That’s hardly a critique of the trolley problem. Special relativity itself stipulates that it doesn’t apply to faster-than-light movement, but a moral theory can’t say “certain unlikely or confusing situations don’t count”. The whole point of a moral theory is to answer those cases where intuition is insufficient, the extremes you talk about. Imagine where we’d be if people just accepted Newtonian physics, saying “It works in all practical cases, so ignore the extremes at very small sizes and very high speeds, they are faulty models”. Of course we don’t allow that in the sciences, so why should we in ethics?
In the practical reasoning, “A” is a shorthand for “I think A is true”, et cetera—no absolute knowledge, nonzero false positive rate, and sufficiently refined moral theory has to take this into account.
Just as thought experiment relying on e.g. absolute simultaneity would render itself irrelevant to special or general relativity, so does trolley problem’s implicit assumption of absolute, reliable knowledge render it irrelevant to the extreme cases where the probability of event is much smaller than false positive rate.
The analogy between moral theories and physics seems to suggest that just as we expect modern physics to act like Newtonian physics when dealing with big slow objects, we should expect some modern moral theory to act like folk morality when dealing with ordinary human life situations. Does that hold?
That’s hardly a critique of the trolley problem. Special relativity itself stipulates that it doesn’t apply to faster-than-light movement, but a moral theory can’t say “certain unlikely or confusing situations don’t count”. The whole point of a moral theory is to answer those cases where intuition is insufficient, the extremes you talk about. Imagine where we’d be if people just accepted Newtonian physics, saying “It works in all practical cases, so ignore the extremes at very small sizes and very high speeds, they are faulty models”. Of course we don’t allow that in the sciences, so why should we in ethics?
In the practical reasoning, “A” is a shorthand for “I think A is true”, et cetera—no absolute knowledge, nonzero false positive rate, and sufficiently refined moral theory has to take this into account.
Just as thought experiment relying on e.g. absolute simultaneity would render itself irrelevant to special or general relativity, so does trolley problem’s implicit assumption of absolute, reliable knowledge render it irrelevant to the extreme cases where the probability of event is much smaller than false positive rate.
The analogy between moral theories and physics seems to suggest that just as we expect modern physics to act like Newtonian physics when dealing with big slow objects, we should expect some modern moral theory to act like folk morality when dealing with ordinary human life situations. Does that hold?