Well, if the point of trolley problems is to gain some insight as to how we form moral judgments, I don’t necessarily do even that particularly well. I suspect they don’t even do that particularly well, since I suspect many respondents are going to give what they think is the approved answer, which is possibly different from what they would actually do. At best they provide insight as to why we might think of certain actions as moral or immoral.
But I sometimes see things like trolley problems used argue that there is something wrong with peoples’ decision making processes, based on apparent inconsistencies in their responses. I think this is a crock. The fact is, we often have to make decisions very quickly based on woefully incomplete information. Yes we use heuristics, and yes sometimes which heuristic gets applied (and thus which choice we make) depends on how the problem is phrased, and that means sometimes we will give “inconsistent” answers. This is not a defect, it is the inevitable result of not having the luxury of infinite time to consider one’s response.
Well, if the point of trolley problems is to gain some insight as to how we form moral judgments, I don’t necessarily do even that particularly well. I suspect they don’t even do that particularly well, since I suspect many respondents are going to give what they think is the approved answer, which is possibly different from what they would actually do. At best they provide insight as to why we might think of certain actions as moral or immoral.
But I sometimes see things like trolley problems used argue that there is something wrong with peoples’ decision making processes, based on apparent inconsistencies in their responses. I think this is a crock. The fact is, we often have to make decisions very quickly based on woefully incomplete information. Yes we use heuristics, and yes sometimes which heuristic gets applied (and thus which choice we make) depends on how the problem is phrased, and that means sometimes we will give “inconsistent” answers. This is not a defect, it is the inevitable result of not having the luxury of infinite time to consider one’s response.