“is it more moral to let five people die through inaction or kill one to save them?”
“uhI think that question problematically assumes capitalism and disposability are inevitable and an engineer is really at fault here"
what the Fuck
Oh, this comes from living in a society where people constantly tell you that, gosh, morality is difficult and sometimes you can’t achieve everything you want and there are lots of tradeoffs and that’s why there are so many on the job injuries here at the Amazon warehouse.
Any ideology that promises you a society free of trade-offs is lying to you.
On the one hand I’m a defender of the utilitarian position on the trolley problem, and I do occasionally want to shout “do you not believe in triage” at people. On the other hand, it does strike me now and then that the widespread tendency to misunderstand it might in fact cast some doubt on its efficacy as a thought experiment meant to get at people’s moral intuitions.
I assume you aren’t always a utilitarian, though, right? Like I’d hope pushing the fat man onto the tracks, or kidnapping a healthy person and harvesting their organs to save five people with organ failure isn’t something you’re okay with…
I’ve always thought that the organ-harvesting example wasn’t really about utilitarianism vs. other moral philosophies. I’m not convinced it even does a good job of tracking the distinction between act and rule utilitarianism; there are reasonably foreseeable consequences of the organ harvesting that include, for instance “you lose your medical license and go to jail, thus depriving any potential future patients of your skills as a doctor,” “the hospital you work at and/or the medical profession as a whole fall into disrepute because the account of the murder gets out,” etc. These are no less consequences of the act of harvesting the healthy person’s organs than saving the sick people in need of transplants is. I think it’s a pretty poorly put-together thought experiment.
I’ll try to approach this indirectly. There’s a story I like where a lifeboat is sinking because too many people are on it. One person organizes two others to throw people off until it stabilizes. Then, after the boat is stabilized, the two others find a guy who hid at the bottom of the boat, and they throw him off even though they don’t need to, because they like throwing people off. The one who initially organized this is charged with murder, and he doesn’t contest the charge, but he receives a lesser sentence compared to the other two.
The organizer’s actions are a trolley problem, but the court’s decision is also a trolley problem. Do you let this man go, because he wanted to prevent at least some deaths? Or do you punish him, in the hopes that fear of unavoidable punishment will prevent people from killing needlessly like the other two did? The court judges him for doing the same thing it does every day, and that’s why it can’t judge him too harshly.
The tendency to misunderstand the trolley problem is something I’d put to it being a cliche and that everyone knows it’s a thought experiment and that your answer would be extrapolated out to determine your ethics, rather than what you personally would do in that situation.
consider “you a worker stood by and watched five people die when you could have sacrificed one fully within your role and responsibility”, vs “you are random passer by watched a disaster happen with a crowd of 50 other people who also did nothing.”
Which feels more inline with why people will kill one to save five in the trolley problem, and then kill five to save one in the organ harvesting, or kill five enemy soldiers to save one friendly.
My answer is and has always been:
We are tiny creatures in a vast universe with limited information. Often the privilege of “time to carefully consider the situation.”
The trolley is speeding. You have almost information. You are scared. You may hesitate.
The reality is, with the limited time you have to make the decision, the limited information (these two things are actually true of all decisions) all you can do is make a REASONABLE choice.
There are no right choices. Rightness is a lie, and even in retrospect, the Right decision can lead to the “wrong” outcome.
All we can do is make decisions that are reasonable, justified, informed, and kind.
The trolley problem is a fakeout. It’s a lose/lose situation.
There are no correct decisions. Only reasonable one.
I mean, I’ll keep banging this gong: of course we face trade-offs, but if you really want to illustrate that fact maybe choose a better metaphor.
Because trolley problem thinking is also an extremely common, real world means of cost-shifting.
What I mean is, dollars to donuts in any real world situation you’ll do some digging and an engineer at TrolleyCo came to management six months ago and said, “Our lack of emergency breaks is a real problem, we need to upgrade our trolleys immediately.”
And a scumbag in management decided that would cost too much money, nixed the idea, got a fat bonus for saving all that money and moved on to work his budgeting magic at another company.
And even though the cost of upgrading all the trolleys is lower than the cost of squishing and traumatizing people, the cost of the brakes is borne by the company, and the cost of squishing people is borne by the people and the lever operator.
So management really, really, really wants you to be asking questions like “What should the lever operator have done” or “Is having a trolley system worth the danger of people getting tied to the tracks” and they want you at all costs to avoid the question of “Could we just have prevented this whole thing in the first place?”
This is not some rare side case that hardly ever happens; it’s incredibly common in this kind of situation and describes a huge number of these kinds of disasters.
If you don’t want people to start thinking in that direction then get a different metaphor.
This seems weirdly blame-ish? Why on Earth do you think that bad things happen because bad people decided they should?
Doesn’t it make more sense that no one ever realized anything was wrong, and then, without anyone’s involvement, something bad happened? I mean, that’s 99.9% of all things that ever happen, ever, and the other 0.01 % are good things that happen because people want them to.
This feels like “lightning happens because Thor is angry” kind of reasoning. There is no Sky God, the laws of nature just happen to be unfriendly to our meat bodies. Most things happen because Nature is just Like That, and most things are bad. Nothing remains to be explained.
Who is this invisible devil who wants people to be run over by trolleys that you’ve dreamed up? Why do you believe that he exists?
they’re upset because people like you keep insisting that when people like us say “the trolley problem is bullshit” it’s because we’re criticising the mechanics of the setup and not your motivations behind rolling it out on us
like
my issue here is not that I think it impossible for someone to ever be stuck in a situation where all the choices are shitty ones
my issue is why are you asking me what I think should happen in a situation where all the choices are shitty ones
because I kinda feel like the next thing you’ll say is “okay, well, we’ve established what you are, now we’re just haggling over the price…”
because it’s a legitimately interesting conversation topic and ethics are important?
my ethics are “don’t let shit like this fuckinghappen”
but when i say that you get all mad and yell that I’m dodging the question
I’m with theresponseblog on this; it feels like the focus on edge cases contrived to have no good answers is 1. An attempted moral injury intended to degrade and start walking towards human rights violations/war crimes/genocide/that kind of thing as morally praiseworthy and 2. Creating an environment where considering the immediate and contributing causes of situations with no good answers existing isn’t considered under the banner of ethics and morals at all.
Considering that the IRL problems of this type frequently occur as a result of government and/or corporate decision-making that can and should be subject to review and critique, I think moralists really need to mix up the trolley problems with “how many bureaucrats, etc should be held morally liable for the deaths, property destruction, and trauma?” problems.
Moving decisions like “should the ship have enough lifeboats to accommodate all of the passengers and crew, and should the lifeboats be stocked with survival rations regularly replaced when they go stale?” into the realm of ethics, rather than merely debating who deserves a place on the lifeboat or who should be cannibalized, helps people consider decisions of this type in their own lives as micro-trolleys rather than purely budgeting choices.
IMO, the trolley problem is supposed to be an example of descriptive ethics, not prescriptive ethics. The question is less “what should you do?” and more “what would you do?” The idea is to get a sense for how much your ethics are guided by consequentialist factors versus other aspects of morality. Like I definitely pull the lever to kill one stranger over five strangers, but if the only person on one track is my dad, I suspect I’d be significantly less of a utilitarian.
Alfred is manning the trolley. The trolley is playing ‘All Star’ at an extremely loud volume. He is distracted. The trolley is moving at 65mph. There is very little time to react
Arthur has cloned himself. He and his clones have been super glued to the track by an unknown person.
Francis is standing by the lever. You can get his attention by screaming. You have ten seconds to convey that you want him to pull the lever….if you want him to. Otherwise, leave him be.
Feliciano will get up and move depending on which way the trolley goes. His death is inevitable.
What will you do
Now I’m going to answer this unironically, as if OP has a gun pointed at my head.
The thing that everyone forgets is that Alfred/America is the one on the trolley. This is key. We have no say in this. It’s his choice. This is not a moral dilemma. This is an exercise in character interpretation and hypothetical conjecture.
However, it’s actually impossible to tell if America at that very moment is in the “spite england ya’ll” or “haha you can’t die yet you owe me money” or “of course imma hero here to save you!” mood. Their relationship perpetually oscillates between these contradictory truths, and sometimes all three mindsets are at play at the same way. Canon America’s brain is fucking wild. Hell, I’d make the case that if he could run all of England’s clones over, killing them, and claim it wasn’t his fault (”the trolley was going too fast” “I couldn’t decide in time”) and get away with it, he absolutely would. But see, even ifhe decided instinctively to spare England, his vitriolic ally, there is the added complication of assuming that France would go along with it.
You see, France can just as easily feign not understanding America’s incomprehensible yelling as his voice is distorted from the wind caused by the trolley speeding at 65 mph, and therefore conveniently allowing his insignificant other, his pain in the ass rival, to perish without taking the blame for it. This is also a possibility that he’s in a non-bitchy mood and does not wish violence upon England, yet who could blame him if he couldn’t hear America over that obnoxious All Stars music that was playing “at an extremely loud volume”? This situation makes it almost impossible for England to survive, evenifthey both made a conscious decision to save him.
Italy’s role here is completely irrelevant. He dies either way and neither America or France have strong feelings of resentment towards poor Italy, unlike England whom they share a common disdain for, yet at the same time wouldn’t feel right to end in such a premature way.
My answer is, of course, that the trolley will continue to take its course, as the universe intended. RIP England.
Then again, this is all irrelevant because they’re all fucking immortal metaphysical representations of nationalism and England and/or Italy will simply re-spawn and come back to life eventually. Then maybe England can explain why he thought it’s be a good idea to clone himself and who is the ‘unknown person’ who tied him on the tracks. Then maybe Italy can explain to them why he was feeling suicidal that day. Yeah, maybe we ought to unpack that??? What America was doing on top of that thing and France standing around the lever being extra is completely in-canon, needs no explanation. I rest my case.
