Karpel Tunnel, is your position on the original trolley problem (not the fat man problem) the same as your position on what I’m saying here? If not, how do you distinguish them? Your arguments seem equally applicable (“what are the consequences of having these kinds of scenarios BEING A REGULAR PART OF HUMAN INTERACTIONS”, such that everyone around you would be pulling the switch to kill you to save five other people all the time.)
I’m not suggesting any change in social order – I posted this in the Philosophy forum because it’s not a policy proposal. This is a question of morality no more horrible in the asking (and taking no more time/orphan lives in the discussing) than the trolley problem or its more visceral variations.
Meno_, I think your point about the Stalin quote is apt: human cognition is not consistent, we think differently about questions when posed differently, including, as Stalin notes, when they deal with concrete vs. abstract concepts. Our cognition evolved to have a pretty good intuitive grasp of what a single person is, but not at all of what a million people are. We literally engage different brain structures to reason about those two things.
But we can reflect on those differences and see if they’re consistent. If the value we place on the life of one person is greater than the value we place on the life of a million people, we know that something is going wrong and we need to examine the intuitions to find out which is correct. If you think that pressing a switch so a train hits one person is OK, but that hitting that person so they press the switch isn’t, we can tell there’s something more to the story.
Granted, but that doesn’t bear on how well numbers describe the world. You might be an artist of housebuilding, and eyeball every length with perfect precision, and never once resort to a tape measure or calculator. But someone else can still measure every piece you cut, and can say with great confidence what the lengths are and what you would measure the lengths to be if you were to measure them.
Again, this isn’t about how people do think, it’s about they can think.
I’m saying surveys aren’t a great way to get at a consistent moral framework. People who haven’t analyzed their moral intuitions are not likely to notice if they are inconsistent.
I would also say it seems understandable that people are repelled by the fat man hypo, but not reasonable. See my comments to Meno_ above; people’s intuitions are derived from cognitive mechanisms that evolved to solve very different problems from the trolley problem and the fat man variation. They don’t tend to think about it, or be bothered by the possibility that it’s inconsistent upon analysis. That doesn’t mean that it is not inconsistent upon analysis.
Not if they’ve already happily answered the original trolley problem in favor of pulling the switch, in which case it’s special pleading to complain about using mathematics in hypothetical life and death decisions only when we get to a life and death decision that feels icky.
These statements conflict, and I agree with the latter. This is a hypothetical limited to its terms, the hidden consequences are removed by hypothesis, we’re talking about an artificially pure scenario that gets only at a specific question of morality. The only difference between world A and world B, by hypothesis is that in world A someone is dead and an orphanage has X dollars.
And if your only problem with the hypo is that a more realistic situation would have a whole lot else going on, then it seems like you agree: it is morally permissible to choose World A and to act to bring it about.