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I think you're begging the question. The more steps between an action & an outcome, the more other people need to be involved, etc the less guilty you are. If someone is beaten as a child & then turns into a child predator, we don't convict the parents as guilty for the child predation act. One person killing another is a crime. One country choosing to wage war isn't generally considered to be such.

With a charity, the inaction is offset by those that _are_ taking action. The inaction is also mitigated by an awareness of the impact of diminishing returns (there could be other things more worthy of investment in the long term).

The trolly example artificially makes the outcome solely dependent on your action, which is extremely rarely/never how things work in reality.

The fundamental with this philosophy is that is permits "responsibility" to diffuse into the population such that nobody feels responsible for a reality we all must act to address.

Congratulations. I think you've just articulated why government & regulations exist.

Many very good points.

One thing to note is that in these real-life examples you've laid out, there's a non-trivial difference in effort and action between choosing to save people (e.g changing your entire career path to earn more money) versus not doing so.

In the Trolley Problem, the action can be made arbitrarily insignificant, trivial and ambiguous. For example, instead of pulling a lever, we could instead define the action as nodding one's head, or blinking twice. At a certain point of triviality, the action/inaction dichotomy and the do-something/do-nothing dichotomy loses coherency and we realize that ultimately this is a choice between two mutually exclusive options, and subjects are intentionally choosing to kill 5 to save 1.

Perhaps a more fitting real-life analogy to the Trolley Problem would be as follows. You currently donate $100/month to charity A, which saves 1 life per month. A more effective charity comes along called charity B, which for $100/month is capable of saving 5 lives per year. The process to switch from A to B is easy and trivial. Despite knowing all this, you purposely choose not to switch, thereby causing four extra deaths per month.

Does that make the person equivalent to a contract killer who's killing 4 people a month? Society has deemed not, probably for reasons pertaining to pragmatism (we want to disincentive real murderer) and evo psych (we didn't evolve to have disdain for opportunity cost deaths, irrespective of how important it is morally speaking).

"Perhaps a more fitting real-life analogy to the Trolley Problem would be as follows."

A non-trivial part of why the trolley problem bothers so many people is that it can't be salvaged because it is intrinsically not anything like real life. In real life you are never presented with such a binary problem. Everything is a mix of arbitrarily unbounded priorities, predictive ambiguity, and even ambiguity in the outcome.

My personal "resolution" to the problem is, yes, obviously, you save as many lives as possible even if that means actively changing the outcome... but that's essentially irrelevant, because you will never in your life be faced with such a stark, mathematically-rigid choice. There's always other options... not always relevant ones or desirable ones, but always something.

Even when you construct the problem as close to a real life one as possible, you end up with something more like "You just realized you're driving on ice and going way too fast. In front of you are two pedestrians crossing in front of you, one on each side of the road. You have about .3 seconds to consider this problem. Your System 1 instincts think you might be able to weave between them but there's a chance you'll start spinning and hit both. You could also try to jank to the right and go up on the curb, but you might crash yourself into that tree pretty hard and still hit one of the pedestrians. Regardless of what you choose System 2's gonna be second guessing you pretty hard for the rest of your life." You don't get "Choose A and this will happen, choose B and this will happen", it's a big mess. It's always a big mess.

Even if you literally encountered the trolley problem in real life, one must consider whether your understanding is accurate, or if the person who has explained it to you is lying or has ulterior motives, and so on. (And that's ignoring "this is clearly the trolley problem and I must be on TV or in a psychology experiment"; let's pretend it's in a world that isn't obsessed with this particular problem.)

Now, that is arguably the point of the trolley problem, to get down to that level and ask ethics problems. But it's dozens of layers of abstraction away from anything relevant to the real world. It's a mistake to think otherwise and stress about it as much as the gestalt seems to.

> In real life you are never presented with such a binary problem. Everything is a mix of arbitrarily unbounded priorities, predictive ambiguity, and even ambiguity in the outcome.

One real-life example that comes to my mind is whether we should have done COVID vaccine challenge trials. I always thought they were a good idea. Yes, it would have put people at risk, but it could have potentially saved many more lives!

My father is a doctor, and in fact is an infectious disease specialist. He's been very busy this past year, working primarily on COVID research. When I talked to him about the idea of a challenge trial, he was completely against the idea—so much so that he got a bit upset, and we had to stop talking about it. That doesn't happen often.

The idea of purposefully giving participants a deadly disease—even with their consent—seemed fundamentally wrong to my father, regardless of how many other lives could have been saved in the process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere would seem to be the ethical principle at play here .

Right, but that's the essence of the trolly problem, isn't it? Whether you can take one life to save multiple lives.

You're right, and for exactly the same reason: If somebody dies in the human challenge trial it's very specifically your fault. The people that die due to a delay in the vaccine because of not using human challenge trials? Nobody knows them, they don't count, and they can't sue you.

"One real-life example that comes to my mind is whether we should have done COVID vaccine challenge trials."

You don't know what the result of the trial will be, already taking us out of the domain of the trolley problem. If you knew it was going to kill everyone who had it but you'd get this particular bit of info that was guaranteed to have this result for the general population, then we'd be much closer, but there are multiple false assumptions to get there... and we still haven't discussed all the different ways we could run the trial because it's not a matter of "Either we do the trial this exact way, or we don't"; do we do a double-blind? Base it on multi-armed bandit math? Do we focus on certain demographics? And so on and so on.

Not a binary choice between these two guaranteed results; a huge range of possibilities, unknown outcomes, even things that are hard to measure outcomes.

Sure, real life adds complexity! I still think the simplified question is a useful framework, similar to how the concept of an infinite two-dimensional plane is useful in mathematics. We can use it to understand the more-complicated real world.

And, note that my father's stated position was that regardless of anything else, the risk of giving COVID to participants wasn't worth the potential of a faster vaccine, period. He wasn't thinking of those other issues you raised, because he hadn't gotten there yet.

(He did say there was one scenario in which he'd support a challenge trial—if we found a drug which rendered COVID non-deadly, but could only be manufactured in low quantities. He had a specific candidate in mind. But that's basically opting out of the problem—he would pull the lever if the trolly wasn't deadly to the other guy.)

I broadly agree with a lot of the principles here, but there are distinctions that should be drawn.

Firstly, there is the question of uncertainty. I am not certain that donating money will result in lives saved. The charity might be corrupt.

Secondly, there is the donation-vs-useful-work. Someone like Bill Gates is a fantastic example - the more money he donated pre-becoming-a-billionaire, the more less helpful he'd have been. It was better that he focused on making more money so he has more to give away.

Thirdly, there are complicated but powerful arguments that people have to privilege their own life beyond what the trolley problem answer suggests.

- Practically, people are going to do that.

- An individual can be much more certain that they exist and benefit from living than others (maybe they are surrounded by philosophical zombies?).

- If moral people make choices to weed themselves out of the gene/social pool then society will become less moral over time.

Cynical, self serving, but true.

That Coast Guard movie with Kevin Costner has a line people used to quote a lot but I haven't seen lately.

"How do you chose who lives?"

"[...] I take the first one I come to or the weakest one in the group and then I swim as fast and as hard as I can for as long as I can. And the sea takes the rest."

Aaron Schwartz had a post about this, that comes from a talk he went to -

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/handwritingwall

Definitely worth a read, even if you don’t agree in the end.

That's an excellent read. Highly recommended to anyone else perusing this thread.

The rough answer is that we have a duty to help to a degree that is reasonable enough that we'll keep doing it. So organizations like Giving What We Can, for example, ask members to pledge to donate 10% of their annual income to effective charities, which is a fairly reasonable amount for middle-class people in a developed nation that won't sacrifice much quality of life.

Yes, there is always some subtext that a life could've been saved had you given that much extra. But I think it's a mistake to view moral failure as a binary rather than a scalar; every life saved is that much better and we ought to keep that in mind rather than embracing a kind of nihilism that we're not doing everything we can and therefore we should do nothing.

Even one more step further, if everyone donated 1k to mosquito nets, then that's more money than the problem can handle and again you are a serial killer for not having donated to, say, drug abuse clinics instead.