Trolley problem

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The trolley problem is a thought experiment in ethics, first introduced by Philippa Foot[1], but also extensively analysed by Judith Jarvis Thomson[2][3] and, more recently, by Peter Unger[4] and Frances Kamm[5]. Similar problems have traditionally been addressed by criminal lawyers and are sometimes regulated in penal codes, especially in civil legal systems. A classical example of these problems became known as "the plank of Carneades", designed by Carneades to attack Stoic moral theories as inconsistent. Outside of the domain of traditional philosophical discussion, the trolley problem has been a significant feature in the field of neuroethics, which tends to approach philosophical questions from a neuroscientific approach.

Japanese tramway destroyed by the atomic bombing
Japanese tramway destroyed by the atomic bombing

Contents

[edit] Overview

The problem is this[6]:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

A utilitarian view asserts that it is permissible to flip the switch. According to simple Utilitarianism, flipping the switch would be not only permissible, but, morally speaking, the better option (the other option being no action at all).

While simple utilitarian calculus seeks to justify this course of action, some non-utilitarians may also accept the view. Opponents might assert that, since moral wrongs are already in place in the situation, flipping the switch constitutes a participation in the moral wrong, making one partially responsible for the death (when otherwise the mad philosopher would be the sole culprit). Additionally, opponents may point to the incommensurability of human lives.

It might also be justifiable to consider that simply being present in this situation and being able to influence its outcome constitutes an obligation to participate. If this were the case, then deciding to do nothing would be considered an immoral act.

[edit] Related problems

The initial trolley problem becomes interesting when it is compared to other moral dilemmas.

[edit] The fat man

One such is that offered by Judith Jarvis Thomson:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you - your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

Resistance to this course of action seems strong; most people who approved of sacrificing one to save five in the first case do not approve in the second sort of case. This has led to attempts to find a relevant moral distinction between the two cases.

One clear distinction is that in the first case, one does not intend harm towards anyone - harming the one is just a side-effect of switching the trolley away from the five. However, in the second case, harming the one is an integral part of the plan to save the five. This is an argument Shelly Kagan considers, and ultimately rejects, in The Limits of Morality. [7]

So, some claim that the difference between the two cases is that in the second, you intend someone's death to save the five, and this is wrong, whereas in the first, you have no such intention. This solution is essentially an application of the doctrine of double effect, which says that you may take action which has bad side-effects, but deliberately intending harm (even for good causes) is wrong.

On the other hand, Thomson argues that an essential difference between the original trolley problem and this version with the fat man, is that in the first case, you merely deflect the harm, whereas in the second case, you have to do something to the fat man to save the five. Thomson says that in the first case, nobody has any more right than anyone else not to be run over, but in the second case, the fat man has a right not to be pushed in front of the trolley.

Act utilitarians deny this. So do some non-utilitarians such as Peter Unger, who rejects that it can make a substantive moral difference whether you bring the harm to the one or whether you move the one into the path of the harm. Note, however, that rule utilitarians do not have to accept this, and can say that pushing the fat man over the bridge violates a rule that adherence to is necessary for bringing about the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

[edit] The track that loops back

The claim that it is wrong to use the death of one to save five runs into a problem with "loop" variants like this:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. As in the first case, you can divert it onto a separate track. On this track is a single person. However, beyond that person, this track loops back onto the main line towards the five, and if it weren't for the presence of that person, who will stop the trolley, flipping the switch would not save the five. Should you flip the switch?

The only difference between this case and the original trolley problem is that an extra piece of track has been added, which seems a trivial difference (especially since the trolley won't travel down it anyway). So intuition may suggest that the answer should be the same as the original trolley problem – one may flip the switch. However, in this case, the death of the one actually is part of the plan to save the five.

The loop variant may not be fatal to the "using a person as a means" argument. This has been suggested by M. Costa in his 1987 article "Another Trip on the Trolley", where he points out that if we fail to act in this scenario we will effectively be allowing the five to become a means to save the one. If we do nothing then the impact of the trolley into the five will slow it down and prevent it from circling around and killing the one. As in either case some will become a means to saving others, then we are permitted to count the numbers. This approach requires that we downplay the moral difference between doing and allowing.

[edit] Transplant

Here is a case, due to Thompson, where most of us come to the opposite conclusion[citation needed] that we do in the original trolley problem:

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ, each of whom will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of these five transplant operations. A healthy young traveler, just passing through the city the doctor works in, comes in for a routine checkup. In the course of doing the checkup, the doctor discovers that his organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose further that if the young man were to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor.

As rare as it is to find someone who does not think we should turn the trolley, it is even rarer to find someone who thinks it is permissible for the doctor to murder this patient and harvest his organs. (A rare few utilitarians, such as Alastair Norcross, think that this might be acceptable under certain exceedingly unlikely circumstances.)[clarify] Yet both cases seem to involve a choice between one life and five. What, if anything, explains this difference in our judgments?[clarify]

[edit] The man in the yard

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Unger argues extensively against traditional non-utilitarian responses to trolley problems. This is one of his examples:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You can divert its path by colliding another trolley into it, but if you do, both will be derailed and go down a hill, across a road, and into a man's yard. The owner, sleeping in his hammock, will be killed. Should you proceed?

Responses to this are partly dependent on whether the reader has already encountered the standard trolley problem (since there is a desire to keep ones responses consistent), but Unger notes that people who have not encountered such problems before are quite likely to say that, in this case, the proposed action would be wrong.

Unger therefore argues that different responses to these sorts of problems are based more on psychology than ethics – in this new case, he says, the only important difference is that the man in the yard does not seem particularly "involved". Unger claims that people therefore believe the man is not "fair game", but says that this involvedness cannot make a moral difference.

Unger also considers cases which are more complex than the original trolley problem, involving more than just two results. In one such case, it is possible to do nothing and let five die, or to do something which will (a) save the five and kill four (passengers of one or more trolleys and/or the hammock-sleeper), (b) save the five and kill three, (c) save the five and kill two, or (d) save the five and kill one. Most naïve subjects presented with this sort of case, claims Unger, will choose (d), to save the five by killing one, even if this course of action involves doing something very similar to killing the fat man, as in Thomson's case above.

[edit] The guilty man and the president

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Dr. Robert Jacobson asks,

"What happens if, on the tracks of one trolley, five men guilty of murder are tied, and on the other, one man is innocent. Should you choose to save the one man, simply because he has committed no crime?"

Jacobson believes that most people will save the innocent man. He also raises this question: Should you save the five guilty men, or the innocent man, who may commit a murder after you save him?

Jacobson again asks a difficult question:

"What happens if, on one of the trolley tracks, the President of the United States has been tied by terrorists, and on the other trolley tracks, five average citizens are also tied up. As in the original trolley problem, who should you save?"
"What if the trolley is headed towards five average people you've never met but on the other tracks is your mother?" "Do you flip the switch and save five or save your mother?"

Jacobson, in this instance, is really asking if the President of the United States/your mother is more important than five average citizens.

[edit] The ultimate sacrifice

A final twist on the thought experiment runs this way:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five helpless people. This time, however, you are on board the trolley yourself. There is a large explosive device on the trolley with you. Detonating it would utterly obliterate the trolley, saving the five people, but killing you. Or you could escape from the trolley, killing the five people, but saving your own life. Should you detonate the device?

Responses to this example, like some of the others, are also influenced by whether or not the subject has been exposed to previous thought experiments in the trolley problem. However, subjects appear to be much more willing to sacrifice their own lives to save the five than they are to sacrifice the lives of others. This appears to be because the subject is making the decision for himself and is therefore aware of the consequences, abrogating any need for a larger moral query. Another issue seems to be that subjects do not wish to be perceived as "selfish" or "cowardly."

A further variation runs the same way, but posits that the subject and another, uninvolved person (often someone unconscious or otherwise unable to comprehend the consequences of the explosion) are both on the trolley. Is it now morally acceptable for the subject to detonate the device, killing not only himself, but also the other person?

(Notice that the question asks if you "should", not if you would. There are certainly at least two possible answers to this, depending on the phrasing.)

[edit] In neuroethics

In taking a neuroscientific approach to the trolley problem, Joshua Greene[8] under Jonathan Cohen decided to examine the nature of brain response to moral and ethical conundra through the use of fMRI. In their more well-known experiments[9], Greene and Cohen analyzed subjects' responses to the morality of responses in both the trolley problem involving a switch, and a footbridge scenario analogous to the fat man variation of the trolley problem. Their hypothesis suggested that encountering such conflicts evokes both a strong emotional response as well as a reasoned cognitive response that tend to oppose one another. From the fMRI results, they have found that situations highly evoking a more prominent emotional response such as the fat man variant would result in significantly higher brain activity in brain regions associated with response conflict. Meanwhile, more conflict-neutral scenarios, such as the relatively disaffected switch variant, would produce more activity in brain regions associated with higher cognitive functions. The potential ethical ideas being broached, then, revolve around the human capacity for rational justification of moral decision making.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

 This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations.
You can improve this article by introducing more precise citations.
  1. ^ Philippa Foot, The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978)
  2. ^ Judith Jarvis Thomson, Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem, 59 The Monist 204-17 (1976)
  3. ^ Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Trolley Problem, 94 Yale Law Journal 1395-1415 (1985)
  4. ^ Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
  5. ^ Francis Myrna Kamm, Harming Some to Save Others, 57 Philosophical Studies 227-60 (1989)
  6. ^ Philippa Foot, The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978)
  7. ^ Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
  8. ^ Homepage of Joshua Greene
  9. ^ Joshua D. Greene, "The secret joke of Kant’s soul", in Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality, W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Ed., (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

[edit] External links