Trolley Problem Sidebar

In my last post about punching people, I touched on the Trolley Problem, and I'd like to ramble on about it a bit here.

The Trolley Problem basically asks you to choose between killing one person or killing more than one.  Sometimes it's phrased as killing one person to stop from killing more than one.  Sometimes it's choosing whether to kill one or more than one.  Sometimes it's killing one to save more than one.  The central takeaway usually is that you've got to kill one or many.

But you can put things slightly differently and say that you either kill many by inaction or kill one by action.  You can take out the trolley and talk about a madman who tells you to shoot one person and he will spare the lives of twenty hostages or something like that.  That puts the ball more in your court: you've got to do the killing, not simply decide which option to take.

And then there's the idea that one person is going to die anyway; the madman will kill all the hostages unless you pick one of them to be killed.  So that one person is going to die regardless, but the blood wouldn't be as directly on your hands if you simply allow the hostages to be killed wholesale.

What it boils down to, however, is that you must choose between options, both of which are sub-optimal.  Simply phrased, is one death preferable to more than one death?

If you're in an action-inaction scenario and you happen not to believe in sins of omission (to use the Catholic turn of phrase, here meaning, "an immoral act which happens because of inaction"), then you would probably choose the path where your actions alone couldn't be blamed for the result.  You'd let the multiple people die because you yourself would be blameless.  And that's... not moral, in my mind.  Simply refusing to act so as not to be blamed is pretty much the worst thing you can do in this situation.  You might decide not to act because you feel that the greater good is served, but that's a choice which should acknowledge that the result is still your fault.

And that's what I think a lot of people actually do in life.  I include myself among those people.  We refuse to act, not because of the greater good, but because we don't want to be blamed.  That's immoral in the extreme, both because of the result and because we're behaving not only immorally but amorally, without consideration of the morality of the situation at all.  We're not trying to justify our inaction; we're simply avoiding action for its own sake.

The Trolley Problem doesn't take into account any personal risk either.  Many people, myself included again, do not act because it would entail risk.  We're cowards.  That's immoral too, although perhaps not amoral.  It's selfish.  And usually it's lazy, because most of the time self-preservation isn't motivated by the thought that it would be in the best interests of the world for us to escape risk.

So perhaps the most important lesson of the Trolley Problem, from a moral standpoint, is that it's important to actually make a damn choice.  Whatever you choose, it is more morally defensible than simply abdicating your responsibilities and letting the dice fall where they may.  In the Trolley Problem, that would be something along the lines of a runaway trolley which has an equal chance of killing one or a group of people unless we actually pick.

Sure, the thing which winds up serving the greater good might happen if we simply let chance dictate.  And it's easy.  We don't have to make a tough choice, shoulder moral responsibility, punch that Nazi even if it makes us a hypocrite and immoral.  And there's no guarantee that our choice would be the right one, so maybe it's just better to let fate decide.  But that's not the moral position.

Make a choice.  Don't sit on the sidelines kibbitzing and offering suggestions.  Make a choice, throw the switch, and yes, you may well make the wrong choice, and people may blame you, and things may not work out.  But it's still important to choose.