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The Trolley Problem Problem

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Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#81

Post by oarsinsync »

catssie wrote: post #59
contravariant wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> pick the course which reduces the greatest amount of suffering

Reduces for who? Over what time frame? What's the scope, and why that scope and not a different scope?

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#82

Post by totetsu »

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…

meanwhile, the real world problem plays out.. https://mobile.twitter.com/rob_bennett/status/12668957194552...

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#83

Post by wccrawford »

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…

SpaceX just launched a shuttle into orbit that had a 1 second window for launch. They had zero extra fuel on board. It had 2 passengers and room for 2 more.

It's not ridiculous at all to think that they'd fuel a supply ship with exactly the fuel it needed and not more, and that that supply ship might have some empty space in it, especially if it were very, very large.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#84

Post by adjkant »

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…

The irony here is you just pigeonholed "ethics" and then made several ethical arguments yourself while saying you don't care about ethics!

To add some formal language:

> I don't think absolute right and wrong, or even absolute "lesser of two evils" is a particularly useful goal.

This sounds like a metaethical argument - what underpins ethics is a very important question that a lot of people miss, but that argument is actually the base of ethical stances. The formal metaethical belief here is objectivism. Some other options are things like subjectivism, cultural relativism, error theory, and non-cognitivism.[1]

[1] A video alternative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOoffXFpAlU

> It's the contextual framework that matters... Values, priorities, fears, desires, needs, the things that comprise a person's identity and worldview. Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made.

Ethics (once you get past metaethics) is almost always around a framework, and focuses exactly on everything you listed. Aristotle explicitly focused on values to built his ethical framework. Foucault talks a lot about fear and power. Most of consequentialism and utilitarianism focuses on needs and desires. Rawls and egalitarianism is an example of talking about priorities.

--------------------------------------------------

To me, it sounds like you have a gripe with the impracticality of philosophers talking about ethics but care quite a lot about ethics itself. If so, I'd be with you strongly on both accounts.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#85

Post by luckylion »

ponker wrote: post #69
luckylion wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 troll…

Have you worked in AV? “Save Driver” vs “Save Pedestrian” isn’t actually a problem that comes up in the real world. There’s never a situation where you’d use a pedestrian as a meat bag to absorb a collision or fling a driver over a median to save a pedestrian. The dilemma is completely a philosophical construct, no self driving car will ever need to solve it. In reality, saving drivers and saving pedestrians are comp…

That's not the typical problem in AV's trolley problem, nobody argues (publicly) "the driver should always be first". You don't even need the driver to play a role, you can use an AV truck, train or drone.

"Your brakes are gone, you cannot decrease speed. You are on a collision course with 10 people who are crossing the street. You can slightly alter your direction to run over one person instead."

You can alter that as required, put a dog in the other lane. Or an old person. If you want to go deeper: put a light car in the other lane with the assumption that the driver of that car has a 10% chance to survive.

Give http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ a try, they've set up a few different scenarios. "None of this will ever happen, the car will simply learn to fly and avoid the accident" is not an option unfortunately.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#86

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

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 trolley problems invalidate the principle because of the unlikely certainty that they assume.

We're living the trolley problem problem in real life, right now, because human beings are bad at estimating risk. A lot of people are operating with a certainty that IF you are EXPOSED to the virus, you WILL contract it, and it WILL be terrible, and PROBABLY fatal. Therefore, no amount of safekeeping -- masks, distancing, wiping down delivered groceries, baking mail and newspapers -- can be too aggressive. For such people, diverting the "trolley" to make long-running, terrible financial hardships for a third of the population is an easy call, when they feel they are literally saving the life of everyone on forward track.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#87

Post by Traster »

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…

The problem is that there's nothing inherent about a hypothetical that elides irrelevant details, it elides only whatever the author of the hypothetical wants to elide. Hypotheticals can let us agree on one aspect of a situation, but it can't make us agree on how relevant that aspect is to the situation we're actually interested in. This is why the trolley problem as applied to autonomous driving is so problematic, whilst it's an interesting thought experiment, its totally irrelevant to the person actually designing a self-driving car. It's a perfectly valid position to take that a situation is complex enough that hypotheticals aren't ever going to be helpful in reasoning about it.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#88

Post by juped »

6510 wrote: post #72
viburnum wrote: post #15

It’s not just philosophy. So much of economics education is getting students to narrow their vision down to the something that somebody else wants them to see. Force the assumptions on people and then tell them how smart they are when they draw the inevitable conclusions. It’s a trap. Normal people forget about the assumptions and walk away believing the conclusions. It’s a technique for reshaping people’s intuitions…

haha, yes! Why is everyone relevant in philosophy dead? The answer to the trolley problem is that it doesn't matter if you pull the lever or not. You should figure out who or what created the situation and truly eliminate the problem at its source.

Killing Philippa Foot is a common joke solution to trolley problems, but few consider it seriously ethical.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#89

Post by klmadfejno »

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…

I agree, but also disagree, because many people take this as a literal problem. People think "how can we have self driving cars until they can solve the trolley problem in a way I find agreeable?" but that's not really how the world works. Just try not to hit people. And not just practically in the sense that literal trolley problems never occur. If you find yourself in a situation of needing to choose the lessor of two evils, you're probably just best off believing that absolute morality doesn't exist and you're just going off your gut because that's how you, as an individual human, work.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#90

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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…

Taking ethics out of context, squashes the very life out of it. The related context is the whole ball game. Further, pretending one thing is like another (adult violinist dependent on your kidney; foetus dependent upon mother) erases several critical ethical points in an obvious attempt to argue toward a conclusion. Its disingenuous.

A simpler example: Killing a convicted murderer, is murder again! Oh, except the murderer has a whole different ethical context than say a child: the murderer is again a threat to more people; the murderer had agency and could have decided not to murder; the act has societal benefit instead of harm; and on and on.

And if you don't like my argument, then voila! Taking your ethical dilemma and recasting it as mine seems "not fair!" to you. Which ironically is my point and QED.

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