Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Absurd Trolley Problems

neal.fun

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 951 posts

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#541

Post by capableweb »

sneak wrote: post #530
capableweb wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I didn't consider any legal liabilities at all, and would easily break the law in order to sacrifice one person in trade for five people. I also didn't consider doing "nothing", not pulling the lever was also an act, and I didn't "see" any options doing nothing. Fun to see how differently people approach these ones :)

On what basis do you assert that not pulling is also an act? It seems to me that you are asserting inaction == action which, to me, is false.

I can either pull the lever or I can not pull the lever. Choosing to not pulling the lever when I know I can save others, would be me making the choice to not saving others.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#542

Post by galangalalgol »

sneak wrote: post #529
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally perhaps, but morally, I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference. 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 sec…

Not my circus, not my monkeys. I don't think I can be held morally responsible for inaction in any circumstance. We didn't start the fire etc. 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.

Interesting! Do you disagree with the legal traditions that penalize doctors for failure to render aid, even when not at work? Or perhaps that isvlike saying you are actually the (or at least a) trolley switch operator, you just aren't in duty, in which case maybe your position obligates action when it is warranted?

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#543

Post by 1ark »

thrown_22 wrote: post #148
everfree wrote: post #98

I'm surprised to see the popular answer to Question 3. > Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, but then your life savings will be destroyed. What do you do? Over 70% chose to pull the lever and destroy their life savings. People die of preventable causes in developing countries today. By choosing not to donate your life savings today to help them, you ar…

People want to feel like good people. A rather hilarious example is asking if they are against bestiality. Pretty much everyone is. Asking why in more liberal circles gets you an answer along the lines of "it hurts the animals" a lot of the time. Then asking if it hurts animals more than eating them usually results in a ban.

It hurts the liberal ego more than anything.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#544

Post by __s »

Aeolun wrote: post #423
mcv wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that one made it clear how much context matters. These problems pretend there's no context, but we always look at them with some subconscious context in mind. 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…

Eh, it doesn’t matter how old the people are, really. They have all already gotten to experience the joy of life. The baby hasn’t, so they have the most to lose.

It does matter. Five young people have been fully invested in & will now produce value for the next few decades. Whereas a baby has still not been fully invested in, years of education etc, so they're cheaper to replace

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#545

Post by twelvedogs »

paxys wrote: post #12

Level 20 was weird. It was a choice between letting a trolley run as normal ("emits CO2, kills 3 people in accidents over 30 years") or running it into a brick wall and decommissioning it. For some reason more people picked the latter. So, they just dislike public transit? What about the emissions and death rate when everyone switches to cars instead? Goes to show how easily the context and exact wording of a questio…

i wouldn't do it to a real world trolley as it would cost a lot to replace something that is better in many respects to the alternatives but i wasn't taking it too seriously and they only gave the trolley negative traits within the question

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#546

Post by mensetmanusman »

sneak wrote: post #529
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally perhaps, but morally, I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference. 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 sec…

Not my circus, not my monkeys. I don't think I can be held morally responsible for inaction in any circumstance. We didn't start the fire etc. 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.

I used to think like you until I learned about how ethical frameworks are different when you are being extorted. This trolley problem is a class of extortion because your choices are very limited and out of your control.

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.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#547

Post by Helmut10001 »

From an ethical point of view, the biggest problem for me was when there were two bad choices to be weighted against each other, e.g. 1 person on a track dies against 5 persons on the other track. In most of these cases, I "did nothing" - because I don't want to play god and I knew where this leads: There are ethical edge cases that I definitly do not want to think about. I am not super convinced about this in hindsight: E.g. Triages exist in hospitals to help doctors find the least worse outcome among many bad options. Most, this involves metrics such as number of dead patients, or number of lived years lost (e.g. prefer to safe children before elderly).

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#548

Post by mensetmanusman »

SahAssar wrote: post #434
baron816 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the trolly also reducing carbon emissions by killing so many people? With enough of these questions, it will be able to reduce the world’s population to zero, at which point there should be no carbon emissions from humans.

Decomposition emits carbon, right? Let's fire everyone into interplanetary space to be sure we solved the problem.

You can run the trolley into a giant vat of molten glass that would pour over all the dead bodies of humanity and freeze them from decomposing into the atmosphere. (note that the energy used to create this large vat of glass was from renewables)

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#549

Post by bobthechef »

capableweb wrote: post #506
praptak wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actual law strongly discerns between action and inaction. For example the Polish penal code says you can only be criminally liable for a result of inaction only if you had a specific legal obligation to prevent it.

That's ok, it wouldn't change my mind anyway. If I can prevent more people from getting hurt, I'd be willing to break the law and take the punishment.

No post body was provided.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#550

Post by pizza234 »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #522
rax0m wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the problems under the assumption that "pulling the lever" was an act, while doing nothing was not acting. Implied legal (and moral) liabilities made a difference in my choices.

Legally perhaps, but morally, I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference. 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 sec…

> I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference.

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 :))

Post reply on HN