I think it’s more generally explicable by lose-lose counterfactuals being in common use in the real world (politics, schoolyard) for purposes of entrapment—a rejection of lose-lose counterfactuals in general, rather than of the trolley question in particular. This would also explain why philosophy lecturers have such a hard time getting many people not to just outright reject counterfactuals, because a philosophy class will for many be the first time a lose-lose-counterfactual wasn’t being used as a form of entrapment.
Edit: TheOtherDave below nails it, I think: it’s not just lose-lose counterfactuals, people heuristically treat any hypothetical as a possible entrapment and default to the safe option of refusing to play. If they don’t know you, they aren’t just being stupid.
IME this is a special case of a more general refusal to answer “hypothetical questions”, even when they aren’t lose-lose.
I used to run into this a lot… someone says something, I ask some question about it of the form “So, are you saying that if X, then Y?” and they simply refuse to answer the question on the (sometimes unarticulated) grounds that I’m probably trying to trick them. (Tone of voice and bodyparl is really important here; I started running into this reaction less when I became more careful to project an air of “this is interesting and I’m exploring it” rather than “this is false and I am challenging it”.)
This also used to infuriate me: I would react to it as an expression of distrust. It helped to explicitly understand what was going on, though… once I recognized that it actually was an expression of distrust, and that the distrust was entirely reasonable if they couldn’t read my mind, I stopped getting so angry about it. (Which in turn helped with the bodyparl and tone issues.)
I think it’s more generally explicable by lose-lose counterfactuals being in common use in the real world (politics, schoolyard) for purposes of entrapment—a rejection of lose-lose counterfactuals in general, rather than of the trolley question in particular. This would also explain why philosophy lecturers have such a hard time getting many people not to just outright reject counterfactuals, because a philosophy class will for many be the first time a lose-lose-counterfactual wasn’t being used as a form of entrapment.
Edit: TheOtherDave below nails it, I think: it’s not just lose-lose counterfactuals, people heuristically treat any hypothetical as a possible entrapment and default to the safe option of refusing to play. If they don’t know you, they aren’t just being stupid.
IME this is a special case of a more general refusal to answer “hypothetical questions”, even when they aren’t lose-lose.
I used to run into this a lot… someone says something, I ask some question about it of the form “So, are you saying that if X, then Y?” and they simply refuse to answer the question on the (sometimes unarticulated) grounds that I’m probably trying to trick them. (Tone of voice and bodyparl is really important here; I started running into this reaction less when I became more careful to project an air of “this is interesting and I’m exploring it” rather than “this is false and I am challenging it”.)
This also used to infuriate me: I would react to it as an expression of distrust. It helped to explicitly understand what was going on, though… once I recognized that it actually was an expression of distrust, and that the distrust was entirely reasonable if they couldn’t read my mind, I stopped getting so angry about it. (Which in turn helped with the bodyparl and tone issues.)