Most people do, in fact, say that murdering one healthy person to harvest their organs to save five people is bad, even though the math is exactly the same
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
Exactly. It's a critique/discussion of pure naive utilitarianism, not a real debate on who to kill to save who?
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Imo the other thing is that most cases of trolley problem aren't actually calculated decisions. In real life they're usually snap judgments (often by the one person who's gonna be sacrificed) or calculated military decisions where it's a choice of evils rather than ideals
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Replying to @loudpenitent @Czhorat and
Yeah - I do think that overall, the abstract utilitarian challenge makes it interesting, but it's not the answer but why they're different that matters the most.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @loudpenitent and
Interestingly the Wikipedia article on "Trolley Problem" does point out a controversial real life case that closely fits the original parable, even if no one died in the end
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
In 2003 there was a runaway freight train in LA that was heading toward a station where passenger trains stopped To reduce the risk of loss of life, since they couldn't stop the train they diverted it into a sparsely populated low income neighborhood (the town of Commerce)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
They knew that the area was inhabited and that the train would likely derail and go into people's houses but decided this was a better option than a collision on the tracks Two people's houses were destroyed and thirteen people went to the hospital
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
One of the victims was a pregnant woman who very narrowly avoided being crushed by a collapsing ceiling This was already pretty bad PR for the company but that would've been worse
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
Interestingly the debate over the company's decisions here does reflect various classic "trolley problem" arguments Like the argument over whether people in a passenger train have "assumed the risks" of a train accident but people in nearby houses have not
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
One of the interesting things about empirical studies of the trolley problem is people instinctively care a lot about who's "already involved" in any moral situation
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They react very differently if the one person was tied to the tracks same as the five than if you say that you're gonna derail the trolley and kill some random person in the yard of their house with no awareness of what's going on Even though this is indefensible
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
Presumably the one guy being tied to the tracks wasn't there consensually but once he's in the category of "people whose lives are threatened by trolleys" you're mentally more okay with him dying "Dragging a bystander into this" feels worse It's a clear sloppy heuristic we have
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein and
Yes, exactly. That's my point - the trolley problem is interesting in that it illuminates the gap between what we THINK we believe and what we really DO believe.
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