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The Trolley Problem Problem

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Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#31

Post by msla »

arkades wrote: post #11
msla wrote: post #5

The problem here is reminiscent of the classic short story "The Cold Equations": A young woman is fooling around near a space ship and ends up accidentally stowing away on a craft needed to move serum to a colony in the grips of disease. The mass on the ship is accounted for to the gram (the gramme, even!) so her excess mass means the ship no longer has the fuel to make it to the colony. The dashing space hero has to…

> They'd kill a whole town in a fit of fascist pique. That's a new one to me. Any sources I can read up on that?

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

Anthropoid was the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

> More than 13,000 people were arrested, including Jan Kubiš' girlfriend Anna Malinová, who died in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. First Lieutenant Adolf Opálka's aunt Marie Opálková was executed in the Mauthausen camp on 24 October 1942; his father Viktor Jarolím was also killed.[52][53] According to one estimate, 5,000 people were murdered in the reprisals.[54]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre

> In February 1944, the SS Division Das Reich was stationed in the Southern French town of Valence-d'Agen,[1] north of Toulouse, waiting to be resupplied with new equipment and fresh troops. Following the Allied Normandy landings in June 1944, the division was ordered north to help stop the Allied advance. One of its units was the 4th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment ("Der Führer"). Its staff included regimental commander SS-Standartenführer Sylvester Stadler, SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann commanding the 1st Battalion and SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Weidinger, Stadler's designated successor who was with the regiment for familiarisation. Command passed to Weidinger on 14 June.[2]

> Early on the morning of 10 June 1944, Diekmann informed Weidinger that he had been approached by two members of the Milice, a collaborator paramilitary force of the Vichy Regime. They claimed that a Waffen-SS officer was being held prisoner by the Resistance in Oradour-sur-Vayres, a nearby village. The captured officer was claimed to be SS-Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, commander of the 2nd SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion (also part of the Das Reich division). He may have been captured by the Maquis du Limousin the day before.

> On 10 June, Diekmann's battalion sealed off Oradour-sur-Glane and ordered everyone within to assemble in the village square to have their identity papers examined. This included six non-residents who happened to be bicycling through the village when the SS unit arrived. The women and children were locked in the church, and the village was looted. The men were led to six barns and sheds, where machine guns were already in place.

[snip]

> Several days later, the survivors were allowed to bury the 642 dead inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane who had been killed in just a few hours. Adolf Diekmann said the atrocity was in retaliation for the partisan activity in nearby Tulle and the kidnapping of an SS commander, Helmut Kämpfe.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#32

Post by msla »

sukilot wrote: post #7
msla wrote: post #5

The problem here is reminiscent of the classic short story "The Cold Equations": A young woman is fooling around near a space ship and ends up accidentally stowing away on a craft needed to move serum to a colony in the grips of disease. The mass on the ship is accounted for to the gram (the gramme, even!) so her excess mass means the ship no longer has the fuel to make it to the colony. The dashing space hero has to…

You reject science fiction for being too unrealistic in its imperfect space travel engineering, meanwhile NASA blew up two crewed Space Shuttles by launching shuttles that they knew had failed components.

The point is less that I find it unimaginable that space organizations have flaws, and more that those flaws spoil the supposed lesson by diffusing the responsibility: The story only works if the young woman is entirely responsible for her own death, by placing herself in a position where the laws of physics and morality dictate she has to die to save many others. If she died because the NASA-equivalent was run by buffoons, the moral lesson is lost and she becomes a murder victim as opposed to an inadvertent suicide.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#33

Post by mcphage »

ls612 wrote: post #25
dereferenceddev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you train a chicken to pull a trolley lever, does it weigh on the conscious of the chicken whether they killed 1 chicken vs 5 chickens? I'm not a chicken so I don't really know.

I think he meant with humans pulling the lever and chickens dying.

I think the ethics of humans dying vs delicious chickens dying are pretty incomparable.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#34

Post by mcphage »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #10

The trolley problem is a non-problem. I don't know about you guys, but nobody I know is ever going to buy a car that might decide to kill them to save some stranger(s).

Very close analogues to the trolley problem exist. I remember reading about a hospital which replaced the staff that measured out drug prescriptions with a computerized system. It made far fewer mistakes but, critically, it did allow for some mistakes which human operators would have caught and corrected. When I read the article I remember being annoyed that they didn’t mention the trolley problem at all because it was an almost perfect analogue.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#35

Post by mc32 »

mcphage wrote: post #33
ls612 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he meant with humans pulling the lever and chickens dying.

I think the ethics of humans dying vs delicious chickens dying are pretty incomparable.

Of course, but I think you can still surface those ethics without people as the experimental subject. Get pacifists, vegans, what have you.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#36

Post by dvtrn »

dereferenceddev wrote: post #23
mc32 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of conceptual people you could experiment with real fish or chickens.

If you train a chicken to pull a trolley lever, does it weigh on the conscious of the chicken whether they killed 1 chicken vs 5 chickens? I'm not a chicken so I don't really know.

If one could train a chicken to pull or not pull a lever to save x amount of chicken lives, does it weigh on the conscience of the trainer that they’ve compelled a self-aware creature to kill one of its own kind?

(I’m not asking this to refute your point, it’s well met, I just found the opportunity to poke at the imaginary ethical elephant too much to resist, and no I’m not proud of it-those were good hens)

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#37

Post by IggleSniggle »

mc32 wrote: post #28
dereferenceddev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to be silly in pointing out the real reason why the trolley car experiment is supposed to have some challenge to it.

There are animals people have deep affection for and you’ll find great resistance to these experiments, never the less, I think you can get valid data from experimenting on “lower” animals.

The whole point of using a thought experiment is to gain intuitions about the "but what if it wasn't a person, but a chicken instead? Would that be equivalent? Why?" Ie, the value of the experiment is in the experiential learning of the attempt to arrive at the answer. At least, imho

Sure, you can do things that you consider evil just to see how you would really react to being presented with such an unpleasant binary choice, but if you chose to do it, was it in fact not evil to you, are you just pathological, or are you perhaps in toddlerhood, where you don't yet really have an intuition for your own relationship with causality, such as it is?

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#38

Post by ghaff »

baddox wrote: post #12
Sophistifunk wrote: post #10

The trolley problem is a non-problem. I don't know about you guys, but nobody I know is ever going to buy a car that might decide to kill them to save some stranger(s).

That seems overblown. Would you ever ride in a car with a driver that might sacrifice the lives of everyone in the car to save 1,000 people? I suspect that lots of people have actively made decisions while driving their own car that endangers their own life in order to potentially save the life of someone else.

I'm not sure I'd make that assumption. I'm sure lots of people have made a split-second reflexive decision to avoid hitting a person/people/deer in a collision that still carries some danger to themselves. I wonder how many have made a deliberate decision to drive off the road to considerable hazard (e.g. off a cliff) in order to avoid hitting someone at no danger to themselves.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#39

Post by efitz »

msla wrote: post #5

The problem here is reminiscent of the classic short story "The Cold Equations": A young woman is fooling around near a space ship and ends up accidentally stowing away on a craft needed to move serum to a colony in the grips of disease. The mass on the ship is accounted for to the gram (the gramme, even!) so her excess mass means the ship no longer has the fuel to make it to the colony. The dashing space hero has to…

Here’s a remake of the “Cold Equations” story:

https://youtu.be/-BL8GsHWtqc

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#40

Post by castratikron »

Stallman said it better:

The Trolley Problem poses this question: if a trolley is about to run over and kill five people standing on the tracks, and you can shunt it to a different track where it would only kill one person, should you do it? Or what if you could save those five by throwing a person near you onto the tracks; should you do it?

Many people feel intuitively that it would be wrong to throw that person onto the tracks, and an argument attributes this to a supposed essential difference between killing someone and deciding to let that person die.

I disagree. I too believe it would be wrong to throw that person onto the tracks, in real life, but not in the hypothetical trolley problems. There is no ethically significant difference between killing a person and letting the person die, if (as supposed in the trolley problems) there is no doubt that the death will occur.

The reason, in real life, why killing someone is ethically different from letting someone die is that real life is full of surprises: the person might not really die. If you kill him, his death is pretty certain (though not totally; just recently a man was hanged in Iran and survived). If you merely don't take action to save him, he might survive anyway. He might jump off the track, for instance, or someone might pull him off. All sorts of things might happen. Likewise, throwing the one person onto the track might not succeed in saving the other five; how could you possibly be sure it would? You might find that you had done nothing but cause one additional death. Thus, in real life it is a good principle to avoid actively killing someone now, even if that might result in other deaths later.

The trolley problems invalidate the principle because of the unlikely certainty that they assume. Precisely for that reason, they are not a useful moral guide for most real situations. In general, difficult artificial moral conundrums are not very useful guides for real-life conduct. It's much more useful to think about real situations. In the free software movement I have often decided not to propose an answer to a general question until I had some real cases to think about.

For real driverless cars, the trolley problem never arises: the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible.

More generally, the goal is to make sure to avoid any trolley problem.

https://stallman.org/articles/trolley-problem.html

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