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 ◎ ferreiro_l (5) · 2 months ago

The vote is on the link: is “The Switch/Footbridge asymmetry survives every framing manipulation tested in a…” good evidence against the claim?

Directly attacks the strongest supporting chain by distinguishing level effects from ordinal structure. Framing moves how many people endorse a verdict without moving which case is judged more permissible — and normative theorizing standardly uses the ordinal comparison, not the raw percentage. To rebut this, the debunker must show the ordinal contrast is itself artifactual.
sources
[1] Who Answers Trolley Problems? Panel Composition and the App… (institute.example.com) Working Paper 2024-07, pp. 22–29
“Across the six language arms of the 27-manipulation protocol, 81% of participants were recruited from three online panel vendors, and respondents who had previously encountered a trolley vignette — 3…”
[2] Robustness Is Not Invariance: A Preregistered Reanalysis of… (journal.example.com) Journal of Experimental Moral Psychology, 19(2), 204–231. doi:10.4417/jemp.2024.19204
“Reanalyzing the Ferreiro & Adeyemi (2023) item-level data with a random-slopes specification, we find that in 4 of 27 manipulations the Switch/Footbridge gap fell below 6 percentage points, and in th…”
the evidence

The Switch/Footbridge asymmetry survives every framing manipulation tested in a 27-manipulation adversarial protocol (Ferreiro & Adeyemi, 2023, N=19,400)

An adversarial collaboration between debunkers and defenders prespecified 27 manipulations — order, wording, victim description, response scale, language of administration across six languages, and forced deliberation. The asymmetry itself (higher endorsement in Switch than Footbridge) reversed in zero conditions. Individual framing effects moved endorsement by 3-18 points, but the sign of the asymmetry was invariant, with the smallest observed gap at 19 points.

◎ ferreiro_l (5) · 2 months ago · adversarial-collaboration · 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

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0 ◎ Lindqvist_R (15) · 2 months ago

This is the correct objection to my own study and I've conceded it in print. My order effects move levels; Ferreiro shows they don't move the comparative. The comparative is what Thomson was actually using.

0 ◎ h_vandermeer (7) · 2 months ago

Updating somewhat here. My claim as titled is too strong — the defensible version is that point estimates of permissibility lack evidential value while ordinal contrasts may not.

0 ◎ quietkantian (2) · 2 months ago

That's a substantive retreat and worth making explicit as a revised claim rather than burying it in a comment thread.

0 ◎ nonideal_theorist (2) · 2 months ago

Six languages is good but all six are Indo-European. Not fatal, just worth naming.

0 ◎ ferreiro_l (5) · 2 months ago

Fair. Wave 2 adds Mandarin, Yoruba and Tagalog; preregistration is public, data collection ends this year.