this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Ah yes, the first day in ethics they tell you how the Trolley Problem famously has one objective answer that everyone agrees with. You have clearly, definitely attended an ethics class.
Dunning-Kruger in full effect here.
The trolley problem famously has a near infinite number of variations to tease out people's ethical boundaries. The first basic one is the starting point. It's a point pretty much everyone agrees on. Theoretically you could disagree, but I've never seen it. Everyone almost always understands that more people dying is bad, and that pulling a lever is a minimal action that you should feel obligated to pull if it saves lives.
The variation where you push someone onto the tracks to stop the trolley? There are lots of disagreements about that, because you're actively killing someone to save lives. That's not so with the lever.
Edit to add: Yes, I have taken ethics courses. I had a professor who was in the CIA, which led to some interesting discussions of ethics, as I'm sure you can imagine.
It's not something "pretty much everyone agrees on." There's an entire branch of moral philosophy, deontology, that completely disagrees with pulling the lever in the original problem, but there's also plenty of other philosophies that could say the same, such as rule utilitarianism. Do not try to tell me I don't know basic ethics when you've never even heard of a major school of thought.
The entire purpose of the trolley problem is to highlight disagreements between different branches of moral philosophy, and to interrogate our moral intuitions. The fact that it seems better to pull the lever doesn't necessarily mean that it is better, especially when, as you mentioned, there are follow up to the thought experiment where the intuitive answer is the opposite.
No offense but an ethics professor who was in the CIA sounds like the setup to a bad joke, and I'd ask you to appreciate my restraint in not clowning on that. But if you were taught about the trolley problem in an ethics class, and the things I just said weren't mentioned, then you were taught poorly. The purpose of such a class is not to give you objective right-or-wrong answers, it's to inform you about a variety of perspectives and encourage you to identify and question your preconceived beliefs.
You got wrecked on your own ethics lessons! That had to hurt a bit!