The classic problem is you are faced with a situation where a unmanned runaway trolley is rolling down a track. There are five people who are tied up on the track down the line, who will all be run over and killed if the trolley continues along its current route. But there’s a switch next to you that you can flip and send the trolley down a different track. But there is one person who is tied up on that line, who will be killed if you do so. So the moral question is whether you should flip the switch or not.
I have seen some people make the argument that there is no moral issue involved in not flipping the switch. They did not create the situation where there were people tied up on the trolley track so they bear no moral responsibility for that situation. If they take no action, they bear no moral responsibility for the five people who die. However if they flip the switch, they are taking an action which causes the death of one person and they therefore are morally responsible for that death. They do not see the issue as a choice between one death and five deaths; they see it as a choice between causing one death and not causing any deaths, even though deaths occur.
Okay, so here’s the point of this post. Let’s imagine a slightly different scenario. There’s still a runaway trolley and there’s still five people tied up ahead on the trolley’s current track, and there’s still a switch you can flip that will divert the trolley to a different track. But in this scenario, there’s nobody on this second track. If you flip the switch, the trolley will roll along until it comes to a stop and nobody is killed.
So here’s the moral question: are you morally responsible for the deaths of five people if you decide to not flip the switch? You were in a situation where you could have prevented their deaths but you did not take the action to save them. However, just as in the first scenario, you did not place them on the tracks and you took no action which caused their deaths. You just stood by and let their deaths happen.
I feel that most people would agree that even though you took no action which caused five people to die, you bear some moral responsibility for their death because you did not take an action which would have prevented it. And if that’s the case, that shows there can be a moral responsibility in a non-action. Which in turn must be applied to the first scenario.
You do not need this trolley stuff to reason that it is categorically important to help people: if you came across an injured person who had been in an accident (and no one else is coming to help), would you not take them to the hospital?
Your first scenario is more about it being unacceptable to kill people (even to save your life, or someone else’s life, or a bunch of people’s lives… depending on the parameters of the dilemma). In more realistic scenarios, self-defense or defense of the lives of others is a concept that comes up, though.
If you fight the hypothetical you’re not dealing with the trolley problem anymore. It just illustrates that sometimes you have to choose between two shitty choices.
If you have the capacity to reduce harm, choosing to to nothing is still a choice.
And really, “I only bear a responsibility to reduce harm if I directly caused the situation” is kind of a horrifying take.
If this is about what I said in the green button hypothetical thread, my issue remains that the hypothetical had too many unknowns in its execution, and thus does not guarantee that your actions would actually save people. You couldn’t be sure that your action wouldn’t make things worse. That’s why I say inaction does not mean you bear moral responsibility if you argue you go with the default. (Well, that and that it’s a time travel thing where the bad thing has already happened.)
With any of the trolley problems, the outcome is certain by design. You know for sure that the only difference is how many people will die, and that your choice determines this. That is why the vast majority of people say it’s right to pull the switch, even if it means killing one person to save five. If you remove the one person, then the downside is even less, so of course pulling the lever is the right choice.
That said, I’m wary of assigning moral responsibility for one big reason: people have trouble pulling the switch. We know for sure with the original classical trolley problem that people freeze up. It can be quite traumatic, in fact. I don’t think there is anything gained by assigning guilt to these people, saying they had a moral responsibility to pull the switch. Granted, this seems like it would a lot easier if there is no one else on the other track. But I still think some people might freeze up.
And even though most people say they’d pull the switch on the original trolley problem, you can change it in a way where the same number of people die, but much more people say they wouldn’t do it. You can make it someone you have to push onto the tracks yourself to stop the train. Because people would be more directly involved in the killing, a lot more people say they wouldn’t kill the one person to save five in that scenario.
And, of course, there are many situations in real life where people find it immoral to kill one person to save multiple people. The classic version is killing a healthy person to harvest their organs for transplant, saving more lives.
In reality, people do not view deaths that happen due to their inaction to be equivalent to deaths that happen due to their specific actions. It honestly depends heavily on the scenario in question.
I agree with your general stance, but I don’t think it’s quite as simple as it first appears.
What if you have the capacity to reduce harm (or even to save a life), but at some cost or difficulty or risk to yourself? What if someone is being attacked by a rabid tiger, or has fallen through the ice into a freezing lake, and you could try to help them, but with a 95% chance of losing your own life? I think most people would say you’re not morally obligated to try to help in a situation like that. But if you are morally obligated to do something to save a life in the OP’s scenario, where there is the minimum possible cost to yourself to do so, where is the line between when you do and when you don’t?
By the way, OP: have you seen the TV series The Good Place? I highly recommend it if you’re interested in ethical dilemmas and moral philosophy. One of its episodes is about the trolley problem—but I hesitate to say any more for fear of giving away any spoilers. The whole series is best appreciated if you go into it knowing as little as possible about what to expect.
I have no idea how a trolley or a rail yard switch actually works, but I would have to agree with this.
Assuming it’s just a big red button with a clearly indicated outcome, thinking you bear no responsibility for those deaths by doing nothing demonstrates a sort of sociopathic thinking. At the very least it presents someone with a dangerously disconnected and nihilistic view of the world.
To me, it’s axiomatic that not only are there natural (God-given, if that’s your inclination) rights, there are natural duties. Your duty to assist someone else is complicated by a few things, including how dire is the impact of inaction, did the person in peril create their own jackpot, does acting unfavorably (perhaps dangerously) impact you….? Etc., etc.
I think all natural rights are some form of the right to be left alone. I think all natural duties are some form of the obligation to reduce human suffering, subject to reasonable restrictions regarding personal risk and long-term impacts of intervention.
So, yes, for me it’s absolutely unethical and immoral to not flip the switch, an action that creates zero risk for someone and produces a profound avoidance of human suffering. But because it’s axiomatic for me, I can’t explain it beyond “because it’s just self-evidently obvious to me that someone ought to do so.”
ETA: I’ll just add that inaction is as much a decision as acting is. For me, one should take no comfort in doing nothing under the false assumption that inaction automatically renders one an innocent bystander.
The relevant scenario here is Kitty Genovese. I realize that the popular version of the story isn’t factual but the popular narrative illustrates the possible moral responsibility that comes from not taking an action.
I agree. I feel this is the key point; choosing not to flip the switch is just as much an action as choosing to flip the switch. The person in that situation can’t say they didn’t take an action and therefore have no moral responsibility for the outcome. Making the choice is the action.
I feel like this can be summed up as ‘if it were different, it would be exactly the same’
If you diisect out pieces of the problem and reassemble them alongside different pieces of another scenario, you’re creating a different question, which may have a different answer, and maybe the answers can’t simply be inserted back into the original, different problem.
I think the point where it breaks down here is that in the original problem, you’re choosing between two evils, each of which has a number of facets or dimensions to it, which are difficult to weigh against each other
In your revised problem, the choice is between one of those evils and null; there’s no weighing up to do. The choice is obvious.
Consider another scenario where the track is empty ahead of you, but if you pull the switch, you will divert onto the track that kills one person. It’s obvious that you shouldn’t pull the switch, therefore if you apply that to to original scenario, it’s obvious that you shouldn’t pull the switch there either, right?
As to the new one, I’d like to think there is some obligation to do the minimum to save lives, but I bet I make decisions all day long that I could change easily, but lead to some deaths in some faraway lands. The Good Place covered this, too – it’s hard to live in the modern world without doing harm somewhere.
I feel you’re making a different argument than the one I’m making.
You’re changing the consequences of doing something and using that as the basis of arguing over the morality of what was done. That is, of course, one of the main points of the trolley problem.
But I was addressing one specific issue; the argument some people make that some participation is required for there to be any moral responsibility. Someone above called it the innocent bystander argument. It’s that you have no moral responsibility for something terrible happening as long as you did not cause it to happen - even if you could have taken an action which would have prevented it from happening.
I was deliberately creating a situation to refute this argument. I wanted a situation in which there would be a consensus that a person had moral responsibility for some consequences that they had not caused but had chosen to not prevent. In effect, I wanted to show that it’s possible to be a guilty bystander.
And I feel that this does affect the original problem. The central pillar of the innocent bystander argument, as I see it, is the premise that all bystanders are innocent. It argues that all you have to do is demonstrate the bystander part and the innocent part automatically follows. So an argument which raises the possibility of guilty bystanders nullifies that premise.
If the situation is as clear cut as your post describes, not flipping the switch is a moral offense in my book, one for which I have no demands for retribution however. Remember the last episode of Seinfeld where the group of friends are arrested in some county for not intervening to prevent the mugging of a man on the street? Seinfeld’s is a much milder situation than your version of the trolley problem, and in that case I believe it’s reasonable not to intervene to prevent street crime because there is a clear direct danger to your own safety.
But the trolley problem does not present a source of danger to the safety of the person making the choice. If someone decides it’s not their job to intervene to - easily and without coming in harm’s way - prevent unnecessary harm, then they’re morally responsible for the five deaths as far as I am concerned. I don’t want them to go to jail, and I am against any sort of authority enforcing morals on people because you know where that leads, but they are definitely immoral.