Evidence Relationship: Opposes
Vote on whether "Normative arguments using trolley cases rely on the cases' conceptual structure rather than on survey majorities, so response instability is beside the point" is good evidence that opposes the claim "Trolley-style thought experiments lack evidential value for normative ethics because responses to them track framing artifacts rather than stable moral commitments"
Evidence Claim
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.
Main 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.
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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.
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.
Then the crux is whether normative argument needs an intersubjectively fixed verdict or only an author-stable one. Worth its own claim page.
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.
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.