In my last post, I offhandedly disparaged the Trolley Problem as a serious thought experiment. Let me elaborate.

Any philosophical thought experiment contains stipulations about what is going on. In the trolley problem, it is stipulated that by flipping the switch, it *will* prevent five deaths, and it *will* cause another person’s death.

Question: do we believe that stipulation? We don’t exactly believe in it, it’s a fictional scenario. But you at least have to accept the stipulation to think about the problem on the level that it was intended.

In the variant of the trolley problem, it is stipulated that by pushing a fat man in front of the trolley, this *will* prevent five deaths, and it *will* cause the death of the fat man.

Do we believe this stipulation? To state the obvious, it’s ludicrous. Fat people aren’t nearly as massive as trains. The difference between a person and a train is so large, that one wonders why the thought experiment even bothers stipulating that they are fat, as if it’s relying on latent fatphobia to make it more believable. If a train were light enough to be stopped by a fat person, then maybe someone who could push a fat man off a bridge could just stop the train with their bare hands instead.  And the problem doesn’t just require that a fat man will magically stop the train, but also that we have magical knowledge of this fact.

I think it’s a common issue with these thought experiments, they make these absurd stipulations and assume that people will just automatically accept them. But when you actually talk to people, you find that accepting the stipulation is often a difficult step.

There are also cases when it is correct to reject the stipulation! Most notably, people come up with thought experiments to justify torture, and their stipulation amounts to “what if torture works, wouldn’t torture be justified?” Okay, but it doesn’t work, and the thoughtless reenactment of this thought experiment across media is materially harmful.  And the torture thought experiment really isn’t that far off from the trolley problem, whose stipulation amounts to “what if murder saved lives actually?”

The absurd stipulations of trolley problems are particularly problematic, because it’s not just philosophers thinking about it. Trolley problems are the subject of psychological research. They were asking ordinary people for their thoughts, and using this to come up with descriptive ethics. But the fact that trolley problems contain stipulations that vary in absurdity is a big confounding factor.  I think it’s bad scholarship. I believe the initial research on trolleyology belongs in the trash, alongside the countless other psychology studies implicated by the replication crisis.

The demotion of trolleyology to unfunny memes is what it has always deserved.