It talks about descriptive adequacy of a thought experiment, while the goal of the enterprise is to figure out what should be done.
I partially agree. But the point is, in any emergency situation, you’re going to default to your training if you’re acting. Thus, individual moral intuitions give way a host of other concerns, and a body of history, literature, and tradition of the particular discipline (whether it be emergency first response, engineering, soldiering, policing, surgery, or any other form of life or death issue).
If you’re going to spend the thought cycles, much better to use a real discipline. Here’s one—there’s two run down apartment buildings with roughly 200 people in them. Mortars were fired off the rooftops the night before, killing ~20 innocent civilians. The next day, military troops raid the buildings, arrest everyone, find a cache of weapons, and strongly suspect the people using them are among the 200 arrested. Everyone says they don’t know who did it. What do you do with those people?
It addresses the same questions a trolley problem does, except it doesn’t have the flaws a trolley problem has.
It’s like a trolley problem, except better, because it doesn’t have the flaws a trolley problem has.
Except that it has a different problem: trying to answer the question quickly derails into complex real-world issues, but you can’t reliably predict which real-world issue it will derail into. If you use that example and try to talk about whether it’s okay to punish innocents to save others from being mortared, some readers will want to talk about fingerprints and forensics, some will want to talk about how poverty caused the situation in the first place, and some will want to talk about anti-mortar defense hardware. A trolley problem focuses the conversation in a way that real world problems can’t, and when talking about philosophical issues that’re confusing to begin with, that focus is something you can’t do without.
Thank you for replying. The downvotes without reply are confusing—I’m not sure exactly what people take issues with, whether they disagree on a particular grounds or just dislike the point viscerally.
A trolley problem focuses the conversation in a way that real world problems can’t, and when talking about philosophical issues that’re confusing to begin with, that focus is something you can’t do without.
Trolley problem do that, but at some expense that I believe can lead to poor quality thought—constraining a situation to two possible decisions with predetermined outcomes. While a little messier, I think forcing people to actually think through a variety of scenarios and be creative is healthier, and you can still get at ethical systems. If you wanted to make it much simpler, there’s still ways to do so without being forced into a constrained situation with predetermined outcomes. That’s the issue I have—the idea that someone can tell you, “Here’s your two options, and here’s the outcomes from them”—I think this potentially primes people to listen to false dichotomies later, like in politics.
Maybe I’m mistaken, but I don’t think so. At least, this is worth considering. Any time you get a false dichotomy with 20⁄20 foresight presented to you, I think, “That’s a false dichotomy and you’re claiming 20⁄20 foresight” would be a good answer. Considering how often even highly educated and smart people fall for the false dichotomy and believing someone who claims they know what the outcomes will be with certainty in advance, I believe this is a legitimate concern.
But the point is, in any emergency situation, you’re going to default to your training if you’re acting.
Trolley problems aren’t conceived as a model of an emergency situation. The emergency part is there mainly to emphasise the restricted choice. To push or not to push, there is no time for anything else. You can easily imagine a contrived trolley scenario with a plenty of time to decide.
I don’t understand the analogy between trolley problems and your mortar scenario.
I partially agree. But the point is, in any emergency situation, you’re going to default to your training if you’re acting. Thus, individual moral intuitions give way a host of other concerns, and a body of history, literature, and tradition of the particular discipline (whether it be emergency first response, engineering, soldiering, policing, surgery, or any other form of life or death issue).
If you’re going to spend the thought cycles, much better to use a real discipline. Here’s one—there’s two run down apartment buildings with roughly 200 people in them. Mortars were fired off the rooftops the night before, killing ~20 innocent civilians. The next day, military troops raid the buildings, arrest everyone, find a cache of weapons, and strongly suspect the people using them are among the 200 arrested. Everyone says they don’t know who did it. What do you do with those people?
It addresses the same questions a trolley problem does, except it doesn’t have the flaws a trolley problem has.
Except that it has a different problem: trying to answer the question quickly derails into complex real-world issues, but you can’t reliably predict which real-world issue it will derail into. If you use that example and try to talk about whether it’s okay to punish innocents to save others from being mortared, some readers will want to talk about fingerprints and forensics, some will want to talk about how poverty caused the situation in the first place, and some will want to talk about anti-mortar defense hardware. A trolley problem focuses the conversation in a way that real world problems can’t, and when talking about philosophical issues that’re confusing to begin with, that focus is something you can’t do without.
Thank you for replying. The downvotes without reply are confusing—I’m not sure exactly what people take issues with, whether they disagree on a particular grounds or just dislike the point viscerally.
Trolley problem do that, but at some expense that I believe can lead to poor quality thought—constraining a situation to two possible decisions with predetermined outcomes. While a little messier, I think forcing people to actually think through a variety of scenarios and be creative is healthier, and you can still get at ethical systems. If you wanted to make it much simpler, there’s still ways to do so without being forced into a constrained situation with predetermined outcomes. That’s the issue I have—the idea that someone can tell you, “Here’s your two options, and here’s the outcomes from them”—I think this potentially primes people to listen to false dichotomies later, like in politics.
Maybe I’m mistaken, but I don’t think so. At least, this is worth considering. Any time you get a false dichotomy with 20⁄20 foresight presented to you, I think, “That’s a false dichotomy and you’re claiming 20⁄20 foresight” would be a good answer. Considering how often even highly educated and smart people fall for the false dichotomy and believing someone who claims they know what the outcomes will be with certainty in advance, I believe this is a legitimate concern.
Trolley problems aren’t conceived as a model of an emergency situation. The emergency part is there mainly to emphasise the restricted choice. To push or not to push, there is no time for anything else. You can easily imagine a contrived trolley scenario with a plenty of time to decide.
I don’t understand the analogy between trolley problems and your mortar scenario.