Your second category of response seems to say “my intuitions about considering a group of people, taken billions at a time, aren’t reliable, but my intuitions about considering the same group of people, one at a time, are”. You then conclude that you care because taking the billions of people one at a time implies that you care about them.
But it seems that I could apply the same argument a little differently—instead of applying it to how many people you consider at a time, apply it to the total size of the group. “my intuitions about how much I care about a group of billions are bad, even though my intuitions about how much I care about a small group are good.” The second argument would, then, imply that it is wrong to use your intuitions about small groups to generalize to large groups—that is, the second argument refutes the first. Going from “I care about the people in my life” to “I would care about everyone if I met them” is as inappropriate as going from “I know what happens to clocks at slow speeds” to “I know what happens to clocks at near-light speeds”.
The next time you are in a queue with strangers, imagine the two people behind you (that you haven’t met before and don’t expect to meet again and didn’t really interact with much at all, but they are /concrete/). Put them on one track in the trolley problem, and one of the people that you know and care about on the other track.
If you prefer to save two strangers to one tribesman, you are different enough from me that we will have trouble talking about the subject, and you will probably find me to be a morally horrible person in hypothetical situations.
Your second category of response seems to say “my intuitions about considering a group of people, taken billions at a time, aren’t reliable, but my intuitions about considering the same group of people, one at a time, are”. You then conclude that you care because taking the billions of people one at a time implies that you care about them.
But it seems that I could apply the same argument a little differently—instead of applying it to how many people you consider at a time, apply it to the total size of the group. “my intuitions about how much I care about a group of billions are bad, even though my intuitions about how much I care about a small group are good.” The second argument would, then, imply that it is wrong to use your intuitions about small groups to generalize to large groups—that is, the second argument refutes the first. Going from “I care about the people in my life” to “I would care about everyone if I met them” is as inappropriate as going from “I know what happens to clocks at slow speeds” to “I know what happens to clocks at near-light speeds”.
I’ll go a more direct route:
The next time you are in a queue with strangers, imagine the two people behind you (that you haven’t met before and don’t expect to meet again and didn’t really interact with much at all, but they are /concrete/). Put them on one track in the trolley problem, and one of the people that you know and care about on the other track.
If you prefer to save two strangers to one tribesman, you are different enough from me that we will have trouble talking about the subject, and you will probably find me to be a morally horrible person in hypothetical situations.