perfectly possible the problem description lied, and the opposite thing happens. Either way real life doesn't come with problem descriptions. Since "what happens" is profoundly inaccessible, the more important question is what you wanted and why.

So, it's permissible to redirect the train away from one and towards many, if directing it away from the one was what you wanted. It's equally permissible to redirect the train away from the many and towards the one, if directing it away from the many was what you wanted. It's easy to imagine a world where you got what you wanted, but the bad thing that looked like would happen as a side effect didn't happen. Maybe that's the one we live in.

However, if you really wanted a specific person on the track to die, then you should pull it away from them. Not for their sake, but for yours. What happens is still uncertain, but the important thing is that you did not act on this bad desire.

(By the way, virtue ethics is just a stupid "third way" branding exercise. To say goodness isn't derived from outcomes is fine. To say it is, is at least a coherent position. But thinking you can dodge that problem by talking about "virtues" instead is just nonsense.)

A runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workers who will all be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. Next to you is a stranger who happens to be very large. The only way to save the lives of the five workers is to push this stranger onto the tracks where his large body will stop the trolley. The stranger will die if you do this, but the five workers will be saved.

Does the act of physically pushing a person onto the tracks make it different than pulling a lever?

One reason could be because your presence at this railroad switch is exceptional or at least unusual in some way. Maybe its worth considering what would happen if you weren't there at all.

When working in a new codebase, it's generally better to assume that something odd is the way it is for a reason, rather than changing it to something that seems right (easier to understand) to you. This is because in the real world, there is so much you don't / can't yet know about a situation that you're thrown in to.

I guess this is kind of reflected in the switch example where its 5 people that tied themselves to the railroad vs. one who didn't, and something like 85% "choose" the 5. How do you know how they got there? That implies so much prior knowledge and background that isn't really considered in the oversimplified "choices" in the website. Maybe they were forced to tie themselves to the railroad at gunpoint, or maybe it's a weird death-by-train suicide cult.

This kind of reasoning really defeats the point of the thought experiment, which is to construct a scenario where those considerations aren't a factor so we can reason about ethics and moral intuitions without the greater complexity of real-world situations.

It's like economists assuming perfectly reasonable actors in markets, or physicists assuming a perfectly spherical object that ignores wind resistance.

They're toy problems that don't match reality at all, and the value is dubious at best as anything other than a very gentle intro to the subject.

Here's a thought experiment - How many people do you think would actually make the choice they state they will make if you present them the trolley scenario in real life with no warning? People who say they will pull the lever are fooling themselves.

1. They won't know how to read tracks

2. They won't know how the lever works

3. They don't know for sure that anyone will die: those five people might be able to move off the tracks just fine themselves

4. If they do pull the lever they're almost certainly going to get arrested or troubled by the legal system, because they fucked with shit and someone died afterwards (the courts won't give a shit that "they thought five other people might have died!").

5. For all they know the trolley operator can stop just fine, why would anyone be about get hurt?

6.... on and on.

Basically - you're setting up an impossible framework, the results (even if you get them) are useless because they're only valid in that impossible framework.

If the results of the real world never match the results of the framework you've set up, what is the value of that framework? It's just a shitty model with bad reproducibility. We have lots of those.

All models are wrong but that doesn't make them useless.

My claim is that the trolley problem is useless. It asks people to make a guess about how they would behave, but that guess is predicated on a set of initial conditions that are impossible to fulfill (omniscience is a bitch to get in real life).

How does gathering all that incorrect data help you? What ethical reasoning are you trying to tease out here?

Here's one you might love - "if the earth is flat and you reach the edge, would you jump?"

Now lets just categorize everyones answer to the that question.... and: Hold the phone! The earth isn't flat? It doesn't matter? It turns out this question has basically no relevance to anything!

Is it fun? Sure. Is it useful? I have doubts.

If you are a professional trolley network controller then you have the judgement and the duty to operate/not operate the lever. I think that few people would question the ethics of a professional operator flipping the switch to save the most people.

It's really very similar to the reason physicists use simplified models, and the value of physics, even when it assumes a perfectly spherical cow, shouldn't need to be stated.

But isn't that's just because when you find yourself in a new codebase it's generally because you will be in a long-term relationship with the other contributors to that codebase, and thus it makes sense to be cooperative? If you were dropped into a new codebase in a hypothetical scenario like the trolley problem where you only need to make a single choice without any expectation of ongoing interaction with the relevant parties, then you might very well just do the quickest and dirtiest change to the codebase to accomplish your immediate goal.

A very clear example of this is medicine with the "do no harm" principle - that the actions of the physician should be chosen to minimize the scenarios of harming the patient under any circumstance - under chance, under lack of patient compliance, etc.

Furthermore, the actions in the real world have also different experiences and meanings. Its easy to think about pulling a lever to kill 1 instead of 5, but not easy to think of killing one to harvest their organs and save other 5, though they are, with a lot of abstraction, "equivalent moral actions".

There are other thought experiments that elucidate this more clearly, like a soldier deciding whether now is the right time to fire the first shot to start a battle.

People's moral intuitions have heuristics that attempt to deal with this ("bystander effect") although they definitely can be poorly-calibrated in the real world, and are almost always badly calibrated in artificial thought experiments because that's not the environment they were designed for.

There is a fundamental branching point of ethical systems between consequentialism (eg utilitarianism, which says the outcome is what matters) and deontology (which says basically that some set of rules exist, and ethical behavior equates to following those rules, no matter the consequence).

If you are a deontologist, “the ends don’t justify the means” and it’s rarely ok to just kill someone to save someone else. If you are a consequentialist then the choice to live in the better world is obvious.

Western morality, being heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian systems with Ten Commandments and books of God’s Rules, has a lot of deontological assumptions baked in (as does the legal code). So even with time to ponder the problem, “thou shalt not kill” will weigh heavy on many.

> "(eg utilitarianism, which says the outcome is what matters)"

Speaking of the outcome - before you are involved, the person who tied six people to the tracks is attempting murder; if society finds the person it will punish them. After you pull the lever, should society try you for murder? For aiding and abetting a crime? Celebrate your rescue? A society where any individual can kill any other individual, if they think it is for the greater good, feels like it would be unable to hold together. The outcome of more people being alive but the destruction of society seems like it could be bad enough to outweigh the loss of five people.

In this case making the people different would make the experiment needlessly complex. The problem as-stated (assuming identical individuals) already illustrates the consequentialist/deontologist conflict.

I think you are perhaps engaging on a different level than intended; “what are the legal consequences of this action” is downstream of the problem. In other words, we should make our legal system conform to our ethical system, not take the legal system as some fact that must guide our ethical principles.

This is not intended as some legal case study to test law students’ understanding of culpability in homicide. (Although that might well be an interesting discussion in its own context).

> It seems overly simple to me to reduce it to "more is better".

No consequentialist would claim this, and to be clear that’s not what I claimed either.

There are various utility functions that utilitarians might choose, for example hedonic (Mills) or eudaimonic. And various other assumptions you must make, such as “is the average life net-positive in utility or net-negative?”. Then you put your values into your utility function and assess the possible worlds and their likelihood of occurring. (For simplicity I’m leaving out the utility of having rules as heuristics, but worth mentioning as two-level utilitarianism seems appealing to me).

All else being equal, as in this thought experiment, saving more lives is better than saving fewer in my and most utilitarians’ opinion. But “more lives is better” is not the underlying principle at work in making the evaluation/decision. It’s merely the result of the calculation. One can easily construct thought experiments where more lives in existence would reduce utility and not increase it, in which case utilitarians would advocate for not saving those lives. For example if we modify the trolley problem to say pulling the lever will also cause the five survivors to be imprisoned and tortured for the rest of their lives.

(Look up “the repugnant conclusion” if you want to see a thought experiment where common intuitive morality breaks down under most systems).

What should you do? If you're going to take the view that failing to save a person you could have saved is morally equivalent to killing, then clearly you should kill your one patient to save the other five.

But think of the longer-scale effect this would have. Would anybody ever go to a hospital and get elective surgery knowing they might be killed to harvest their organs? A more general form of trolley problem doesn't necessarily present that exact dilemma with such clear consequences, but at any scale, think of the consequences of being concerned with what happens because of your inaction. Do you donate blood once a week or whatever the max frequency is at which your body can regenerate the red cells? Do you still have both kidneys? Do you ever spend money on anything except bare minimum shelter, enough grain to stay alive, and every other cent going to the AMF or whatever the maximum QALYs saved/dollar donated charity is? How many people have died in your time on Earth that could have lived if you'd done something different? If we all seriously made that a primary concern in our daily decision-making, virtually all productive action would be paralyzed. Everybody would be trying to become a hedge fund manager living like a pauper and giving all their money to the AMF, but the AMF would no longer be able to do anything, because everyone would be a hedge fund manager and there would be no one left to manufacture mosquito nets.

I think non-actions are judged less harshly than actions, so people are more inhibited in making them..

I would ask the person who is (in most of these scenarios) on the diverted tracks what they want me to do. They have the right to make this decision, since they are masters of their own life.

What I find…not surprising I guess, but sad is that while a large percent of people would pull the lever only a small percent of people would pull the lever if they were the one on the other track. People not being at least as likely to pull the lever when they are at stake breaks all basic moral principles.

Then again, a sizeable minority wouldn't sacrifice their life savings for lives either, which means this portion of the respondents does not think the lives of strangers have value at all, or at least that they are not in any case responsible for lives other than their own. Which is interesting!

Jokes aside, I'm aware of my own moral weakness in this regard. The religion I was raised in - and I'm still a spiritual person - holds that suicide is the gravest of sins, but I don't have that high an opinion of my own life and its potential. The closer I am to the situation, and the more urgent it is, the more tempted I am. So I try to stay aloof, for the sake of those who love me, and out of my own instinct of self-preservation, which is a powerful force in most human beings.

If your mind was exactly like mine, and you were close enough to the situation to make the decision to sacrifice someone else for a group of strangers - and being tied to the tracks is pretty damn close - you would likely be willing to sacrifice yourself. But remember, someone must have tied me to the tracks in the first place for my life to be in danger. As I said in previous comments, in most cases I am, though inaction or stalling, attempting to save the life of the single person in the tracks - the person in the same position. I will not kill to save others, and attempting to not kill myself to save others is consistent with this position.

I would be useless as a soldier!

For instance:

- Being run over by a trolley is a highly improbable event

- Being run over by a vehicle (higher category in which trolleys are a part of) is a less improbable event

- Dying of a very specific form of cancer which destroyed an organ is a highly improbable event

- Dying of cancer is less improbable

In the scenario for organ donation, what if the recipient had an improbable reason for needing the organ?

As far as my own views, I don't know if the tragicness/one-offness/improbability of the cause of death factors much in my decision-making. Though, I do think there's probably a good argument for reducing active suffering (that I haven't fully thought out).

The only moment in the scenario that matters is when you've made your choice and as others have said: it's binary. You pull the lever or you don't. The moral act is in making the choice, not what comes after. In that moment of choice you've expressed a hierarchy of your values.

Now, you might value most highly your own mental well-being, and making the most of that by rationalizing to yourself that you didn't actually make the choice that you just made. You might value your social standing or legal disposition the highest and make the choice accordingly. etc.

Of course, the scenario itself is a bit silly and not the kind of everyday living guidance that one will most likely have thought deeply about in anything than abstract moralistic terms. It's pretty rare to face that sort of scenario with that kind of consequence.

For one thing, in the real world if the trolley is close and moving fast then you have little time to think and observe and high uncertainty, but if the trolley is distant and slow then you have lots of time to try calling other bystanders, untie or rescue people from the track instead. So the more your choice is constrained down to just moving the lever or not, the higher uncertainty and less clear the situation is.

And in the real world it's more likely that a group of young people would tie some shop mannekins to a track for a laugh, or a film studio would tie props to a track, than that a moustache-twirling villain would tie some real people to a track. There is uncertainty in simply believing what you see; seeing five people tied to train tracks and about to die and being convinced they are real people, would have me thinking I must be dreaming.

I answered "no pull" to every one except the one where the express goal was pranking the trolley driver (and no implied harm from pulling). This is apparently an unpopular opinion, but the only one I can reconcile with my own concept of responsibility.

For example, it wouldn’t be wrong if someone forced you to steal a package of bubblegum or else they would kill your family and you decided to steal the bubblegum instead of inaction. In this case, it’s better to think of it as the act of saving your family and the extortionist caused the gum to be stolen.

Every day people go through this type of extortion-limited choice when, for example, a couple experiences an ectopic pregnancy where inaction would result in the death of the mother. You aren’t primarily choosing to kill your child, you are choosing to save your wife.

Inaction means both mother and fetus die. Action means just the fetus dies.

I don't see how you could possibly defend inaction. The fetus is going to die either way.

If you choose to do nothing and ignore the drowning child, are you really not morally responsible in any way for the child's death?

You may say that that is the case, but if you're responsible for everything, you may as well be responsible for nothing.

No, you are morally responsible for every evil happening right in front of you that you could immediately change with little risk to yourself.

For instance if you can't swim and the child is in the middle of the pond, I'd argue you aren't responsible because the risk is too great to yourself.

In fact due to the danger of drowning people pulling you under, I'd argue unless the child is in water shallow enough for you to stand in it's not your moral responsibility to save them.

Though in the situation, I'd probably feel compelled to save them anyway.

The problem with this is that you snuck a quantitative difference there and made it sound qualitative. How much risk is "little risk"? What if you could spend all your money and save N people from starvation? There's no risk to you, so are you responsible for their deaths if you don't do it?

What if the child is a bit less likely to pull you under? What if even less than that? Where do you draw the line?

You're never completely free of responsibility, there are just varying degrees.

Heroism (jumping in the pond and saving the child) doesn't imply moral responsibility for the situation.

Assuming the full question is:

> Is it not possible to be a passive observer of evil without being responsible to some degree?

No, with the caveats of being mentally and physically able to do something about it of course.

How can you impose a duty to fight evil when "evil" itself has no workable concrete definition?

I am obligated to my family and to myself. To provide for them as an example. But I would also be able to fly across the world and feed a starving child, in theory. But my obligation to my own family, and myself outweighs that. There would also be risks to the journey. Consequences with those actions as well.

If you say that proximity does not imply morality, where are you drawing the line? Would family friends and job duties encompass it? Certainly you can’t say that helping your child implies you are responsible for the whole world.

That is my personal take on it. We are all living in sin, in reality we are all full of shit and have only a veneer of ethics.

A trolley switch operator has explicitly opted in to the responsibility, and consents to same. A bystander has not.

This is why the famous internet video of the trolley problem acted out in the real world was required to offer post-experiment psychological counseling to the test subjects. They had not consented to being placed in a position of responsibility for life safety.

So many of these questions are artificial, and it’s interesting how the legal system gets involved, but to a certain extent I think these questions are meant to describe a persons moral position outside of societies judgement of them. In many of these situations, it’s life and randomness that is putting these people into those situation, not producers of internet videos. I guess if you don’t feel bad your not morally responsible, but if someone was in distress I would feel _compelled_ to act.

I assume by compelled you mean by human forces but I can’t help but compare it to the notion that chance and ‘destiny’ often violate our consent, and compell us to action.

As Henry David Thoreau said:

It is not man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

It's not your duty to fix the world. It's not even your duty to optimize the outcomes of the world as best as you could. The world is not in your hands. There was one trolly problem on this page where everything was blurred, but in the real world you don't remotely get clean problem statements at all, let alone clean outcomes. Not only are the outcomes profoundly unknowable, but the world is full of other people pulling their own levers!

To illustrate it, maybe he should have added one trolley problem where you were given the classic #1 description, but regardless of what you picked, the opposite happened. Or you got a random pick from one of the other people on the site. Or one where a third, entirely unexpected thing happened.

Classic appeal to authority. The above quotation contains grand declarations with no supporting logic or evidence. Just because Henry David Thoreau said it doesn't make it true.

> in the real world you don't remotely get clean problem statements at all, let alone clean outcomes. Not only are the outcomes profoundly unknowable, but the world is full of other people pulling their own levers!

The outcomes of inaction are equally as "profoundly unknowable" as the outcomes of taking action. From an "unintended consequences" perspective, it's a wash. So we might as well focus on the first order known consequences, which are pretty clear.

If we're going down the road of appealing to authority, I'm partial to "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"

> The outcomes of inaction are equally as "profoundly unknowable" as the outcomes of taking action.

Absolutely.

> From an "unintended consequences" perspective, it's a wash.

Indeed. That's exactly what I said.

> So we might as well focus on the first order known consequences

Sure. Or we might not. Either is permissible because...

> which are pretty clear.

That's where you've been lied to. And the site author absolutely should have added an example where the description didn't match up with what happened at all.

You're not running the train, nor own the railway, you didn't bind the people on the rails. You just happen to be there, and can perhaps improve the outcome.

In case the worst outcome happens because of your inaction, the biggest moral fault lies on those who created the situation in the first place. (If you're looking at a bank robbery and don't push the alarm button, you have some moral responsibility, but the robbers are the villains.)

When you take action, you become part of the situation and take full responsibility of the outcome.

So, no, I don't think the choice are morally symetrical. Taking action is morally a high risk high return strategy, while inaction is low risk mild returns (best case is you did nothing and that was the right choice, so you could have been absent, it wouldn't have made a difference)

True. Yet some large subset of people seem to highly value plausible deniability in their own head - they fear more having to think about the one person they kill by pulling the lever vs. just feeling like they can ignore the 5 dead because they did nothing, expecting that they can say that they had nothing to do with it.

Also seems like they can't recognize the inherent limitations of the situation -someone's already dead,you're just trying to make a least-worst choice,and I've seen many who fail to recognize such situations and just think that a good option must be available when it isn't, and that delusion ends up causing the worst outcome.

People choose inaction all the time. When we see a bully abusing a colleague... A homeless person on the street... A car aciddent. This is the metaphor.

That said, if you do actually care about consistency and the consequences, and don't care about what others think of you, then active/passive makes no difference.

... which brings up the real problem with these scenarios. In real life, the person at the switch would be trained. While that training is unlikely to include hypothetical scenarios created by philosophers, they would be expected to assess the safety of the act. This would put them into a position where the physical act of pulling or not pulling the switch would not, as you say, make much of a difference. They would have to answer for their actions down the line, even if their only answer was that it put them into an ethical conundum where they had insufficient information to assess the value of that one life verses five. A court may, or may not, accept that argument. It could be based upon the numbers (e.g. five lives are more valuable than one). It could be based upon the psychological impact of the decision upon the switch operator (e.g. a calculated sacrifice of one life may be frowned upon relative to an emotionally crippling indecision that led to the loss of five lives).

In turn, that brings up another issue with these artificial scenarios: they virtually always include follow-ups that are intended to raise doubt in decisions made. What if that one person was a child with their entire life ahead of them, and the five lives elderly people who have less to look forward to? What if that five included a "Hitler" plus four regular people, and the one was a "Gandhi" (i.e. the one slaughtered many orders of magnitude more people, and the one was revered for their regard of life)? Those are the sorts of things that are usually raised to justify indecision, even though they are highly unlikely.

For starters, real-world railroad (RR) switches are more complex than what you would understand from model RR sets, cartoons, old movies, and philosophy books. They are not binary, are often less than well-maintained, and may required upper-body strength that you don't have to successfully throw. The trolley may be going too fast for the track that you divert it onto, resulting in a derailment that kills everybody you were looking at - plus some more inside the trolley. Plus extra bystanders. Your well-intentioned passerby's understanding of which way the switch is actually pointing may be wrong. RR history has some famous (& deadly) accidents where an experienced RR employee misunderstood the situation, and threw a switch the wrong way.

Real-world, I certainly would not be touching the switch.

Fun to see how differently people approach these ones :)

This is a quite disturbing statement. So many psychopathic examples; If you were a doctor would you randomly kill healthy people with compatible organs to multiple patients? Or a researcher inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people to save millions later...

In fact we could simplify your statement further; The ends always justify the means., and so endorsing all terrorism and war, even genocide; whenever the ends is enough peace to make a net positive.

So it is to be human :)

> If you were a doctor would you randomly kill healthy people

No.

> researcher inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people to save millions later

If it was guaranteed to save millions later, I'd think about it, if we remove the "gruesome" and "healthy people" parts. But "inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people" for the mere possibility of saving millions later? No.

It all depends on the context obvious, as life is never between two binary choices or black VS white.

I don't think it's so disturbing to wanting to help a bigger part. I (and many others) already do this constantly by protesting and striking. Strikes generally impacts people who don't actually have anything to do with what you're striking against (example: when doctors strike, it hurts sick people), but in order for you and your colleagues to make a wage you can actually survive on, it does sometimes justify the means.

> > No.

Why not? It's clearly a different approach than your original to turn the lever to kill a person in order to save 5 other people. So what changed?

> researcher inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people to save millions later

> > If it was guaranteed to save millions later, I'd think about it, if we remove the "gruesome" and "healthy people" parts.

So you're willing to turn the lever to save 5 people because it's seemingly obvious those 5 people will therefore be saved (reasonable to me) and you see no problem killing 1 person, to reference your previous post, not only you would do that, you would easily break the law to do that! However, when it comes to killing thousands, in order to save millions, so the "net gain" is now not 4 but millions, and it's no longer the same order of magnitude, but it's a difference of 3 orders of magnitude, even if we remove the "gruesome" and "healthy people" parts, you will only "think about it"???? :D

> It all depends on the context

It seems to me you don't care about the context when it comes to killing one person, but once the stakes are higher and involve thousands, you hesitate. So I too find it disturbing, not just that you don't want to treat people individually and just consider the outcome of the trolley dilemma as +4 gain, rather than killing to save, but also the automatic disregard to individual rights creates a portrait of a person very dangerous to the society.

I'm also quite surprised that someone could imply overthinking as a negative on HN. Gaining a deeper understanding of something, even modern philosophy, is intellectually useful. You should not under-think things, it does you a disservice to skip over the flaws and paradoxes in the world.

Also, I think there’s a tendency in philosophy to end up in places you just don’t need to go. Zeno says it’s impossible to walk to a destination; Diogenes counters by walking to a destination.

Sometimes a trolley problem is just a trolley problem, not a side effect from some universal theory of everything.

A law that says “don’t pull this lever” or whatever is different than “don’t kill a healthy person and harvest his organs”.

That has literally been humanities M.O. for thousands of years.

History is written by the victors, and somehow the books start off with mentions of moral superiority. Strange that.

"He unified a warring country, bringing an end to a century of strife and violence!"

"His conquest allowed for the formation of a national identity, bringing the people together."

etc. etc.

On the other hand, you seem to be arguing that the means justify the end. So you'd let all the terrorism and war, even genocide, go ahead if it took not having to stain your hands to stop it

On the killing 1 person to save 5 lives example, it seems like your answer is "I wouldn't do it", which for the people actually being killed is equivalent to killing 5 people to save 1 person ( but what really matters is that you weren't the one personally killing the 5 people )

In my estimation, inaction only seems to not be an action, because people are afraid of the idea that they are causally connected with outcomes in which things are killed - they want to avoid tit for tat game theoretic follow on concerns that aren't part of the game definition but might be implied by it. I think for myself, I discount this concern, because I assume policies of mercy are preferred to policies of judgement - the world is so complex and hard and some err isn't just reasonable, but inevitable. Not allowing for mercy in response to harm from decisions seems more likely to trap in tit for tat. So intent ends up mattering to me much more than the outcome when I consider the follow-on games that are implied.

Yes. Alas, we humans ( including myself ) are quite good at not feeling responsible if the issue isn't staring us in the face

A student not doing their homework is an action, correct? That is why their grade is penalized, for not acting.

If someone doesn't turn on the fan in the bathroom during a shower and the walls get moldy, that is an inaction that the person will be blamed for!

This is always my problem with the trolley problem. Are we supposed to take second order effects into account?

For example, if I destroy the trolley that is killing 5 people over 30 years with CO2, does another trolley get built to replace it?

Or ‘kill 5 people now or send the trolley into the future 100 years and kill 5 people then’. Is it 100% guaranteed the trolley kills them then? Or can I assume there is a tiny chance they figure out time travel and can make preparations?

Or the ‘stuck on an eternal loop’. Does this mean true eternity and are the people in the trolley immortal? Or just for 70 years?

Or do the passengers take their cars instead releasing far more CO2?

1) The lever is in an intermediate state, that will cause the trolley to set into effect some global catastrophe, and therefore must be pulled in one of two directions. This may be a rather unconvincing scenario.

2) Have two trollies, each running down their own track, and the operator has a choice which of two levers---only one of which can be reached in time---to pull to detour a trolley to a harmless side track.

> Implied legal (and moral) liabilities made a difference in my choices.

Serves to muddy the two. I'm saying if we want to consider the moral option the legal isn't relevant.

I maintain that the real answer to the trolley problem involves an overwhelming personal struggle that is so traumatizing that it transforms the hypothetical subject into a vigilante -- a hero who devotes themselves to carrying out personal justice against the nefarious evil-doers who keep setting up these trolley problems. The problem is the Joker, ergo the solution is Batman. Dismissed!

This is actually done in the game Dr. Trolly's Problem[0]. This technicality is interesting enough such that a streamer creates his own internal rule around it to handle issues of morality[1].

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/773830/Dr_Trolleys_Proble...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dabWpa-FwUo

For cases where you did nothing, you did not kill anyone. The trolley did.

Death happens to everyone eventually. No way around that, at least not yet. The most I can do with a trolley switch is possibly affect the timing.

It seems to me that any time I pull the lever to direct the train toward a person (as opposed to toward other trains or lobsters or money), I'm causing the death of whoever is on the other track to happen sooner. I'm killing them.

But if I don't pull the lever, if I don't intervene, I'm allowing death, which was already coming, to come to whoever's on the original track.

As a principle, the distinction between killing and allowing to die really starts to make itself felt when we're talking about the difference between, say, turning off a respirator to allow someone to die, versus actively euthanizing someone by administering medication to stop their heart, even though in this case, both involve an action.

To me, those aren't the same act. There's no moral obligation to try to extend life as long as technologically possible. Death comes and that's OK. But there is an obligation not to cause death, and an obligation not to pursue it as its own end.

Given that the way the problems are presented as if the decider is an innocent bystander, perhaps inaction is the most sensible choice.

For me there is, if there is something to save (i.e. not brain dead).

Some people will accept the moral responsibility, while others will say their inaction absolves them of legal responsibility.

Yes, it totally is a question about moral responsibility. But it's still not called "killing" by any reasonable definition of the word.

It'd be fine if it said "death count" or even "you oversaw x deaths". But not "you killed" or "you caused x deaths", because you didn't.

Different cultures would probably have different answers to this question.

As long as the trolley moves, you can switch back.

While I have mixed opinions on the game (literally mixed, i.e. both good and bad, not a euphemism for bad), it provides more uneasy emotion than any other trolley problem game I played.

The "bad" part is that it is a paid game, working only on Windows, while at the quality of a Flash game from the 2000s from Newgrounds. The good part is that it is at the creativity level of a Flash game from the 2000s from Newgrounds.

For example 2 buttons, with a timer to the side, which when it hits 0, rolls a dice and picks a random outcome.

Does the above now make someone want to choose?

If not is there any mechanism that does not forcibly require a decision (ie just stating you must make a choice or place the chooser in a situation where a choice is a functional requirement, such as you're in a locked room and cannot leave until you press a button).

Goes to show how easily the context and exact wording of a question can sway people's opinions.

It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live, so I think of trolleys as philosophical constructs that don't have a real existence.

Actively making a real life or death decision is quite a lot different than reasoning though a game.

If you are in a burning, sinking ship and all going to die for sure, it's still immoral to rape someone.

So the argument still stands, the difference in the consequences, when considered outside of any context, is simply not worth the mental effort to figure out if the lever should be pulled. The exercise is only interesting because it provokes to think about real life scenarios.

Edit: On the other side, if you really decide to not take more context, you just destroyed the only existing trolley of the universe.

Does anyone really still call them that? A trolley is not a tram, it's a trolley, and harkens back from last century. In the US, some people call them trams, most of us call them trains. Portland does have a special version they like to call a streetcar, though. Functionally a light rail train, but runs in normal lanes of traffic.

Yeah, when I clicked on the link I was hoping that finally someone had solved the problem of never having a pound coin to unlock trolleys at the supermarket.

I mean, it seems like it's the same trolley that have run over a lot of people for the previous 19 levels, why wouldn't I want to decommission such bloodthirsty trolley?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

The gist is that we design our streets in such a way that people drive dangerously fast on them when they’re not slowed down by congestion, and during the pandemic that’s exactly what happened. Some other countries (particularly in Western Europe) take a safe systems approach to street design and did not have the same uptick in fatalities that we did.

"“They were just sick and tired of kids being killed in the streets,” says Jason Slaughter"

Keep existing public transit system that contributes to X deaths per year from pollution an accidents, or...

...pull the lever and...

Replace it with a public transit system of bloodthirsty trolleys. There is zero pollution! Only 1% of X deaths per year from accidents! Just one catch: all the accidents involve the trolley morphing into a scary mechanical beast and biting a random person's head off.

But more seriously, I just realised that this is actually an argument that's often used against various environmental measures. People argue against wind turbines because they kill birds, ignoring the fact that pollution from fossil fuel kills far more, and birds are killed in larger numbers by other causes (cars, windows, cats). But somehow inaction seems more moral to some people if that action still leads to some deaths. Same with a multitude of other social issues.

More people were in favor of pulling the lever than there were in favor of pushing someone onto the tracks. This indeed hints that the more direct action, the harsher the judgement.

However I did not take into account the CO2 emissions and possible industrial accidents at the trolly factory or trolly materials mines.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/aug/17/car-scra...

Taking into account future discounting, it's probably almost never a good idea.

I would argue that it shouldn't factor into the equation. The polluting trolley will be replaced sooner or later, anyway. You're just moving the date forward.

The catch is that the argument could be made every year, with a new, more efficient trolley replacing the previous. In which case the construction costs obviously need to be considered, and it wouldn't be worth to spend 100 CO2 to save 10.

My feeling was, if I let the trolley go, it can be destroyed later. It will be harder to undo the decision to destroy it. Who knows, maybe the transportation capabilities it offers can save lives by rushing people to hospital. I just don't believe that pulling the switch and destroying a vehicle is really the only possible opportunity to stop emissions that will get released over 30 whole years. So I didn't pull it.

I assume the information they have told me is the only thing relevant and everything else is equal.

Of course many philosophers disagree and arguably terrible things were done with such mindset[3]. The point I am trying to make is that if you need context then you cannot have a universal rational decision, thus you will be imposing your own morals possibly over others. You might be fine with it, but now you relativized morals.

PS: I highly recommend the Great Lectures on Audible on philosophy. Specifically "Why Evil Exists" and "The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas".

The first one is more on the religious part, but provides great background on moral and ethical thought starting with the Gilgamesh all the way to XX century psychology.

The second is a great over view of western thought, with philosophical counter arguments on thinkers I never heard of, but which i find essential to help form one's thought on how Western society must progress. That book changed my life due to the sheer exposure of captivating ideas even sometimes conflicting. I loved Rawls but consider myself a freedom guy. Now my thought is clearer: How can we find a way to measure that further distribution would harm the most disadvantaged? This is still open but a more practical question, that i can use on evaluating certain concrete policies. Example:

In Portugal the minimum wage has been increased to the point it matches the average salary. A person who did not train to specialize and works in a coffee shop earns similarly to an engineer that spent his first 24 years studying. This is harmful because without differences in rewards, higher difficulty but needed professions will not have enough practitioners. Therefore society as a whole will suffer because it lacks trained specialists to improve the untrained coffee worker's life. "Bam, simple as that". It soothes me in the face of the torrent of events and ideologies pushed upon me all the time.

[1] "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Eichmann

In my opinion, people who would like to study engineering would do so not so because of what they are paid (the situation today), but because of their genuine interest.

On further reflection, it seems ludicrous to believe that that hardest professions are the most paid. The average CS job pays obscenely well, but is relatively trivial. Primary healthcare providers, essential services workers and so on are severely underpaid.

I understand the willingness to not discredit someone's hard work, but some skills are legitimately more complex than others.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the hardest professions are the most paid.

Training takes time, and often unpaid. A coffee shop worker will immediately get rewarded while the engineer will not. If they will be equally compensated then the engineer is at a disadvantage.

> In my opinion, people who would like to study engineering would do so not so because of what they are paid (the situation today), but because of their genuine interest.

Marx said the same. If the people would be free they would produce out of their heart's desire. As it did not turn out that way the party needed to force the worker's desire into them. Literally to free them by force (freedom by force is another concept in itself :)).

In fact, I don’t see why the ability to have a good standard of living should be predicated on your profession in the first place.

The fact that engineering training is… unpaid as you say seems to put people who cannot afford to not make money for rent, food, etc. at a clear disadvantage. Those already rich (and able to afford unpaid training) would just get richer if they are paid more than an “untrained” worker.

Because the lack of payment is the trainee's quid-pro-quo. It makes the trainee a counterpart in the training investment. In several countries in Europe to varying degrees and forms, the state pays for the training. It pays the professors, facilities and can even pay scholarships so that a disadvantaged background is not an impediment to such training(tackling the inequality issue you mention). I am not aware of any institution/state paying even a minimum wage up to master level.

Then there is the issue of difficulty, where it is clear that learning to serve a coffee mug requires less effort than learning advanced calculus. If you pay/reward the student engineer the same as the coffee waiter, you will likely still have fewer engineers[1]. Fewer engineers will produce fewer useful infrastructure or wealth to redistribute that the coffee waiter could benefit from. Therefore according to Rawls having them earning the same would be unfair.

> In fact, I don’t see why the ability to have a good standard of living should be predicated on your profession in the first place. It is not. It is predicated on the the value the profession generates.

[1] The reward/base-line ratio feels like the reaction coefficient, where you use a higher reward to make an unlikely reaction become possible :)

PS: It took me a good while and rewrites to come up with a satisfactory answer. Thanks for the comment.

High minimum and median salaries are usually good for engineers as it requires more productive companies which requires more engineers. When workers are cheap few wants to pay for expensive systems.

In this case, I did pull the lever, because it could be replaced by an electric trolley. But if killing the trolley means more cars and more car accidents and CO2, then of course we should keep the trolley. But if we ignore context and just look at kill 5 people or kill the inanimate object responsible for killing those 5 people, the answer is obvious. (But did I really ignore the context there?)

Others also have important subconscious context. Sacrifice 5 elderly people to save one baby. How elderly are they? Are they so elderly they're just waiting for death, or do they each still have more than 20 years of relatively healthy life left? And thanks to modern health care, that baby now has a very good chance to survive until adulthood, but 100-200 years ago, that chance was only 50%. Maybe not worth sacrificing 5 people for. I think that one was the hardest.

(My friends may be somewhat worried to learn that I had surprisingly little trouble sacrificing my best friend for 5 strangers. But really, I'd prefer to kill whoever keeps tying these people to the track.)

Actually streetcars are kind of a bargain because they use mostly existing infrastructure. But that’s the downside too, because they can easily get stuck in traffic. The LA Red Car system died in the end because without its own right-of-way, it was worse than cars, less convenient than buses.

After some deliberation, my muncipality recently decided against a streetcar-system and for a bus-based system with electric buses, right-of-way everywhere and dedicated bus-lanes where possible (nearly everywhere).

It worked out really well.