[bhickey]

Alone? No. Wrong? Yes.

The concept you're describing is known as moral indulgence or moral self-indulgence: When a person refuses to do the right thing because they want to keep their hands clean. When you're standing at the switch you have agency and should be prepared to own your action. "Five people were struck by a trolley because I lacked the moral fortitude to save them."

[0] https://cla.csulb.edu/departments/philosophy/wp-content/uplo...

[imtringued]

>When you're standing at the switch you have agency and should be prepared to own your action.

The problem is people don't stand at these switches. They have to go out of their way to stand at them. They probably aren't even aware that there is a switch. They probably don't know what the effect of the switch is. Yet somehow they have to pull it and get it correct, with no one to support them in making that decision?

This isn't some amateur aircraft landing scenario, where you get assistance by the control tower.

[bhickey]

You're missing the point. These hypotheticals exist to interrogate our respective frameworks for moral decision making.

[imtringued]

Ok, I will pull the switch and kill one guy so you stop bullying me.

[AnonC]

This answer makes a lot of sense from an observational perspective because, in reality, a lot of people decide based on someone else doing something (or perceived to be doing something) instead of using the direct and relevant information at hand.

In other words, what I mean to say is that your response (and similar ones) are quite common.

[dskloet]

Why are those 5 people there? How can I be sure they'd be killed? How can I be sure they don't want to be killed. It's not wrong not to kill the one man because you can't be sure of the situation.

[bhickey]

There are variations of this (incredibly, incredibly boring) problem that consider this. The five people are workers, the one person is a trespasser, or they're all workers, or all trespassers and so on.

> It's not wrong not to kill the one man because you can't be sure of the situation.

People don't make decisions with perfect information. We make decisions based on the best information we have available. Refusing to sacrifice one to save five because you don't know how they ended up there smacks of making excuses to get out of making hard choices.

[imtringued]

>People don't make decisions with perfect information.

That is exactly the reason why the trolley problem is bad. People don't make decisions with perfect information, but the trolley problem is such a perfect information problem.

The thing is, people follow some sort of behavioural pattern that simplifies reality. Shooting people with guns is bad, therefore killing people with switches is bad. Choosing to kill people with switches might make them more likely to kill people with guns and people with guns are more of a danger than people not flipping switches.

These heuristics aren't optimal in theoretical scenarios that test the limits, but they work in every day scenarios.

[jncfhnb]

The trolley problem has more information and stats than someone is likely to ever encounter but it’s hardly an inconceivable level of information for a thought experiment

[corethree]

Assume all things are sure. The point of the moral conflict is to address the core problem of the moral dilemma not side details and speculative hypotheticals.

[zorrolovsky]

Thanks for your feedback. It's brave to judge a moral position as wrong, as that implies the judge is some sort of omniscient god :)

Thinking more about it, in my case it's the number of people what would push me to take action. I feel 5 lives vs 1 is not worth enough for me to change destiny. If it was 100 lives vs 1, I would definitely take action (sorry fat man). I'm not still not sure about 10 vs 1. I guess in the moment I'd go with my intuition.

[bambax]

Utilitarianism assumes we have all the facts, yet we never do. We talk of "saving" lives but that's incorrect: no life is ever "saved"; the inevitable moment of death can be postponed a little -- and with unforeseeable consequences.

Utilitarianism and its more recent avatars like "effective altruism" intends to replace moral questioning with math from elementary school. The world doesn't work that way. Never has, never will.

(It's also quite perverse, because there's this underlying assumption/insult that if you're not utilitarian, then it means you don't quite understand that 5>1, and therefore you're beyond stupid and shouldn't be part of the conversation.)

[bhickey]

> Utilitarianism assumes we have all the facts, yet we never do.

All the facts, while helpful, are not necessary for utilitarianism.

> "effective altruism"

I think you're attacking a straw man. You won't find Peter Singer attacking people for engaging in suboptimal charity.

> there's this underlying assumption/insult that if you're not utilitarian, then it means you don't quite understand that 5>1, and therefore you're beyond stupid and shouldn't be part of the conversation.

You can certainly say you'd sacrifice five to save one, but you need to back it up. The moral indulgence critique says, more or less, if you refuse to do it because you don't want to do something distasteful you're being a coward, not stupid.

Rule utilitarians can coherently refuse to pull the switch. I happen to disagree with their moral framework, but they can mount a vigorous defense of the position. Personally I come down hard on the side of rejecting the status quo bias. Commiting to symmetry in moral decision making is useful for avoiding contradictions. I also don't care much for act utilitarianism, since it's susceptible to non-utilitarians putting their fingers on the scale (ex. "buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog".)

[bambax]

> you're being a coward, not stupid

It would seem the whole setup of the experiment is designed to rule out personal courage. The question isn't "would you fight a terrorist" to save five people, or would you climb a dangerous mountain, or swim a violent stream, or defeat some incel with a machine gun...

The question is "would you flip a switch", and the subtext is "with zero risk to yourself". How does flipping a switch become an act of courage and not flipping an act of cowardice.

Also, movies. I don't think there's one (successful) movie where the hero voluntarily and coldly sacrifices even one completely innocent and unrelated individual, in order to save any number of people. When the hero kills someone, every movie goes to great lengths to explain that person somehow deserved it or was an enemy.

In movies, it's the villains who are utilitarians. That should tell us something.

[twiceaday]

I don't watch many movies but in the ending of the Spiderman video game (Spoilers:) there is a deadly virus going around and aunt May is on her deathbed from it. Spiderman gets just enough antiserum to save her or to study it and make more but she will not live long enough for that. It's an emotional scene and they don't weasel out of it by having her decide for him, or giving some signs that she wouldn't make it. He ultimately gives the vial to a doctor and the scene fades as he is crying on his knees over aunt May in her hospital bed.

https://youtu.be/Q3hAt1uWo8M?si=7JdVISScles5PPKD

[bhickey]

You're responding to something I didn't say.

> The moral indulgence critique says, more or less, if you refuse to do it because you don't want to do something distasteful you're being a coward, not stupid.