Reposting my comment from the other thread because I was specifically asked to elaborate by @[email protected] but the thread got locked:

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Honestly, I wonder how much of our disagreements do ultimately come down to moral philosophy. I see a lot of people making this comparison and I’d be happy to put aside the present political situation and step back to discuss a higher level of disagreement.

I am a consequentialist, and I would agree, in principle, that the correct decision in the trolley problem is to pull the lever. But that should always come with an extreme amount of disclaimers. There are no shortage of people throughout history who have made justifications for their actions on the basis of “the ends justify the means,” but often, they turned out to be wrong. To use an example, torture under the Bush administration was claimed to be justified on the basis of getting useful intelligence in order to save lives. But no such intelligence was ever extracted. Really, it was more motivated by revenge, or a desire to be the sort of cool antihero who does the stuff nobody else will that needs to be done, but “the ends justify the means” served as a rationalization. Another example like that (though perhaps more controversial) is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The problem with applying the trolley problem to real life is that we are mere human beings of flesh and blood. We have a whole host of cognitive biases that mislead us even when we have the best of intentions. If we give our minds a way to justify things that we know are bad, it gives it an out that allows us to rationalize the irrational and justify the unjustifiable.

There are two practices that are necessary to apply in order to counteract these biases. First, it is necessary to adopt a set of strong moral guidelines based on past experience and historical evidence. Second, it is necessary to regularly practice some form of introspection or meditation in order to better understand where your thoughts and feelings arise from, and how they flow through your mind. Said guidelines do not have to be rigorously adhered to 100% of the time, but they should be respected, and only deviated from after clear, careful consideration, understanding why the guideline exists and why deviation from them is almost always bad.

“Base” consequentialism, where you recognize that pulling the lever in the trolley problem is the correct decision, but simply accept that as a guiding principle, is a terrible moral philosophy, worse than deontology and possibly worse than having completely unexamined moral views. Some of the worst atrocities in history are the result of that sort of “ends justify the means” approach, detached from a set of moral guidelines and detached from humility and self-reflection. I would even say, speaking as a communist, that many of the bad things communists have done in history are a result of that kind of mentality. Following moral rules blindly is preferable to breaking moral rules without first doing the necessary work to be trusted with breaking them.

There’s plenty more I could say on the topic but people always complain about my long posts so I’d better cut myself off there.

Elaboration:

The trolley problem isn’t intended to demonstrate that consequentialism is simply correct, as some people seem to think. Rather, it’s meant to highlight disagreements between different moral philosophies and present contradictions in our moral intuitions. There are two follow ups to the classic trolley problem: one involves pushing someone off a bridge to stop the trolley, and the other involves a doctor killing a healthy patient in order to harvest their organs to save the lives of five people who need transplants. While a majority of people agree with pulling the lever in the original problem, most people disagree with pushing the man off a bridge, and virtually no one agrees with harvesting organs from a healthy patient. This reveals an apparent contradiction in our moral intuitions. To adopt the principal that it is right to kill one to save five very quickly leads to conclusions that are widely condemned as morally abhorrent, and so a deeper examination is needed. Like most things in philosophy, the trolley problem is meant to raise questions, not answer them.

The deontological answer is to say that consequentialism is simply wrong, because it leads to those sorts of conclusions, but in my view this is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The reason our moral intuitions scream at us not to push the man off the bridge or harvest organs is that these hypotheticals have unrealistic constraints and foreknowledge. In real life, it’s extremely unlikely that a trolley with enough force to run over 5 people would be stopped by one person, and it’s also not something we could possibly calculate with any degree of certainty ahead of time. Our physical intuitions get mixed up with our moral intuitions, and it’s difficult to actually accept the constraints of the hypothetical. The organ harvesting example is even worse. If the crime was ever revealed to the public, it would cause major damage to the reputation of the entire medical field, which would cause people to avoid potentially lifesaving treatments, and the doctor doing it would lose their license preventing them from saving who knows how many lives. Meanwhile, surgeries carry inherent risks and it is impossible to know with the certainty assumed by the problem that they will be successful, and there’s also the possibility that the other patients could miraculously recover. Moreover, the problem of not having enough organs could be addressed on a larger scale through policy without resorting to murder. The problem asks us to assume that every possible alternative is arbitrarily cut off and that we are 100% guaranteed to get away with it - which our brains rebel against, for very good reason. Many people commit crimes feeling certain that they’ll get away with it, but then get caught, and immediate, short term solutions often seem appealing, even when they might have very negative long term consequences or when a more cautious, long term approach might be wiser.

It might seem that I’m simply rejecting the validity of those hypotheticals altogether, and to an extent I am, but this analysis reveals something important. People often fail to consider all these different factors that might make a situation not as simple as the original trolley problem, even when they appear to be. That is the danger of “base” consequentialism, of applying the principle of “the ends justify the means” blindly and without due consideration of alternative solutions or of consequences that are not immediately apparent. It is generally very foolish to reduce things to the trolley problem when they are more complicated, and people who reduce the election to a trolley problem are making the exact same kind of error as people who reduce the organ harvesting thought experiment to a trolley problem.

I’ll use a hypothetical of my own to further illustrate my point. Suppose you and four other people have been taken hostage, and the hostage taker tells you to kill one of the other hostages, or else he’ll kill all of them including you. Is this a trolley problem? It might appear to be, but the reality is that introducing a human actor instead of a purely mechanical process changes everything. What happens if, after you kill a hostage, the gunman says, “Great! From now on, you work for me. You will kill anyone I say to kill. And if you refuse, I’ll kill twice as many people. My first order is for you to capture more hostages so I can repeat this and recruit another person just like you.” Isn’t that obviously indefensible? It would be completely justified for someone to kill you to stop you from doing that. But this is exactly where the ideology of lesser-evilism leads. We cannot allow ourselves to be manipulated like machines into strengthening the very people who put us into the situation in the first place.

I make a point every time I refer to lesser-evilism to call it an ideology, because that’s what it is, even though it’s adherents do not recognize it as such and simply call it obvious, objective, and rational. It is none of those things. It is important to recognize that this is a specific belief system, and one that frequently leads to absurd and abhorrent conclusions, and that many people reject, including many academics and philosophers.