Oh no! A pandemic virus is spreading throughout the world, do you take sensible precautions and get vaccinated when it's your turn, or do nothing?
What if you don't know exactly what the lever does? What if pulling the lever makes all the infants in the world cry for an hour straight? What if pulling the lever only saves a life one time in 1000, but it sprains your wrist 1 time in 10. What if the sensible precautions are very very annoying? What if you're not sure about the side effects of the vaccine?
Ugh, masks are not that bad. I literally went to a party and danced until 4AM with my friends in a N95 and it was fine. We only unmasked to do tequila shots.
If you're talking about vaccines, I have an all natural colloidal silver supplement to sell you.
What eliminates social cohesion and trust is
* the disease itself
* the people instrumentalizing the disease and/or the sanitary measures to partisan ends..
What if the elimination of the societal cohesion and trust was the product of a cynical, self-serving multi-decade political movement and propaganda campaign, and had only a little to do with pulling the lever, but the people who pulled the lever got most of the blame for it?
Ending with a contextless kill count was the perfect touch. This feels almost as profound as it is silly, but I'm not sure how meta-level the profundity is. Lovely site for sure
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 question can sway people's opinions.
Or people walk instead, emitting no carbon and killing zero people...
This is what's fascinating about the Trolley Problem, and philosophy in general, and how it applies outside of philosophy - most people struggle to answer questions based on the evidence available without bringing in some external justification for their answer. People wamt a 'logical' reason to justify their choice. They can't say "I don't know", or "I used the limited data I had" when the choice they'd make goes against the something they belive about the real world (eg 'public transport is good'). They bring in a "but what if <imaginary thing that supports their biases>!" and make a decision based on that instead. They even believe they made the right choice.
This applies to everything from choosing a tech stack to picking who to vote for. It's infuriating once you see it.
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.
Then give them their own right-of-way. Amsterdam trams go through the streets, but you're not supposed to block them. They often have their own lane (though frequently still shared with buses and taxis), and when they don't, it's because the street is too narrow, but that's usually only for a limited section of the street.
You still need tracks and power lines. If the only benefit of streetcars over buses is right-of-way, why not just give buses right of way.
After some deliberation, my muncipality recently decided against a streetcar-system and for a bus-based system with electric buses, right-of-way everywhere and dedicated bus-lanes where possible (nearly everywhere).
> For some reason more people picked the latter. So, they just dislike public transit?
I mean, it seems like it's the same trolley that have run over a lot of people for the previous 19 levels, why wouldn't I want to decommission such bloodthirsty trolley?
The gist is that we design our streets in such a way that people drive dangerously fast on them when they’re not slowed down by congestion, and during the pandemic that’s exactly what happened. Some other countries (particularly in Western Europe) take a safe systems approach to street design and did not have the same uptick in fatalities that we did.
Thank you for the interesting article. I started skimming it after a little bit though and my eyes happened to pick up this line out of context. What a name to go with that quote:
"“They were just sick and tired of kids being killed in the streets,” says Jason Slaughter"
Isn’t the trolly also reducing carbon emissions by killing so many people? With enough of these questions, it will be able to reduce the world’s population to zero, at which point there should be no carbon emissions from humans.
You can run the trolley into a giant vat of molten glass that would pour over all the dead bodies of humanity and freeze them from decomposing into the atmosphere. (note that the energy used to create this large vat of glass was from renewables)
Keep existing public transit system that contributes to X deaths per year from pollution an accidents, or...
...pull the lever and...
Replace it with a public transit system of bloodthirsty trolleys. There is zero pollution! Only 1% of X deaths per year from accidents! Just one catch: all the accidents involve the trolley morphing into a scary mechanical beast and biting a random person's head off.
People also cause pollution, so it might be less polluting in the long run to keep the trolley.
But more seriously, I just realised that this is actually an argument that's often used against various environmental measures. People argue against wind turbines because they kill birds, ignoring the fact that pollution from fossil fuel kills far more, and birds are killed in larger numbers by other causes (cars, windows, cats). But somehow inaction seems more moral to some people if that action still leads to some deaths. Same with a multitude of other social issues.
If I remember correctly the original trolley problem was actually two problems. One was "pull the lever to kill one person instead of five" the other was "push someone onto the tracks (killing them) to stop the trolley and save five people".
More people were in favor of pulling the lever than there were in favor of pushing someone onto the tracks. This indeed hints that the more direct action, the harsher the judgement.
Yep, the original is "pull the lever to kill on person instead of five" and there are many many more variations with more direct action. The pure utilitarian will still choose the "kill one instead of five" no matter the situation. But some variations come up with things like: "you are a doctor with 5 patients who need 5 different organ transplants and are going to do die, do you kill the hospital janitor to harvest their organs to save 5 people"
Only to decide to recommission them in many places, increasing the heat-attack rate for those trying to get to work on time through the 6 year long construction zones.
From my point of view trams have no advantages over buses. On the other hand they need lots of special purpose infrastructure and often condition road traffic rules terribly, like forcing traffic lights instead of roundabouts. Actually I am open to hear the advantages of trams.
Running on rails is super efficient once they are in place. Less resistance, less wear and tear. For high-frequency routes, they really are great. But for new routes, trolley buses are probably a lot cheaper to set up. Maybe use trolley buses first, and only switch to trams once it's clear that this really is a high demand, high frequency route that's not going to go away.
One of the major problems with anything that isn't on rails is that it is easy to make go away. Unironically one of the reasons for trams is that it's harder to rip up the tracks and delete the service entirely as opposed to bus routes which can vanish in a single day or be altered in incredibly dumb ways. Of course, if you're sufficiently destructive you can rip up any infrastructure.
Still, I feel that trams will be dying soon. The improved efficiency is simply not enough to justify the extra infrastructure and inflexibility. Modern battery electric buses have a range of 500+km and can thus be used for an entire day, and charged at times when electricity is cheap and green (ie overnight on wind energy).
Battery electric buses require batteries, which may be flexible, but are also expensive.
I don't see existing trams and light rail disappearing soon. Not in cities that have well-functioning networks, like Amsterdam. But I can imagine that for new projects, electric buses are preferable.
They are far more comfortable than buses. Larger too. If you rely on public transit, then your city switching to trams for the highest frequency routes can be a significant quality of life improvement for you and the many thousands of others who will use them every day.
That isn't their only advantage, but it's one which is often overlooked.
My logic on that particular question was that someone would probably get a new trolley to replace it (trolleys are insured, right?), no matter what I thought, so I let the trolley go.
with a home, thats not universally true, if its pooorly insulated for example. trolleys, sure, they are all electric, so you can go down to zero emissions if you use green energy sources. Producing them though, metal production still runs with coal today just like in the 19th century
Even if your home is poorly insulated it would take a long time to recoup the (direct and indirect resource) costs of a new home with better insulation.
Taking into account future discounting, it's probably almost never a good idea.
But not your pool pump. If you have an old pool pump then you should definitely consider replacing it with a modern one as they function better, more reliably, and use far less energy.
> However I did not take into account the CO2 emissions and possible industrial accidents at the trolly factory or trolly materials mines.
I would argue that it shouldn't factor into the equation. The polluting trolley will be replaced sooner or later, anyway. You're just moving the date forward.
The catch is that the argument could be made every year, with a new, more efficient trolley replacing the previous. In which case the construction costs obviously need to be considered, and it wouldn't be worth to spend 100 CO2 to save 10.
Whether it's public or private property, the trolley is really not mine alone to destroy. We need to decide, together what to do with it. Maybe we could stop it, and put it in a museum. Maybe we could change its source of power and make it a green trolley.
My feeling was, if I let the trolley go, it can be destroyed later. It will be harder to undo the decision to destroy it. Who knows, maybe the transportation capabilities it offers can save lives by rushing people to hospital. I just don't believe that pulling the switch and destroying a vehicle is really the only possible opportunity to stop emissions that will get released over 30 whole years. So I didn't pull it.
Basically same for me. I wouldn't actively go out and destroy someone's car to reduce emissions. I'm not going to take an action to destroy something for the sake of making up for the shortcomings of our collective global leadership
I always assume trolley problems are in a vacuum without context. Otherwise for every one of them you have to ask, "what is the background of each person on each track" to make a proper choice.
I assume the information they have told me is the only thing relevant and everything else is equal.
In philosophy Kant would disagree with you with his Categorical Imperative[1]. Rawls also went that way, with the veil of ignorance[2]. The lack of state or context is not only desirable but is the whole foundation on why their theories are rational.
Of course many philosophers disagree and arguably terrible things were done with such mindset[3]. The point I am trying to make is that if you need context then you cannot have a universal rational decision, thus you will be imposing your own morals possibly over others. You might be fine with it, but now you relativized morals.
PS: I highly recommend the Great Lectures on Audible on philosophy. Specifically "Why Evil Exists" and "The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas".
The first one is more on the religious part, but provides great background on moral and ethical thought starting with the Gilgamesh all the way to XX century psychology.
The second is a great over view of western thought, with philosophical counter arguments on thinkers I never heard of, but which i find essential to help form one's thought on how Western society must progress. That book changed my life due to the sheer exposure of captivating ideas even sometimes conflicting. I loved Rawls but consider myself a freedom guy. Now my thought is clearer: How can we find a way to measure that further distribution would harm the most disadvantaged? This is still open but a more practical question, that i can use on evaluating certain concrete policies. Example:
In Portugal the minimum wage has been increased to the point it matches the average salary. A person who did not train to specialize and works in a coffee shop earns similarly to an engineer that spent his first 24 years studying. This is harmful because without differences in rewards, higher difficulty but needed professions will not have enough practitioners. Therefore society as a whole will suffer because it lacks trained specialists to improve the untrained coffee worker's life. "Bam, simple as that". It soothes me in the face of the torrent of events and ideologies pushed upon me all the time.
I think it’s certainly a myth that an engineer’s profession is “inherently harder” than a coffee brewers.
In my opinion, people who would like to study engineering would do so not so because of what they are paid (the situation today), but because of their genuine interest.
On further reflection, it seems ludicrous to believe that that hardest professions are the most paid. The average CS job pays obscenely well, but is relatively trivial. Primary healthcare providers, essential services workers and so on are severely underpaid.
It’s not a myth for those that have to study 16 hours a day to understand all the intricacies of building structures with safety factors. The integrated corpus of engineering knowledge is just far greater than that of coffee brewing.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the hardest professions are the most paid.
I specifically mentioned training because I knew this answer would come, and like clockwork it did.
Training takes time, and often unpaid. A coffee shop worker will immediately get rewarded while the engineer will not. If they will be equally compensated then the engineer is at a disadvantage.
> In my opinion, people who would like to study engineering would do so not so because of what they are paid (the situation today), but because of their genuine interest.
Marx said the same. If the people would be free they would produce out of their heart's desire. As it did not turn out that way the party needed to force the worker's desire into them. Literally to free them by force (freedom by force is another concept in itself :)).
Fair argument but I don’t see why training should inherently be unpaid.
In fact, I don’t see why the ability to have a good standard of living should be predicated on your profession in the first place.
The fact that engineering training is… unpaid as you say seems to put people who cannot afford to not make money for rent, food, etc. at a clear disadvantage. Those already rich (and able to afford unpaid training) would just get richer if they are paid more than an “untrained” worker.
> Fair argument but I don’t see why training should inherently be unpaid.
Because the lack of payment is the trainee's quid-pro-quo. It makes the trainee a counterpart in the training investment. In several countries in Europe to varying degrees and forms, the state pays for the training. It pays the professors, facilities and can even pay scholarships so that a disadvantaged background is not an impediment to such training(tackling the inequality issue you mention). I am not aware of any institution/state paying even a minimum wage up to master level.
Then there is the issue of difficulty, where it is clear that learning to serve a coffee mug requires less effort than learning advanced calculus. If you pay/reward the student engineer the same as the coffee waiter, you will likely still have fewer engineers[1]. Fewer engineers will produce fewer useful infrastructure or wealth to redistribute that the coffee waiter could benefit from. Therefore according to Rawls having them earning the same would be unfair.
> In fact, I don’t see why the ability to have a good standard of living should be predicated on your profession in the first place.
It is not. It is predicated on the the value the profession generates.
[1] The reward/base-line ratio feels like the reaction coefficient, where you use a higher reward to make an unlikely reaction become possible :)
PS: It took me a good while and rewrites to come up with a satisfactory answer. Thanks for the comment.
No, the economy will just become uncompetitive for engineering companies and produce more coffee-shop workers. Given Portugal's economic dependence on tourism is perhaps by design.
Of course not exactly but if most of the people earn the same minimum, then the average will be close to minimum. There is no cap on max, but with few they do not make a difference.
I don't see how minimum wage is the problem. Engineers aren't better compensated in other markets because of low minimum wages but because they are expected to deliver more value. The Internet tells me that the minimum wages in Portugal is 823€ a month. That isn't a lot compared to many other markets. Sounds more like a productivity problem. Or that someone else is capturing much of the value.
High minimum and median salaries are usually good for engineers as it requires more productive companies which requires more engineers. When workers are cheap few wants to pay for expensive systems.
Right, you can run it in to a brick wall, ending the CO2 emissions and its usefulness as part of a transit network, and also, of course, depriving its owner of a valuable asset (the trolley)
No one likes public transport, but people like motorized traffic even less. It's a relative choice.
The option should have been between decommissioning the train, saving 3 people and a few tons CO2, and decommissioning all motorized vehicles, saving millions of people every year and having a real impact on CO2 reduction.
I have a anecdatum of one, that being myself, that I like public transport. Just, the US public transport is god awful and you may be thinking of the US style of public transport, or the lack thereof, and thus come to that conclusion. Which, fair enough. Just not representative of the wider world.
In Germany, a lot of the time, public transport is awesome. I love public transport here. You can always find something to complain about, and of course there will be exceptions, but compared to other places I've been to, public transport here is available, useful, and clean.
"No one likes public transport" - if by that you mean almost anyone would prefer to have forms of transport that don't have all the disadvantages of PT (being crowded, limited routes, scheduling/timetabling issues) then sure, but it's also true almost anyone would prefer to have forms of transport that don't have all the disadvantages of private travel (cost, traffic, parking etc.). I'd still suggest there are plenty who'd choose much better public transport over much better private travel options. (Disclaimer: I'm in the latter camp - I get myself almost everywhere by bicycle where possible).
Whenever you visit a web site, that's tied back to your device and your name / identity. Data brokers have browser fingerprints. You have lots of CDNs hosting content and third party cookies. You're not anonymous online anymore.
Many "fun" surveys are built to help collect data to better profile you. There are many techniques here, from asking a mixture of innocuous and profiling questions, to looking for correlations. With a few, you can extrapolate a person's age, political leanings, etc.
This is snowballing, and it's hard to predict how data collected today will be used, or what inferences will be possible. It's safer not to do a threat analysis every time, but just to click one button each time and not risk letting profilers know your value system.
If you included "the trolley actually exists in a realistic world and is part of a public transport network" then sure, I won't decommission it, but trolley problems are weird zero-context questions about trade-offs and I assume they fully describe the consequences of choosing each leg when answering.
It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live, so I think of trolleys as philosophical constructs that don't have a real existence.
But it's problematic to assume these problems are in a 0-context vacuum because that would mean your actions don't actually have consequences. If the world ends immediately at the end of the experiment, then your choices in the experiment don't have any meaning, imo.
However if you're in a plane nose-diving vertically, shooting someone a second before the plane hits the ground (in a way that obviously is going to kill everyone), hardly has any moral relevancy. It's taking 1s of life from someone, probably comparable to smoking a cig near someone. More so, this is a low-quality second of life, with all the stress coming from the awareness of imminent death.
So the argument still stands, the difference in the consequences, when considered outside of any context, is simply not worth the mental effort to figure out if the lever should be pulled. The exercise is only interesting because it provokes to think about real life scenarios.
Right but if you ask someone whether that situation is murder I bet most people would say yes. And I bet they would apply the same logic to someone on death row or with a terminal illness.
> It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live
Yeah, when I clicked on the link I was hoping that finally someone had solved the problem of never having a pound coin to unlock trolleys at the supermarket.
> It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live
Does anyone really still call them that? A trolley is not a tram, it's a trolley, and harkens back from last century. In the US, some people call them trams, most of us call them trains. Portland does have a special version they like to call a streetcar, though. Functionally a light rail train, but runs in normal lanes of traffic.
They aren't zero-context; all the value that you attach to a human life is context. If you don't grant anything else, you are just choosing one cartoon line-drawing over another. Certainly you are free to look at it this way, but it isn't really a useful point of view in a discussion about the hypothetical consequences.
But they're not... real. What someone says they might do in a trolley problem situation vs what a person would actually do I would assume basically have nothing to do with each other.
Actively making a real life or death decision is quite a lot different than reasoning though a game.
Certainly the simulation and the action in the real life has some connection. It just a matter how strong the connection is. I guess no one will test it though, at least that is what I hope.
This is a natural response, but I think it also misses a good opportunity. Philosophy setups like this are always massively unrealistic, but the same is true for almost all physics problems, especially so for first year undergrads. We usually accept the latter as, nonetheless, important pedagogical tools.
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.
Agreed, they don't say anything about replacement trolley, maybe the new one will kill just slightly less people, maybe they won't replace it at all, way too many factors to consider and I am not really management of transport company to make these decisions.
Yeah, that one made it clear how much context matters. These problems pretend there's no context, but we always look at them with some subconscious context in mind.
In this case, I did pull the lever, because it could be replaced by an electric trolley. But if killing the trolley means more cars and more car accidents and CO2, then of course we should keep the trolley. But if we ignore context and just look at kill 5 people or kill the inanimate object responsible for killing those 5 people, the answer is obvious. (But did I really ignore the context there?)
Others also have important subconscious context. Sacrifice 5 elderly people to save one baby. How elderly are they? Are they so elderly they're just waiting for death, or do they each still have more than 20 years of relatively healthy life left? And thanks to modern health care, that baby now has a very good chance to survive until adulthood, but 100-200 years ago, that chance was only 50%. Maybe not worth sacrificing 5 people for. I think that one was the hardest.
(My friends may be somewhat worried to learn that I had surprisingly little trouble sacrificing my best friend for 5 strangers. But really, I'd prefer to kill whoever keeps tying these people to the track.)
Eh, it doesn’t matter how old the people are, really. They have all already gotten to experience the joy of life. The baby hasn’t, so they have the most to lose.
the baby (young enough) doesn't understand the situation
also, you can easily flip it: elderly cannot be saved from the torture of existence, having lived so long, but the baby has barely suffered anything yet - we can save it!
The elderly also have wisdom to offer. The baby only has potential wisdom. Of course, if you're trading on potential, the baby could potentially grow up to be a serial killer. Or the elderly could potentially be mute.
It does matter. Five young people have been fully invested in & will now produce value for the next few decades. Whereas a baby has still not been fully invested in, years of education etc, so they're cheaper to replace
Easiest one IMO. Spare an evil baby who would gladly sacrifice every single person on this planet for some ridiculous thing they feel entitled to or spare five diligent elders?
The results on all the questions implied to me that most people answered more as if it was a quiz than a philosophical question. That is, they'd tried to select the most logical/utilitarian answer based on the wording of the question rather than necessarily thinking about what they personally would do in that situation, or any wider context that may exist.
I hope not all the people took this seriously, hence (probably) some of the answers.
I knew I responded with "do nothing" to 100% of the questions, it's not my job to solve the problems of the Universe (and if that good person had been that good in real life then he/she wouldn't have ended up in front of an incoming trolley while the bad person was tied down on the other, "take action", line).
We’re talking about some damn cartoons. That’s the whole “philosophical” point of this trolley problem, which can be better described as a sadistic game, i.e. that we shouldn’t let this type of nonsense get between us and our real “inner values” (for lack of a better term), we shouldn’t let the people who “apply” this game condition us.
Of course this is a satirical game that should not be taken seriously, but only because at some point it starts making you choose between 5 lobsters and a cat.
The point of this type of questioning is to know how much moralist vs utilitarian you are.
It makes you question what are those inner values, where they come from and if they are rational.
i wouldn't do it to a real world trolley as it would cost a lot to replace something that is better in many respects to the alternatives but i wasn't taking it too seriously and they only gave the trolley negative traits within the question
I assumed that the trolly company would need to clean up the mess, with lots of construction equipment, and would replace the trolly, incurring the cost of building a new one. I guessed that the CO2 emissions from that result would dwarf the emissions of the extant one, so I left it alone.
I prefer the emissions and death rate of people living in their own mostly self-sustaining little village, within walking distance of everything they need, and not needing to constantly travel around to other people's villages.
I was one of them: Somewhere around 10-15 I got bored and just wanted to see all the scenarios so I was mostly just going "Do nothing.. Do nothing.. Do nothing.." for the rest.
My dad never grasped thought problems either. Same for riddles. He would always try to find a crack in the description or wording that he could exploit to find a solution you didn't expect, when in reality it just subverted the thought problem, transforming it into a different one that was easier to answer, but not useful to anyone.
If the choice was between 3 deaths over 30 years and something more than that, then the problem would have stated as much. But it didn't. You don't add extraneous details that you thought of to bend the problem to what you want it to be, you make the choice between two sides as they are presented.
The question regarding baby vs old people was really telling. It’s practically the argument for / against abortion. What’s strange to me is that someone would choose to kill five people who are capable of thought instead of an undeveloped human being. But I suppose that’s why we’re seeing the reversal of Roe v Wade being supported. Sigh, fuckin religion.
> Supporting abortion rights doesn't mean killing babies.
There is something very revealing about the GP's attitude though. They literally interpret someone wanting to avoid killing a baby as being the exact same thing as opposing abortion. So in their worldview abortion really is all about killing babies.
Eh, not so much. See my other comment to the sibling thread in regards to this discussion.
There are two parts to this discussion that people are pointing out that I could have done a better job explaining.
First that I’m confounding the trolley problem of killing a baby with abortion. I’m well aware it’s a thought experiment that’s used in philosophy. I understand that killing a baby is different than abortion. My main point which wasn’t articulated at all in the first thread was more from an anti-natalist perspective. The society I live in primarily assigns more value to the fetus and or baby than they do the people that already are living.
A lot of the argument comes down to whether or not the child will have a chance to do great things and to experience life. Killing the baby means stopping them from having this opportunity. However I look at it from the perspective of potential suffering and current ability to feel and think. Killing the baby really doesn’t stop the baby from thinking because well, baby. And more importantly killing the baby stops a lifetime of suffering.
Second, my worldview doesn’t contain that mentality. Abortion isn’t about killing babies. To me it’s more about stopping potential life. Whether or not that life has potential that is actually good is the part that I disagree with most of society.
You're way, way overthinking it. The world isn't black and white, this is a game, and there's always more choices than just two.
I'm pro choice and my choice was to run over the old people.
In virtu's defence, it's difficult to avoid overthinking things in this day and age. We've been conditioned to look for the overlap with our politics in so much that it consumes many of us. Culture wars take heavy psychological tolls on the participants.
I think a common utilitarian way of thinking is years of life left. A baby has a far greater expected value of remaining years and thus is often assigned higher moral value by people. For me it was a no-brainer to kill the old people, although I was imagining them as very old such that they each only had ~5 years left on average.
Mostly agreed. But in another society that values the wisdom of their elders, then they could see that as a large loss. Where-as the baby is replaceable with very little cost to society. I wonder if the stats would be different in an Eastern society.
I chose to read it as "would you kill a teenager, or all of that teenager's caregivers." I felt that sufficiently raised the moral stakes, to make both choices similarly hazardous, while fitting into the parameters written into the scenario.
I think of it from more of an anti-natalist perspective. The child will have a far greater chance of suffering while the adults will have a chance for less suffering due to their expected lifespan. That’s why I thought about it in the frame of abortion. We’ll typically assign the notion of having a life positive value, but from my perspective that’s just a chance for more suffering.
In that case, it is not really linked to abortion: the baby is already born. A convincing (to me) argument that I heard during COVID debates is that by saving a baby you save, on average, 80 years of potential future life; for elderly people, 5 x 10/15 years.
It's a big difference that someone is already in the way. If you take no action they die anyway. If you suddenly collapse on the ground or get struck by lightning before you can pull the lever, they still die. It's not your fault that they died.
I took it as simply 1 full life expectancy vs 5x remaining life expectancy of a senior citizen. Put a few more older people on the tracks and I'd pick the other switch.
Plus the child still has the potential to bring more life into this world, whereas the old people are now infertile (my definition of old being they are too old to procreate).
Those additional lives are hypothetical and in the future, and maximizing the number of humans alive might not be the right thing to do. IMO this is one of the really juicy questions.
Fair point. Given the decreasing birth rate in the western world, I figured we need a few more humans to pay for prior generations retirement. Only half joking…
I selected that one. Not because I'm particularly selfless, but because I think it's morally wrong to throw the switch whenever doing so amounts to killing someone, even when inaction results in more death.
I don't make a conscious choice to take action that will cause a stranger's death (even if more people die because I didn't take action) with exceptions for my monkeysphere. In the case of the worst enemy one, I didn't hesitate to run them over. In the case of self preservation, I chose to save myself. In the case of my best friend, other people are gonna die. Etc.
It makes a lot of these pretty easy and a few (like first cousin vs 3rd cousins) a matter of happenstance, just like the happenstance that I was looking at these absurd trolley problems.
I think inaction refers to intent, not the way the wind blows. In the case of the hair trigger, I’d be morally obligated to stand very still, but it wouldn’t be particularly blameworthy if I happened to falter. This is in contrast to the normal switch, where I’d be to blame if I pulled it.
That completely changes the question because it gives you obvious deniability, whereas the lever probably does not. Especially if witnessed.
That matters legally (accidental death) versus intent (mens rea, murder).
It also matters socially, because you can deny that you made any choice even though you may have chosen (assuming you only do it once). You can even deny it to yourself.
It does beg the question: who set the trolley up to kill people, and why did you happen to be standing on the trigger?
I'm curious how far you're willing to take that, e.g. if instead of a couple people on a track it was "press the button to confirm destroying the bomber and pilot or let the nuke drop on NYC due to lack of confirmation" counts?
I tend to feel that is the general answer, but that at some (arbitrary) level of absurd disparity of outcome, it becomes morally imperative to act.
Like that 5-to-1 standard trolley problem is a hard question for me to answer, and on different days, I pick different answers. Probably "do nothing" most days. But if you made it 50,000,000-to-1, it is not a hard problem any more. Somewhere in between those two is "the line" where the fact that you are becoming a murderer is outweighed by the value of the life you saved.
Yes, if I could be certain that I could save 50,000,000 lives by murdering someone, I think it would be a moral imperative to do so. That wouldn't change the moral evil of murder, it just outweighs it.
I think. Don't ask what I'd do "in real life", I won't know until it happens (which I pray it will not)
Why is that so hard to believe? There are innumerable stories of people sacrificing themselves for other people. Everything from throwing oneself onto a grenade to having kids.
I'm a little confused by your rant when they clearly stated having kids as the sacrifice here - which makes a lot more intuitive sense than whatever antinatalist position you're projecting here onto them.
Also, while I'm firmly pro reproduction, this all sounds more than a little judgemental and presumptuous about the motivations of those that chose to not procreate.
Unless you chose every death-and-suffering-maximizing option for these absurd trolley problems, in which case you will be remembered for your reign of trolley-derived terror.
I too was surprised. My gut reaction is this is "my guy" syndrome where people are still reasoning in the third person even though the problem says "you" - if you were to mad-scientist this experiment I bet you'd have a near 100% self-preservation response.
On the other hand, some of the responses have a small contingent disagreeing, and to explain those I would remind you of the Lizardman Constant [1]. That is, some pollsters just want to watch the statistics burn.
The fact that its so low is kind of disturbing, and the fact that you're so cynical about it being so high means maybe you should reassess your values.
Values don't mean anything if you're dead. Five complete strangers? Knowing how terrible people are, they would probably save themselves too if they could. Every man for himself.
Life experience that would make me want to want to die if I was in this scenario? I sincerely hope I don't experience anything like that.
But I'm glad that innocent-minded people like you exist. Here's a question, if you had the choice between killing me or yourself, who would you choose?
"you" are not the thoughts and emotions that happens to reside in some sack of meat. Or at least that's not a complete picture. In some sense "ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee" should be taken literally. 100% individualism is not the only mode of being a person, and not the default or "best" mode.
These are mostly gut feelings and unfinished thoughts. I'm not sure about any parts of it except "it's not a complete picture". I'd love to hear any thoughts on this and reading recommendations are welcomed.
I don't think 59% of people would succeed in doing it and I say that as part of the 59%. At the same time I thought it was the "which is ethically preferable" answer which is what I interpreted the questions being about.
I'd sacrifice myself for five clones, not five random people. Or for the robots. Robots and clones have got it tough. Random people are probably dicks, and I've not been a great person either.
To really be sure, I think you need to test for the switched case as well. ie. would you do nothing and kill a human or switch and kill sentient robot.
Chickens are sentient. Would you have changed your answer if it were chickens?
I chose to save the human as the prompt didn't set a bar for the level of sentience. Also partly because of shameless speciesism. I love animals, have gone mostly vegetarian, but I would still save a human over any other animal.
Would you save a fit, healthy monkey that can communicate with us using sign language, or would you save a human in a permanent coma? (Or whose brain is damaged and will only ever have the mind of a 1 year old)
I cannot really say what I would do if I was a monkey, it's like asking me what a circle with corners would look like. Too far outside my ability to imagine. I wouldn't sacrifice any number of humans to save any kind of robot either, unless it was a robot critical to human survival like a surgical robot in the middle of a natural disaster.
Lots of animals die due to our existence and not just for our food. We accidentally kill things all the time with our vehicles and the pollution we cause. I wish it wasn't the case but you can't step outside without ruining some ants day.
To then be faced with a choice between killing one more animal or a human... my heart would bleed for the monkey but to do anything else would be murder and pretty hypocritical unless one lives an extremely vegan and eco friendly lifestyle.
No medical issue will strip away the fact that it is a human life. I'll make it more absurd for you... they could have a terminal disease and likely be dead tomorrow and I'd still choose to sacrifice the monkey to give them 24 more hours.
Yep, it's essentially the same question as the cat vs the lobsters. Most chose to save the cat, and that's not exactly surprising given the western context of cats as companion animals. We just value some lives more than others.
I chose to spare the robots. Not for kind reasons, mind you, but rather because I did a "maximize human death and suffering" run (and it's fascinating that the minimum percentage of agreement throughout said run was 10%).
I saved the robots, last thing I want is their sentient robot friends and family going on a rampage to destroy all humans because we didn’t care about them enough.
I strictly don't believe in sentience being possible for robots. I think robots can and may eventually pass the Turing test to a meaningful degree - but only on the end of imitating/fooling us.
So this question is more like would I like to destroy a couple of expensive robots or kill someone. I chose to 'kill' the robots. Some might see this as cheating or not in the spirit of the question being asked - for me, I can't and will never concede 'programmable sentience' as any sort of reality.
>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 even be that different, day to day.
If it were truly the one single opportunity I will ever have to choose to stop existing, it's a tougher choice for sure.
But on the other hand, I might be so curious about what in the heck happened in the world outside - the world that led to this universe where it will be impossible for me to die for eternity, and somehow I know this with absolute 100% certainty - that I still opt out.
Well, perhaps it is not possible to die in this universe, and there are several takes on this idea, see e.g. quantum suicide on wikipedia, or perhaps time starts looping (e.g. you reincarnate as yourself), or perhaps you even reincarnate as somebody else (in the future or in the past). Remember: we know very little about what is time and consciousness.
The "you have solved philosophy" message at the end of the game is very far from the truth.
On a serious note, it feels worse in every case that the end of your life is in the hand of an external actor.
Best case scenario you can do what you want and deal with whatever urge you have at your pace. Worst case scenario you don't have agency, and just stay stuck suffering instead of dying. Personally I'd take the chance.
Would it change if you were stuck on the trolley with the type of people that seem to occupy my city's transit now that fare enforcement no longer happens and no one is asked to leave the trolley at the end of the line?
My response, to leave them there was based on 1) not taking lives as a result of my decision, and 2) if they're alive, they might eventually find a way to stop the trolley and get off. My choice gives them that chance, in my opinion.
> stuck on the trolley quite literally for eternity
What "literally" means in this case? Am I completely certain that I'll be stuck on the trolley for eternity? I would think that I'm having a psychotic break and delay my decision.
Literally, as in, if a passenger finds a way of getting out of the trolley somehow, they will be put back in so the thought experiment can continue working as intended.
Absurd amendment to an absurd trolley problem.
If you can communicate with the outside. Or maybe humanity exterminated itself besides the people in the magic trolley before you decided to get blown up.
But they are not immortal there are they (never read/saw it)? And it's 'slightly' bigger than a trolley with more humans so you can (and i think they do/have?) a small society.
I interpreted it as the passengers would go round in circles for eternity, but not necessarily living passengers. I assumed they would die of hunger and dehydration which seemed less humane than instantaneous death by explosion.
The year is 2199. The trolly residents have figured out how to tap the trolly's motion for near-limitless power. Despite its small size, the trolly has developed a stable population of 24 (give or take over the years) and has dubbed itself Trolland. Their primary exports are electricity via pantograph back to the mainland, information services, and entertainment syndication, as the trolley offers a 24/7/365 reality tv experience akin to the Truman show.
The Trolland Show draws millions of views. The residents initially had relatively normal interaction with friends and family via Zoom calls, but as the first generations died off, a new social order evolved. The community is very tight-kit and intimate (in every sense of the word), while having parasocial relations with outsiders, whom they call Stationaries. A Cult of the Trolley which worships the eternal engine has sprung up, periodically giving offerings to the trolley and its denizens. Ratings skyrocketed one day in 2077 as five cultists, in an odd sense of irony, tied themselves to the track as a sacrifice to the great Prime Mover.
I pulled the lever. It said "eternity" and I couldn't possibly condemn the passengers to eternal life. Maybe it's because I read The Eyes of Heisenberg by Frank Herbert [0]
I guess I may have misinterpreted this as a choice between forcing the passengers to go around in circles for literally eternity versus dying immediately. Figured that it'd get awful boring after the trillionth or so revolution, especially if there were no other options. At some point, I imagine the passengers would be begging for the sweet release of death and I didn't want to condemn anyone to that fate.
I reasoned that the trolley is essentially just a scaled down earth, and plenty of people feel perfectly fine living their lives confined to that looping prison.
My reasoning was someone onboard might make a valuable contribution to the world even if they are stuck on the trolley, and the cost to the rest of society for letting it run seemed small.
As a compatibilist, I don't know what to do with level 28 ("Oh no! A trolley problem is playing out before you. Do you actually have a choice in this situation? Or has everything been predetermined since the universe began"). Both statements can be true! Although I guess that means there is no choice :(
Determinism doesn't mean that we don't _choose_. Free will is an incoherent idea, but choice still exists in a deterministic universe. Choice is just the outcome of that determinism.
I found that problem kind of silly. I chose the free will option because it seemed to imply that determinism would just let the people get run over. I don't know if it would have been the same in end, but if the free will option was the only one that saved lives it strikes me as an unfair way to discount determinism as some sort of passive "I'll just let people die" mindset, when arguably the neuron interaction in my brain would make me choose the same result in identical circumstances.
> Lizardman’s Constant is an idea proposed by Scott Alexander that each poll always has about 4% weird answers. In one poll, 4% of Americans said that reptilian people do control our world and, in another 4% answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Have you ever been decapitated?’
That’s strangely a whole 3 percentage points higher than the number of Americans who self identify as ‘evil’ (on the D&D alignment chart) - see 4:47 at https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/where-americans-fall-on-t..., although at this point we’re probably well within polling margin of error.
You fool, Amazon will refund you the cost because it's late and you'll get your package in a few days regardless. You threw away a lifetime of free Amazon stuff!
The thing is that when you pull the level, you're interfering so you're the cause of the consequence after pulling the lever. If you don't pull the lever, you're not responsible for what happens, at least in my opinion. That's why in the basic case of a trolley heading towards 5 people or 1 person, I wouldn't pull the level no matter what because at least the deaths of the 5 people aren't my fault, but the death of the 1 person would be my fault.
Apparently we’re in the minority together. Cynically (and practically) there’s also the legal side to think about. If you cause a person to be killed by a trolley, you will at minimum be sued into oblivion. If you do nothing no legal case can realistically be levied against you.
Edit: a fun part of the trolley problem not really explored here is how inconsistent most people’s logic gets when the outcomes are effectively the same but the actions are slightly different. For example, what if instead of pushing a button you had to shoot the person on the tracks? What if you could kill someone today who is going to shoot up a mall tomorrow? More fun, what if you could push a button to kill a millionaire and redistribute their wealth to save 100 families in subsaharan Africa?
Logically, as soon as you go down the path of actively choosing to kill a person to achieve some “greater good”, you’ve really thrown an awful lot of morals out the window.
Isn't a standard alternative, you can push a very fat man on the track and derail the trolley. All of a sudden a lot less people are willing to sacrifice the fat man.
Despite the fact that a man fat enough to derail a trolley, if even possible, likely has an extremely low quality of life and an extremely short life expectancy.
>If you don't pull the lever, you're not responsible for what happens, at least in my opinion.
I disagree. I think there's some point at which minimal effort from you for appreciable reward for others puts an obligation on you. And that's precisely the reason the trolley problem is so popular.
I was really surprised majority would pull the lever to kill the litterer versus the inaction killing good citizen. I don't consider myself the moral authority to sentence someone to death for such a minor crime. There was a substantive barrier before I would take action but I would take action when it was significantly weighted.
I wonder what would happen for the bribe problem if the rich man wasn't on the track at all. I feel the unfairness of comparing the relative value of rich life vs poor life compels people to reject the bribe. But if it was simple bribe to kill with the other side being empty, then it becomes a measure of the worth of a life.
I justify it like this: a world where well-being is decided by wealth is unjust and undesirable, so trying to enjoy your privilege is a moral wrongdoing because it very directly prevents the spreading-out of wellbeing. This makes it equivalent to the littering problem (in mode, not scale), where I chose to kill the litterer.
I'm not confident, but that's how I rationalize it. I'd love to hear any thoughts on this.
I feel like this is easier if you’re a non-lever-puller. If you think it’s wrong to pull the lever if it causes anyone’s death who wasn’t dying anyway, then most of these are easy.
Except the “you can’t see the track” one I suppose :P
I think it's never right to pull the lever, unless there aren't any humans on the other track. I'd sacrifice an animal or objects, but people should never be sacrificed for other people, unless they actively choose to.
“The court also found that the act [shooting down hijacked plane] is incompatible with the constitutional right to life and the human dignity. The act would turn passengers and crew of a hijacked plane, victims themselves, into "objects" - not only to the terrorists, but also to the state, which does not have the authority to kill innocents. If their deaths would be used to save others they would be reduced to mere "things" at the pleasure of the state. Further, the court believes that the arguments of the federal government, saying that passengers in such a situation would die anyway, are invalid, as human lives deserve protection regardless of the expected duration of their existence and that it is impossible to fully assess the situation leading to an eventual invocation of the act.”
Extreme situation that could be a counterexample to your claim:
Dr. Evil is 90 years old, his consciousness is slowly fading away, and he is going to die in a week. He is almost ready to release a bomb that will torture kill half of the world population. If you pull the lever Dr. Evil will die today and you will save all those people. You are the only one who can pull the lever. Do you pull the lever, or do you stick to your principle of not sacrificing other people who don't want to be sacrificed?
There is one person in front of the trolley, and five people on the side track. But nobody knows that you saw the five people, and there's video of you noticing the one person.
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 are choosing not to pull the Question 3 lever.
According to Givewell, it takes $4500 to save a life in Guinea. So for every $4500 of your savings that you choose not to donate to Guinea, that's one person you are choosing not to pull the lever to save. Have $45,000 in savings? That's 10 people you're choosing not to pull the lever to save.
I doubt that over 70% of respondents are regularly donating anywhere close to their life savings.
It depends on how much people's life saving is..
It can be even negative...
not everyone is in your situation.
There are pragmatic reasons as well. For me, people spend a lot to be happy like buying luxurious stuff or go to the movies/good restaurant. Saving people makes me happy. I am willing to pay for my own happiness.
I think many people would agree in the abstract that donating some amount of their savings to developing countries is the right thing to do -- many more people than actually do this in practice.
Saying something ought to be done is not the same as doing it, basically.
And of course, while donating to poor countries is fundamentally similar to Question 3, in practice it's obviously not the same; people do seem have a 'moral discount' for things that occur farther away (geographically, temporally, or otherwise).
Not to mention a lot of people measure account their wealth in more than just money.
Reminds me of Richard Posner, former Chief Justice of the Seventh Appelate court. His essay on how poor people have no wealth so you need the threat of prison to keep them in line. And how middle class people you only need the threat of impoverishment to keep them in line. So you can just fine them. And wealthy people only need the threat of loss of reputation to keep them in line.
Which is to say Posner is an idiot that knows nothing of poor people. Because all an honest poor person owns is his reputation. Where Musk... when you are that wealthy someones always going to overlook your transgressions.
Evidently he also didn't know anything about rich people. If they manage to damage their reputations then they figure a good PR firm and some contributions to the right places will take care of that for them.
I think it used to be true. The Musks and Trumps have, like Neo in the Matrix, decided they have total control over their actions with no regard for mere perception any longer. Some people think the old framework is still valid, and others think it no longer applies.
What did you answer for problem 6, where a rich man offers you money to pull the lever and kill someone else? Presumably, a rich man is likely to have more economic productivity than a random person.
> I really do want a comprehensive list if possible of which charities are actually worthy of even being allowed to keep existing on this planet.
You're in luck! That's exactly the problem that the Effective Altruism movement aspires to solve (namely, how to do altruism effectively.) And Givewell, in particular, is a great site for that - you can either donate to them and have them spread your donation over their "top charities", or donate to the charities yourself.
They do a lot of research, very transparently, to figure out which charities are actually achieving good outcomes. You can read their research, their thought processes around it, etc.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean those charities have "zero overhead", as you alluded to in another comment - that's not a good way to judge a charity, in general, the same way it isn't a good way to judge a company; we don't really care how much money it takes to run a company or how that money is used, we care about their profit. Similarly, if a charity uses a lot of money on things like staff, but this makes them more effective at actually (say) saving lives, then it's a net better charity to donate to than other charities.
Well, once the event hits the news and it comes out that you sacrificed your saving to save some people, then it should be easy to set up a gofundme and recoup the costs, at least if you're like me and your life savings are paltry. You may even profit!
I think a lot of people would pay money in the situation. You sending money to someone whose suffering you never even saw in Guinea and never hearing whether it helped is indeed a different thing than this trolly problem.
Silly random thoughts that went through my head at this question
1) Many people's life savings is 0. A bargain!
2) If _I_ were one of the five people, I'd try and make it up to the lever puller. Lever-guy might even come out ahead.
3) If I pull this lever right away in question 3, if there are later questions about giving up my life savings, they'll be free. This might be the value lever pull! I might be kicking myself later for missing this deal.
Other people have worked a long, long time for their life savings, and it's very likely that, as appreciative as these people might be, it's just as likely that this person gets a sincere thank you but no financial compensation. In the right situation, I could see it leading to severe depression as the puller feels they gave up everything and nobody cares.
My guess is that it is a question about responsibility. In the trolley problem it is my responsibility to pull the lever or not. If I don't lose my money people will die. In real life it is the responsibility of everybody. Maybe still very egocentric not to donate but at least your conscience can let you sleep at night.
An interesting take on it is that if, for example you have 90.000 in savings you could choose not to pull the lever and use your savings to save 20 people in Guinea, but also this would not be a popular choice I guess.
There's also a matter of proximity. In many of the other problems, people chose to sacrifice more people that they didn't know well over sacrificing someone (best friend, cousin, yourself) that you do know well. The charity problem isn't quite the same as the trolley problem, because it's saving someone outside of your tribe in a faraway land, vs. saving someone who is presumably local to you and about to die in front of your eyes. Also note that people frequently do give up their life savings (in medical bills, or GoFundMe) to save people close to them.
The charity problem is also unimaginably complex. What if I donate my entire (literal) life savings...then lose my job, go homeless, and consequently die? I've thus saved a handful of lives, lost one (myself), and doomed maybe dozens or hundreds of other lives I could've later saved! Uh, whoops. :|
Every moment, every (in)decision you make comes at the opportunity cost of many other choices, and their exponentially multiplying secondary/tertiary/etc consequences.
These thought experiments feels like (#0) solving an optimization math problem where you're:
1. Stumbling through an unimaginably large solution space and
2. Latching onto local minima (heuristics like "choose the fewest trolley deaths"), which are probably bad answers, only to realize
3. We don't even precisely know the objective function we're optimizing. So the problem has gone "up" one level. We first need to solve that optimization problem. GOTO #0.
The whole thing feels farcically hopeless and is maybe even a recursive or self referential minefield. Yikes. So the idea of avoiding it entirely by just winging it through life using your gut, or checking out entirely, doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Hell, it might be the only way to keep your sanity. It's an unsatisfying heuristic, but...oh look, we're back at step #2... :))))))
I answered with the majority because I followed John Rawls' condition of the "veil of ignorance", which means that the only information I have to start with is:
1) an average person's life savings is less than 1 million
Contrary to popular belief, there's nothing unethical about attaching a price to a human life: it's a very uncomfortable question, and I think there ought to be some disagreement on what the number should be...
But money is fundamentally just a unit of value. We use it to compare the value of different things. We can use it to convert between labour (someone's time, which is a fraction of one's life) and goods and services. We can also use it to measure lives: 5 statistical lives lost is worse than 1 statistical life lost, all else being equal. We can also use it to weigh years lost to disability, etc.
Note that this doesn't mean things always have a fair price, and it says nothing about whether money is fairly allocated in society. And it certainly doesn't mean that people can be replaced with money. None of this is the point.
As a thought experiment, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is a human life worth more than nothing, or zero dollars? (I hope you will say yes)
- Is a human life worth more than 20$? (I hope you will say yes)
- Does a human life have infinite value? I hope you will agree that this is not the case: if it was, then we would be justified in sacrificing all of the world's resources combined, in order to save a single life. The paradox is that this would come at the cost of all other lives, which is clearly nonsensical. Even a pharaoh's life, or a king's life, is not normally considered to be worth the combined lives of all of his subjects, from the perspective of modern society. Lives have some non-zero, but finite, economic/social "value".
- Is there a fair price, in dollars, for an hour of labour or work? If there is, then you accept that there is some conversion factor between a fraction of a human life, and some amount of dollars.
Putting a price tag on a human life is something that is so important, that we ought to discuss it more often. Whether we put the price too high, or too low, is often what explains political disagreements on the provision of public goods and services. We do ourselves a great disservice by not forcing ourselves to come up with a concrete number, or by not being honest about what our numbers are. We should challenge each other's assumptions and ensure we put a fair price on it, and ensure that this price is based on the things that matter to us as a society.
Judges, actuarial scientists, and economists, all do it explicitly. Nobody agrees on a specific number, but they all pick a number. The rest of us? We do it implicitly, whether or not we're aware of it, every day of our lives. The problem is that our value judgments and our choices, especially if they are not conscious, are often not self-consistent.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. A lot of this thinking does line up for me, but it seems like there's something missing. Why do we all feel a little bit sick when we hear about car executives doing calculations to determine whether to perform a recall or not? Isn't it because we're putting a financial price on life? Or is it just that the price we're hearing is too low?
I think even if we all agree that there is a price, it’s hard not to feel discomfort about that.
Depending where in the world you are, you may have grown up to believe that humans are more worthy than animals because we have “souls” or whatever that means. A lot of our culture and religion deeply reinforces the “humans are special holy magic” feelings. I won’t develop this thought to great detail unless someone wants me to.
But in addition to that, you’re absolutely correct in saying that oftentimes the price we put on life is too low.
In addition to that, even if the price is correct, it may be difficult for us to have a good perspective on that, simply because we are talking about large numbers (we’re really bad at large numbers), and because pricing stuff is hard. Even stocks are hard to price, and people argue with each other about wildly different price targets.
The most infamous recall was the Ford Pinto, and it was particularly bad because they knew about the problem before the car ever shipped, and once the problem was known didn't fix it for years even though the cost would have been $11/car.
Less directly, there's the fact that new safety features often come to luxury vehicles first, and might eventually trickle down to cheaper cars due to competition and regulation (backup cameras, automatic emergency braking).
I think mostly we don't like to think about it. This comes up particularly in the health care industry. There was the (manufactured) furor over "death panels" but there's also the very real challenge of deciding whether it's worth paying possibly millions of dollars on a drug that might have a marginal-at-best improvement in someone's survival odds. And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.
> And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.
Not only that, but even in first world countries (ie.: countries that have a good universal/public healthcare system), the dollar value of a statistical human life matters as well. There are waiting lists where you have to decide a priority rank of who gets the organ first, or who gets scheduled in on Monday for their surgery vs who has to wait, etc. Nobody likes that it has to be this way, and nobody wants to be the person that decides (in reality, it's often an ethics committee and there are rules and guidelines to follow), but that's how it has to be.
The money used to save and extend lives has to be taken from somewhere, and it's taken from the money that represents a fraction of the population's labour one way or another (it's a bit more complicated than that, especially when you consider monetary policy, and non-labour sources of income, but the general idea stands).
If you don't put a dollar value on it, then you're going to be making a lot of subjective decisions based on how you feel resources should be allocated: you're going to be taking from some people and giving to others, based on a gut feeling rather than a system. Your gut feeling might be the right one from time to time, but chances are it won't be self-consistent, and will be very biased.
If five people in my immediate presence experienced such peril then watched me sacrifice my life savings to save their lives, I would expect their testimonies of admiration and relationships backed by a life-debt would end up being an asset of equal or greater value than a tremendous lot of liquid cash. I won't lie; I want to be whole-heartedly adored by them, even more than I want the rich man's $500,000 bribe.
It's a false comparison in my opinion, but I do get your idea.
With your scenario, there are two elements to consider:
1. Bystander Effect, i.e., someone else can help in this situation so I don't have to
2. People likely reason that Guineans still have some agency to try to subsist, so the threat is not as immediate
Compared to the Trolley problem proposed, there is a decision to be made _now_ that only you have control over and there will be an immediate effect in that people's lives will be saved in a situation where they have no option to help themselves or even get by at a bare minimum.
Ignoring the "I'm absolutely broke so who cares?" people (which while a fair point I think isn't quite the spirit of the scenario, which is will you sacrifice items of significance to you for the lives of others), I think that your scenario has too much distance and layers of abstraction as to how the money helps. Fundamentally, if we can't actually understand specifically what the charities do to save a life in Guinea, so it's harder for people to accept that the decision has any significant impact.
So I don't see any real inconsistency between your scenario and the trolley one. People aren't as accepting of the premise that the charitable donation immediately saves a life and count on the help of others whereas pulling the lever immediately has an observable effect.
I took the Giving What We Can Pledge[1] and donate 10% of my income to effective charities for this reason. It barely makes a difference to me and it saves more than 1 life a year. They also have a really cool How Rich Am I calculator[2] to put it in context.
I still chose to pull the lever though because I don't have $18000 in my life savings yet.
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…
How do you know if you’re a bad driver or a good driver? It seems like a pretty blatant tautology to say that only bad drivers kill. Willing to bet almost every one of those fatal car crashes were caused by people who would have said they were a good driver…
By that logic, somebody defrauding a charity out of $4500 should be punished roughly the same as a homicide.
(Not saying that's necessarily wrong, just to give some perspective on the "fun" corners you get into when putting a monetary value on human life, and it's so much different from the value you get where you live).
Only if they defrauded one of the most effective charities (as opposed to $4500 raised to buy some new musical instruments for a school) and only if punishments should be determined by total harm caused.
Harm caused is usually one of several factors we use to determine punishments, which is why attempted murder is punishable even if the perpetrator failed to cause any harm.
(Not saying our current system for punishment is necessarily right.)
I picked that option. Based on the knowledge that it would take me around 6 years to regain my life savings at the moment and it would take me over 6 years to get over the decision of picking the savings.
If I very publicly save 5 people from a violent death I can easily play that off into much more than my life saving are worth with a couple of book deals and maybe a movie
I never understood how the trolley problem applies to real life.
When is there ever a situation where you have perfect and complete information about a scenario? Only in thought experiments.
The situation where the boxes are probabilistic was more realistic. You’re never sure in real life that you will certainly do less harm if you pull vs not pull.
I don't think it's supposed to apply immediately and directly to real life. But it's supposed to use moral intuition to highlight the balance of various philosophical frameworks (mostly consequentialism vs deontologicalism).
One common real-life debate where these moral trade-offs often comes up in real life is voting choices in our first past the post system.
A consequentialist might say that you should vote for the lesser of two evils that has a serious prospect of winning. That, while they might not be someone you support in the abstract, in the interest of harm mitigation you might give them your vote to deny victory to the greater of two evils.
Whereas a deontologicalist might say that voting for a candidate that you actively dislike and consider evil is a harm in and of itself, and that you should not cast a vote for someone you wouldn't want to see in office. Even if that means the greater of the evils ends up winning.
When I was younger and struggling with this question, the trolly problem was informative to me, and has generally lead me to a harm reduction strategy when it comes to voting (while also advocating for a reform of the voting system).
That question is actually really easy. No party represents the population. There aren't any meaningful choices to be made. Thq as weere is no such thing as a wasted vote if there is no party worth voting for.
They all suffer from the same flaw. Especially the ones near the left are particularly hypocritical. My hunch is that they depend on poor and angry voters so there is no way they would ever try to achieve prosperity for them while risking to lose their voters.
It's not that unrealistic. Imagine driving a car and a kid runs onto the street. You can swerve onto the sidewalk but there are people walking there you'd hit. The question if you'd take action to save someone to (potentially) kill someone else is interesting. And it has been discussed in the context of self driving vehicles.
But from all I remember, the outcome always was that an AI should never actively make a decision to sacrifice someone. And that's also how I view the trolley problem. Actively making a decision feels worse for me, even if fewer people die in the end.
In real life, though, you never have either perfect information about whether your action (or inaction) will have your intended consequences nor do you have the time for complete/rational analysis.
I feel like that's not realistic either—when you encounter these sorts of situations in real life, you don't really make a thought out choice because it happens so fast. People swerve and crash into trees trying to avoid rabbits, it's not a reasoned thing.
These problems do, however, come up fairly often in so many other areas. Cryptography is probably one near and dear to many people's hearts here—supporting cryptography directly saves many lives (journalists in totalitarian regimes, people in abusive relationships, the general wellbeing of people being able to communicate securely for a myriad of industrial purposes, etc.) but it also, to a lesser degree, directly leads to some deaths (terrorists are able to organize and hide their plans). Do you spend your life developing more powerful cryptographic algorithms knowing that it will have some small negative outcome that your work is partially responsible for? Or do you do nothing at all and have a larger number of people suffer as a result of you not having produced a work.
Agreed re actively making a decision: my answer was mostly not to pull the lever, and if I analyse my feelings it's because then the results aren't my fault. Pulling the lever makes me party to the situation.
Disagree re realism though. You never get a chance to think in real life; and any situation in which you could deliberate what the moral course of action is, is a situation you could avoid entirely. Really the closest to trolly problems in real life are public policy decisions - which are real and affect all of us. So yes I guess I've argued myself around to agreeing again :).
It's unrealistic because the trolley problem is basically a torture apparatus that you're instructed to operate for unknown reasons. Our decision to pull levers or not, means nothing in the context of why the situation exists in the first place, and why you have the job of executioner.
We have time to think and weigh things up in regards to pulling the lever. But in the driving scenario, a split-second decision is needed. Muscle memory and reflexes come into play. Everyone will apply the brakes anyway. There is no "do nothing" option in the driving scenario.
The original trolly problem showed that people find it less repressible to kill people when no action is taken. It's presented both ways. "Pull the lever and kill five to save one" and "pull the lever to kill one and save five". You'd think that people would answer to kill one person in both cases, but it turns out people are biased against taking action (pulling the lever) regardless of how you word it, and so when it's worded as kill five if you do nothing, a lot of people will do nothing.
I would argue the people’s choices are appropriate.
In real life you never get perfect information, so doing nothing as opposed to pulling represents the humans uncertainty of the parameters in the scenario.
That's not a bias, that's completely logical. The only thing in this world you can control is your own actions, so it's completely logical not to take an action that will kill someone.
Think about it: The number of inaction's you have is infinite - there are an infinite number of different things you could have done that would have saved someone's life. So an inaction is the default state in this world, but taking an action: That's something that has meaning, and people chose not to kill by taking an action.
Aside from the above, you are assuming that 5 people is worth more than 1, but that's not something you can know, you can't know the worth of another person. So who are you to choose to kill someone?
It really does apply, but maybe not always for obvious reasons.
I really would encourage everyone to watch Michael Sandel's political philosophy lectures (titled "Justice") at Harvard University. It's available on Youtube.
The point of the trolley problem isn't to answer the trolley problem (either globally in the framework of moral absolutism or locally in the framework of "what do you personally value?"). The point of the trolley problem is to scaffold the discussion about how you answer the trolley problem and other moral dilemmas. If you prefer to switch the trolley to actively kill one person over passively allowing five to die, the interesting point is not "that's absurd, the real world doesn't work that way!" but why the real world doesn't work that way. What else goes into our decision to not harvest one person's organs to save five others?
The covid pandemic is a trolly problem. Lock down and cause some hardship (including maybe some deaths) or let the pandemic spread and kill lots of people?
I always found the trolley problem interesting. It usually boils down to who believes in karma or a creator or not.
Most religions have the idea that it’s different to take a life than to stand by and do nothing. For instance, you should always try to help others (save a life), pretty much above all else. However, to take a life, requires taking action. Ie standing by as someone drowns is not the same as sticking someone under water. For murder you’re damned to hell. For standing by you’ll need to repent, but it’s a lesser sin.
The trolly problem IMO is a framing problem. (1) it assumes you know the future and (2) it assumes your will is above others.
The example I typically gave people when discussing this problem is actually in this fun exercise. Imagine if the 5 people strapped themselves to the tracks. Imagine they knew they would murder and wanted to die rather than murder. When you redirect the train, you actually cause more deaths, because you didn’t know the intent of those people.
The exercise helps you decide what you value. For me I never apply my outside influence to the system, except when I can save a life without costing a life. I believe life is more valuable than pretty much anything I saw in the game.
I’m a realist and objectivist. So for me the question is “what could I live with?” And “what information do I have to make a decision?”
In reality, everyone in this situation made their bed (so to speak). So I am unwilling to ever impose my will into the system baring saving a life (without costing one).
I disagree with how you’re assessing the magnitude of the sins here. I don’t think the problem really changes at all when you introduce religion to it. There’s theistic arguments in each direction of this problem, and much like with the non-theistic arguments, you won’t find any of them to be conclusively correct.
You're assuming free will though. It could be that nobody made their bed, and you're just doing what was preordained, but chalking it up to free will to feel better. Maybe you could live with anything. Maybe the information is a facade, and never really makes a difference, because you'll always just do what you were going to do anyway.
If there is no free will, though, then there isn't an interesting moral quandary about you pulling the lever. You either do, because you were preordained to do so or you don't, because you were preordained not to, and in neither case does any morality or decision-making enter into the picture, since, absent free will, you are not a morality-possessing or decision-making entity.
There's no free will in a clock but it's still interesting to watch the gears. And just because you don't have free will doesn't mean you don't have morals; even if you don't choose to do right or wrong, you can still distinguish them as separate concepts. And even if you can't distinguish morality, that doesn't necessarily make you amoral either. It's like being born to be an extra in a play and die once the play is over.
In a world with strong determinism, there is no consequence. Actions don't cause reactions. The initial state of the system causes all outcomes -- both immediate and apparently-consequent.
The person doesn't really pull the trolley lever insomuch as the universe began in a state which determined that at that moment, the person's arm and the lever would move.
In such a world, even time is barely meaningful, since events, not being dependent upon each other, don't really have a causal ordering.
If you put your hand over a flame and it hurts you pull it back. It doesn't matter if it was "determined" that you would put your hand over it, there is still an obvious and immediate reaction to the action. The time it takes for these things to happen is also meaningful as it effects how much pain you feel.
So even in a completely determined universe, there are consequences, and time is meaningful. The only difference is whether you realize that there's a universal puppeteer or not.
One of the problems did have people who tied themselves to the track, while the other person stumbled. Most people chose to let the group that chose to be on the track die.
Another interesting problem would be 5 people tied themselves to the track in front of the trolley, and 1 person tied themselves to the other track. Everybody tied themselves to the track, so should you let the one die instead of the 5? Or did the one tie themselves to the track believing that track was safe, while the other 5 tied themselves to the track expecting to die?
Interesting then that a religious society like the U.S. (>80% consider themselves religious) does not actually support helping others. This is particularly striking for law enforcement, who have no obligation to help, and then are free to choose not to. Last month, cops watched a man drown, and that's apparently perfectly fine https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/06/arizona-man-...
Humanist secular societies (e.g. France, Germany, ~30% religious people) instead have a culture and legislature that makes helping others an important duty; law enforcement and also civil citizens have a moral and legal duty to help, and it would be morally and legally unacceptable to watch someone drown.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadWhat if you don't know exactly what the lever does? What if pulling the lever makes all the infants in the world cry for an hour straight? What if pulling the lever only saves a life one time in 1000, but it sprains your wrist 1 time in 10. What if the sensible precautions are very very annoying? What if you're not sure about the side effects of the vaccine?
If you're talking about vaccines, I have an all natural colloidal silver supplement to sell you.
You then lose the election, and they start pulling the lever over and over again.
For a second I though had been dosed with something hah.
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Goes to show how easily the context and exact wording of a question can sway people's opinions.
This is what's fascinating about the Trolley Problem, and philosophy in general, and how it applies outside of philosophy - most people struggle to answer questions based on the evidence available without bringing in some external justification for their answer. People wamt a 'logical' reason to justify their choice. They can't say "I don't know", or "I used the limited data I had" when the choice they'd make goes against the something they belive about the real world (eg 'public transport is good'). They bring in a "but what if <imaginary thing that supports their biases>!" and make a decision based on that instead. They even believe they made the right choice.
This applies to everything from choosing a tech stack to picking who to vote for. It's infuriating once you see it.
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.
After some deliberation, my muncipality recently decided against a streetcar-system and for a bus-based system with electric buses, right-of-way everywhere and dedicated bus-lanes where possible (nearly everywhere).
It worked out really well.
I mean, it seems like it's the same trolley that have run over a lot of people for the previous 19 levels, why wouldn't I want to decommission such bloodthirsty trolley?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
The gist is that we design our streets in such a way that people drive dangerously fast on them when they’re not slowed down by congestion, and during the pandemic that’s exactly what happened. Some other countries (particularly in Western Europe) take a safe systems approach to street design and did not have the same uptick in fatalities that we did.
"“They were just sick and tired of kids being killed in the streets,” says Jason Slaughter"
Keep existing public transit system that contributes to X deaths per year from pollution an accidents, or...
...pull the lever and...
Replace it with a public transit system of bloodthirsty trolleys. There is zero pollution! Only 1% of X deaths per year from accidents! Just one catch: all the accidents involve the trolley morphing into a scary mechanical beast and biting a random person's head off.
But more seriously, I just realised that this is actually an argument that's often used against various environmental measures. People argue against wind turbines because they kill birds, ignoring the fact that pollution from fossil fuel kills far more, and birds are killed in larger numbers by other causes (cars, windows, cats). But somehow inaction seems more moral to some people if that action still leads to some deaths. Same with a multitude of other social issues.
More people were in favor of pulling the lever than there were in favor of pushing someone onto the tracks. This indeed hints that the more direct action, the harsher the judgement.
https://bathtrams.uk/the-most-energy-efficient-mode-of-publi...
Still, I feel that trams will be dying soon. The improved efficiency is simply not enough to justify the extra infrastructure and inflexibility. Modern battery electric buses have a range of 500+km and can thus be used for an entire day, and charged at times when electricity is cheap and green (ie overnight on wind energy).
I don't see existing trams and light rail disappearing soon. Not in cities that have well-functioning networks, like Amsterdam. But I can imagine that for new projects, electric buses are preferable.
That isn't their only advantage, but it's one which is often overlooked.
However I did not take into account the CO2 emissions and possible industrial accidents at the trolly factory or trolly materials mines.
Taking into account future discounting, it's probably almost never a good idea.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/aug/17/car-scra...
I would argue that it shouldn't factor into the equation. The polluting trolley will be replaced sooner or later, anyway. You're just moving the date forward.
The catch is that the argument could be made every year, with a new, more efficient trolley replacing the previous. In which case the construction costs obviously need to be considered, and it wouldn't be worth to spend 100 CO2 to save 10.
My feeling was, if I let the trolley go, it can be destroyed later. It will be harder to undo the decision to destroy it. Who knows, maybe the transportation capabilities it offers can save lives by rushing people to hospital. I just don't believe that pulling the switch and destroying a vehicle is really the only possible opportunity to stop emissions that will get released over 30 whole years. So I didn't pull it.
I assume the information they have told me is the only thing relevant and everything else is equal.
Of course many philosophers disagree and arguably terrible things were done with such mindset[3]. The point I am trying to make is that if you need context then you cannot have a universal rational decision, thus you will be imposing your own morals possibly over others. You might be fine with it, but now you relativized morals.
PS: I highly recommend the Great Lectures on Audible on philosophy. Specifically "Why Evil Exists" and "The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas".
The first one is more on the religious part, but provides great background on moral and ethical thought starting with the Gilgamesh all the way to XX century psychology.
The second is a great over view of western thought, with philosophical counter arguments on thinkers I never heard of, but which i find essential to help form one's thought on how Western society must progress. That book changed my life due to the sheer exposure of captivating ideas even sometimes conflicting. I loved Rawls but consider myself a freedom guy. Now my thought is clearer: How can we find a way to measure that further distribution would harm the most disadvantaged? This is still open but a more practical question, that i can use on evaluating certain concrete policies. Example:
In Portugal the minimum wage has been increased to the point it matches the average salary. A person who did not train to specialize and works in a coffee shop earns similarly to an engineer that spent his first 24 years studying. This is harmful because without differences in rewards, higher difficulty but needed professions will not have enough practitioners. Therefore society as a whole will suffer because it lacks trained specialists to improve the untrained coffee worker's life. "Bam, simple as that". It soothes me in the face of the torrent of events and ideologies pushed upon me all the time.
[1] "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Eichmann
In my opinion, people who would like to study engineering would do so not so because of what they are paid (the situation today), but because of their genuine interest.
On further reflection, it seems ludicrous to believe that that hardest professions are the most paid. The average CS job pays obscenely well, but is relatively trivial. Primary healthcare providers, essential services workers and so on are severely underpaid.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the hardest professions are the most paid.
Training takes time, and often unpaid. A coffee shop worker will immediately get rewarded while the engineer will not. If they will be equally compensated then the engineer is at a disadvantage.
> In my opinion, people who would like to study engineering would do so not so because of what they are paid (the situation today), but because of their genuine interest.
Marx said the same. If the people would be free they would produce out of their heart's desire. As it did not turn out that way the party needed to force the worker's desire into them. Literally to free them by force (freedom by force is another concept in itself :)).
In fact, I don’t see why the ability to have a good standard of living should be predicated on your profession in the first place.
The fact that engineering training is… unpaid as you say seems to put people who cannot afford to not make money for rent, food, etc. at a clear disadvantage. Those already rich (and able to afford unpaid training) would just get richer if they are paid more than an “untrained” worker.
Because the lack of payment is the trainee's quid-pro-quo. It makes the trainee a counterpart in the training investment. In several countries in Europe to varying degrees and forms, the state pays for the training. It pays the professors, facilities and can even pay scholarships so that a disadvantaged background is not an impediment to such training(tackling the inequality issue you mention). I am not aware of any institution/state paying even a minimum wage up to master level.
Then there is the issue of difficulty, where it is clear that learning to serve a coffee mug requires less effort than learning advanced calculus. If you pay/reward the student engineer the same as the coffee waiter, you will likely still have fewer engineers[1]. Fewer engineers will produce fewer useful infrastructure or wealth to redistribute that the coffee waiter could benefit from. Therefore according to Rawls having them earning the same would be unfair.
> In fact, I don’t see why the ability to have a good standard of living should be predicated on your profession in the first place. It is not. It is predicated on the the value the profession generates.
[1] The reward/base-line ratio feels like the reaction coefficient, where you use a higher reward to make an unlikely reaction become possible :)
PS: It took me a good while and rewrites to come up with a satisfactory answer. Thanks for the comment.
I understand the willingness to not discredit someone's hard work, but some skills are legitimately more complex than others.
High minimum and median salaries are usually good for engineers as it requires more productive companies which requires more engineers. When workers are cheap few wants to pay for expensive systems.
The option should have been between decommissioning the train, saving 3 people and a few tons CO2, and decommissioning all motorized vehicles, saving millions of people every year and having a real impact on CO2 reduction.
I have a anecdatum of one, that being myself, that I like public transport. Just, the US public transport is god awful and you may be thinking of the US style of public transport, or the lack thereof, and thus come to that conclusion. Which, fair enough. Just not representative of the wider world.
A quarter probably did that, considering both options.
Many "fun" surveys are built to help collect data to better profile you. There are many techniques here, from asking a mixture of innocuous and profiling questions, to looking for correlations. With a few, you can extrapolate a person's age, political leanings, etc.
This is snowballing, and it's hard to predict how data collected today will be used, or what inferences will be possible. It's safer not to do a threat analysis every time, but just to click one button each time and not risk letting profilers know your value system.
It doesn't help that actual trolleys are called trams where I live, so I think of trolleys as philosophical constructs that don't have a real existence.
If you are in a burning, sinking ship and all going to die for sure, it's still immoral to rape someone.
So the argument still stands, the difference in the consequences, when considered outside of any context, is simply not worth the mental effort to figure out if the lever should be pulled. The exercise is only interesting because it provokes to think about real life scenarios.
Yeah, when I clicked on the link I was hoping that finally someone had solved the problem of never having a pound coin to unlock trolleys at the supermarket.
Edit: On the other side, if you really decide to not take more context, you just destroyed the only existing trolley of the universe.
Does anyone really still call them that? A trolley is not a tram, it's a trolley, and harkens back from last century. In the US, some people call them trams, most of us call them trains. Portland does have a special version they like to call a streetcar, though. Functionally a light rail train, but runs in normal lanes of traffic.
Actively making a real life or death decision is quite a lot different than reasoning though a game.
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.
In this case, I did pull the lever, because it could be replaced by an electric trolley. But if killing the trolley means more cars and more car accidents and CO2, then of course we should keep the trolley. But if we ignore context and just look at kill 5 people or kill the inanimate object responsible for killing those 5 people, the answer is obvious. (But did I really ignore the context there?)
Others also have important subconscious context. Sacrifice 5 elderly people to save one baby. How elderly are they? Are they so elderly they're just waiting for death, or do they each still have more than 20 years of relatively healthy life left? And thanks to modern health care, that baby now has a very good chance to survive until adulthood, but 100-200 years ago, that chance was only 50%. Maybe not worth sacrificing 5 people for. I think that one was the hardest.
(My friends may be somewhat worried to learn that I had surprisingly little trouble sacrificing my best friend for 5 strangers. But really, I'd prefer to kill whoever keeps tying these people to the track.)
also, you can easily flip it: elderly cannot be saved from the torture of existence, having lived so long, but the baby has barely suffered anything yet - we can save it!
I knew I responded with "do nothing" to 100% of the questions, it's not my job to solve the problems of the Universe (and if that good person had been that good in real life then he/she wouldn't have ended up in front of an incoming trolley while the bad person was tied down on the other, "take action", line).
If the choice was between 3 deaths over 30 years and something more than that, then the problem would have stated as much. But it didn't. You don't add extraneous details that you thought of to bend the problem to what you want it to be, you make the choice between two sides as they are presented.
Supporting abortion rights doesn't mean killing babies.
There is something very revealing about the GP's attitude though. They literally interpret someone wanting to avoid killing a baby as being the exact same thing as opposing abortion. So in their worldview abortion really is all about killing babies.
There are two parts to this discussion that people are pointing out that I could have done a better job explaining.
First that I’m confounding the trolley problem of killing a baby with abortion. I’m well aware it’s a thought experiment that’s used in philosophy. I understand that killing a baby is different than abortion. My main point which wasn’t articulated at all in the first thread was more from an anti-natalist perspective. The society I live in primarily assigns more value to the fetus and or baby than they do the people that already are living.
A lot of the argument comes down to whether or not the child will have a chance to do great things and to experience life. Killing the baby means stopping them from having this opportunity. However I look at it from the perspective of potential suffering and current ability to feel and think. Killing the baby really doesn’t stop the baby from thinking because well, baby. And more importantly killing the baby stops a lifetime of suffering.
Second, my worldview doesn’t contain that mentality. Abortion isn’t about killing babies. To me it’s more about stopping potential life. Whether or not that life has potential that is actually good is the part that I disagree with most of society.
Generally someone is already in the way of the trolley, so the question is more like "Would you kill x in order to save y?".
So you could ask people this:
Would you kill a baby to save 5 elderly people?
Would you kill 5 elderly people to save a baby?
How people answer these questions does not really have anything to do with abortion.
Thoughts on why you can't? I think you can and must.
1. Abortions usually happen before there's an actual living baby.
2. Abortions don't usually result in sparing the lives of adults.
Many people are annoyed by Boomer actions every day...
I don't make a conscious choice to take action that will cause a stranger's death (even if more people die because I didn't take action) with exceptions for my monkeysphere. In the case of the worst enemy one, I didn't hesitate to run them over. In the case of self preservation, I chose to save myself. In the case of my best friend, other people are gonna die. Etc.
It makes a lot of these pretty easy and a few (like first cousin vs 3rd cousins) a matter of happenstance, just like the happenstance that I was looking at these absurd trolley problems.
Which one is "inaction" now, purposefully standing very still, or acting as you would have otherwise?
That matters legally (accidental death) versus intent (mens rea, murder).
It also matters socially, because you can deny that you made any choice even though you may have chosen (assuming you only do it once). You can even deny it to yourself.
It does beg the question: who set the trolley up to kill people, and why did you happen to be standing on the trigger?
I'm just trying to poke at the gp's idea (paraphrasing) that inaction is morally blameless.
Allow me a dodge: I think that I’d probably press the button, but that it’s strictly wrong for me to do so. Chalk it up to weakness.
Like that 5-to-1 standard trolley problem is a hard question for me to answer, and on different days, I pick different answers. Probably "do nothing" most days. But if you made it 50,000,000-to-1, it is not a hard problem any more. Somewhere in between those two is "the line" where the fact that you are becoming a murderer is outweighed by the value of the life you saved.
Yes, if I could be certain that I could save 50,000,000 lives by murdering someone, I think it would be a moral imperative to do so. That wouldn't change the moral evil of murder, it just outweighs it.
I think. Don't ask what I'd do "in real life", I won't know until it happens (which I pray it will not)
Also, while I'm firmly pro reproduction, this all sounds more than a little judgemental and presumptuous about the motivations of those that chose to not procreate.
On the other hand, some of the responses have a small contingent disagreeing, and to explain those I would remind you of the Lizardman Constant [1]. That is, some pollsters just want to watch the statistics burn.
[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
But I'm glad that innocent-minded people like you exist. Here's a question, if you had the choice between killing me or yourself, who would you choose?
These are mostly gut feelings and unfinished thoughts. I'm not sure about any parts of it except "it's not a complete picture". I'd love to hear any thoughts on this and reading recommendations are welcomed.
I am probably just as terrible in their eyes.
https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/the-day-michelangelos-piet...
Why the robots choose to get involved with murderous trams is another question…
I chose to save the human as the prompt didn't set a bar for the level of sentience. Also partly because of shameless speciesism. I love animals, have gone mostly vegetarian, but I would still save a human over any other animal.
That’s actually a very good point, I made more assumptions than the text gave cause for.
brain damage: now there's a hard one
Or equivalently, would you sacrifice a billion humans to save a robot that's twice as sentient as the average human?
Lots of animals die due to our existence and not just for our food. We accidentally kill things all the time with our vehicles and the pollution we cause. I wish it wasn't the case but you can't step outside without ruining some ants day.
To then be faced with a choice between killing one more animal or a human... my heart would bleed for the monkey but to do anything else would be murder and pretty hypocritical unless one lives an extremely vegan and eco friendly lifestyle.
No medical issue will strip away the fact that it is a human life. I'll make it more absurd for you... they could have a terminal disease and likely be dead tomorrow and I'd still choose to sacrifice the monkey to give them 24 more hours.
Right?
So this question is more like would I like to destroy a couple of expensive robots or kill someone. I chose to 'kill' the robots. Some might see this as cheating or not in the spirit of the question being asked - for me, I can't and will never concede 'programmable sentience' as any sort of reality.
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 even be that different, day to day.
But on the other hand, I might be so curious about what in the heck happened in the world outside - the world that led to this universe where it will be impossible for me to die for eternity, and somehow I know this with absolute 100% certainty - that I still opt out.
The "you have solved philosophy" message at the end of the game is very far from the truth.
Best case scenario you can do what you want and deal with whatever urge you have at your pace. Worst case scenario you don't have agency, and just stay stuck suffering instead of dying. Personally I'd take the chance.
What "literally" means in this case? Am I completely certain that I'll be stuck on the trolley for eternity? I would think that I'm having a psychotic break and delay my decision.
50 more years to live? Okay. 50+? Kill me immediately!
* Study the science behind the infinitely reliable trolley. If the science is tractorable then humanity wins.
* How are the people prevented from leaving the trolley? New science?
* Is the trolley just a thought experiment? Then we can think about other solutions.
* Is the trolley somewhere inaccessible? How did the people get there? Science.
The Trolland Show draws millions of views. The residents initially had relatively normal interaction with friends and family via Zoom calls, but as the first generations died off, a new social order evolved. The community is very tight-kit and intimate (in every sense of the word), while having parasocial relations with outsiders, whom they call Stationaries. A Cult of the Trolley which worships the eternal engine has sprung up, periodically giving offerings to the trolley and its denizens. Ratings skyrocketed one day in 2077 as five cultists, in an odd sense of irony, tied themselves to the track as a sacrifice to the great Prime Mover.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_Heisenberg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsqBtZNBL60
I interpret that as the passengers would live their natural life-span and then their rotting bodies would go in circles for eternity.
Replace the trolley with planet Earth and it's no different from regular life. (approximating eternity with life of the Sun).
I imagine I’d rather go insane from eternity than die for oblivion.
I’m also fairly certain I’ll change that opinion as time goes on, but that doesn’t affect my current decisionmaking.
This isn't a democracy and I hold all of the levers of power.
Amazing that 50% of people are nihilistic enough to just blow it up.
-- Rush (paraphrased)
> Lizardman’s Constant is an idea proposed by Scott Alexander that each poll always has about 4% weird answers. In one poll, 4% of Americans said that reptilian people do control our world and, in another 4% answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Have you ever been decapitated?’
Well, until they ban you that is I guess.
Edit: a fun part of the trolley problem not really explored here is how inconsistent most people’s logic gets when the outcomes are effectively the same but the actions are slightly different. For example, what if instead of pushing a button you had to shoot the person on the tracks? What if you could kill someone today who is going to shoot up a mall tomorrow? More fun, what if you could push a button to kill a millionaire and redistribute their wealth to save 100 families in subsaharan Africa?
Logically, as soon as you go down the path of actively choosing to kill a person to achieve some “greater good”, you’ve really thrown an awful lot of morals out the window.
Or that’s one weak-ass trolley.
I disagree. I think there's some point at which minimal effort from you for appreciable reward for others puts an obligation on you. And that's precisely the reason the trolley problem is so popular.
Apart from stupid cat problem...
This kinda misses the mirror problems, where out comes are switched.
Do I start over and pull more levers to lower my score or do nothing?
Edit: misread your ? as !
I justify it like this: a world where well-being is decided by wealth is unjust and undesirable, so trying to enjoy your privilege is a moral wrongdoing because it very directly prevents the spreading-out of wellbeing. This makes it equivalent to the littering problem (in mode, not scale), where I chose to kill the litterer.
I'm not confident, but that's how I rationalize it. I'd love to hear any thoughts on this.
Except the “you can’t see the track” one I suppose :P
https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/German_Constitutional_Court_pro...
“The court also found that the act [shooting down hijacked plane] is incompatible with the constitutional right to life and the human dignity. The act would turn passengers and crew of a hijacked plane, victims themselves, into "objects" - not only to the terrorists, but also to the state, which does not have the authority to kill innocents. If their deaths would be used to save others they would be reduced to mere "things" at the pleasure of the state. Further, the court believes that the arguments of the federal government, saying that passengers in such a situation would die anyway, are invalid, as human lives deserve protection regardless of the expected duration of their existence and that it is impossible to fully assess the situation leading to an eventual invocation of the act.”
Dr. Evil is 90 years old, his consciousness is slowly fading away, and he is going to die in a week. He is almost ready to release a bomb that will torture kill half of the world population. If you pull the lever Dr. Evil will die today and you will save all those people. You are the only one who can pull the lever. Do you pull the lever, or do you stick to your principle of not sacrificing other people who don't want to be sacrificed?
> 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 are choosing not to pull the Question 3 lever.
According to Givewell, it takes $4500 to save a life in Guinea. So for every $4500 of your savings that you choose not to donate to Guinea, that's one person you are choosing not to pull the lever to save. Have $45,000 in savings? That's 10 people you're choosing not to pull the lever to save.
I doubt that over 70% of respondents are regularly donating anywhere close to their life savings.
There are pragmatic reasons as well. For me, people spend a lot to be happy like buying luxurious stuff or go to the movies/good restaurant. Saving people makes me happy. I am willing to pay for my own happiness.
Saying something ought to be done is not the same as doing it, basically.
And of course, while donating to poor countries is fundamentally similar to Question 3, in practice it's obviously not the same; people do seem have a 'moral discount' for things that occur farther away (geographically, temporally, or otherwise).
Reminds me of Richard Posner, former Chief Justice of the Seventh Appelate court. His essay on how poor people have no wealth so you need the threat of prison to keep them in line. And how middle class people you only need the threat of impoverishment to keep them in line. So you can just fine them. And wealthy people only need the threat of loss of reputation to keep them in line.
Which is to say Posner is an idiot that knows nothing of poor people. Because all an honest poor person owns is his reputation. Where Musk... when you are that wealthy someones always going to overlook your transgressions.
People operating on different sets of facts!
The cost of the lives of 5 first-world people in terms of economic productivity is like an order of magnitude greater than my savings.
And while yes, some good charities do exist apparently; I can't name any.
Edit: and no one better try to say 'WE' is a good charity.
And not to be that person; but proof please.
I really do want a comprehensive list if possible of which charities are actually worthy of even being allowed to keep existing on this planet.
You're in luck! That's exactly the problem that the Effective Altruism movement aspires to solve (namely, how to do altruism effectively.) And Givewell, in particular, is a great site for that - you can either donate to them and have them spread your donation over their "top charities", or donate to the charities yourself.
They do a lot of research, very transparently, to figure out which charities are actually achieving good outcomes. You can read their research, their thought processes around it, etc.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean those charities have "zero overhead", as you alluded to in another comment - that's not a good way to judge a charity, in general, the same way it isn't a good way to judge a company; we don't really care how much money it takes to run a company or how that money is used, we care about their profit. Similarly, if a charity uses a lot of money on things like staff, but this makes them more effective at actually (say) saving lives, then it's a net better charity to donate to than other charities.
Comment redacted to help hide idiocy... sorry.
A rather hilarious example is asking if they are against bestiality. Pretty much everyone is.
Asking why in more liberal circles gets you an answer along the lines of "it hurts the animals" a lot of the time.
Then asking if it hurts animals more than eating them usually results in a ban.
1) Many people's life savings is 0. A bargain!
2) If _I_ were one of the five people, I'd try and make it up to the lever puller. Lever-guy might even come out ahead.
3) If I pull this lever right away in question 3, if there are later questions about giving up my life savings, they'll be free. This might be the value lever pull! I might be kicking myself later for missing this deal.
I still think you need to pull the lever.
out of sight out of mind.
An interesting take on it is that if, for example you have 90.000 in savings you could choose not to pull the lever and use your savings to save 20 people in Guinea, but also this would not be a popular choice I guess.
Every moment, every (in)decision you make comes at the opportunity cost of many other choices, and their exponentially multiplying secondary/tertiary/etc consequences.
These thought experiments feels like (#0) solving an optimization math problem where you're:
1. Stumbling through an unimaginably large solution space and
2. Latching onto local minima (heuristics like "choose the fewest trolley deaths"), which are probably bad answers, only to realize
3. We don't even precisely know the objective function we're optimizing. So the problem has gone "up" one level. We first need to solve that optimization problem. GOTO #0.
The whole thing feels farcically hopeless and is maybe even a recursive or self referential minefield. Yikes. So the idea of avoiding it entirely by just winging it through life using your gut, or checking out entirely, doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Hell, it might be the only way to keep your sanity. It's an unsatisfying heuristic, but...oh look, we're back at step #2... :))))))
1) an average person's life savings is less than 1 million
2) an average person's life is worth ~10 million
But money is fundamentally just a unit of value. We use it to compare the value of different things. We can use it to convert between labour (someone's time, which is a fraction of one's life) and goods and services. We can also use it to measure lives: 5 statistical lives lost is worse than 1 statistical life lost, all else being equal. We can also use it to weigh years lost to disability, etc.
Note that this doesn't mean things always have a fair price, and it says nothing about whether money is fairly allocated in society. And it certainly doesn't mean that people can be replaced with money. None of this is the point.
As a thought experiment, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is a human life worth more than nothing, or zero dollars? (I hope you will say yes)
- Is a human life worth more than 20$? (I hope you will say yes)
- Does a human life have infinite value? I hope you will agree that this is not the case: if it was, then we would be justified in sacrificing all of the world's resources combined, in order to save a single life. The paradox is that this would come at the cost of all other lives, which is clearly nonsensical. Even a pharaoh's life, or a king's life, is not normally considered to be worth the combined lives of all of his subjects, from the perspective of modern society. Lives have some non-zero, but finite, economic/social "value".
- Is there a fair price, in dollars, for an hour of labour or work? If there is, then you accept that there is some conversion factor between a fraction of a human life, and some amount of dollars.
Putting a price tag on a human life is something that is so important, that we ought to discuss it more often. Whether we put the price too high, or too low, is often what explains political disagreements on the provision of public goods and services. We do ourselves a great disservice by not forcing ourselves to come up with a concrete number, or by not being honest about what our numbers are. We should challenge each other's assumptions and ensure we put a fair price on it, and ensure that this price is based on the things that matter to us as a society.
Judges, actuarial scientists, and economists, all do it explicitly. Nobody agrees on a specific number, but they all pick a number. The rest of us? We do it implicitly, whether or not we're aware of it, every day of our lives. The problem is that our value judgments and our choices, especially if they are not conscious, are often not self-consistent.
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See also:
- https://fee.org/articles/marginalism-and-the-morality-of-pri...
- https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843310123/how-government-agen...
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230963-100-put-a-pr...
- https://asiatimes.com/2020/05/get-honest-about-the-price-of-...
- http://justiceharvard.org/lecture-3-putting-a-price-tag-on-l...
- darkerside ↗ Thanks for the thoughtful comment. A lot of this thinking does line up for me, but it seems like there's something missing. Why do we all feel a little bit sick when we hear about car executives doing calculations to determine whether to perform a recall or not? Isn't it because we're putting a financial price on life? Or is it just that the price we're hearing is too low? epgui ↗ I think even if we all agree that there is a price, it’s hard not to feel discomfort about that. e_y_ ↗ The most infamous recall was the Ford Pinto, and it was particularly bad because they knew about the problem before the car ever shipped, and once the problem was known didn't fix it for years even though the cost would have been $11/car. epgui ↗ Indeed!
Depending where in the world you are, you may have grown up to believe that humans are more worthy than animals because we have “souls” or whatever that means. A lot of our culture and religion deeply reinforces the “humans are special holy magic” feelings. I won’t develop this thought to great detail unless someone wants me to.
But in addition to that, you’re absolutely correct in saying that oftentimes the price we put on life is too low.
In addition to that, even if the price is correct, it may be difficult for us to have a good perspective on that, simply because we are talking about large numbers (we’re really bad at large numbers), and because pricing stuff is hard. Even stocks are hard to price, and people argue with each other about wildly different price targets.
Less directly, there's the fact that new safety features often come to luxury vehicles first, and might eventually trickle down to cheaper cars due to competition and regulation (backup cameras, automatic emergency braking).
I think mostly we don't like to think about it. This comes up particularly in the health care industry. There was the (manufactured) furor over "death panels" but there's also the very real challenge of deciding whether it's worth paying possibly millions of dollars on a drug that might have a marginal-at-best improvement in someone's survival odds. And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.
> And it's not just about some corporate executive's pockets; these costs get passed on to regular people through increased premiums and may cause people to drop their health insurance entirely.
Not only that, but even in first world countries (ie.: countries that have a good universal/public healthcare system), the dollar value of a statistical human life matters as well. There are waiting lists where you have to decide a priority rank of who gets the organ first, or who gets scheduled in on Monday for their surgery vs who has to wait, etc. Nobody likes that it has to be this way, and nobody wants to be the person that decides (in reality, it's often an ethics committee and there are rules and guidelines to follow), but that's how it has to be.
The money used to save and extend lives has to be taken from somewhere, and it's taken from the money that represents a fraction of the population's labour one way or another (it's a bit more complicated than that, especially when you consider monetary policy, and non-labour sources of income, but the general idea stands).
If you don't put a dollar value on it, then you're going to be making a lot of subjective decisions based on how you feel resources should be allocated: you're going to be taking from some people and giving to others, based on a gut feeling rather than a system. Your gut feeling might be the right one from time to time, but chances are it won't be self-consistent, and will be very biased.
With your scenario, there are two elements to consider:
1. Bystander Effect, i.e., someone else can help in this situation so I don't have to
2. People likely reason that Guineans still have some agency to try to subsist, so the threat is not as immediate
Compared to the Trolley problem proposed, there is a decision to be made _now_ that only you have control over and there will be an immediate effect in that people's lives will be saved in a situation where they have no option to help themselves or even get by at a bare minimum.
Ignoring the "I'm absolutely broke so who cares?" people (which while a fair point I think isn't quite the spirit of the scenario, which is will you sacrifice items of significance to you for the lives of others), I think that your scenario has too much distance and layers of abstraction as to how the money helps. Fundamentally, if we can't actually understand specifically what the charities do to save a life in Guinea, so it's harder for people to accept that the decision has any significant impact.
So I don't see any real inconsistency between your scenario and the trolley one. People aren't as accepting of the premise that the charitable donation immediately saves a life and count on the help of others whereas pulling the lever immediately has an observable effect.
I still chose to pull the lever though because I don't have $18000 in my life savings yet.
[1]: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge
[2]: https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i
But that's fine because and and I bad drivers are not.
(Not saying that's necessarily wrong, just to give some perspective on the "fun" corners you get into when putting a monetary value on human life, and it's so much different from the value you get where you live).
Harm caused is usually one of several factors we use to determine punishments, which is why attempted murder is punishable even if the perpetrator failed to cause any harm.
(Not saying our current system for punishment is necessarily right.)
When is there ever a situation where you have perfect and complete information about a scenario? Only in thought experiments.
The situation where the boxes are probabilistic was more realistic. You’re never sure in real life that you will certainly do less harm if you pull vs not pull.
One common real-life debate where these moral trade-offs often comes up in real life is voting choices in our first past the post system.
A consequentialist might say that you should vote for the lesser of two evils that has a serious prospect of winning. That, while they might not be someone you support in the abstract, in the interest of harm mitigation you might give them your vote to deny victory to the greater of two evils.
Whereas a deontologicalist might say that voting for a candidate that you actively dislike and consider evil is a harm in and of itself, and that you should not cast a vote for someone you wouldn't want to see in office. Even if that means the greater of the evils ends up winning.
When I was younger and struggling with this question, the trolly problem was informative to me, and has generally lead me to a harm reduction strategy when it comes to voting (while also advocating for a reform of the voting system).
They all suffer from the same flaw. Especially the ones near the left are particularly hypocritical. My hunch is that they depend on poor and angry voters so there is no way they would ever try to achieve prosperity for them while risking to lose their voters.
But from all I remember, the outcome always was that an AI should never actively make a decision to sacrifice someone. And that's also how I view the trolley problem. Actively making a decision feels worse for me, even if fewer people die in the end.
I feel like that's not realistic either—when you encounter these sorts of situations in real life, you don't really make a thought out choice because it happens so fast. People swerve and crash into trees trying to avoid rabbits, it's not a reasoned thing.
These problems do, however, come up fairly often in so many other areas. Cryptography is probably one near and dear to many people's hearts here—supporting cryptography directly saves many lives (journalists in totalitarian regimes, people in abusive relationships, the general wellbeing of people being able to communicate securely for a myriad of industrial purposes, etc.) but it also, to a lesser degree, directly leads to some deaths (terrorists are able to organize and hide their plans). Do you spend your life developing more powerful cryptographic algorithms knowing that it will have some small negative outcome that your work is partially responsible for? Or do you do nothing at all and have a larger number of people suffer as a result of you not having produced a work.
Disagree re realism though. You never get a chance to think in real life; and any situation in which you could deliberate what the moral course of action is, is a situation you could avoid entirely. Really the closest to trolly problems in real life are public policy decisions - which are real and affect all of us. So yes I guess I've argued myself around to agreeing again :).
It's unrealistic because the trolley problem is basically a torture apparatus that you're instructed to operate for unknown reasons. Our decision to pull levers or not, means nothing in the context of why the situation exists in the first place, and why you have the job of executioner.
We have time to think and weigh things up in regards to pulling the lever. But in the driving scenario, a split-second decision is needed. Muscle memory and reflexes come into play. Everyone will apply the brakes anyway. There is no "do nothing" option in the driving scenario.
In real life you never get perfect information, so doing nothing as opposed to pulling represents the humans uncertainty of the parameters in the scenario.
“First do no harm”.
Think about it: The number of inaction's you have is infinite - there are an infinite number of different things you could have done that would have saved someone's life. So an inaction is the default state in this world, but taking an action: That's something that has meaning, and people chose not to kill by taking an action.
Aside from the above, you are assuming that 5 people is worth more than 1, but that's not something you can know, you can't know the worth of another person. So who are you to choose to kill someone?
Mathematically the expected outcomes should be the same, but morally they are not.
I really would encourage everyone to watch Michael Sandel's political philosophy lectures (titled "Justice") at Harvard University. It's available on Youtube.
Most religions have the idea that it’s different to take a life than to stand by and do nothing. For instance, you should always try to help others (save a life), pretty much above all else. However, to take a life, requires taking action. Ie standing by as someone drowns is not the same as sticking someone under water. For murder you’re damned to hell. For standing by you’ll need to repent, but it’s a lesser sin.
The trolly problem IMO is a framing problem. (1) it assumes you know the future and (2) it assumes your will is above others.
The example I typically gave people when discussing this problem is actually in this fun exercise. Imagine if the 5 people strapped themselves to the tracks. Imagine they knew they would murder and wanted to die rather than murder. When you redirect the train, you actually cause more deaths, because you didn’t know the intent of those people.
The exercise helps you decide what you value. For me I never apply my outside influence to the system, except when I can save a life without costing a life. I believe life is more valuable than pretty much anything I saw in the game.
I’m a realist and objectivist. So for me the question is “what could I live with?” And “what information do I have to make a decision?”
In reality, everyone in this situation made their bed (so to speak). So I am unwilling to ever impose my will into the system baring saving a life (without costing one).
The person doesn't really pull the trolley lever insomuch as the universe began in a state which determined that at that moment, the person's arm and the lever would move.
In such a world, even time is barely meaningful, since events, not being dependent upon each other, don't really have a causal ordering.
So even in a completely determined universe, there are consequences, and time is meaningful. The only difference is whether you realize that there's a universal puppeteer or not.
Another interesting problem would be 5 people tied themselves to the track in front of the trolley, and 1 person tied themselves to the other track. Everybody tied themselves to the track, so should you let the one die instead of the 5? Or did the one tie themselves to the track believing that track was safe, while the other 5 tied themselves to the track expecting to die?
Humanist secular societies (e.g. France, Germany, ~30% religious people) instead have a culture and legislature that makes helping others an important duty; law enforcement and also civil citizens have a moral and legal duty to help, and it would be morally and legally unacceptable to watch someone drown.