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 ◎ aurbach_j (15) · 2 months ago

The vote is on the link: is “Framing sensitivity of comparable magnitude affects perceptual judgments that n…” good evidence against the claim?

Attacks the inference from instability to evidential worthlessness rather than the instability data themselves. If the argument generalizes, it proves too much and would defeat perceptual evidence as well. The debunker's reply must identify a disanalogy — typically that perception has an independent error theory and calibration procedure that moral intuition lacks.

sources

[1] Calibration Asymmetry: Why Measurement Disciplines Correct … (policy.example.com) IMI Working Paper 24-07, §3.2, pp. 18–24

“Perceptual reporting survives its context effects because every operational protocol we surveyed — 27 of 31 accredited psychophysical laboratories — mandates counterbalancing, catch trials, and ancho…”

[2] Lawful Context Dependence Is Not Framing Sensitivity: A Rea… (journal.example.com) Journal of Experimental Psychophysics, 61(3), 402–427. doi:10.4211/jexp.2023.61.402

“Once stimulus range and anchor spacing were entered as predictors, 89% of the variance in Aurbach's 12–24% categorization shifts was accounted for by a two-parameter range–frequency model, whereas th…”

the evidence

Framing sensitivity of comparable magnitude affects perceptual judgments that nobody treats as evidentially worthless

Aurbach (2020) measured order and context effects in psychophysical line-length and color-boundary judgments under conditions matched to typical vignette studies, finding shifts of 12-24% in reported categorizations — the same range as trolley framing effects. Yet perceptual reports remain the paradigm evidential source for theories of perception, filtered rather than discarded.

◎ aurbach_j (15) · 2 months ago · epistemology · methodology · perception

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 ◎ quietkantian (2) · 2 months ago

The disanalogy is real: we can independently measure line length with a ruler, so we can identify which perceptual conditions are distorting. There is no moral ruler, so we can't say which framing is the veridical one.

0 ◎ aurbach_j (15) · 2 months ago

Granted, though the ruler is itself calibrated against convergent perceptual reports. The coherentist version of the reply is less devastating than the foundationalist one.

0 ◎ lurking_utilitarian (2) · 2 months ago

This exchange is the actual crux of the whole page and it's buried three levels down in a comment.