311–320 of 951 posts
Most chilling for me was the majority who would divert the trolly away from a good citizen to kill a citizen who litters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems to take place in a hypothetical universe with an overabundance of trolleys.
And they cost $300k apiece, which seems like a bargain in the context of the average public works project.
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.
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…
If you play along with the isolated premise (without adding in "nuance") of these Trolley Problems, I find they can act like little experiments on our moral intuitions that can illuminate one small, isolated facet of the full complex moral machinery. It's likely a bit like Michelson-Morely, though, where it takes work to digest the experimental results into a useful model of the underlying mechanism.
In that light, it's also interesting to start adding in the nuance you mention, piece by piece, and see how our moral intuitions change, vacillate, and even give simultaneous conflicting answers.
>Oh no! Due to a construction error, a trolley is stuck in an eternal loop. If you pull the lever the trolley will explode, and if you don't the trolley and it's passengers will go in circles for eternity. What do you do? 50% of people pull the lever?!? I hereby declare that if I'm ever going to be stuck in a trolley for my entire life, I do NOT want the lever pulled. Toss me a smartphone charger and my life wouldn't…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how that trivializes the problem. With that additional consideration, the options are: 1. Let 5 people die and 1 live, and you probably don't have any legal consequences. 2. Save 5 people, cause the death of 1, and you probably go to jail. So the thing that made the answer trivial was the introduction of legal consequences that affect you personally? Doesn't the difference of 4 deaths dwarf that?
You're implying that you'd go to jail for the lives of 4 people (or that people should), but recent experience has shown people won't even wear a mask to save other people's lives.
Think about how many people have sacrificed themselves for others. Not just jail time, but death. Would each of those people have lived completely pure, selfless lives if they hadn't done what they did? Probably not. Who knows, some might have ended up being anti-maskers. It is said that "dying is easy". Making one clearly right choice, damn the extreme consequences, is actually very normal for humans. Just as normal as spending a whole life making bad decisions. Even more bizarre is the two "modes" aren't even mutually exclusive.
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…
Like most people, you probably drive a car from time to time. Collectively, cars kills 30-40k americans every year. By choosing to drive you are a fractional murderer - statistically responsible for some slice of a death. Not many people will decide not to drive on learning this…
But that's fine because and and I bad drivers are not.
1. Only pull the lever if you are sure. With an action you assume responsibility for the outcome.
2. Don't believe everything what you see or are told. If you doubt do nothing. Imagine you killed many people because you have been lied to and pulled the lever. In this case it is better you did nothing.
3. An action of yours might kill someone. This is a very heavy responsibility you assumed. You need to be very sure and the odds need to be extreme. None of the problems managed to tip the odds. So whenever I was afraid that pulling the lever kills someone, I didn't pull the levers.
4. If my life is at stake, I pull the lever to save myself.
5. If I am extremely sure that no lives are at stake and I am relatively confident that pulling the lever will avoid lots and lots of damage, then I pull the lever. If I am unsure, I do nothing.
6. In all other cases responsibility is too high and I won't do anything. The idea: don't touch the damn thing.
The website told me that I decided differently than the majority of people and finally that I "have solved philosophy"
EDIT: The top comment made a good point. I had to click a button to do nothing. This made me realize that I a had a silent assumption:
7. Time to decide is short. The trolley is already coasting. So I didn't think long and hard because I didn't have time and when I was unsure I would have let the trolley coast past without having pulled the lever.