Would you reroute a train to run over one person to prevent it from running over five others? In the classic “Trolley Problem” survey, most people say they would. But I wanted to test what people would actually do in a real-life situation. In the world’s first realistic simulation of this controversial moral dilemma, unsuspecting subjects will be forced to make what they believe is a life-or-death decision.
(2 votes)
Comments
(Long Spike)
Interesting results. We know what the test subjects answered on camera. Unfortunately we cannot know if that is the truth.
(Short Spike)
I dont think this was a good way to test this scenario, because i believe that doing nothing in this situation is the only rational decision a person could make.
Heres how i view the situation. Imagine that you are getting a tour of some sort of industrial factory. There is heavy machinery and potentially dangerous things all over the place. Your tour guide (who presumably has years of training) is showing you the basics of how to operate a piece of machinery, when he/she suddenly has to step out for a moment. While they are gone, something that they havnt spoken about starts taking place. You perceive this to be dangerous. Some of the signals on the machine might even be indicating that it is dangerous.
Do you make the assumption that everyone involved in this situation (who are experienced professionals) are messing up, and that you with your 2 minutes of tour guide expertise are better able to asses the situation than them?
What if you decide to take action and someone ends up getting killed because of it. Then you find out after, that everything was actually fine, because the people who work there know what they are doing, and what you perceived as dangerous, because you have no actual experience with it, was actually a very common thing which would have been fine, had you not pulled that lever.
They really glance over that point when they are talking about the responses, and attribute their lack of actions to thinking that someone else was responsible for it, but are dismissive about the significance of that. Someone else IS responsible for it, and that person is highly trained, as are the workers on the tracks. What if there was a safety mechanism put in place that you weren't told about (because you don't work there, and have no actual training) and you unknowingly disabled it by touching the machine during this event.
These scenarios are fundamentally NOT the trolley problem. In the trolley problem YOU are the one responsible to make the decision, and YOU are the one trained to operate the trolley. You don't have to make assumptions about whether or not this is actually a dangerous situation, or if their are existing safety mechanisms to take care of this. You know for a fact that this is a dangerous situation, and that there are no other safety mechanisms in place to take care of this for you. It is specifically your responsibility to make the decision.
(Long Spike)
'It's someone elses problem' is a solution to the trolley problem.
(Short Spike)
And? That has nothing to do with anything I said.
(Long Spike)
It has in the sense that this is the closest we can get to simulating the trolley problem. Without doing things that are borberline immoral. So the best answer to the trolley problem currently is that given certain test parameters most choose inaction. Which is an answer to a methaphysical problem to begin with. Like what is the sound of one hand clapping. Meaning that the problem is the point, not the answer as such.
I bet most of those tested had never pondered anything close to the trolley problem.