I’d honestly find the far more plausible answer to be that people just have trouble with truly direct, unambiguous communication. My own experience is that either I’m very bad at such communication, or else other people are very bad at receiving it. When I ask extremely specific questions, people will usually assume a more generalized motive to asking it, and try to answer THAT question. I’ve had conversations with very smart people who kept re-interpreting my questions because they assumed I was trying to make a specific point or disprove some specific detail.
I’d actually find it very interesting to study how wording affects this question. You have the improbable scenario of the trolley, you have the far more realistic scenario of the crying baby, and then you have the simple and direct question “would you kill a person to save five others?”
Lastly, I’d say I have a very strong objection to this passage: “However, trolleylike dilemmas are actually quite common in real life, when you take the scenario not as a case where only two options are available, but as a metaphor for any situation where all the available choices have negative repercussions”
The Trolley scenario is a strong binary decision with perfect information and absolutely no creative thinking or alternate solution possible. Do you really think that comes up frequently in real life? If not, why not use an exercise that accommodates and praises creative solutions instead of rejecting them as being outside the binary scope of the exercise?
The Trolley scenario is a strong binary decision with perfect information and absolutely no creative thinking or alternate solution possible. Do you really think that comes up frequently in real life? If not, why not use an exercise that accommodates and praises creative solutions instead of rejecting them as being outside the binary scope of the exercise?
Real life trolleylike dilemmas are generally ones where creative thinking has already been done, but has not turned up any solutions without serious downsides. In such cases, deferring the decision for a perfect solution, when enough time has been dedicated to creative thinking that more is unlikely to deliver a new, better solution, is itself a failure condition.
I’d honestly find the far more plausible answer to be that people just have trouble with truly direct, unambiguous communication. My own experience is that either I’m very bad at such communication, or else other people are very bad at receiving it. When I ask extremely specific questions, people will usually assume a more generalized motive to asking it, and try to answer THAT question. I’ve had conversations with very smart people who kept re-interpreting my questions because they assumed I was trying to make a specific point or disprove some specific detail.
I’d actually find it very interesting to study how wording affects this question. You have the improbable scenario of the trolley, you have the far more realistic scenario of the crying baby, and then you have the simple and direct question “would you kill a person to save five others?”
Lastly, I’d say I have a very strong objection to this passage: “However, trolleylike dilemmas are actually quite common in real life, when you take the scenario not as a case where only two options are available, but as a metaphor for any situation where all the available choices have negative repercussions”
The Trolley scenario is a strong binary decision with perfect information and absolutely no creative thinking or alternate solution possible. Do you really think that comes up frequently in real life? If not, why not use an exercise that accommodates and praises creative solutions instead of rejecting them as being outside the binary scope of the exercise?
Kind of late to get back to this, but
Real life trolleylike dilemmas are generally ones where creative thinking has already been done, but has not turned up any solutions without serious downsides. In such cases, deferring the decision for a perfect solution, when enough time has been dedicated to creative thinking that more is unlikely to deliver a new, better solution, is itself a failure condition.