> I think learning to articulate your moral assumptions, then to interrogate them and resolve any contradictions as they arise are all useful, and really the whole point of philosophy.

Again, not what most people are using thought experiments for, and "it's good practice for when you actually have to make a moral judgement about something completely unrelated" is hardly a ringing endorsement for their usefulness.

> the factors they have identified as morally relevant will remain relevant across a range of issues

I don't think they will be. People are weird, inconsistent, and illogical. You don't have some smooth culpability function for wrongdoing that justifies punishment once it rises above a certain threshold, you've got an arbitrary collection of competing criteria that includes morally irrelevant details like how well you slept last night and how long it's been since you last ate.

> There's a bunch of ways to do it, but hashing out which one you prefer is absolutely worthwhile and teaches you about yourself.

But again, it doesn't teach you anything generalizable. Someone who might balk at pushing the fat man might have no problem demanding a pre-vaccine end to COVID restrictions for economic reasons. So it might be intellectually stimulating, but not actually useful.

> What the trolley problem teaches us is that those running a closed system should run it so as to minimize the loss of life within it.

Maybe, but that's absolutely not what people are using the Trolley Problem for, and we don't really need the Trolley Problem to reach that conclusion in the first place. The point of thought experiments is to isolate the moral dilemma from details that might distract from the core intuition, but that's worse than useless because those details aren't distractions, they're profoundly important.

> This is only a problem if you consider ethics and morality to be absolute laws that never change.

No, it's a problem if you want to create generally applicable rules or convince people that something is right or wrong. What does the Trolley problem tell us about the ethics of killing people to harvest their organs for lifesaving transplants? Nothing, because despite the fact that you're choosing between killing one person and letting several die, they don't engage our moral intuitions the same way.

Edit: Thought about this a little more, and it's easier to make my point if we reverse the Trolley Problem. Would you pull the lever to switch the trolley from the track with one person to the track with five? Obviously not, that would be monstrous. So we can generalize a rule that reads something like "it's wrong to take an action that you know will increase the number of deaths", right?

So is it wrong to save the life of an organ donor? I think the answer is just as obviously "no". The Trolley Problem has completely failed to generalize.

So what good is the Trolley Problem if it only lets us examine our moral intuitions about scenarios that literally involve choosing which people tied to a track should die. That's not something that anyone is going to encounter.

It's not just interesting and worthy of study, it calls into question the entire utility of thought experiments. Which is the point of the article, although it does a strangely poor job of explaining why it's important.

If thought experiments are extremely sensitive to framing and demographic variation, then whatever conclusions we reach using them aren't generalizable. That is to say, if we get different answers to the Trolley problem depending on which generation we ask, then we're definitely going to get different answers if we change the trolley into a car, let alone a bigger change like a bullet, explosion, or disease.

And this is something of a general problem with argument by analogy, which is basically what thought experiments are. The conclusions you reach with an analogy often don't generalize to the thing you're drawing a comparison to. They differ enough that you can almost always generate an equally appropriate analogy that reaches the opposite conclusion.

> 160 years (In the USA that is a long time).

In some parts of it, maybe, but hardly all of it. There's a street in my town that's 400 years old.

> Personally, I think Citizen's United is an intentionally overbroad ruling that's predicated on creating a false choice and erring on the side of our corporate overlords (look at their waiver analysis and tell me it's applied the same way in other cases).

That's a far different statement than your original claim that "Corporate personhood is a legal fiction, or at least it was until Citizens United..."

Did you actually read the argument though? The alternatives available to the Supreme Court were to strike down so many laws and rulings that for-profit companies could directly engage in electioneering, or carve out an exemption so conditional that it effectively wouldn't be useful for anyone else, therefore infringing on rights it shouldn't. And the Court couldn't find against Citizens United after the FEC made clear that they believed they could and would censor political books in the wake of such a decision.

> However, I would say that describing a corporation as an association of natural persons is just a theory of "corporate personhood" by another name.

I wouldn't. Think about it this way: what if you wanted to put out a political ad? You obviously don't have enough money yourself. But if you and 10,000 of your closest friends pooled your money, you could. But how do you store all that money while you're collecting it? How do you spend it? If you give it to Fred no strings attached, there's nothing stopping Fred from keeping the money for himself. So you need some mechanism that gives Fred conditional access to the money so he can only spend it on the political ad. We call that mechanism a "corporation".

Citizens United recognized that the only practical way for people to engage in certain exercises of their rights was collectively, so restrictions on corporations specifically formed for political purposes were necessarily infringements on the rights of individuals.

> or at least it was until Citizens United...

Citizens United had nothing to do with corporate personhood. The decision was based on the idea that if a group of people pool their money they shouldn't suddenly lose their right to free speech. And the decision didn't even cover all corporations, just unions and non-profits that were strictly political in nature.

Sure, but authors can and generally do depict characters with different values and personalities than their own. Authors also create the villains in their stories; do you assume that they are indicative of the authors' character?

> As soon as I read statements like that I skip the rest of the comment

How could you possibly read the phrase "that famous pedophile Nabokov" and not pick up on the sarcasm? Nabokov isn't famous for being a pedophile.

> On this very thread we have someone calling Nabokov

If you actually read both sentences in my comment you'll see that I was literally saying the opposite.

You need to work on your reading compensation.

> On the other hand, Butcher is the one who put them there, and Butcher sure likes to use sexy feminine monsters a hell of a lot more than he uses bigfoot.

We can't really be sure he actually likes it. That's the whole problem with people extrapolating content to author character: there's no actual certainty of connection between the two. Maybe he does it because he thinks it makes the books sell better. Maybe he does it to maintain a consistent theme. Maybe he does it to upset people. There's no way to know, short of Butcher literally telling us his reasons.

> It's honestly a concerning issue how so many people no longer seem capable of differentiating character from author

I had the temerity to suggest that what an author writes isn't indicative of their personal character. You can now find my comment buried at the bottom under a pile of downvotes.

People aren't just not talking about this, they're actively hostile to the notion.

> But, I’m starting to think Winslow is a creep who sees women, especially Mexican women, as pieces of meat.

Definitely sounds like he's as bad as that famous pedophile Nabokov.

Or maybe it's possible for authors to write about things without it being an indication of their personal character.