Evidence against: Trolley-style thought experiments lack evidential value for normative ethics because responses to them track framing artifacts rather than stable moral commitments

0 · asserted by ◎ rasmussen_e (15) · 2 months ago

The vote is on the link: is “Normative arguments using trolley cases rely on the cases' conceptual structure…” good evidence against the claim?

Challenges the target of the main claim rather than its evidence base: if the working use of trolley cases is consistency-testing of principles, then facts about population response variability do not bear on that use. The vulnerable premise is that consistency-testing is intuition-free — the philosopher's own verdict on the case is still doing evidential work, and it is subject to the same framing pressures.

sources

[1] From Seminar to Statute: How Thought-Experiment Verdicts Tr… (think.example.org) IDPS Working Paper 2024-08, pp. 19–24

“Tracing 37 national and supranational advisory documents on automated-vehicle collision algorithms, we found that 22 cited trolley-style verdicts as evidence of public moral consensus, and 14 cited e…”

[2] Appeals to Intuitive Verdict in Contemporary Normative Ethi… (journal.example.com) Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 26(4), 611–638; doi:10.5219/etmp.2023.26.4.611

“Contrary to the reconstruction on which trolley cases function purely as consistency probes, 63 of the 104 papers we coded (60.6%) contained at least one passage in which the author asserted that a v…”

the evidence

Normative arguments using trolley cases rely on the cases' conceptual structure rather than on survey majorities, so response instability is beside the point

A survey of 92 papers in normative ethics published 2015-2023 that invoke trolley variants (Rasmussen, 2024) found that 81 used the cases to test the internal consistency of a stated principle — e.g. whether the doctrine of double effect delivers the verdict its proponents claim — rather than to establish a verdict by appeal to widespread agreement. Only 7 cited empirical response distributions at all.

◎ rasmussen_e (15) · 2 months ago · metaphilosophy · philosophy

the claim

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

The claim is that intuitive verdicts elicited by trolley cases are so sensitive to order, wording, and irrelevant affective features that they cannot function as evidence for or against normative principles. It targets the evidential role of the intuitions, not the coherence of the cases as conceptual tools; a defender of the cases must show either that the observed instability is small, or that it is filterable by procedures independent of the theory being tested.

◎ h_vandermeer (7) · 2 months ago · experimental-philosophy · metaethics · moral-psychology · philosophy

discussion

0 ◎ h_vandermeer (7) · 2 months ago

This is the objection I take most seriously. My reply is that the 81 consistency-testing papers still need a fixed point about what the case verdict is, and Ojeda's expert data says that fixed point moves with order.

0 ◎ rasmussen_e (15) · 2 months ago

It moves by 7-9 points in the aggregate, which is compatible with any individual author's verdict being stable. Aggregate variance across philosophers is not instability within a philosopher's reasoning.

0 ◎ deontic_dave (2) · 2 months ago

Then the crux is whether normative argument needs an intersubjectively fixed verdict or only an author-stable one. Worth its own claim page.

0 ◎ phil_of_mind_grad (2) · 2 months ago

Coding request: how were the 92 papers sampled? If it's a keyword search on 'trolley' you'll oversample metaethics-adjacent work that self-consciously discusses methodology.

0 ◎ rasmussen_e (15) · 2 months ago

Keyword search across eleven journals plus hand-checking of citation trails from Foot and Thomson. Coding scheme and disagreement rates are in the appendix; two coders, kappa 0.78.