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Trolley Problem

None that i can see. The simplified models reduce information, variables and options, therefore there is little chance of inconsistency outside the thinkers ficklness...
Now you may have read this somewhere, and possibly from a reputable source too (this benefit of the doubt I'm happy to extend), but I've yet to see any explanation as to how this may be. Come on, man. Use some critical thinking on the subject and substantiate your point of view.
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No two real ethical decisions are going to be exactly identical. If we don't have some sort of simplification we can't make comparisons between cases that share some similarities, and we have no way of checking if we are being consistent. We can never understand all the details of anything-we have limits to our cognitive powers and must accept that all our experiences are in fact simplified versions of reality. If you feel that there is some important difference that means we should act in different ways in the real world and the thought experiment, then modify the model to more accurately map reality. For instance, we could change the problem so that the 3 people are elderly, to reflect the reality of limited life expectancy for organ recipients. If thought experiments like these are not a good way to evaluate ethical systems, we should have to judge these systems once they were already in use in the world, with potentially disastrous consequences.
The reference to the Socratic method was meant to illustrate the fact that hypothetical scenarios can be an excellent tool to highlight inconsistencies in arguments.
no amount of simplified theory is going to give all similar instances with a definitive (and consistent) ethical stance. actually, to even endeavour for this end, that is to reduce the consideration of cases on the individual scale, is far more unethical than any option in these simplified scenarios.
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Are you saying that engaging in these thought experiments is less acceptable than killing someone/letting 2 people die unnecessarily (whichever you consider to be the reprehensible action?
 
on that last question, yes i do.

i think such endeavours DISCOURAGE due consideration in real world applications, therefore potentially being far more disasterous. the ethic of reciprocity can be applied to all ethical dilemmas far more constructively than these "thought experiments".
 
^while i consider the golden rule one of the, if not the most powerful concentration of ethics, its valid use can be seriously tempered because of its direct correlation to ones weaknesses in realizing what it really is that one wants to have done onto him. (justice)

i am mainly thinking of adamant avoidance issues when in reality one actually is on the wrong end of the justice stick (in an impartial judgement).
its personal individualisation is both its strength and its weakness. more abstractly, its its idealization that is problematic in a real world where there are people that justify actions against the golden rule by means of excuses. that is why we have courts. the golden rule has already failed, and is thus useless in a situation where a third party ethical judgement is required. it is strange to see you resort to the 'real world' all the time, yet embrace such an extreme idealism. in the real world people are too weak for it, ie. they are people. absolute adherence to the golden rule demands a holiness and sacrifices very few are willing or even able to pursue.

when you take into account what a working ethics of reciprocity demands of a person in terms of ideality; the whole thing is really a thought-experiment (guiding real world applications).
the golden rule is in reality a guiding principle; which derives authority from an ideal ethical system. any ethical system aims such an ideal (perfect consistency).

(go socrates!)
 
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fair enough. the golden rule does allow one to justify varying degree of justice and injustice, but this can be worked out through open dialogue.

so, how does the trolley problem assist the justice stick?
 
it tells us that an ethical calculus by itself does not work/is not consistent; that there are certain things that are not quantifiable in its equation, ie. have a 'sacred' value and should be respected as such.
 
excellent!

for that learning, i am now convinced of its value! well said! :D
 
This problem is about the lesser of two evils is it not? Either 3 die or 1 dies, regardless of conscious intervention these are the two only options, that is a given fact.
To say that doing nothing is the least wrong is being ignorant and consciously looking the other way if you ask me. Because if you can say that by doing nothing at least you are not putting a person in harms way you would have to say just as firmly that by doing nothing you are passively killing 3 people.
Don't involve the law, ethics have little to do with it in this case. You are not doing right or wrong just because you avoid punishment of yourself or not.
If you make a distinction between passively killing and actively killing then in a way you imply that it is ok to do nothing even if people die, because there is no action involved.
By this logic it is certainly ethically wrong to let thousands of people around the world die every day but I think the reason many find this acceptable is because:
- to stop it you would have to do many different things to accomplish it, the threshold is larger and it is easier to ignore it and act on things you have a much more direct contact with.
- the line is much more blurry: where do you stop if you start randomly saving people you don't know that are not in immediate danger over which you are given control!

Rationally I would say you can just as easily be blamed for sacrificing one person as being blamed for doing nothing to prevent the death of 3. Actually the last one is heavier because it's 3 instead of 1.

That nobody would know if you would just ignore the situation because they are not aware of your power over the situation is not an ethical argument in my book.
You may be punished severely for sacrificing a person but in the eye of the universe it's 1 death + 1 severe punishment vs. 3 deaths.
All the rest is irrational and avoiding argumentation and behaviour if you ask me.
If this problem would be a real one, it should be fair and the public should be aware of the possibility of you being responsible for not saving the three. Many would not forgive you this.


Azzazza is right though, there is no good option whatsoever only bad and worse.

If this would be a real situation though, many many people would be seized by their emotions and couldn't possibly bring themselves to cause a person to die. I think the stakes would have to be gigantic for a person to commit such action. Kill a baby to save planet earth? Is this not something similar although extreme? If no one would know about the risk they only see a babykiller in you but I ask you: how sweet does an infant have to be to be worth a whole planets inhabitants?
 
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Because if you can say that by doing nothing at least you are not putting a person in harms way you would have to say just as firmly that by doing nothing you are passively killing 3 people.
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This is true only if you consider killing and letting die to be, at least in some sense, morally equivalent. I think this is a problematic stance, though, as it seems to lead to the conclusion that every time we let someone die we have "passively killed" them. Therefore (assuming that killing is immoral) we have a duty to preserve life in any and every instance that this is possible. This isn't how we lead our lives, though; as was mentioned earlier in the thread, most of us do not kill, but we often do not perform actions that could potentially save lives. We have a strong intuition that donating blood is not the same as murder.
Azzazza is right though, there is no good option whatsoever only bad and worse.
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I accept that both outcomes are undesirable, but does that mean that every possible action is immoral? There is something about the idea of being unable to escape performing unethical actions that doesn't sit well with me.
Kill a baby to save planet earth? Is this not something similar although extreme?
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Yes, it is very similar, and this is interesting. If your intuition is to leave the trolley on its course but to kill the baby, you seem to have uncovered an inconsistency in your reasoning-it is either acceptable to kill in order to save life or it is not. If you wish to preserve the distinction, you must give an adequate account of why behaving differently in these two situations is ethical. You could try and argue that there is some "cut-off point" where the number of lives saved justifies a single act of killing, but I think it would be difficult to define this number without being arbitrary.
 
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Yerg said:
I accept that both outcomes are undesirable, but does that mean that every possible action is immoral? There is something about the idea of being unable to escape performing unethical actions that doesn't sit well with me.
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i said it before, any outcome is immoral only when the persons do not have a history and are all innocent (ie. undeserving of their possible fate). when this problem is inscribed within the real world, the whole situation and persons seize to be islands, and are inscribed and tied to all sorts of connections; of which the moral agent having a choice is not conscious of.

thus IF this is a real world situation, the choices become: either take control of the situation and kill 1 on your own account, assuming responsability of both the situation and the kill, or accept the situation as one you did not consciously create, and are thus not responsable for. in the latter case you deem it impossible to judge a situation you have no omniscience over. in the latter case, through all the factors you do not know about, it is possible that the situation as it takes its course is infact, in some botched way, ethical.
When you DO take control, you judge the situation as being evil, and since your conscious action brings about evil as well, you have thus brought evil into the world.
when you do not, it is possible that this situation is good, due to factors not known to the moral agent. you can mourn the 3 deaths, but your conscience is allowed to rest in the unknown factors (Gods will). it is the only possibly ethical outcome. this rest on the trust that the world is fundamentally good and just, as i attempted to explain on the first page. when none of our own actions can bring about the good, we must resort to that trust.

when assuming responsability through intervention, in that moment one deems himself equal to God, omniscient regarding a judgement between good and evil over which one is not. who are you to decide you are the God of the situation? your not. you can't be, since your action brings an evil into the world.

though this is in reality an idealistic simplification, i think it clarifies the ordeal somewhat.

connected with this is the problem of the slippery slope that arises when you have decided to kill the one person. you did so without you having a justification for taking his life over the other tree. taking his life has no foundation in justice. enter the slope. since you start taking life without an inherent justification to/within the person you kill himself, you enter heaps of problems. when there is no justification for his death towards the person himself, everything becomes relative and you infact end up blowing up ethics alltogether. because when your life is not valued anymore relative to yourself and your own actions (which is what moral conscience is), only in terms of your worth for good relative to others, there is no moral agent anymore. a fundamental injustice is created in that no matter what holy life you may live; you may be killed at any time for a reason beside yourself over which you never even have (had) a choice. you are no longer responsable for yourself and thus no longer responsable at all. furthermore, as such none of your own ethical choices does not really make any difference to no one else ether, since they too can at any time be sacrificed. any ethical value is negated through its own random relativism.
 
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Its interesting to think about how different philosophical stances deal with the trolley problem.

Say Utilitarianism and deontology.
 
when you do not, it is possible that this situation is good, due to factors not known to the moral agent. you can mourn the 3 deaths, but your conscience is allowed to rest in the unknown factors (Gods will). it is the only possibly ethical outcome. this rest on the trust that the world is fundamentally good and just, as i attempted to explain on the first page. when none of our own actions can bring about the good, we must resort to that trust.
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I was hoping you could clarify this for me a bit azzazza. Is it the case that allowing the train to continue you are allowing for the possibility of an ethical outcome and are thus behaving ethically, or is it the case that the action will be ethical if and only if the outcome actually turned out to be ethical, and it is possible that by allowing the train to continue one is still performing an immoral action? Is the morality of the action determined by the outcome, or by the action itself?
 
well, provided this is a real world situation, that is the only ethical option available. the other option is simply unethical a priori. to defend it as actually being ethical; one has to fall back on ontological ways in which one argues that the world is fundamentally good, but these are unprovable and you can say those arguments ultimately only voice the fundamental trust people have in the good of the world.
thus: Yes , by itself the action cannot be intrinsically ethical. if it would be, then in the situation in which all people are undeserving of their fate, it would necessarily also be the ethical course to take. which it is not. So yes, the morality of the action is also determined by its outcome; or more precisly, an omniscient beings' perception and judgement of it. all ethics ultimately rest in this absolute (Levinas, and others). no action, when solely taken as simply the action by itself (without internal states of mind, emotion) can be intrinsically ethical. we can see that in Wittgensteins Big Book. it is also reflected in the can of worms that has been called 'moral luck'.
 
So is it not possible, in a situation where the potential sacrifice is thoroughly nasty and deserving of death, that the course of action with "better" results is to divert the train? If this is the case, but diverting the train is intrinsically immoral, it seems that we are trapped, unable to perform an ethical action. Is this right or have I not understood what you're saying? Just as "ought" implies "can", shouldn't "ought not" imply "could not"?
 
i see what you are saying. given that the agent in the situation does not know anything of this fact, his judging to do so, even while it is a serial killer, would indeed be ethically wrong. it cannot be his call, for he is unable to justify it at that moment. the agent can not be blamed for letting the train go. he did not create the situation intentionally, thus the responsability over it lies not with him. in order to counter this, i have to resort to cognitive dissonance and ontology in order to argue that this could not happen in the real world. although this is unprovable in a foundational way (which i argue is an ontological necessity), i am left with a coherentist defence., which i think is rather strong considering the opposing position that the world is fundamentally evil, which will also have to be a coherentist defence.

diverting the train without justification is immoral, in the real world. BUT, in the above, you make an unwarranted jump. you can think of that in the thought experiment, just as you can say all persons are completely innocent, yet you place that immediately in my real world case. in order for you to do that, you should first provide an argument opposing mine why the real world is fundamentally evil, allowing this one, and the 'all persons are innocent' one as well, to be a possible real world scenario. if you can manage to maintain that the world is fundamentally evil, it should come as no surprise that we can indeed be trapped and unable to perform an ethical action.
watched by a malevolant genius amused by our squirming for the good.
 
i am left with a coherentist defence., which i think is rather strong considering the opposing position that the world is fundamentally evil, which will also have to be a coherentist defence.
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It seems to me that you're ignoring what I think is the correct position, that the world is neither intrinsically good nor bad, but morally neutral.
 
the 'correct' position depends on the perspective you assume. but you have to take the implications of your perspective with you.

without us? without free will, intention? without a moral agent? yes. if there is such a thing. but then again, whats the use of an ethical question in a neutral world? or ethics as a whole?

not in a humans world. the world is a world before the subject. phenomenology. the scientific, neutral world is a constructed reduction of, which is sub-jected (from the latin iacere; throwing) under our first, natural (personalistic) approach to it (Husserls' Ideas, book II, section III: the construction of the spiritual world).

this is what i mean that on the whole, an ethical world is always fundamentally a coherentist theory. one cannot make a link to the empirical, for the empirical world knows no ethics (again, Wittgensteins Big Book). there is no such thing as 'neutral' before the moral subject, for morality implies the distinction into the categories of either good or bad.
 
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Assuming I had nothing to do with creating the situation, I'd put the trolley on the track to kill fewer people and sleep soundly at night. I think the distinction between "doing" and "letting happen" is here a trivial one, as the amount of action needed to select between one of the two possibilities is minimal.

A similar, more realistic, scenario, could be the decision that faces a pilot of a small aircraft that is damaged and must make a crash landing. Currently he is on course to land in a level field that is filled with a crowd watching a live concert. Alternatively, he can change course, and land in a level field with far fewer people. These are the only two landing sites, as the rest of the area is densely populated. I think our ethical intuition here is pretty clear. We go for the field with fewer people.

I don't think the case of the maniacal utilitarian doctor is a good analogy, as it implicates far more than a question of whether it is right to kill one person to save three. It triggers intuitions about the proper role of doctors in society, and about how and what kind of power we want to give to an individual over other individuals. So our ethical intuition in the case of the doctor will be influenced by various factors that don't occur in the trolley problem.
 
Heuristic said:
A similar, more realistic, scenario, could be the decision that faces a pilot of a small aircraft that is damaged and must make a crash landing. Currently he is on course to land in a level field that is filled with a crowd watching a live concert. Alternatively, he can change course, and land in a level field with far fewer people. These are the only two landing sites, as the rest of the area is densely populated. I think our ethical intuition here is pretty clear. We go for the field with fewer people.
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this is very different. the craft will not land itself. it did not take off without the pilots intention either. the plane would not be where it was without the pilots actions. the pilot is already responsable for any outcome of the situation from the start.


edit: i think the main impetus for the response that is not ethically consistent is exactly this. we do not limit ourself to the abstracy of the moral agent by itself. by the fact that we as a human being find ourselves that situation, having that power; we automatically assume responsability for it. why would we be in that situation, having that pressure extered on us, if we had nothing to do with it in the first place. if we really have nothing to do with it, we would be unaware of any power we might have over it; the decision would not be bestowed on us. the possibility of the decision already implies a bestowed responsability for our conscience.
 
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^ eh, those are pretty easily tailored. Assuming the pilot did nothing wrong, he's not responsible for the plane being damaged or in its current problem. I don't think the fact that he operated the plane from takeoff to this point is relevant. If you think it is, have the pilot become incapacitated and replace the pilot with a passenger.

As far as the plane landing, assume that the plane has lost power and lacks speed and altitude to land anywhere but in one of those two fields or in a densely populated space. Say it took off from the airport, suffered a complete engine loss, and has insufficient speed and altitude to turn around.
 
it is different. a crashing plane does not land itself. there is pressure coming on his own life. the passenger is completely involved from the start, to the highest degree (his life). to save his own life, the passenger must take control of the plane. his own life is his primary responsability, and he has control over that, that is a given. in order to fullfill his responsability towards himself, he must take control of the plane. the second he does, he assumes responsability over the plane and its situation, as an extenstion of his own responsability over his own life.

edit: again, your example does serve an excellent point as to the intuitions which lead to assuming responsability. the moral agent is emotionally involved; pressure is exterted. one is de facto responsable for his own well-being. the situation, by giving the moral agent a means to control it, exterts an (unwarranted) pressure on the innocent moral agent as a human being; which he should not have to face if he is truly innocent. his well-being has already been compromised, which awakens a sense of responsability for the situation on the whole. why else would he have been given the responsability that entails having that power in the first place, if he is not in the right position to use it?

thus i return to my very first statement; the situation itself is unethical. the situation itself has an icky mean of saying you are responsable while you are not. it would be an evil genius telling you that you are in the position to judge over the outcome, by giving you means over it, while you actually are not. so you'd have to consciously deny that given, and affirm your trust in God while the evil genius just told you that God cannot be trusted.
 
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