[throwawayarnty]

I never understood how the trolley problem applies to real life.

When is there ever a situation where you have perfect and complete information about a scenario? Only in thought experiments.

The situation where the boxes are probabilistic was more realistic. You’re never sure in real life that you will certainly do less harm if you pull vs not pull.

[jedberg]

The original trolly problem showed that people find it less repressible to kill people when no action is taken. It's presented both ways. "Pull the lever and kill five to save one" and "pull the lever to kill one and save five". You'd think that people would answer to kill one person in both cases, but it turns out people are biased against taking action (pulling the lever) regardless of how you word it, and so when it's worded as kill five if you do nothing, a lot of people will do nothing.

[ars]

That's not a bias, that's completely logical. The only thing in this world you can control is your own actions, so it's completely logical not to take an action that will kill someone.

Think about it: The number of inaction's you have is infinite - there are an infinite number of different things you could have done that would have saved someone's life. So an inaction is the default state in this world, but taking an action: That's something that has meaning, and people chose not to kill by taking an action.

Aside from the above, you are assuming that 5 people is worth more than 1, but that's not something you can know, you can't know the worth of another person. So who are you to choose to kill someone?

[jedberg]

That's.... kind of the point?

Mathematically the expected outcomes should be the same, but morally they are not.

[throwawayarnty]

I would argue the people’s choices are appropriate.

In real life you never get perfect information, so doing nothing as opposed to pulling represents the humans uncertainty of the parameters in the scenario.

“First do no harm”.

[jedberg]

I would argue that they are too. That's kind of the point. That morally taking no action is better if you have imperfect information.

[ncallaway]

I don't think it's supposed to apply immediately and directly to real life. But it's supposed to use moral intuition to highlight the balance of various philosophical frameworks (mostly consequentialism vs deontologicalism).

One common real-life debate where these moral trade-offs often comes up in real life is voting choices in our first past the post system.

A consequentialist might say that you should vote for the lesser of two evils that has a serious prospect of winning. That, while they might not be someone you support in the abstract, in the interest of harm mitigation you might give them your vote to deny victory to the greater of two evils.

Whereas a deontologicalist might say that voting for a candidate that you actively dislike and consider evil is a harm in and of itself, and that you should not cast a vote for someone you wouldn't want to see in office. Even if that means the greater of the evils ends up winning.

When I was younger and struggling with this question, the trolly problem was informative to me, and has generally lead me to a harm reduction strategy when it comes to voting (while also advocating for a reform of the voting system).

[imtringued]

That question is actually really easy. No party represents the population. There aren't any meaningful choices to be made. Thq as weere is no such thing as a wasted vote if there is no party worth voting for.

They all suffer from the same flaw. Especially the ones near the left are particularly hypocritical. My hunch is that they depend on poor and angry voters so there is no way they would ever try to achieve prosperity for them while risking to lose their voters.

[Rayhem]

The point of the trolley problem isn't to answer the trolley problem (either globally in the framework of moral absolutism or locally in the framework of "what do you personally value?"). The point of the trolley problem is to scaffold the discussion about how you answer the trolley problem and other moral dilemmas. If you prefer to switch the trolley to actively kill one person over passively allowing five to die, the interesting point is not "that's absurd, the real world doesn't work that way!" but why the real world doesn't work that way. What else goes into our decision to not harvest one person's organs to save five others?

[dx034]

It's not that unrealistic. Imagine driving a car and a kid runs onto the street. You can swerve onto the sidewalk but there are people walking there you'd hit. The question if you'd take action to save someone to (potentially) kill someone else is interesting. And it has been discussed in the context of self driving vehicles.

But from all I remember, the outcome always was that an AI should never actively make a decision to sacrifice someone. And that's also how I view the trolley problem. Actively making a decision feels worse for me, even if fewer people die in the end.

[Sirened]

> You can swerve onto the sidewalk but

I feel like that's not realistic either—when you encounter these sorts of situations in real life, you don't really make a thought out choice because it happens so fast. People swerve and crash into trees trying to avoid rabbits, it's not a reasoned thing.

These problems do, however, come up fairly often in so many other areas. Cryptography is probably one near and dear to many people's hearts here—supporting cryptography directly saves many lives (journalists in totalitarian regimes, people in abusive relationships, the general wellbeing of people being able to communicate securely for a myriad of industrial purposes, etc.) but it also, to a lesser degree, directly leads to some deaths (terrorists are able to organize and hide their plans). Do you spend your life developing more powerful cryptographic algorithms knowing that it will have some small negative outcome that your work is partially responsible for? Or do you do nothing at all and have a larger number of people suffer as a result of you not having produced a work.

[codefreeordie]

In real life, though, you never have either perfect information about whether your action (or inaction) will have your intended consequences nor do you have the time for complete/rational analysis.

[exodust]

> It's not that unrealistic.

It's unrealistic because the trolley problem is basically a torture apparatus that you're instructed to operate for unknown reasons. Our decision to pull levers or not, means nothing in the context of why the situation exists in the first place, and why you have the job of executioner.

We have time to think and weigh things up in regards to pulling the lever. But in the driving scenario, a split-second decision is needed. Muscle memory and reflexes come into play. Everyone will apply the brakes anyway. There is no "do nothing" option in the driving scenario.

[mrwh]

Agreed re actively making a decision: my answer was mostly not to pull the lever, and if I analyse my feelings it's because then the results aren't my fault. Pulling the lever makes me party to the situation.

Disagree re realism though. You never get a chance to think in real life; and any situation in which you could deliberate what the moral course of action is, is a situation you could avoid entirely. Really the closest to trolly problems in real life are public policy decisions - which are real and affect all of us. So yes I guess I've argued myself around to agreeing again :).

[epgui]

It really does apply, but maybe not always for obvious reasons.

I really would encourage everyone to watch Michael Sandel's political philosophy lectures (titled "Justice") at Harvard University. It's available on Youtube.

[benlivengood]

The covid pandemic is a trolly problem. Lock down and cause some hardship (including maybe some deaths) or let the pandemic spread and kill lots of people?