You have probably heard of
the Trolley Problem. The second and third of the following scenarios add up to a version of the Trolley Problem. Each of the following five scenarios is a situation where someone will die if you choose to do something, but two people will die if you choose not to do it.
1) Transplant
A doctor tells you that two of her patients will die within the week if they do not get transplants. They need different organs, and the organs of another of her patients who is obese but not otherwise poorly would give both of them good life expectancies. Suppose that you are physically capable of committing a perfect murder of the obese patient, who has an organ donor card and a low life expectancy. And suppose that the doctor would operate successfully. Should you murder the obese patient and deliver the corpse to the doctor?
2) Footbridge
An obese person is with you on a bridge over a railway track. Two people are working on the track on one side of the bridge, and they cannot hear an approaching train over the noise of their equipment. From where you are, you can see it coming from the other direction. It will pass under the bridge, and then it will hit those two workers, who have their backs to you. It will not be able to stop in time. It will kill them. But if you pushed the obese person over the side of the bridge then that would slow the train down enough for it to be able to stop without killing either of the workers, although it would kill the obese person. There is no one else about, and the police would assume that the obese person had committed suicide if you were not there when they arrived. You are physically capable of pushing the obese person off the bridge. Should you do that and be on your way?
3) Lever
As in Footbridge, there are two workers on a railway track with some noisy equipment, and they have their backs to an approaching train. But instead of a bridge there is a side track onto which the train could be diverted. An obese person is walking very slowly over that side track, and you are standing next to the lever that controls where the train will go. The two workers and the obese person are in one direction, with their backs to you, and the train that they cannot hear over the noise of the equipment is rapidly approaching from the other direction. Should you quickly pull the lever, diverting the train so that it kills the obese person instead of the two workers?
4) Driver
This scenario is a lot like Lever, but instead of being next to a lever, you are the driver of the train. Your brakes are not working but your controls will allow you to direct the train onto the side track. Should you drive the train onto the side track and thereby kill one very large member of the public instead of two people who, like you, work for the railway?
5) Doctor
You are a doctor and you can either save the life of one very obese patient, or else you can save the lives of two patients who are not obese but who both have very similar injuries to the obese patient. You cannot save all three because of the severity of the injuries, and the obese patient will be harder to save because of that obesity. Should you save the lives of the two non-obese patients?
My answer to that question is "yes" but my answers to the questions in the first three scenarios are all "no" (for the fourth scenario my answer is "I don't know").
You probably agree that the answer is "yes" in Doctor. But perhaps you think that the answer is also "yes" in Lever. Lever is a lot like Driver and Doctor. Indeed, you might think that the similarities between Footbridge and Lever mean that the answer is also "yes" in Footbridge. But I think that the answer is "no" in Lever because of the similarities between Transplant, Footbridge and Lever.
It seems to me that if you pull a lever to divert a train that will then hit and kill an obese person, that is a lot like pulling the trigger on a gun that fires a bullet at that person.
Let me explain. Suppose that a gangster would give you enough money to save
two hundred lives if you pulled the trigger on a gun pointed at an obese person. Would it be OK to pull the trigger on the grounds that you were being paid
to pull the trigger, not to kill anyone, and that you would spend some of the money saving two lives? Of course not.
I think that if you pulled the lever, you would be killing one person instead of killing no one. You would not be choosing the lesser of two evils (one person dead instead of two), you would be choosing the greater of two evils (murdering someone instead of letting two people die).
Of course, if you were watching
two hundred people die while you stood next to a lever that you could have pulled in order to save them at the relatively small cost of one obese person with a low life expectancy, then you might feel as if it was
you who was killing them. And most people do think that while it would be wrong to push a fat man off a bridge in order to save five people from being hit by a train, it would be OK to divert the train into him in order to save them (they think that
this is the difference between killing and letting die). But what do the experts think?
Well, a lot of the philosophers who have thought about that classic Trolley Problem think that because of the similarities, it would be OK to push the fat man off that bridge!
I wonder if they were confusing that problem with the
political problem of the allocation of resources (if resources are allocated in one way, then some people will suffer, and if they are allocated in another way then other people will suffer), or with such
political questions as whether torture is ever acceptable, and how much collateral damage is acceptable. Politics is all about big, complicated problems and solutions that have addressed innumerable real-world details. Here, we are looking at five very simple scenarios. Here we have one relatively simple
moral problem and it has a very simple answer. It is one thing to save two people instead of one by letting one person die instead of two (as in Driver and Doctor), it is another thing to kill someone in order to save two lives when you have no authority to kill anyone (as in Transplant, Footbridge and Lever).
The language of the philosophers may well be very clever, not unlike the language of lawyers, but a lot of philosophers seem to be confusing morality with politics, not unlike bad politicians.
Note that in none of these scenarios would you be killing an attacker in order to save lives. The Trolley Problem is not like the choice between twenty million people dying and murdering Hitler when he was an innocent child. Nor is it like the political problem of drawing a line between assisted suicide and murder. The following two variants of Transplant are more like that problem.
6) Gangster
A gangster offers a poor but very healthy man the chance of a better life. The gangster will toss a coin, and on heads he will give the poor man a million dollars, but on tails he will kill him and drive his body to a hospital, where surgeons will give his healthy heart to a billionaire who needs a heart transplant. Suppose that the poor man agrees, and that the coin lands tails up. When he sees that it is tails, he tries to run away but he is murdered by the gangster. Would it have been murder if he had accepted his fate?
7) Robot
A trillionaire needs a new heart, so he has a lot of robots built. Each robot will be in a bedroom, and if the room is occupied then when the person in the bed is asleep, it will toss a coin ten times. If the robot gets ten heads in a row, it will kill that person and wheel the bed into an operating room. If it gets anything else, it will deposit a million dollars in that person's bank account. A lot of people think that the job of sleeping in such a bedroom is better than a lot of jobs, where there is some risk of death and little chance of retiring with a million dollars to spend and the time to spend it. A month later, the trillionaire has a new heart. Is he a murderer?
