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

The Trolley Problem Problem

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 119 posts

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#51

Post by luckylion »

efitz wrote: post #18

One challenge that I have always had with the trolley problem is that in general solutions are not symmetrical. By this, I mean that as an observer, I might conclude that several different choices made by the subject of the experiment were ethical. For instance, if the subject threw the switch and caused one person to be killed (instead of multiple), I would see that as ethical. I would also see it as ethical if the…

> So I guess the problem is that I’m not convinced that the thought experiment generates objectively ethical outcomes, only subjective ones.

But that's also literally what it's supposed to do. It's a device to poke around and figure out your positions, e.g. are you into consequentialism or do you prefer deontology, are there circumstances that can change your position etc.

I often find people (not you, people in general) rejecting thought experiments, because they are not comfortable with their intuitive decisions and they feel that it will be exposed when they're forced to apply it to a hypothetical situation that does not leave them an easy out ("this wouldn't happen, I don't walk near train tracks, ever").

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#52

Post by mac01021 »

msla wrote: post #32
sukilot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

It doesn't change the dilemma ghost for the guy that has to eject her, though.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#53

Post by luckylion »

castratikron wrote: post #40

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 ont…

I did not expect Stallman to offer such lame thinking.

> 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.

Just like a cancer patient might always spontaneously get cured and you'd be an ass for cutting them open. Life is full of surprises, don't take action, ever!

> 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.

Wow, why didn't anybody ever think of making the car just stop? Like, have we tried talking to the car and asking it not to have malfunctioning brakes? What if we offer the car a nice oil change later in exchange for behaving and not running people over?

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#54

Post by mjevans »

DangitBobby wrote: post #16

I was in just such a conversation the other day, where we were discussing the implications of the second amendment with regards to tyranny in the US. A participant would not allow the conversation to continue without a description of how tryanny would take hold, and no hypothetical was realistic enough. They could not have brought the conversation to a halt faster if it were deliberate. Ultimately, they didn't agree…

It is sad that I am far more willing to believe those events plausible. There is a saying about attributing to stupidity before malice, and I think that also applies to the foundation of how such an outcome could occur.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#55

Post by mjevans »

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…

Also out of the scope of the experiment... The rocket in question is already doomed due to the lack of any safety envelope at all.

The mass included in the initial acceleration has already been accelerated, so even if they space someone it's not making it to the destination.

Also; How would they eject someone into space without going off course or using more fuel?

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#56

Post by bigfoot675 »

castratikron wrote: post #40

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 ont…

> the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible.

This actually isn't true in every scenario. What if there is a car following close behind? What if the car behind has more passengers than the car in front of you? What if swerving will kill pedestrians, but less than the passengers in the car you're about to hit?

There are a lot of variables, and it's really not as straightforward as you make it sound

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#57

Post by luckylion »

post_below wrote: post #4

Maybe a little off topic... Ethics thought experiments are interesting and sometimes fun and you can't deny the value of getting people thinking about choices and behavior. But it's always seemed to me that they, along with ethics in general, miss the point. I don't think absolute right and wrong, or even absolute "lesser of two evils" is a particularly useful goal. It's the contextual framework that matters... Value…

> Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made.

And the point of the thought experiment is to uncover those things, and they make up that person's personal ethics. Maybe their ethics are "I'll always save my family, fuck everybody else", maybe their ethics are "I only save people who share my skin color", or maybe they are "I always maximize the damage, I hate people", using hypothetical situations allows you to figure that out without taking that person on daily walks and sacrificing lots of people on the train tracks to find out.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#58

Post by bigfoot675 »

sukilot wrote: post #8

Absolutely bizarre to see a philosopher writing at some length that some questions are bad because they are hard to answer cleanly. Does he know what his profession is? It's also poor form to sling broad accusations about what "some" philosophers do without citing any examples.

I would think it worse to operate under the "principles of his profession" without questioning them at all, no?

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#59

Post by catssie »

contravariant wrote: post #45
dereferenceddev wrote: post #14

There just seems to be a misunderstanding on the intention of a though experiment here. There is a subtle implication that because the thought experiment is "contrived" that its less valuable. When thinking about philosophy, a core part of philosophy is to reduce concepts, ideas, or beliefs into abstractions (or a "spirit" or "essence" of what their intention is), the thought experiment presents itself as a perfectly…

That said the experiment does deny the always precent uncertainty (or hope, depends how you call it). Arguably the most ethical course of action would be to do everything to prevent any deaths. This might be futile, but it's impossible to know at the time.

If you want to maximize ethical utility, pick the course which reduces the greatest amount of suffering. Prognosticators not required.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#60

Post by function_seven »

bigfoot675 wrote: post #56
castratikron wrote: post #40

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 ont…

> the right thing to do, whenever there is a danger of collision, is to brake as fast as possible. This actually isn't true in every scenario. What if there is a car following close behind? What if the car behind has more passengers than the car in front of you? What if swerving will kill pedestrians, but less than the passengers in the car you're about to hit? There are a lot of variables, and it's really not as str…

That's the entire point of Stallman's essay. Those what-ifs (EDIT: well, #2 and #3) aren't things the self-driving car (or a human driver, in most cases) will compute in the milliseconds it takes to make a decision.

> What if there is a car following close behind?

They may be able to stop fast enough. Whereas if you intentionally don't brake hard enough and strike the car in front of you, you (the computer) have traded a possibility for a certainty. You control your braking and following parameters, they control theirs. (EDIT: Yeah, if there's a lot of distance in front of you, then the car can make use of that. It doesn't need to screech to a halt in every case. But this isn't trolley-car territory, it's just the standard way adaptive cruise and emergency braking already works)

> What if the car behind has more passengers than the car in front of you?

Irrelevant. It is not the car's job to be counting the number of occupants in every other car on the highway.

> What if swerving will kill pedestrians, but less than the passengers in the car you're about to hit?

I want the self-driving car to not make that choice. The passengers in the car, however numerous, are much more likely to survive impact than unprotected pedestrians.

It really is straightforward. Don't burden self-driving cars with silly edge-cases. Apply the most effective mitigation known in the general sense, and see that everyone is happy because they can anticipate the car's choices a bit better.

Post reply on HN