Father, you said there's no connection between the murder of one and the salvation of the other,
that's a contrived connection. So a situation that was put to us today is the classic
"trolley problem," what is the moral thing to do? And something about that
situation struck me as "Well, this isn't realistic," because it seems
to paint a very black-and-white picture where there is no God, and I guess I just want your
take on: how do you answer someone who proposes that kind of situation?
You're sitting by the side of the trolley tracks,
here comes a trolley out of control rolling down the hill; and if the trolley goes one way
it's going to kill five people, if it goes the other way it's going to kill one person;
and you pull the lever to make it avoid the five people, but then it kills that one person;
haven't you done evil to bring about good? That's the classic trolley problem.
Father, help us out of it. Great. So this is a good example that helps to distinguish between
the consequences of an act and the object of the act. So this would be a really good test case to
show the difference between consequentialism and a traditional catholic morality. So let me give
you two versions of the trolley problem. The one version is that the trolley's coming down
and it's going towards the five people, you pull the lever and it it goes down the other track
and it hits the one person on the other track. That's version one—and kills him. Version two:
the trolley's coming down towards the five people, you run over and you shoot the guy,
the one guy on the track, and then you switch the lever and the trolley runs over a dead guy,
right, and then you get the same result, right? One dead guy. What's the difference
between those two cases? In the one case, what you have is: you directly did an act of murder,
right? The object and the intention, the very object that you were intending in your act,
was to kill someone. You murder the guy and then you let the trolley go on his side.
Whereas in the case where you're just pulling the lever for the trolley, the object there is to
switch the trolley from one lane to the other, and it's not intrinsically related to killing people,
right? It happens that there's someone on the track, and you foresee,
as an effect of the act, that it will kill someone; but switching trolley car lanes
is not intrinsically evil one way or the other, but it might have an effect that you foresee.
And that's way different than an object where you're directly intending the death of someone.
So in that case what you have is the principle of double effect. And the principle of double effect
says that as long as what you're doing isn't intrinsically bad, then you can look at the
effects, and if both effects are going to be evil, you can choose the one with the lesser evil and it
can still be a morally good act. So the answer, when all's said and done in this kind of strange
hypothetical—which probably never has happened in the history of the world and never will—but
in this strange hypothetical, the answer is: you pull the lever so that it goes down the track
with the one person. That's assuming that the five people and the one person, there's nothing
else you know about them other than the fact that they're human beings, right? There might
be some other factor involved that could cause you to change your decision, but in any case,
from the standpoint of that moral dilemma, it's not morally wrong to change the direction of the
trolley. That's not intrinsically evil. It would be intrinsically evil to go up and kill a guy
and then change the direction of the trolley so he runs over a dead guy, or something.
And I have to say, this requires a fine distinction that many people are unwilling
to make, and I have to say this is what strikes me as part of the moral danger of our era, is
people just roll their eyes and go "Well, you're saying the same thing. You're doing a bad thing,"
and they will not listen to the fact that no, the the principle of double effect is actually a way
of adhering to the good and doing the good, making sure that you're doing the good that you can do
and that you are avoiding evil. This is not at all the same thing but I do feel like our society is
just unwilling, often, to make fine moral distinctions. And I'm not saying that this one
is terribly fine, but it's unwilling— There's a famous line in Chesterton's—I think it's in
Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" where he says: "Fine points make a big difference." He says: "One small
change in vocabulary, and all the finest art in Europe would have been destroyed." He's talking
about the Iconoclast heresy. Oh yeah, right. And it says: "Fine distinctions can sometimes
have immense consequences." So sometimes, you know, a lot hinges on fine distinctions.