The trolley problem: it’s a great philosophical puzzle to occupy the musings of that bunch and keep them off the street where they might do harm. Maybe you’ve seen the drawing. By pulling a lever, you divert the trolley to the track on which one person is lying, killing him. By doing nothing, the trolley rolls ahead and kills 5 on the main track. What should you do? Kill 1 by action ? Or by inaction, suffer 5 to be killed?
In the end, doesn’t every political assassin rationalize his deed as one of saving the greater number? Didn’t the guy who started WWI by plugging the archduke think that? Could be he was acting out the trolley problem in his own head, assuring himself that, while hard, he had made the morally necessary choice which would benefit the greater number. How did that work out?
The trolley problem works as a practical exercise when you are operating a trolley. For anything more complex, figure that you may be wrong. You just may be overestimating your power to save the 5. They also might be nowhere near in the danger you think they are. Whereas, if you pull the lever, beyond all question and ambiguity, you have made yourself a murderer. In real life, people apply their ‘trolley problem’ analysis to situations far more complex than trolleys, into areas where it is certain to break down. In real life, one may find those 5 were never in danger to begin with; it was just your cockeyed view of the world that made you think so. Perhaps their lives will even be improved if you let your dreaded “trolley” hit them.
….
To those who would hesitate to pull the lever, one critic writes:
…..”You now having all the facts or info only excuses you from consequences you couldn’t foresee.”
Doesn’t this statement mean that you don’t have all the facts?
….”Even if there were unexpected consequences then you would be forgiven for not knowing about them beforehand if you had no information to guide your actions.”
Forgiven by who?
…..”Choosing not to act is still to act.”
Of course it is not. People freeze in real life. If someone suffers paralysis, for whatever reason, how are they making a choice? The thought of directly and purposefully taking a life would be enough to freeze many a person in his tracks. He or she might thereafter torment themselves about those that “could have been saved.” But they never got to that point on account of freezing before the act of deliberately killing.
Save us from the lawyerly “knew or should have known” game. (a game which lawyers do not play unless big money is involved) We never really know what another person “knew,” much less what they “should have known.” If someone’s emotion (moral revulsion) freezes them from deliberately taking a life, who is anyone else to say what they “should have known?”
Maybe this entire “trolley problem” suffers from the philosopher’s curse that we are all thought and no emotion, or even that we can separate the two. It is the curse from which unlimited hubris arises, and unbounded pretension that our role is to judge other people.
In fact, emotion and thought are not separable. Medical research has shown that when portions of the brain associated with emotion are destroyed, people become incapable of even the most fundamental of logical choices. The 1994 book ‘Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain’ presented, as one example, a man who underwent an operation that resulted in such brain damage. He continued to excel in memory and logic tests, his 130+ IQ unimpaired. “However, he couldn’t decide trivial matters—e.g., selecting lunch from a menu took hours, or choosing a shirt led to endless pros/cons analysis without conclusion. His life unraveled: he lost jobs, went bankrupt, and divorced due to chronic indecision.” (Grok)
And if we’re going to ask for “any suspension of disbelief since it is only a hypothetical,” why limit ourselves to the hypotheticals the critic quoted above has spelled out? What are those 5 people doing on the tracks to begin with? What faulty assumption put them there? I know enough not to sit on railroad tracks. Why don’t they? Surely, one consideration of the fellow called upon to decide (assuming it IS decision unimpeded by emotion) will be if it is his job to save the world from self-imposed blinders? Maybe he’ll “save” those five, committing certain murder to do so, and they will immediately sit on another set of train tracks.
“The trolley problem is just one more depressing example of academic philosophers’ obsession with concentrating on selected, artificial examples so as to dodge the stress of looking at real issues.” – Mary Midgley
I mean, if it were Mary on the spur, and all the philosophers on the main line, no way would you not let that train keep on rolling and take take our all of that air-headed bunch.
****** The bookstore
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