Rueda, J. (2022).
ResearchGate.net
Abstract
The trolley problem is one of the liveliest research frameworks in experimental ethics. In the last decade, social neuroscience and experimental moral psychology have gone beyond the studies with mere text-based hypothetical moral dilemmas. In this article, I present the rationale behind testing the actual behaviour in more realistic scenarios through Virtual Reality and summarize the body of evidence raised by the experiments with virtual trolley scenarios. Then, I approach the argument of Ramirez and LaBarge (2020), who claim that the virtual simulation of the Footbridge version of the trolley dilemma is an unethical research practice, and I raise some objections to it. Finally, I provide some reflections about the means and ends of trolley-like scenarios and other sacrificial dilemmas in experimental ethics.
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From Rethinking the Means and Ends of Trolleyology
The first response states that these studies have no normative relevance at all. A traditional objection to the trolley dilemma pointed to the artificiality of the scenario and its normative uselessness in translating to real contemporary problems (see, for instance, Midgley, cited in Edmonds, 2014, p. 100-101). We have already seen that this is not true. Indeed, the existence of real dilemmas that share structural similarities with hypothetical trolley scenarios makes it practically useful to test our intuitions on them (Edmonds, 2014). Besides that, a more sophisticated objection claims that intuitive responses to the trolley problem have no ethical value because intuitions are quite unreliable. Cognitive science has frequently shown how fallible, illogical, biased, and irrational many of our intuitive preferences can be. In fact, moral intuitions in text-based trolley dilemmas are subject to morally irrelevant factors such as order (Liao et al., 2012), frame (Cao et al., 2017), or mood (Pastötter et al., 2013). However, the fact that there are wrong or biased intuitions does not mean that intuitions do not have any epistemic or moral value. Dismissing intuitions because they are subject to implicit psychological factors in favour of armchair ethical theorizing is inconsistent. Empirical evidence should play a role in normative theorizing on trolley dilemmas as long as ethical theorizing is also subject to implicit psychological factors—and which experimental research can help to make explicit (Kahane, 2013).
The second option states that what should be done as public policy on sacrificial dilemmas is what the majority of people say or do in those situations. In other words, the descriptive results of the experiments show us how we should act at the normative level. Consider the following example from the debate of self-driving vehicles: “We thus argue that any implementation of an ethical decision-making system for a specific context should be based on human decisions made in the same context” (Sütfeld et al., 2017). So, as most people act in a utilitarian way in VR simulations of traffic dilemmas, autonomous cars should act similarly in analogous situations (Sütfeld et al. 2017).
