Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I want you to consider the following scenario.
You're out for a stroll one day when you happen along a runaway trolley.
The trolley is headed straight down the tracks
at a breakneck speed.
The engineer has appeared to faint,
and the trolley is headed straight toward five people.
The only option open to you
is to flip a switch and redirect the trolley down another path
on which there is one person.
Now, most people will say it is permissible,
maybe even morally required,
for you to flip the switch, redirect the trolley down that path
and kill the one person.
Why?
Well, because we should minimize harm whenever we can, right?
It's worse that five people should die than that one person should die.
[Bystander at Switch]
Well, is that right?
[Transplant]
Suppose instead that you are a fine surgeon,
and your specialty is organ transplants.
You have five patients, each in dire need of an organ:
one needs a heart, two need kidneys, two need lungs.
Time is running short, when, lo and behold,
in walks a perfectly healthy person for his routine physical,
and he turns out to be a perfect match for all five.
You explain the situation to him,
you tell him that five people are going to die ...
They could use his organs. Would he help?
He's polite and he refuses and says, "Sorry!"
Now, in this case, most people think that it would be impermissible -
in fact, morally forbidden -
for you to kill the healthy person in order to save the five.
So why do we think this?
Notice that the numbers are exactly the same in both cases.
Now, it's unlikely that any one of us
is ever going to confront such a horrible and admittedly bizarre dilemma,
but it would be reassuring to know
why these two cases affect us in such different ways,
why our intuitions are so different.
So I'm going to walk through the problem
and try to explain the different directions
in which the bystander and the transplant cases pull us.
Well, you might think that, in the bystander case,
you're not actively harming someone.
In the transplant case, you are actively harming someone.
Killing someone is harming someone.
If you flip the switch in the trolley case,
in the bystander case,
you're not going to be ...
killing anybody, right?
Wait, that's wrong.
If you flip the switch in the trolley case,
we think that's something you ought to do,
even though you will be killing one person, right?
But we think it's perfectly permissible. We think that you ought to do that.
So that doesn't seem to be the difference.
How about this:
as a transplant surgeon,
you have a positive duty not to harm people.
You took the Hippocratic Oath, right?
People don't go to see you expecting to be killed.
And as a bystander, you don't seem to have any comparable duty.
Unless you are a physician or a clergy person,
in which case, presumably, you do have comparable duties.
You don't leave behind your professional duty when you leave the hospital
or when you leave the pulpit.
So that doesn't seem to be
what's explaining the difference in these two cases.
Alright, how about this:
in the transplant case,
you are using the healthy patient solely as a means or as an instrument
to achieve some desirable outcome
where you don't need to use anyone as a means ...
in the bystander case, right?
I mean, you could redirect the trolley down the path
even if nobody had been there
and achieve the same desirable results.
But what if - just imagine this -
what if the track on which the one person is now laying
looped around and continued on
so that the five people would be hit from behind and killed?
And the only way to stop the trolley
is by using something to impede its progress,
and the only thing you have at your disposal in this case
is one very, very, very large person.
Now, it seems that in this case we still think it's permissible
to use the very, very, very big person as an impediment.
That extra bit of track
should not make a morally relevant difference to our judgment.
Now, I suspect that these examples make all of us uncomfortable
because they force us to consider the values
that lie behind the decisions that we make.
Now, philosophy is not going to solve these examples for you.
Philosophy is not going to tell you what you ought to do.
I'm a philosopher.
If I confronted this scenario, I would be horrified.
I'd be just as flummoxed as the next person.
But what philosophy can do
is help us make sense of some of the problems,
and it can do this by making use of two resources
in what I want to call the philosopher's toolkit.
And the two resources are cogent arguments:
reasoning that adheres to rules of logic,
and thought experiments or examples.
The transplant and the bystander case are thought experiments.
They're called trolley problems
and they were introduced to the philosophical literature
by two philosophers,
Judith Jarvis Thompson and Philippa Foot.
So, really, what drew me to philosophy, I think,
is that it presents us with weird problems of this sort.
I'm an obsessive thinker.
But these are fundamental problems of the sort that all people grapple with.
What differentiates philosophers is that we grapple with these questions
in a very, very systematic and careful way,
and we do so by making use of this toolkit.
But the wonderful thing about the toolkit is that anybody can use it.
It's not just the province of a philosopher
to make use of the toolkit.
And here's why: all of us,
everyone in this room is going to confront a problematic situation
where you have to decide what to do and what to believe,
and you're going to have to justify your actions and your beliefs to others.
That's what human life is all about.
Everybody, then, can benefit
from thinking clearly and carefully about things that matter,
whether in order to understand a complex problem of logic,
in order to solve a sticky business dilemma,
to resolve conflicts in our beliefs,
to figure out matters of social policy
and what stand we should take on matters of social policy ...
And getting a clearer understanding of the things that matter
is something that philosophy and the toolkit can enable us to do.
It would help us all tremendously if we had a better sense of our values.
What are the things that we value?
It would helps us all tremendously if we understood our beliefs,
and the nature of the world
and our place in it.
It would help us all tremendously
if we could get a grip on what we really claim to know.
And I think that where our moral lives are concerned,
there's a special sort of urgency here,
because what we do, what we decide to believe,
have implications for the kind of people that we are, for our identity.
So it's important that we know the motives behind our choices.
Would it make a difference, for example,
in the permissibility of these cases,
the transplant and the bystander case,
whether you acted out of malice, or ignorance,
or a desire to maximize human happiness?
Would it make a difference
to the permissibility or impermissibility of the action
whether the people in need were good people or evil people?
What if the choice was between ...
saving five of your relatives and saving your one true love?
What if the people ended up on the trolley tracks
as a result of their reckless behavior?
What if they were just unlucky tourists
whose poor command of the English language
led them to misread "trolley track" as "trail track" or "trail path"?
So you can do philosophy too, right?
And you can do it by maybe just sitting down with your friends and family
and saying, "What's going on with these weird trolley problems?
What's up with these weird cases?
What things matter in deciding what's right to do?"
And rights, for example, seem to be central in these cases.
In the transplant case, for example,
it seems wrong to kill the one person
because we'd be violating his rights in doing so.
So what rights do people have? How extensive are these rights?
How inviolable are these rights?
What does it mean to have rights, anyway?
Would it be okay to violate the rights of the transplant patient
if doing so maximized the happiness of others?
Now, when we think carefully about these issues,
we learn to detect flaws in our reasoning, we become less dogmatic,
and these are really good things.
They are the payoffs of doing philosophy.
I got into philosophy because I'm an obsessive thinker.
I find a problem, I don't want to let go of it!
I'm like the dog with a bone.
My husband's even worse.
(Speaker imitating a dog growling)
(Laughter)
You don't have to be that obsessive to get the benefits of doing philosophy.
You have to be curious,
you have to be willing to scrutinize what you think,
and you'll have fun with it.
Thank you.
(Applause)