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typellblog · 2 months

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I want to talk about what I'm going to call Trolley Problem Mindset, probably more accurately described as Naive Consequentialism.

You're familiar with the Trolley Problem, I won't go over the basics, but I do want to emphasize its actual, oft-forgotten purpose.

The problem isn't actually whether to pull the lever or not. We know whether you should pull the lever. The majority of people, when asked this question, reply that it is good, or at least permissible, to pull the lever and kill one person to save five. (If you disagree, that's fine, but not relevant to my point.)

The Problem of the Trolley is in figuring out a principle that accommodates this intuition. It presents a pretty picture of ethics, in which we trial a moral principle - "One should not kill innocent people." - and then test it through various hypothetical encounters, modifying when appropriate - "One should not kill innocent people except when it saves a greater number of lives than are lost."

In this way we discover the workings of our moral intuitions and derive generally applicable principles that are acceptable to the majority, and can give us guidance in situations where our intuitions fail to apply.

But in my view there is actually a pretty big Problem with this Trolley that results in it poisoning the principles derived thereof, and that is the completely unrealistic scenarios we're presented with. (Critiques along these lines have been made by smarter people than me, this is just a way of expressing my own feelings about it.)

The main feature of the Trolley Problem, of any trolley problem, is a complete certainty of outcome. We know what will happen if we pull the lever. We know what will happen if we don't. We even know what will happen if we try to stop the trolley by other means, or untie the people on the tracks. It won't work.

We don't know the future ramifications of the situation, whether the trolley company will put more safety measures in place, whether you'll be put on trial for killing the one, whether the five will turn out to be mass murderers better off left to die. But it's fine that we don't know, because these things aren't supposed to factor into the decision.

We are in a box. A box with clearly defined walls in which certain consequences are worth caring about, because we know them, and others aren't, because we don't.

It is a very comforting box. It makes it simple to intuit the answer. It's a hard question, that requires a hard choice, but don't we have to make hard choices sometimes? It makes sense. It is also a lie.

As far as I'm concerned any intuitions derived thereof are worse than useless, because many of the most important moral questions of our time are not in a box.

Take, for example, political decisions. You cannot possibly tell me all the consequences of relaxing COVID policy and the relative utility generated or lost. We know some of the consequences, for sure. You can even make a decent guess at the death toll. But what about the potential economic value generated by letting people back into restaurants? Could that outweigh the deaths? I think many people reading this would agree that it's absurd on the face of it to suffer deaths in order to preserve economic value, but of course this is all in aggregate, and the additional economic value would also save some lives. My point is merely that you're not just thinking about the outcomes here, are you.

I find that left-leaning political thought is uniquely concerned with systems, rather than individuals. This makes it absurdly difficult to construct a box. We understand our own political decisions as only responsible for a tiny ripple in the tide of history. We understand the consequences of that movement as a vast number of run-on effects which are impossible to quantify from our current position. How do we decide where to draw the walls of the box?

Take a step back. Say you encounter a homeless person on the street and they ask you for some money. You can't really know the consequences of giving them $20. Decent chance they spend it on food, of course, but what about (shocked gasp) drugs? What about the knock-on effects of the Chinese takeout place they go to getting another order that night? You can make the judgement that they probably need the money more than you, but that's not a judgement made with full awareness of the consequences.

Many of our decisions are made in boxes, of course. We create the boxes in order to deal with the very, very complicated nature of the universe and only consider the consequences directly in front of us. This is fine. But sometimes the most obvious and immediate consequences are still not easily quantifiable.

You cannot kill people from this position. It's a ridiculous proposition. The possibility that you could be wrong, that if you simply rushed over to untie the ropes the five could be saved, makes the idea of choosing to sacrifice the one absurd. A society composed entirely of people who made decisions like this would be terrifying to live in.

A naive understanding of the Trolley Problem might be that it represents a choice between utilitarianism, which advocates killing the one and some other (usually Kantian) philosophy, which does not.

In fact, the Problem is more like an argument for utilitarianism and consequentialist ideologies more broadly, because it supposes that we can know outcomes with certainty.

Remember, trolley problems are designed in order to test our intuitions. In other words, it was created for the purpose of making a situation where you find it intuitively justifiable to sacrifice an innocent person.

This is not an inherently bad thing. Most thought experiments exist to push for a particular view. But it is important to realise that the Trolley Problem does not arise naturally. It is not a neutral question to ask or answer.

Which is why I find it concerning when people (seemingly unconsciously) replicate its logic across different choices.

Take, for example, the 2024 American election (yeah. sorry.)

The discourse surrounding who to vote for, if at all, is remarkably reminiscent of a trolley problem. Trump is largely discounted as a possibility, leaving Biden or the functionally identical options of no vote, 3rd party, etc.

Voting Biden is equivalent to pulling the lever. We understand that Biden wouldn't be a great president, that atrocities like that currently happening in Gaza (not a hypothetical!) could happen under his administration. But killing one person is better than five.

Not voting is equivalent to doing nothing in the Trolley Problem. Contributing to Biden's election would be contributing to any harm he does or fails to prevent. Avoiding this is preferable, even if it allows a greater harm to happen.

Obvious problems with this framing emerge immediately. Not voting is not the same thing as letting Trump win, because we do not know if he is the default winner without your vote, unlike how killing five people is the default path of the trolley. A single vote doesn't swing elections, anyway. The idea that you would be personally responsible for the outcome in the same way as the agent in the Trolley Problem is laughable.

In fact, in several states, one's vote doesn't affect the election at all, because they are known to be 'safe' blue or red states.

This is never brought up in these discussions of who to vote for because consciously or otherwise people want it to be a trolley problem. They want it to be in a box. They want their vote to be a real, important decision. Most importantly, they want to know the consequences.

It's an accepted truth in these discussions that Trump would be worse. I don't want to disagree. He's pretty bad. But you don't know that for certain, do you?

And that's the only consequence you're looking at - the direct outcomes of their presidency. What about well into the future? What is the consequence of signalling that you're willing to take the devil's bargain, that you will vote for 99% Hitler so long as you are confronted with 100% Hitler?

In a way this is a bad example because - well, there are two reasons. One, I'm not from the US, but two, I would still vote for Biden if I had the chance. I think the way that people often talk about this is weird and wrong enough that it's useful to illustrate an issue I have but it's not actually wrong enough to put me on the opposite side, there.

I guess the point I'm getting to is that you have to make choices without knowing the outcome sometimes, and you shouldn't need to pretend that you do in order for it to make sense to you.

There's enough posts going around about how leftists need to be Pragmatic, and sticking to principles when they don't accomplish anything is worthless, and how people prefer inaction to action that makes them feel complicit in something bad, which is Purity Politics and therefore Stupid

that this feels like an almost sacrilegious direction to think in, but

Consequences are not everything when it comes to morality.

I don't mean to ignore consequences, but to acknowledge the limits of our understanding - to both take into account those consequences we can know, and to not discount those we can't.

Consequences inform our picture of the situation, our understanding of the stakes, but they're not the entirety of the answer to every question.

Our choices should be made in line with our consciences, with our understanding of virtue.

There are many leftist beliefs that line up with utilitarianism: take the idea of welfarism, that our goal should be to improve people's wellbeing in real, practical ways. Or impartialism - the idea that every person's life should be considered equally.

But I don't want to let the consequentialism sneak in unchallenged alongside them!

A big impetus behind this post was something I saw on twitter yesterday.

I'm sure I agree entirely with this person about how cruel it is to devalue the lives of these death row inmates.

I just think it is absurd to ask an individual to make this decision. That, in fact, we do not need to ask an individual to make this decision. This situation does not arise in real life. We can advocate for treating death row prisoners better without killing your wife. You can walk away from Omelas.

The Trolley Problem Mindset supposedly asks us to make the hard choices. But it's an illusion. Within the context of the Trolley Problem, these choices are actually really easy. It's really easy to consign innocent lives to oblivion when you can pretend you know for sure it will lead to a better outcome for many more.

And I think that, if anything, is the real problem.

#rambling #this is really just a first draft #i could make it more coherent #but i can't be bothered #its 3am

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