You make the claim that trolley problems ignore human nature and are thus conducive to sloppy thinking. It is claimed that people who know of trolley problems are more likely to be “anarchists and libertarians” and less likely to accept tyrrany. Ignoring the fact that this is orthogonal to your point, I would endorse the stronger claim that people who know of trolley problems are in general better thinkers.
On the other hand, people who know trolley problems have probably taken a university philosophy class and are thus in a totally different demographic than the general population. And just because people who have taken a class about thinking clearly think more clearly doesn’t mean that the tools we use in those classes are very good. Or that they are any good at all.
When you say that trolley problems ignore human nature, I think there is a deeper truth to that. When you ask people to decide between letting people die and pushing someone in front of a train; well first off magnitude bias kicks in and they see it as “passive bad vs active bad.” Then virtue ethics kicks in and they may see the situation as “me being bad” versus “something bad happening elsewhere.”
When a general makes this decision for his troops, he is already in a position of having made decisions for five platoons which put them in danger, in order to have his virtue ethics of being a good person kick in he has to rescue the people he put in danger.
It has been brought up that humans may operate more naturally in virtue ethics; the standard trolley problem seems to me to be about times when virtue ethics and consequentialism will have unpleasant conflicts.
People have mentioned that the trolley problem specifically comes up rarely. I agree; I think that it is perfectly possible to pursue the virtues which make you a better consequentialist. So why spend time focusing on the conflict, as trolley problems do, rather than looking for a better set of philosophical tools?
You make the claim that trolley problems ignore human nature and are thus conducive to sloppy thinking. It is claimed that people who know of trolley problems are more likely to be “anarchists and libertarians” and less likely to accept tyrrany. Ignoring the fact that this is orthogonal to your point, I would endorse the stronger claim that people who know of trolley problems are in general better thinkers.
On the other hand, people who know trolley problems have probably taken a university philosophy class and are thus in a totally different demographic than the general population. And just because people who have taken a class about thinking clearly think more clearly doesn’t mean that the tools we use in those classes are very good. Or that they are any good at all.
When you say that trolley problems ignore human nature, I think there is a deeper truth to that. When you ask people to decide between letting people die and pushing someone in front of a train; well first off magnitude bias kicks in and they see it as “passive bad vs active bad.” Then virtue ethics kicks in and they may see the situation as “me being bad” versus “something bad happening elsewhere.”
When a general makes this decision for his troops, he is already in a position of having made decisions for five platoons which put them in danger, in order to have his virtue ethics of being a good person kick in he has to rescue the people he put in danger.
It has been brought up that humans may operate more naturally in virtue ethics; the standard trolley problem seems to me to be about times when virtue ethics and consequentialism will have unpleasant conflicts.
People have mentioned that the trolley problem specifically comes up rarely. I agree; I think that it is perfectly possible to pursue the virtues which make you a better consequentialist. So why spend time focusing on the conflict, as trolley problems do, rather than looking for a better set of philosophical tools?