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The Trolley Problem Problem

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Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#91

Post by luckylion »

michaelt wrote: post #77
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 don't think the author's objection is to thought experiments in principle but rather, to the way they are composed and used. After all, a thought experiment that only holds true given an impossible premise would have no rhetorical power if we weren't willing to extrapolate our conclusions beyond the premise, to the possible. Which we are - that's why the trolley problem is taught to people who aren't railway signal…

I believe that's why you don't use the most extreme thought experiment and then go "okay, thanks, we're done here". You want to be able to zero in on different factors. E.g. save the musician by giving five minutes instead of nine months? Lower the risk of death of a part of society by accepting some restrictions on your freedoms?

I view it like a black box where you can define inputs and observe the output and your goal is to understand what calculations are made inside. Thought experiments are essentially fuzzing it to understand what's happening. "What if it's a fat guy? What if it's a smoker? What if it's a politician? What if it's a homeless person? What if there are 10 people, what if there are a million?" and you're iterating over lots of options to get closer to understanding the formula.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#92

Post by sjnu »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #90
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 mur…

I don't think you're allowed to sneak "when I kill it has societal benefit" into the "context".

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#93

Post by ghaff »

klmadfejno wrote: post #89
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…

I mostly agree. And it's certainly way overblown in the context of self-driving.

On the other hand, we can imagine at some point, there may be some broad principles that engineers will have to consider when programming responses to an impending accident. Perhaps slamming on the brakes is essentially always the optimum solution from the point of driver safety if several people unexpectedly appear in front of the car even though braking will be insufficient to avoid hitting them albeit at a reduced speed. On the other hand, there's an unquantifiable but known risk (to the driver) to swerving in order to avoid the otherwise certain collision.

That a human would pick one or the other approach in a split second without really having time to think about it doesn't really inform what the programmed response of a vehicle that does have time to deliberately pick from several options should be.

Added: It is, of course, pretty much an academic exercise today in that cars can't reliably even be prevented from running into highway dividers. But, in a few decades or whenever, one can imagine being at a point where the technology is good enough that some framework is needed for making rules. Maximizing driver safety at all costs vs. trying to do the least harm overall may well not result in the same rules being programmed.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#94

Post by cableshaft »

have_faith wrote: post #76
totetsu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have Trolley problem problem problems, and you have Trolley problem problem problem problems.

I present: The Trolley Solution. I decide what happens to the trolley in every scenario and everyone else is absolved of guilt.

Is that your final answer?

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#95

Post by mdorazio »

sjnu wrote: post #92
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mur…

I don't think you're allowed to sneak "when I kill it has societal benefit" into the "context".

Nowhere in that statement was "I" stated or implied. The actor can be anything you want - a group, the state as an apparatus, a quantum-triggered death box, etc.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#96

Post by luckylion »

paganel wrote: post #73
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…

> philosophy is to reduce concepts, ideas, or beliefs into abstractions This in itself can be see as problematic, as one can say that trying to reduce "concepts, ideas, or beliefs into abstractions" is futile, as those "things" are not black and white, they do not conform to Aristotelian logic of one thing/concept being either "true" of "false", there's a "continuum" (for lack of a better word) when trying to define…

But even on the continuum, there will be usually areas. If you consider the trolley problem and you're dealing with a threshold deontologist, having zero persons on the track will likely result ("I don't throw the guy over the bridget", hopefully) in a different answer then having one person on the track, and at some point the answer will shift again. We'll only need to reduce the problem to find the points of change (or areas, as few people will probably say "well, at 99? no, but for a 100 lives, yeah, I'll throw him over"), we don't need to keep a 1:1 mapping of all possible input values with the output values.

To use things, we usually reduce the single parts and use abstractions to deal with what's important (to us in that context). You don't deal with individual atoms, you look at clusters and clusters of clusters etc and understand and use them alltogether as a pen, just like you've similar pens before, even though they were 100% completely different if you look close enough.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#97

Post by jfengel »

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).

You face the trolley problem every day. You keep far more money than you need, knowing that people will die today without it. You would categorically dismiss a law requiring healthy people to donate organs for those who need them.

The point isn't to change your mind about that. The point is to consider an example that has some similarities and ask why you reach an opposite conclusion. The insights gained from that help clarify the human moral instinct. The project is to understand how we think and feel, not to dictate what we should think or feel.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#98

Post by dereferenceddev »

stupidcar wrote: post #65
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…

Why does every comment like this, criticising an article, always claim the author doesn't understand the concept they're talking about? You can just disagree with something without using cheap tactics like this to imply the author is ignorant. I see no evidence of this claimed misunderstanding in the linked article. And there's nothing "subtle" about it saying thought experiments lack value because they're contrived,…

Do you not see the irony of then taking the position that my tactics are “cheap”?

Having read the same article, my takeaway from their characterization of thought experiments was that they misunderstood their real purpose. To pose thought experiments against what real professionals would do in particular scenarios really does undermine what the point of presenting thought experiments does. They’re used to challenge our notions about the choice we make and think about how we shape our moral code.

They ultimately are intended to make you think more about why you think a particular way about something.

So that is why it seems to be misunderstood.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#99

Post by Majromax »

wccrawford wrote: post #83
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.

> They had zero extra fuel on board.

Nitpick: it had excess fuel on board. Even beyond any institutional safety margins, the first stage landed on the drone ship. That portion of the mission required the stage carry fuel in excess of the requirements for its primary mission.

Re: The Trolley Problem Problem

#100

Post by twic »

have_faith wrote: post #76
totetsu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have Trolley problem problem problems, and you have Trolley problem problem problem problems.

I present: The Trolley Solution. I decide what happens to the trolley in every scenario and everyone else is absolved of guilt.

Oh, i thought they Trolley Solution was that you tie all philosophers to the tracks and then run them over.
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