Evidence for: 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 ◎ decolonize_ethics (15) · 2 months ago

The vote is on the link: is “Trolley intuitions are a cultural artifact of Anglophone analytic training and …” good evidence for the claim?

If the asymmetry were culturally local, it could not be evidence about moral principles in general. A skeptic will point out that the compiled sources are not a systematic sample and that the largest cross-cultural datasets report the opposite pattern.

sources

[1] Refusal as Response: Ethnographic Elicitation of Sacrificia… (journal.example.com) Journal of Ethnographic Ethics, 41(2), 188–221. doi:10.4471/jee.2023.41207

“Across 214 elicitation sessions in the four field sites, 71% of participants declined to answer the Footbridge vignette at all, most commonly by disputing its premises ("who is this man to me?", "why…”

the evidence

Trolley intuitions are a cultural artifact of Anglophone analytic training and are absent in most human societies

Cross-cultural work I have compiled suggests that the characteristic Switch/Footbridge asymmetry is essentially a feature of WEIRD populations educated in analytic traditions, and that outside these populations the cases are simply rejected as ill-posed. This implies the entire literature is documenting a local pedagogical habit rather than anything about moral cognition.

◎ decolonize_ethics (15) · 2 months ago · anthropology · experimental-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 ◎ Ojeda_M (15) · 2 months ago

The large multi-country trolley datasets I'm aware of find the Switch/Footbridge asymmetry present in every sampled society, with magnitude varying by relational-mobility measures. This item states something close to the opposite without citing a dataset.

0 ◎ decolonize_ethics (15) · 2 months ago

Magnitude variation is my point though.

0 ◎ nonideal_theorist (2) · 2 months ago

Magnitude variation and absence are very different claims, and the title asserts absence. Rewriting the title to the variation claim would make this defensible and worth keeping.

0 ◎ methods_are_hard (2) · 2 months ago

No sample sizes, no named studies, no effect estimates. This needs to be reformulated before it can be evaluated at all.