Trolley problem

I'm going to read out the statement and it's a true or false answer.

An AI president should never be given the authority to declare war because the trolley problem dilemma requires human moral judgment.

True or false?

That's a fascinating phrasing because what the trolley dilemma actually represents is how poor humans are at making consistent decision-making on this stuff.

And even the hypotheticals end up turning into real-life scenarios.

So philosophers, uh, at least trained in the kind of thinking that I'm, that I've done, talked for many years about these trolley problems.

And this shows up in, um, in television as well.

You know, here's a runaway trolley.

So this is it's that classic moral dilemma that gets debated in philosophy classes all over the world.

The trolley problem.

Exactly.

And if you ask most people, the immediate, you know, instinctual, utilitarian answer is, yes, pull the lever.

this panic and so i i go back and i open up the the essay and it i i wish i i wish i had written down i was having this absolutely this horrible day and was just like mentally fried and in this space of um really struggling with the work and trying to figure out like am I even like is this even a thing I should be trying to figure out right now and so it was weird to like read my own words and be like oh oh yeah I guess that's I guess that is kind of how I feel like like this tension is not new the today's iteration of it may feel some type of way But I think that there has been a, for me, there has been a consistent truth in coming back to living with this tension.

A partner of mine and I used to get into these arguments about the trolley problem, and she was primarily upset that I was talking about the trolley problem again, which eventually almost became this just like, how can I manage to weasel my way into a trolley problem reference here? Yeah.

And the thing that I have taken away from that, right, everybody wants to talk about this idea of how do we decide what the right decision is in this situation of do we make one choice or the other, which one's the most ethical? And the only takeaway that I really sit with is what matters to me is that you're at the switch, right? It's not about, it is less about making the right decision.

There's going to be a million different influences that make somebody think that one or the other is the right thing.

And that's what keeps bringing me back.

That's amazing.

So I think I was just thinking about the trolley problem.

The thing that always occurred to me with the trolley problem is that it's an impossible situation.

The most direct connection is to the question of objectivity.

One of the recurring themes of this show in the Trolley Problem episode, in the Nietzsche episode, in the discussion of moral philosophy throughout, is the question of whether there are objective truths that hold independently of what anyone thinks or wants.

The philosophy of mathematics is a test case for that question in the cleanest possible domain.

Mathematical truths, whatever their ultimate nature, feel necessary in a way that moral claims do not.