The train or trolley dilemma is basically the
following:
A runaway trolley is speeding down a track
towards five people who are for some reason unable to move or unaware of
their impending fate. You are standing next to a lever. If you pull this lever,
the trolley will switch to a different track. However, there is one unwitting
person on that sidetrack.
You have two options:
- Do
nothing: The
trolley continues on its path and kills the five people.
- Pull
the lever: The
trolley switches tracks and kills one person, but the five people are
saved.
The dilemma forces a choice between two
outcomes, centring on whether it is better to actively intervene to cause one
death to save five, or to passively allow five deaths to occur by not acting.
The core issue is whether you should actively maximise the number of lives
saved.
The philosophical question presented by the
philosopher Alex O’Connor in one of his videos is basically two dilemmas:
1)
Many
people are reluctant to pull the lever and intervene to save 5 people and kill
just one, feeling that killing a person is always bad, even if you have saved
more people at the same time. Alex asks then, if you have inadvertently already
pulled the lever (maybe by falling over) – and yet feel that this should not
have been done on purpose –, whether you would be happy putting it back to its
default 5-people killed position, or – more whimsically – if you could go back
in time would you choose to do so and then not pull the lever (and go back to
killing 5 instead of one).
2)
The
philosopher Peter Singer’s problem: at what point are we no longer required to
give up some of our money/comfort/time to help others worse off than ourselves.
If you see a drowning child are you under an obligation to dive in and save it
and maybe spoil your new suede shoes? Or if you might endanger your own life? Do you have
to keep on diving in to save other children? The extrapolation is then done to
whether you should give to charity and save other people’s lives which you
cannot see but are no less real for it. Should you keep on giving to
charity until you are as poor as those you are helping?
Both these problems are utilitarianism ones. We
look at the different outcomes and are inclined to compare them. This is partly
because we live in utilitarian times, where our default position is based on
comparable outcomes, and generally viewed in a very short timescale. Governments
typically make calculations based on cost and utility, taking on board that
some members of society will end up not having resources designated for them in
order for other initiatives to be funded.
However, it has not always been like this. Historically,
there have been times when the default position would have been based on a
certain view of morality and absolute values. Despite what is
often erroneously said, utilitarianism is not valueless. By sleight of
hand, it seems to be the logical way to go, but it does in fact have itself an
absolute value: it typically elevates the value of aggregate human happiness
(or welfare) above others. It also has a big problem with when exactly the
outcome is to be measured and over what period of time (not to mention why it
typically only takes into account human happiness).
For example, you might be given the choice in a
plane hostage situation to kill one passenger so that the rest are not killed.
But, apart from the effect this might in the long term have on your personal
morals and wellbeing, it might also make future hostage situations more
frequent, or might normalize the random killing of one innocent person with the
aim of potentially saving others, and who knows if the others will then actually
be saved? You might even find that you have just killed the one person who would
have stopped a figure like Hitler from gaining power; or the one person who
also knows how to fly the plane when the pilot suddenly dies of a heart attack.
You might pull the lever to divert the trolley to kill only one person and then
find that the 5 who were saved then had a fatal car crash going home. Had you
not pulled the lever, one person at least would have been saved.
Utilitarianism is what makes Alex O’Connor’s
questions so puzzling. In the first instance utilitarianism is colliding with
an alternative value, that of simply not killing anyone on purpose (i.e. not
playing God). In the second, utilitarianism would suggest one must keep on
giving and giving until one has just enough to survive; or keep on jumping into
the pond to save one child after another, eternally; or at least until one is
exhausted enough to be in danger of drowning oneself. There is, alternatively, an
absolute value in self-sacrifice, but not perhaps to the point of
martyrdom. Utilitarianism is also, maybe, what has led us to the very
situations that it is so maddingly unable to resolve. In the plane hostage
situation, adopting the absolute value of never killing an innocent
person on purpose might make such situations disappear in the future as
hostage taking would become a futile activity and, thereby, not obeying
the terrorists would be the right thing to do in the long term. The
problem of perspective and over which timescale is one that is not really
solved by adopting an arbitrary point of view or length of time.
Utilitarianism in fact makes our societies
transactional and calculating, and maybe – happier or not happier, who knows? –
worse for it. If one person after another sees little overall benefit in
helping others – we are, after all, rarely presented with a pond full of
drowning children –, people in general will start not to act in accordance with moral
virtue and this will put a larger burden on the few who will intervene whether
overall happiness increases or not. If someone is drowning in a pond because
they are suicidally depressed, should we rescue them, endangering our life – or
ruining our new shoes – when they will probably be more depressed if we do, and
may well try to kill themselves later? Is anyone else going to jump in (in
which case on a utilitarian basis we would personally be absolved from doing
the same)? Should we expend our energies on trying to get someone else to take
the risk, if the end result is the same? (Which doesn’t sound like a nice thing
to do.)
Western countries are bringing in laws enabling
euthanasia (although the reality is a far cry from the “good death” that the
word conjures up) under the guise of kindness and allowing individuals to
“choose dignity in death”. (We have euthanised our pets for decades, blissfully
unaware of what the procedure means in practice behind the vet’s closed door.)
Apart from the real questions over whether the
new euthanasia laws will be misused – and it is notable that palliative care
budgets are being drastically reduced at the same time –, perhaps there will be
other effects: making people less resilient, making family members less
prepared to care for their old and ill members, making doctors care less about
curing/caring and more expedient and eugenicist, making us less stoical and
resistant when faced with pain or bad outcomes, making governments more able to
dispose of people according to their future monetary worth, and enabling
lucrative but dubious medical processes during life that may well be actively making
people ill. Will the calculation that killing the old and ill will save money
mean that the old and ill themselves will be ruthlessly eliminated (along with
their respective costs)? We can easily envisage that AI utilitarian
cost-benefit calculations could easily lead to horrible results. Why would the
same calculations carried out by humans differ?
Utilitarian arguments have enabled warmaking in
distant lands under the guise of bringing democracy and freedom to other peoples
that, often, have shown scant interest in our notions of democracy. Arguments
over political expediency have justified different versions of the “first past
the post” electoral method, giving us a pseudo-democracy in which we get a
choice between the Team Red and the Team Blue, both of which are funded by the
same donors, are corrupt at the top, and give society a shockingly low utilitarian
value.
Utilitarianism has nothing to say about the intrinsic
value of truthfulness, almost encouraging euphemisms and current misuses of
lexicon, which is making some discussions almost impossible to bring to a
useful termination, and are often permitted under a misguided notion of inclusiveness
or kindness. (“Transwomen are women” comes to mind, given that “transwomen” are
in fact men; or “safe and effective”, still promoting the covid and flu
“vaccines”, when “safe” is not a medical term and “effectiveness” has to be in
relation to a specificity.) Are utilitarianism and the current quest for equity
stopping the few talented people that typically are produced by every generation
from appearing? Will the quest for equity (an equal and supposedly happy
outcome for everyone) make us lazier, more useless, more stupid, more depressed
and more cynical in the long term?
So, going back to the original problems, maybe
one shouldn’t pull the lever to save 5 and kill one on purpose, nor to
save a million at the expense of one. And, if one tripped by mistake and fell
on the lever without wanting to, even if one had the choice of going back in
time, one should not do so either. Once again, one should not pull it because
the end is irrelevant to morality in behaviour, and not because long-term
outcomes cannot be clearly measured.
In the same light, one should rescue a drowning
child so long as one is not horribly inconvenienced by doing so, because one
has a duty to help others, within reasonable parameters. One does not have a duty
to die or lose one’s only livelihood trying to help others, although self-sacrifice
can be highly laudable. The utilitarian argument would maybe suggest that one
has less of a duty to give to others the less one earns. In this way perhaps a
person could become a better person merely by earning a little less.
This is absurd.
As a side note, my personal view is that the
existence of high earners who choose to give to their charity of choice does
not remotely solve this question, even if many did so. Society should establish
a progressive taxation system on wealth and establish a relative maximum
permitted that does not allow a few to own more than half of humanity, not just
for reasons of fairness but also because no system can benefit most of its
citizens if there are a few who can literally buy up economic and political
power.
Capitalism itself is an economic system praised
because the majority of the populations of broadly capitalist countries have an
affluent lifestyle. Without having to delve into the question of whether these
countries are broadly affluent because they syphon off the monetary and
resource wealth of poorer nations and future generations, there is another
problem: people in capitalist countries are encouraged to deify wealth and
monetary success, becoming less empathetic and more value-free as time goes on.
Indeed, our broadly utilitarian-based governments have brought a crisis of
identity and belief to large parts of their populations. Worse still, a significant
number of people in affluent societies ingest detrimental amounts of drugs and
alcohol, and are very often not happy.
If you dive into a pond to rescue a drowning
child and then drown yourself, the utilitarian would regard this as a very bad
act, with negative utility. But there is intrinsic value in trying to
save a child and in personal sacrifice for the greater good. The end does not
justify the means. Rather, the means justify the end. A completely different
trolley dilemma would be if one could personally throw oneself in
front of the trolley in order to save 5 further down on the tracks (rather than
sacrifice an innocent bystander). In this case, the right course of action
would be to do so, all other things being equal. It is so much easier to think
of sacrificing another individual than oneself!
And maybe the question is not whether you
should be diving in to rescue an endless number of drowning children, but
rather what caused those children to be in the water with no one else around to
stop them getting into trouble in the first place. Maybe once we’ve reached the
point where hapless workers on a trolley track will needlessly die whatever one
does, we’re already on the wrong track.
