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Absurd Trolley Problems

neal.fun

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Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#781

Post by 1602 »

zild3d wrote: post #571
cortic wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [I] would easily break the law in order to sacrifice one person in trade for five people. 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 furt…

The opposite can also be seen as quite disturbing. Deciding to not save the lives of (net) 4 people, because you don't want to break a law

This is not the opposite here. The opposite is to not save lives of some people at the expense of taking life of another, i.e. the ends do not justify the means. It is a moral dilemma and whether you break or not break a law does not matter nor should it exclusively influence a decision here (I mean to do harm, just because you abide orders - that's immoral).

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#782

Post by thegrimmest »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #697
stavros wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are morally responsible for the child's death, you are morally responsible for basically every evil in the world right now, since you didn't do everything in your power to prevent all of them. You may say that that is the case, but if you're responsible for everything, you may as well be responsible for nothing.

> If you are morally responsible for the child's death, you are morally responsible for basically every evil in the world right now 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 your…

Why does your presence/proximity carry moral responsibility? Is it not possible to be a passive observer of evil?

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

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#783

Post by NineStarPoint »

FFRefresh wrote: post #696
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did notice that. I'd pull the lever if I was the one on the tracks, since in that case I am not robbing someone else of their life through my decision - my life is my own to sacrifice. At that point it's best to save five. 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…

Right now, non-hypothetically, would you be willing to donate your internal organs to those who will die without them, even if it meant you will not survive yourself?

A perfectly moral person might? But I also think there’s a difference of kind in dealing with tragic one-off events (Such as someone getting run over by a trolly) and dealing with normal course of life problems (illness and bodily degradation over time).

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#784

Post by smeej »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #755
smeej wrote: post #744

The combo tradeoff between saving tens of thousands of lives of people who had, on average, 6-12 months of life expectancy, versus potentially shortening the lives of millions or billions of people by only months or weeks, and not seeing those effects for 70-80 years, seems to have been part of the covid shutdown tradeoff calculation. Granted, it has all the additional complication of the uncertainty of the real worl…

Being 70 yo makes you high risk wrt Covid, but it doesn’t mean you have a life expectancy of 6-12 months. You must confuse with terminally ill cancer patients. Where are your numbers coming from?

"High risk," yes, but when they were reporting on people who were actually dying of covid, for most of the first year, the data was that it was people with comorbidities, people who already had significant health conditions. It wasn't the 70yo marathoners who were dying. It was the ones who had CHF or COPD and obesity who were. (OF COURSE there are exceptions to this, but the majority of people who were dying were not otherwise healthy.)

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#785

Post by fleischhauf »

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 just assumed it would be replaced with some better trolley. After all which barbaric people would just not have any public transport at all?

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#786

Post by smeej »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #748
smeej wrote: post #744

The combo tradeoff between saving tens of thousands of lives of people who had, on average, 6-12 months of life expectancy, versus potentially shortening the lives of millions or billions of people by only months or weeks, and not seeing those effects for 70-80 years, seems to have been part of the covid shutdown tradeoff calculation. Granted, it has all the additional complication of the uncertainty of the real worl…

Why is saving grandma going to cost months of life expectancy to other people ?

Stress. The kind of social, personal, financial stress people experienced, especially the "essential workers" who had to continue working in person, or people who were already struggling to make ends meet who suddenly didn't get paid what they were expecting, went through significant life stress events.

Or around the world, millions of additional people have been added to the ranks of the "food insecure," who now run increased risk of malnourishment and starvation.

There's certainly an extremely privileged cohort, probably heavily represented on HN, for whom transitioning to WFH was no big deal or actually a benefit, but we're still feeling the effects of supply chain disruptions even in the wealthiest countries, and there are millions (billions?) of people whose lives are much more severely impacted.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#787

Post by vkou »

csours wrote: post #669
vkou wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the elimination of the societal cohesion and trust was the product of a cynical, self-serving multi-decade political movement and propaganda campaign, and had only a little to do with pulling the lever, but the people who pulled the lever got most of the blame for it?

What if pulling the lever lets you win this election but 5% of the voters despise the political process?

Well, you obviously shouldn't pull it, because if you do, your opponents will use it as a precedent to do the same thing in the future.

You then lose the election, and they start pulling the lever over and over again.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#788

Post by noasaservice »

Tepix wrote: post #676
noasaservice wrote: post #609

I chose the route of harm minimization, given this forces an answer. My kill count was 44. We really should have 3 answers: 'refuse to answer', 'pull lever', and 'dont pull lever'. Don't pull lever- is a choice that you make, and acknowledges the intent in doing that action. Refusing to answer- is not accepting the responsibility forced on you. As a comparison, it's when some terrorist on a movie says to someone "You…

> I chose the route of harm minimization As determined by the kill count? But what about time remaining alive? I.e. killing a 95-year old vs killing two children.

> But what about time remaining alive?

That metric isn't calculated, nor is it in good scientific form to use a gross estimate as a fact.

I've also always rejected the trolley problem to begin with. Rarely is anything similar to that ethical/logical problem.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#789

Post by com2kid »

stavros wrote: post #647
hyper_reality wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To pick an extreme but well-known thought experiment. You are walking past a pond, and see a child drowning in it. You glance around and there is nobody else nearby. You could easily jump in and save the child. It will certainly die if you do not. 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?

If you are morally responsible for the child's death, you are morally responsible for basically every evil in the world right now, since you didn't do everything in your power to prevent all of them. You may say that that is the case, but if you're responsible for everything, you may as well be responsible for nothing.

> If you are morally responsible for the child's death, you are morally responsible for basically every evil in the world right now, since you didn't do everything in your power to prevent all of them.

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.

Re: Absurd Trolley Problems

#790

Post by amohn9 »

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…

There's a version of the problem that tries to highlight this:

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?

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