This is a special post for quick takes by aspiringLich. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
In scanning discussions about the trolley problem I don't see much discussion epistemics of it. I understand that in moral dilemmas these are intentionally hand-waved away, but I feel like they play a not-insignificant role in people's moral intuitions.
Most people agree that in the trolley problem, even given personal responsibility, killing one person is better than killing five. When all we have to do is pull a lever, the chain of causality seems solid. I’ve pulled plenty of levers and I’m familiar with the concept of mechanical switch rails. If the lever gets stuck or the switch doesn’t work, the train kills the five and oh well at least I tried.
When my only chance at stopping this trolley is by pushing a fat man off a bridge, what do you expect people to think? I’ve never pushed someone off a bridge. Supposedly there’s a railing, and—forget a fat man, I’m not confident I could get any struggling adult man sailing over a railing. And then there’s the timing. If I do it too early, the man has a chance to stumble off the track. If I do it too late, he lands on top of the trolley. Not to mention the assertion that one extremely obese individual could stop a runaway trolley slated to kill five people. This action feels much worse not only because of the visceral sense of personal responsibility, but also the uncertainty in my execution.
You could modify this scenario by putting the fat man on a trapdoor or something but to me, it starts to lose the simplicity that made it easy to form a moral intuition about. Why is he standing on a trapdoor? Did he volunteer? Is he unaware?
I think you may be expecting too much of the thought experiment. All it does is show the contradictions and edge-cases between one's simplistic rule-based statements and one's simplistic/imagined intuitions of situations. Oh, and it enables a hilarious episode of The Good Place, which makes up for any flaws it may have as a philosophical thought experiment.
For a lot of people, it's a good demonstration that specifics can flip-flop them, so their far-mode preferences/beliefs are probably not sufficient. Some respond by adding epicycles (more rules to fit each change), some respond by acknowledging the contradiction and either claiming to change their mind about what they "would" do, or being OK with contradictions.
For others (including myself), they reject that it shows very much at all, because too many important factors are unspecified (how I got here, who's on the track, who will think what about me based on my actions, etc.)?
"all else equal" does way too much work in a lot of these statements. All else equal, killing 5 is worse than killing 1. But all else CANNOT be equal, as people are individual and not linearly aggregable, and because we're all in a giant web of relations to each other and to the other. Everything is connected.
Sure. Upon further thought I think I would distill my claim down to "I don't think the trolley problem is particularly helpful because in real life you're never working with complete certainties therefore it's very bad at illustrating how to apply morality to daily life." I still think this point is not really emphasized in all the pop discussion I've seen about the trolley problem but I'm fairly certain this is not an exciting novel criticism.
This reminds me of fanfics where there's a lengthy preamble to explain why canonical events are subverted or situations have changed before the actual fanfic begins, or so they can shoehorn in their Mary Sue. And I don't make that comparison lightly, because I believe that it is more effectual to think of thought experiments broadly as rhetorical tools with more than a superficial resemblance to the rhetorical tools employed by storytellers in novels, graduation addresses, advertising copy, and even, textbooks analyzing great works of philosophy.
It just hit me that the way we reason about things is our brain taking advantage of its different capabilities. Or, in other words, our brain leverages different aspects of our inner experience to think!
Some preliminary googling tells me that this list is missing Unsymbolized Thinking, which is basically when you intuitively know the solution to a puzzle, or know what you're going to do next without thinking about it. I can't immediately think of a way to link this to any neurological function, maybe its just your stream of consciousness?
I draw a distinction between visuospatial and visual thinking because personally, while I can't picture things with great clarity, I am very good at manipulating these images in my head. I think this is why I have an easier time with physics / programming, because I can literally manipulate a model in my head or think about a system structurally.
It's interesting that when I ask people whether they have an internal monologue, they're often shocked to hear some people make any decisions—or even function at all—without a voice in their head. Or, on the other side, can't imagine always having your mind rambling at you with no way to shut it off. Personally, I find I lean more on intuitive / visuospatial thinking, and when I bring out my inner voice to reason something out, it has to sputter up like an old engine.
I'd love to hear other people's experiences with this! Things like aphantasia massively affect your aptitude for certain things / the way you move through the world, so I've always been surprised that this stuff doesn't come up as often in common discourse. There does seem to be a lot of research on this that has been done recently so maybe that'll change in the coming decades.