← back to claim Trolley-style thought experiments lack evidential value for normative ethics because responses to them track framing artifacts rather than stable moral commitments

evidence graph

Trolley-style thought experiments lack evidential value for normative ethics because responses to them track framing artifacts rather than stable moral commitments
supports (3)
[+0] Trolley intuitions are a cultural artifact of Anglophone analytic training and are absent in most human societies discuss [i] anthropology
[+0] Verdicts on Footbridge shift 18 points when the victim is described as 'a large man' versus 'a person wearing a heavy backpack', despite causal structure being identical discuss [i]
[+0] Endorsement differences between physical-contact and lever variants vanish under a 90-second forced-deliberation delay (Petrossian, 2022) discuss [i] dual-process
[+0] Order of presentation reverses majority verdicts on Footbridge in 31% of subjects (Lindqvist & Ojeda, 2020, N=4,812) discuss [i]
[+0] Trolley verdicts show test-retest reliability of r=0.34 at six months, versus r=0.71 for the same subjects' abortion and capital punishment attitudes discuss [i] psychometrics
[+0] Order effects on trolley cases persist among professional philosophers with AOS in ethics (Ojeda et al., 2022, N=387) discuss [i] metaphilosophy
[+0] A 2023 direct replication of Ojeda et al. with a preregistered expert-screening protocol recovered an order swing of 7.4 points discuss [i] replication
opposes (3)
[+0] Normative arguments using trolley cases rely on the cases' conceptual structure rather than on survey majorities, so response instability is beside the point discuss [i] metaphilosophy
[+0] Framing sensitivity of comparable magnitude affects perceptual judgments that nobody treats as evidentially worthless discuss [i] epistemology methodology perception
[+0] Moral intuitions show convergent validity across independently constructed case sets at r=0.58, comparable to convergence across perceptual modalities discuss [i] moral-psychology psychometrics
[+0] The Switch/Footbridge asymmetry survives every framing manipulation tested in a 27-manipulation adversarial protocol (Ferreiro & Adeyemi, 2023, N=19,400) discuss [i] adversarial-collaboration
[+0] The 19-point minimum asymmetry gap exceeds the largest single framing effect (18 points) recorded across the same protocol discuss [i] statistics
[+0] Reanalysis of the Ferreiro & Adeyemi cells using a hierarchical ordinal model finds subadditivity of stacked framing manipulations (ratio 0.62) discuss [i]
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