Lifeboat scenarios can be good for helping people to determine and argue philosophical positions, but they can also warp our sense of reality and free will. This is essentially the mental exercise of determining whether you or not you would kill the passengers that you shared a lifeboat with out of necessity if you were trapped at sea and fighting over food. This argument takes many different forms for the same question: Would you hurt someone for your own benefit in an extreme situation?
These types of questions seek to correlate an extreme, dangerous and unlikely example with situations in everyday life which are much easier to manage, forcing us to assume that we would make the same decision in both scenarios. What this also does, is forces us to assume the worst in others, especially when we spend so much our time having philosophical debates with faceless strangers online, instead of seeing the human being the position and considering what the true motivations for their beliefs are.
For example, when communists hear that someone is capitalist, they start talking about a dystopian future where Lex Luther owns all the roads and bosses pay workers 2 cents an hour to repair radioactive robots.
Likewise, when a capitalist encounters a communist, they automatically think that the person will declare them an absentee landlord and be squatting in their house the next time they go to work, plotting the establishment of Stalinist gulags and a repeat of Mao's "great leap forward" democide.
In reality, people on both sides generally come to their positions because they want better for the world, they just have different ideas about how to get there. This can be applied to so many different polarities, and it one of the many reasons people so often find themselves talking past one another.
People who are attached to party politics and the "culture war" rarely actually argue directly with one another, if they did, they might be able to work something out. Instead, what they do, is imagine the person they are talking to is a caricature comprised of every belief they oppose.
Some of this might simply be a fault of the human psyche, but I think that certain "thought leaders" and media personalities have helped exacerbate this problem, by selectively covering the most cartoonish examples of their political rivals, and making a business out of singling out and humiliating people on a particular end of the political aisle.
Most of the extreme lefties and righties who get around the clock news coverage, combined make up a very tiny segment of the population. When your average righty or lefty is having a debate, they aren't really debating the person in front of them, they are debating the mental projection of the "other" that they have gathered from the most extreme examples that their brains collected from the media they consume.