| I disagree - I think that "reasoning about moral intuitions" is completely useless if you're attempting to reason about them in utter isolation and with the assumption that the subject is omniscient. It's like economists assuming perfectly reasonable actors in markets, or physicists assuming a perfectly spherical object that ignores wind resistance. They're toy problems that don't match reality at all, and the value is dubious at best as anything other than a very gentle intro to the subject. Here's a thought experiment - How many people do you think would actually make the choice they state they will make if you present them the trolley scenario in real life with no warning? People who say they will pull the lever are fooling themselves. 1. They won't know how to read tracks 2. They won't know how the lever works 3. They don't know for sure that anyone will die: those five people might be able to move off the tracks just fine themselves 4. If they do pull the lever they're almost certainly going to get arrested or troubled by the legal system, because they fucked with shit and someone died afterwards (the courts won't give a shit that "they thought five other people might have died!"). 5. For all they know the trolley operator can stop just fine, why would anyone be about get hurt? 6.... on and on. Basically - you're setting up an impossible framework, the results (even if you get them) are useless because they're only valid in that impossible framework. If the results of the real world never match the results of the framework you've set up, what is the value of that framework? It's just a shitty model with bad reproducibility. We have lots of those. |