Trolley problem

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A runaway trolley is hurtling down a track toward five workers who will certainly be killed if it continues on its course. You are standing next to a point switch. You can divert the trolley onto a side track, saving the five workers, but only at the cost of a sixth person working on the spur line. Should you pull the switch to divert the trolley, actively choosing to save five lives, but at the certain cost of one?

Philosophy students love the trolley problem. Though introduced in the sixties as a thought experiment about some Roman Catholic moral principle, these days it gets great play when we think about real runaway trams, not metaphorical ones — driverless cars. This intuition pump now functions in the public mind as some kind of live moral dilemma, to be solved (and how could it be solved? It is designed to be insoluble!) before driverless cars can be more widely mandated.

What if a child runs out in front of a robo-car, inside the total stopping distance for the car? What should the robot do? Should it swerve to avoid the child at the expense of oncoming vehicles? Or carry on, possibly killing the child?

How should we configure this potentially horrific technology? Can we — should we — programme your vehicle in advance to manage the kinds of moral quandary the trolley problem presents?

Look: there are plenty of logistical problems and risk allocation issues to be solved before autonomous vehicles can go mainstream for sure, but this highly artificial hypothetical is not one of them. This is a contrived thought experiment dreamed up for a philosophy journal.

Negative-Lindy effect

The JC’s negative lindy effect: Philosophical thought experiments only work as long as they don’t occur in real life. That is why they are philosophy experiments.

By design, Philosophy professors live in a world entirely disconnected from the actual problems of real human beings. It is even disconnected from the world scientists live in. The philosopherIt is like a bad inversion of the world scientists live in.

Scientists live in this simple, stable world filled with hundreds of benign little nomological machines they have designed, and thanks to which everything reliably works. Philosophers inhabit its dark inversion, a world also filled with malicious nomological machines, but which are designed to bugger everything up. In the philosophical world nothing works, which is excellent for philosophers because they can then sit around arguing why not. For every E=MC² or F=ma — happy little heuristics by which the world magically works — there is a Brain in a Vat, a Chinese Room, a Blind Watchmaker a Parallel Universe or a Trolley Problem illustrating how, really, it doesn’t.

It is a world of imaginary problems Like a, well, parallel universe. Philosophers therefore occupy themselves with rarefied, nomological problems that suit that ascetic vibe.

If they happened in real life to real humans, real humans would have long since solved them. For something to have lasting value as a philosophy experiment, it must have some kind of negative lindy effect. This principle suggests that time is a good test of the quality and resilience of a philosophical thought experiment is how long it has survived without ever presenting itself as genuine problem to real people.- things that have stood the test of time are more likely to continue doing so, while new things are more fragile and likely to become obsolete.

This is a sure sign it has never happened and the more enduring it is, the more likely it never will.

What kind of real-world event has such a deterministic outcome, over such an event horizon that is just long enough for to take definitive action that is partially but not fully remedial with moral clarity but not long enough to contrive a different solution, or warn anyone, or avert the outcome some other way.

Artificial certainty The trolley problem assumes there is perfect, certain knowledge of the outcomes on both tracks — that is the only variable possible is points operation — and that this is a binary choices with no middle ground. There is absolute certainty that the affected victims will not survive, which makes us wonder, what are they doing on the train tracks? Are they tied there? In which case why are we obsessing about this plainly second-order moral dilemma? If they are not tied there, to what extent are they able to get off the tracks? Or cul[pablefor being on them? Who hangs out on train tracks?

Artificial timeframe The problem artificially compresses moral deliberation into an instant (to close off potential problem-solving that would spoil the conundrum): It asks you to pre-assess the moral calculation in the abstract, without being able to change the system. But if we know in advance there is an inherent “trolley problem”, we should not wait for a plainly foreseeable calamity and have make a difficult decision. We should redesign the system with fail-safes now. Not to redesign the system is the moral failure.

If we allow the time-frame to be more realistic, there will be time to problem-solve, to warn victims, or contrive other outcomes. In real life there are usually multiple intervention points before a crisis. Where there is not, neither is there time for abstract moral calculation.

Artificial (lack of) social context The scenario strips away all social and institutional context: Why have we done it designed the system this way? How have we managed to get to this crisis point without anyone foreseeing this? The reason trolley problems are not generally prevalent is because in the real world this social context will intervene to prevent the problems arising in the first place

Artificial moral agency It reduces moral agency to a single binary choice, pretending that the many necessarily involvedhumans have practical agency to forsee and anticipate events. So while the subject of the thought experiment is apparently omnisciient, everyone else is expected to be entirely ignorant of the scenario going down, and therefore unable to take any steps to prevent it.

The trolley problem assumes the “points operator” definitely knows what is ahead on the tracks on either side, and what the outcome of his actions will necessarily be while no-one else knows anything.

It’s a false paradox: those things cannot be known in advance: only in retrospect. The humans on either side of the track are autonomous agents, as are the passengers on the train. Given their state of knowledge, their actions cannot be predicted with some kind of expected value theory. If at the time you know of the future events, there are almost certainly things you can do to change them.