Last week, I defended the usefulness of moral hypotheticals. Last night, I dismissed trolley problems as “silly.” Fenn, an Econlog reader, is understandably puzzled:
The reason why trolley problems are silly isn’t that they are hypotheticals. They are silly, rather, because they’re not designed to have clear answers. As a result, they fail to perform the key function of hypotheticals: clarifying complex moral questions. And since literal trolley problems almost never happen, they’re of no intrinsic interest either.