It occurs to me that the Least Convenient World principle, and its applications in producing trolley problems, is actually a dangerous idea. The best response in any situation that looks like a trolley problem is to figure out how to defuse the situation. So maybe you can change the tracks so the trolley runs down a different line; maybe you can derail it with a rock on the tracks; maybe you can warn the five people or somehow rescue them; perhaps even you could jump onto the trolley and apply the brakes. These options are surely less feasible than using the fat man’s body, but the cost of the ‘fat man’ course of action is one life. (Naively, if the expected outcome of the third way is less than 1 life lost, the third way is preferable)
This is a little bit like that Mad Psychologist joke:
A Mad Psychologist accosts you and a friend of yours in the street, and forces a gun into your hand. “Shoot your friend, or shoot yourself. Are you a selfless kindhearted hero, or a black-hearted selfish monster? Who will you choose? Muahaha!” You point the gun at the Psychologist and ask, “Can’t I just shoot you?”
I don’t know if your alternatives are that much less plausible than thinking you can throw someone who weighs a good bit more than you do and is presumably resisting, and have them land with sufficient precision to stop the trolley.
I rather think they are more plausible and will save lives more surely than the fat man’s corpse, but the thought experiment strongly implies that the fat man course of action will surely succeed—and I wanted to make my point without breaking any of the rules of the thought experiment, so as not to distract critics from the central argument.
I strongly suspect that since many people don’t like whatever conclusions can be infered from trolley problems, they try to dismiss trolley problems as “dangerous”. If I find something really dangerous, it is the willingness to label uncomfortable ideas as dangerous when there are no better arguments around. The historical set of “dangerous” ideas includes heliocentrism, evolution, atheism, legal homosexuality.
Actually, nobody has yet demonstrated that in reality, people who are used to think about trolley problems or other simplified thought experiments are more prone to bad thinking.
It occurs to me that the Least Convenient World principle, and its applications in producing trolley problems, is actually a dangerous idea. The best response in any situation that looks like a trolley problem is to figure out how to defuse the situation. So maybe you can change the tracks so the trolley runs down a different line; maybe you can derail it with a rock on the tracks; maybe you can warn the five people or somehow rescue them; perhaps even you could jump onto the trolley and apply the brakes. These options are surely less feasible than using the fat man’s body, but the cost of the ‘fat man’ course of action is one life. (Naively, if the expected outcome of the third way is less than 1 life lost, the third way is preferable)
This is a little bit like that Mad Psychologist joke:
The trolley problems tend to forbid this kind of thinking, and the Least Convenient Possible World works to defeat this kind of thinking. But I think that this third-way thinking is important, that when faced with being gored by the left horn or the right horn of the bull, you ought to choose to leap between the horns over the bull’s head, and that if you force people to answer this trolley problem with X or Y but never Z, they will stop looking for Zs in the real world.
Alternatively, read conchis’s post , as it is far more succinct and far less emotive.
I don’t know if your alternatives are that much less plausible than thinking you can throw someone who weighs a good bit more than you do and is presumably resisting, and have them land with sufficient precision to stop the trolley.
I rather think they are more plausible and will save lives more surely than the fat man’s corpse, but the thought experiment strongly implies that the fat man course of action will surely succeed—and I wanted to make my point without breaking any of the rules of the thought experiment, so as not to distract critics from the central argument.
I strongly suspect that since many people don’t like whatever conclusions can be infered from trolley problems, they try to dismiss trolley problems as “dangerous”. If I find something really dangerous, it is the willingness to label uncomfortable ideas as dangerous when there are no better arguments around. The historical set of “dangerous” ideas includes heliocentrism, evolution, atheism, legal homosexuality.
Actually, nobody has yet demonstrated that in reality, people who are used to think about trolley problems or other simplified thought experiments are more prone to bad thinking.