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A Judicial "Trolley Problem"
(lemmy.zip)
Philippa Foot is most known for her invention of the Trolley Problem thought experiment in the 1960s. A lesser known variation of hers is as follows:
Suppose that a judge is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime. The rioters are threatening to take bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed from the riots only by framing some innocent person and having them executed.
These are the only two options: execute an innocent person for a crime they did not commit, or let people riot in the streets knowing that people will die. If you were the judge, what would you do?
As usual with variations of the trolley problem, there's a lot of hidden assumptions baked into the question to oversimplify a more complex question, which leads to weird results.
For example, I'm given perfect knowledge of a lot of future events. I know that the crowd will riot if I don't convict, and I know that any attempt made by myself or anyone else to reason with them will fail. I also know that people won't riot over convicting an innocent person. There are all sorts of social consequences that could result from my decision, people gaining or losing faith in the system, an effect on my own career and ability to make future decisons, setting a precedent of expanding state power, the possibility that closing the case would let the actual perpetrator run free and cause more problems, etc.
If you ask me to make all the assumptions necessary to frame in the same way as the original trolley problem, then my answer has to be the same (lose one to save five), but those assumptions cause the hypothetical to be utterly divorced from reality. The real answer is not to convict because you're not a psychic.
I take your point but this is more a complaint about thought experiments in general. They're useful tools to test our intuitions (moral intuitions in this case) but at some point they break down. Still, I like this example because (as you imply) the answer that people give to this scenario often contradicts their answer to the Trolly Problem. That's interesting enough to warrant posing the question.
Yeah, it is a general criticism that can apply to a lot of thought experiments. And don't get me wrong, I enjoy the problem, it's just that I also enjoy critiquing it.
I believe most people's initial response to the original problem is to pull, but far fewer people will push the fat man, and this is framed as highlighting a contradiction in people's beliefs. In reality, it shows that if you create an unrealistic scenario, it trips up people's intuitions. One reason people's intuitions tell them not to push the fat man is because their moral intuition is outweighed by their physical intuition. We all know that pushing a guy off a bridge won't actually stop a trolley (and even if it would, we can't know that), so if we start to consider doing something like that, our brains say, "No stop it idiot don't do that." But it's not telling us anything about morality, it's just telling us "that's not how physics works, dummy."
Our intuitions are grounded in a world where physical and scientific laws apply and where we can never have perfect knowledge of future events, and the further you break from that, the less useful they are. But if the idea with the trolley problem is to help us identify what (if any) consistent logical precepts we can apply that match our moral intuitions, then we need to have simple, straight-forward questions. The original trolley problem is a little contrived, but doesn't break from reality nearly as hard as variations like the fat man. That means that the intuitive response to the original problem is more trustworthy and reliable, compared to whatever we feel about the more contrived ones.
Imo pulling the lever is the correct answer, and whenever I see a variation that tries to contradict that, I look for ways that that variation breaks from reality in ways that would trip up my intuition. So in this case my intuition tells me not to convict, in "contradiction" of saying I'd pull the lever, but that's because my intuition hasn't internalized all the assumptions about magical psychic foreknowledge and stuff. When I consider the problem with all those assumptions, then I say, "Oh well in that case it's just like the trolley problem so pull," and in some cases that answer might make me come across as a psycho, but that's only because the hypothetical doesn't allow me to consider the full effects, risks, and ramifications that the action would have in the real world.
So that's my full solution to the problem. I studied physics in uni so sometimes I might be a bit too inclined to find a final objective answer to a problem that's supposed to be open-ended lol