by BRIANNA RENNIX & NATHAN J. ROBINSON
It turns us into horrible people, and discourages us from examining the structural factors that determine our choices…
You are on an asteroid careening through the cosmos. Aboard the asteroid with you are nine hundred highly-skilled physicians, who have been working on developing a revolutionary medication that will cure every disease in the known universe. The asteroid’s current trajectory is taking it straight toward the Planet of Orphans, where all intergalactic civilizations have dumped their unwanted offspring, of which there are now 100 trillion, all living, breathing, and mewling. If you detonate the asteroid, all of the doctors will die, along with the hope for curing every disease in the universe. If you do not detonate the asteroid, the doctors will have time to develop the cure and send it hurtling toward the Healing Planet before you crash into and destroy the Planet of Orphans. Thus you face the crucial question: how useful is this hypothetical for illuminating moral truths?
The “Trolley Problem” is a staple of undergraduate moral philosophy. It is a gruesome hypothetical supposedly designed to test our moral intuitions and introduce the differences between Kantian and consequentialist reasoning. For the lucky few who have thus far managed to avoid exposure to the Trolley Problem, here it is: a runaway trolley is hurtling down the track. In the trolley’s path are five workers, who will inevitably be smushed to a gory paste if it continues along its present course. But you, you have the power to change things: you happen to be standing by a switch. If you give the switch a yank, the trolley will veer onto a different track. On this track, there is only one worker. Do you pull the switch and doom the unsuspecting proletarian, or do you refrain from acting and allow five others to die?
Most people announce that they would pull the switch, thus extinguishing one life instead of five. But usually someone in the class will dissent, and say that pulling the switch is wrong because there is a difference between killing someone intentionally versus letting them die through circumstances beyond your control. A discussion will ensue about the action/inaction distinction. Then variants will be introduced: what if you could save the five people by pushing an obese man in front of the trolley? What if the obese man was evil? This leads to further scenarios: what if you were a doctor in a remote country who could save five dying people by killing one and harvesting his organs? What if you were part of a group of Jews hiding in a basement in 1941 while the Gestapo searched your house, and your baby started to cry—would you be justified in smothering it to death to save a dozen others? (Existential Comics has nicely lampooned the tendency of trolley hypotheticals to quickly spiral out of control with more and more elaborate sets of conditions and caveats.)
If all of this sounds incredibly stupid, with no obvious relationship to any moral problem that an ordinary human is likely to encounter, that’s because it is. And yet it is an “iconic philosophical thought experiment,” one which “has occupied the attention of brilliant minds, from academic ethicists to moral psychologists to engineers.”
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via 3 Quarks Daily