From an ethical point of view, the biggest problem for me was when there were two bad choices to be weighted against each other, e.g. 1 person on a track dies against 5 persons on the other track. In most of these cases, I "did nothing" - because I don't want to play god and I knew where this leads: There are ethical edge cases that I definitly do not want to think about. I am not super convinced about this in hindsight: E.g. Triages exist in hospitals to help doctors find the least worse outcome among many bad options. Most, this involves metrics such as number of dead patients, or number of lived years lost (e.g. prefer to safe children before elderly).
> I "did nothing" - because I don't want to play god
I can't understand this perspective. Deciding not to pull the lever is a decision that you've made. You are "playing god" all the same if you decide to sit there and not pull the lever. There is no ethically important distinction that comes about by the mere fact that physical movement is necessitated by one of the decisions versus the other decision. If the framing of the question changes from lever-pulling to "you must press either button A or B", and that re-framing causes you to make a different decision, then I question the ethical assumptions going into the decision making. The ethical core of the trolley problem is that you're asked to choose whether you prefer one outcome versus another -- the precise physical movements you must carry out (jumping jacks, lever-pulling, blinking, button-pressing, or just sitting still) to lock-in a particular decision are irrelevant.
I agree, but how do you decide e.g. if there's one disabled person on a track, and one not disabled on the other? It's that I don't want to make these decision (and luckily, I am not forced - I didn't design this game, I did not put the people on the track in the first case - I can decide not to play the game, and in reality, I can always ask "Is there perhaps option C that saves both?").
The core ethical point of the trolly problem is that you have to take an action.
In real world scenarios there are most often significant distinctions between taking an action and refusing to take one.
The physical action is a red herring under a moral system that takes consequentialism seriously. The trolley problem shines a light on this red herring.
Firstly, whichever decision you make, you have to take a real physical action. Suppose you decide not to pull the lever. You still have autonomic arousal, neurons are firing, your prefrontal cortex is inhibiting you from pulling the lever just for laughs, and so on. Lots of atoms had to move around to come to that decision, which you would label as "inaction". I disagree, it is action. Only a minority of caloric expenditure is associated with the actual lever being pulled. Not that this really matters, anyway, given that the outcome is what's ethically important.
Secondly, you should consider the consequences of thinking that pulling the lever somehow matters ethically. That means that in certain edge cases, you're surrendering the choice of who lives and who dies to the arbitrary whims of the experimenter. If I was a malicious experimenter, I could maximize the number of dead people by just jury rigging the allocations. If your ethical framework leads to a situation where a maximum number of people die, I would argue that there's some faulty ethical reasoning there.
My mental framing of situations like this is "One shouldn't play god. If expecting to be faced with choices about life and death, one should prepare. Get very, very good at the god job."
We humans have outsized impact on the world around us. Often, we don't get the luxury of no-choice. Not if we want to survive ourselves.
(One variant I've never seen is "You realized that creating a system of moving multi-ton vehicles at street level over long distances at moderate speeds could result in fatal collisions. Do you refrain from inventing trolleys?").
> I am not super convinced about this in hindsight
Yeah, trolley problems are a philosophical tool to help work out the ethical edge cases for situations like the example you gave.
Though they can be a distraction by reducing to the wrong bad choices. When trolley problems became mainstream because of looming spectre of self-driving cars, the example of "should the car drive off the bridge and kill the driver rather than hitting a child on the bridge" was making the rounds. I was always on the side of "I don't care if, in this absurdly rare case, the car decides to run over the kid AND then drive off the bridge because human car drivers kill more the 30000 people a year in North America alone".
And, as aside, ahhhhh, remember those days of our biggest problem being that self-driving cars were about to own the streets and put thousands of truck drivers out of work.
If you were driving a car that was plowing into a crowd of people, who you try to steer it towards the less crowded area that is still hitting people? Or just merrily let the car plow through the thickest part of the crowd? I find it hard to believe you wouldn't make the active choice to steer it away.
