You’re a construction worker. You’re working a job with a crew of six, building a small railroad
station. You’ve been on the job for several days. By the end of the day today, you’ll be
done. You’re excited to go home and enjoy a couple days off with your friends and family.
Everything is going normally, beginning to wrap up, when suddenly, you hear a loud crack.
A pillar on the front of the station has broken, causing the station’s roof to collapse sideways,
pulling the rest of the building’s infrastructure out and toward you. You try to get out of the way,
but you can’t. You and four co-workers become pinned on the train tracks by the debris.
You can’t barely move. You try to maintain your composure, but the feeling of panic begins to set
in, quickly exasperated by the bellowing yells of your co-workers’. Some of them are injured.
You become confused when suddenly their yells go quiet. There’s a vibrational hum in the
distance that replaces them. Then, a train horn. The yells pick back up, now changed
from the sound of pain to the sound of terror. Closer and closer you hear and feel the train
come. This is it, you think to yourself. You hear one of your co-workers yelling,
“Switch the track! Switch the track!” You remember there’s a manned control
booth on the bridge about forty yards behind you. Inside, the attendant can push a button
that will switch the tracks and divert the train away right before it hits you.
You join in on the now collective chant to change the tracks.
After a moment passes, you hear someone else yelling near you but not with you.
It’s your other coworker and good friend. He is pinned on the other track.
The person in the control booth sees what’s happening. They saw the whole thing and called
for help immediately, but it won’t get here in time. They watch the oncoming train get
closer and closer. They have a decision to make. Choose to switch the track and have
the train kill one person or do nothing and let the train kill a total of five people.
You feel the vibration of the train increase as you consider your whole life—a tapestry of
experiences and feelings; relationships and achievements; desires and hopes.
You plead for it to continue. You don’t want to die. No one here does.
The person in the booth is thinking intensely about what to do. They have about five
seconds to decide. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
This dilemma is a version of the thought experiment known as the trolley problem.
Originally posed by philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967 and later advanced in 1976 by
Judith Jarvis Thomson, the trolley problem has become an increasingly popular and sometimes
comical category of thought experiments that challenge our most basic moral intuitions and
show us how unclear questions about ethics and decision making can easily become.
To explore this further, imagine for a moment now that you are the
one in the control booth. What would you do? Would you do nothing, avoiding involving yourself,
but allowing five people to die that you could have otherwise saved; or,
would you switch the tracks and, in some sense, cause one person to die but save the other five?
For most people, the choice is clear enough. In a variety of different surveys, about 90%
of respondents claim that in this situation, they would flip the switch and divert the train.
Afterall, five people dying is worse than one, and most people want to do the least worst thing.
This way of thinking follows from one of the most influential and commonly held ethical theories
known as utilitarianism, originally developed in the 18th century, which describes decisions and
actions as moral when their outcomes result in the greatest amount good (pleasure, happiness,
or well-being) and the minimal amount of bad (pain or suffering). Alternatively, however,
people who disagree with this choice might follow the ethical theory known as deontology,
which argues that decisions and actions are moral solely based on whether or not they
follow defined rules and principles, and not based on their consequences. In other words,
for example, the act of killing someone under any circumstances, even if by not killing them,
you are essentially killing more people, is and will always be wrong on principle. And therefore,
since flipping the switch involves you committing the act of killing someone,
doing so is morally wrong. However, this raises the following question: what is the difference
between allowing and causing? Is there any? By simply observing the event, understanding it,
and possessing the ability to easily change and improve it, are you not already involved?
Is there a difference in involvement between observation and inaction verses observation
and action? Isn’t choosing to not be involved a choice that is already involved? No one can choose
to not choose and no one can opt out of what they already are a part of. What if there was no one
on the other track? Wouldn’t allowing the five people to die clearly be the wrong thing to do?
Even at this level, in just the original, basic version, clearly it isn’t 100% obvious what is
right and how we ought to treat the situation. And it only gets far less obvious with subtle changes.
What if we change the numbers? What if there are fifty people on the main track and ten on
the other? How about five thousand on the main track and one thousand on the other? Now, if you
switch the tracks, you will direct the death of one thousand people, but you will also save five
thousand. The proportions are exactly the same as the original, and therefore the logic should
also be the same, but it seems to feel a lot different knowing that you will at least be partly
responsible for the death of one thousand people. What if we change the proportions now? On the main
track, there are five people. On the other, there are two. How about three on the other,
or four? Again, from a purely utilitarian and seemingly rational perspective, four is still
less bad than five, and so, switching the tracks is still seemingly the right choice.
But yet, there almost seems to be a point at which the difference in people between the tracks feels
more negligible than the intervention itself. Is saving one more person worth the weight of
responsibility you will feel in that decision? What about your own personal suffering and
trauma as a result of this? How do we weigh that against the delta of one person’s life?
Now, let’s make it even harder. What if there are five people on the main track,
and only one on the other, but the one is someone you love. A family member, a partner, a friend,
a child. What do you do then? Your impulse is most likely not to switch the tracks. That is,
of course, very understandable. But is it right? If, in the original version,
you believe you should switch the tracks, the only difference here is your emotional
attachment to the one person. But the morality and logic of the situation does not change
otherwise. Even if in the original version you believe you should not switch the tracks,
just put your loved one in the group of five on the main track and consider the same problem.
Is your emotional involvement enough to compromise your morality? Presumably,
the majority of people would say yes and do the same. But then, we would have to also agree that
morality is flexible based on our emotions and not based on our consistency of logic.
How much of ethics is really just emotion, anyway? The meta-ethical theory known as
emotivism argues that ethical statements never express truths or falsehoods, but rather,
merely our emotional states, influenced by things like our cultural and experiential backgrounds,
moods, personalities, and so on. If this is true, how does that effect things in general?
Let’s return to the bridge in the original example. Again, five people are stuck on the
train tracks and a small train is coming. This time, however, there is no control booth, button,
switch, or any second track at all. You are just a random pedestrian watching the event unfold
from the bridge. Near you, however, at the edge of the bridge, stands a large man also observing the
event unfold. He is massive—morbidly obese. You don’t know any of the people on track. You don’t
know the obese man. But you do know that if you push the man off the bridge in front of the train,
he will cause the train to stop in time, killing him but saving the other five people.
Do you do it? In the same surveys mentioned earlier where 90%
of respondents claimed that they would switch the track by a lever or button, less than 10% claimed
that they would push the man off the bridge. But yet, it’s the same outcome, same number of people,
same relationship with the people involved, and so on. Everything else is exactly the
same. Neither the man on the alternative track in the original scenario nor the man on the bridge
in this scenario chose to be in the situation. This obese man is no more or less involved in
the unfolding of events, and they would both be just as safe if you weren’t there. But yet, you
likely feel differently in this situation, simply because it feels more personal. Emotionally,
you are affected enough to not do what you already (likely) agreed was logical and moral.
For one last twist, let’s imagine a different person is in this same situation on the bridge
making the decision of whether or not to push the man. This person, however, is psychopathic,
and they choose to do whatever you chose to do, but they do it because they want to feel
personally involved in killing someone or they want to see more people die. In either case,
does their intention change the morality of the situation? Would they be more or
less moral than someone who chooses to do the opposite if the psychopaths actions results in
the same outcome of what you believe is moral? Taking the utilitarian view, the psychopathic
person would have done the more moral thing. But who would you want to be alone in a room with?
Let’s say that they did do the more moral thing, but they are an immoral person, justifiably worth
condemning. But what happens if six weeks later, they go to a neurologist after having experienced
months of chronic headaches, and it is discovered that they have a tumor in their brain that had
caused brain lesions in areas responsible for morality and value-based decision-making? The
tumor has directly caused their behavior and decision making to change in ways that they
had no control over. How do we perceive them now? Are they morally responsible for their
behavior? What if the same person didn’t have a tumor but was horribly abused psychologically
and physically as a child, which directly caused a response that led to this behavior.
They would not have chosen or controlled this anymore than a tumor. Is there a difference?
Is anyone truly morally responsible for who they become and the choices they are
led to make if they are by causes they never chose or controlled to begin with? Of course,
the individual still needs to be dealt with and taken out of society—rehabilitated if possible.
But just because you can’t take the tumor out, does not make the person any less of a victim.
Ultimately, the trolley problems aren’t just interesting thought experiments and goofy
memes. They show us that what we think is right or wrong is often based on a lot more than just
rational evaluations of pros and cons, good and bad. They reveal to us that decisions and actions
are often a consequence of a complex array of intentions and beliefs, all puppeteered by a
backstory of cause-and-effect in a chaotic system comprised of incalculable variables.
The point of these questions isn’t to trick the mind, but to demonstrate just
how complicated and unclear matters of ethical decision making sometimes are and can be.
Right now, in this moment of history, we are entering new realms of moral understanding and new
conditions of societal reality. What rights might we owe our animal cousins? How should we program
AI, self-driving vehicles, and other technologies to make decisions on their own about things like,
for example, whether or not a self-driving car should hit one person in order to avoid
five? How should we choose when all choices are bad? How will we? How should we update
laws and justice systems and punishments as we venture out further into these new realms of
understanding and society? In the words of Peter Singer, “What one generation finds ridiculous,
the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.”
It is both a wonder and an incredible feat that we have come as far as we have as a society and
as a species—to understand and agree, at scale, what it means to at least try to be moral, and
to do our best every day to behave accordingly. To attempt uphold peace, and order, and reason,
and understanding. Of course, there is so much chaos, disdain, and misalignment in the world. Our
immorality is always lurking in each moment and each stage of history. But there is also so much
compassion, so much kindness and desire to treat other people and things right, as best we can.
We have come so far. We must not forget this.
But we have so much farther still to go. We must not forget this either.