851–860 of 951 posts
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You would enjoy Peter Singer's writing. You are killing children by not donating your wealth to help them.
This seems to me to be the logical conclusion of the "you must pull" framework.
As a compatibilist, I don't know what to do with level 28 ("Oh no! A trolley problem is playing out before you. Do you actually have a choice in this situation? Or has everything been predetermined since the universe began"). Both statements can be true! Although I guess that means there is no choice :(
If you choose to click "everything has been predetermined", you still have made a choice. -- Rush (paraphrased)
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They aren't zero-context; all the value that you attach to a human life is context. If you don't grant anything else, you are just choosing one cartoon line-drawing over another. Certainly you are free to look at it this way, but it isn't really a useful point of view in a discussion about the hypothetical consequences.
But they're not... real. What someone says they might do in a trolley problem situation vs what a person would actually do I would assume basically have nothing to do with each other. Actively making a real life or death decision is quite a lot different than reasoning though a game.
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True, I imagine the next course of action would be something like "do nothing" — continue straight, try to be predictable, hope that other people in the situation can react accordingly.
If we are still doing the trolley problem it would be “the brakes have failed, and … do you continue straight and definitely hit A, or turn the wheel and definitely hit B”.
But when it comes to self-driving cars, the answer is that it doesn't really matter.
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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…
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.
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Enough context is lacking. That's kind of what makes it all absurd. Take the cat vs. lobsters. Did you know felis catus is responsible for the extinction of some 37 species of birds world wide mostly due to colonization. They're not indigenous predators to the North Americas and enjoy the protections and long life afforded by their proximity to humans while killing for entertainment. Lobsters on the other hand? Usefu…
If the lobsters are tied to a trolley track, they aren't long for this world anyway. Trolley tracks aren't exactly a lobster's native habitat. Untie the cat and it'll, likely, be a-ok.
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Wouldn't sacrifice any humans for a billion monkeys
If you were a monkey, would you sacrifice a billion humans to save a monkey? Or equivalently, would you sacrifice a billion humans to save a robot that's twice as sentient as the average human?
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Wouldn't sacrifice any humans for a billion monkeys
Would you save a monkey whose body contains antibodies for the cure for cancer for humans (or AIDS/HIV/whatever), or 1 human?
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The problem is to pick a timeout long enough to allow the player to at least read through the description and understand the situation, but not so long that players gets impatient and pick the “action” because they don’t want to wait (and there are no real stakes on the website). A timeout could distort the results more than the current version.
You could click a button when done reading, and then be presented with a 4s timer counting down to "don't pull the lever"