Ah, the trolley problem. In middle school I used to think I was cool, talking about ethical dilemmas, thought problems, drawing out people’s beliefs. Now I just think it’s something that must be done. I feel I have a duty to show people that the trolley problem has a clear solution. This post will give that solution, and allay any doubt of its veracity.
If you’re unfamiliar with the trolley problem, imagine this: There’s a runaway trolley (or train carriage). There’s nobody inside it. Some bastard has tied 5 people to a track. The trolley is currently en route to that track. The bastard also tied another person to an adjacent track. You are stood at a lever. The lever is able to redirect the trolley from the trolley’s current track, which has five people tied to it, to the other track, that has one person tied to it. You don’t know any of the people. The “problem” lies in your decision. Do you pull the lever or do you not pull the lever?
Why bother?
Firstly, I want to outline why thought problems such as the trolley problem are important. Many people object to the idea of a thought problem, because it is, well, a thought problem. If it is only ever likely to occur in thought, why waste our time? We could be spending our time on more productive affairs, like working out how to increase food supply in the poverty ridden nations of Africa. However, thought problems are usually not about the solution. They’re about the process one goes through to come to a solution. Hypothetical situations can be made deliberately extreme and deliberately specific to hone in on one particular belief or system thereof. While it’s true these situations are very unlikely to occur in a real life scenario, real life scenarios contain too many variables. If we were to analyse problems that occur in real life, we would have a variety of beliefs and context variables to consider that would make any decision much more complex. The fact that these thought problems are unrealistic is exactly what makes them useful. You can be hyper-specific.
If you’ve had your coffee this morning, and are familiar with the trolley problem, you will have noticed that asserting we should spend our time solving poverty in Africa, is a decision to do one thing and not another. This itself is analogous to a trolley problem. However, we’ll leave the problem of trade-offs more generally to another post. For now, we’re only focussing on the classic, one vs five people tied to tracks, trolley problem.
Another reason that this specific thought problem is important is that we now need a solution. Autonomous cars will be forced to make these decisions. Should the car you’re in drive off a cliff, killing you to save 5 people who are standing next to the barrier that would’ve stopped you from falling off? These are the questions the engineers and programmers must have answers to, fortunately there is an answer.
The Correct Answer
Pull. That’s the answer. Redirect the trolley to the one person. It’s unfortunate one person has to die. It is fortunate that five lives have been saved! It’s crystal clear. Not for everyone though. For the rest of this post I’ll dispel any doubt that this is the right answer.
Moral Responsibility
Most of the problem, if not all of the problem people have with pulling the lever is that they believe they are responsible for pulling the lever. But they believe they are not responsible for not pulling.
Let’s challenge this. A parent has told you to watch over their child at the pool while they drop the (other) kids off at the pool. You agree. After a minute or so, the child is floating facedown in the pool, devoid of movement. Do you jump in to save them? Of course. You were responsible for that child. Not taking action would have been an act of irresponsibility. What if the parent hadn’t told you to watch their child prior to leaving? Do you jump in? Not your responsibility. Right?
Are you responsible for pulling the lever though? No one told you to make the decision. Whether you pull or not, you make a decision. Making a decision is an action. Therefore, not pulling the lever, inaction, is somewhat contradictorily, an action, since the governing decision is an action itself.
But…But…Guilt!
If you’re a lever-leaver, what’s the number of people that would have to be on the first track so that you would pull? 10? 20? 100? 1 million? 1 billion? All of humanity except you? When you don’t pull the lever, you are forced to draw a line. Drawing a line is difficult. Difficult because it’s arbitrary. A decision to pull the lever has very concrete reasons. You save five lives instead of one.
Why would you be guilt free by not pulling the lever? We can now either return to the question of moral responsibility or, alternatively, we can investigate what it means to “pull a lever”. Our evolution consisted of mostly thoughts that were translated into actions, not of projective thoughts, pondering potential decisions and potential consequences. The tangibility of an action, the reification of the thought, is perhaps why it’s difficult to make the leap to pull the lever. The vividness of the cause-effect when pulling the lever and one person dying is greater than that of you just observing a trolley run over five people. You’ve participated. This is related to the vivid evidence bias. The more vivid an image of something is, the more likely you are to remember it.
What’s interesting is that if one begins to delve deeper into their feelings of guilt they find it’s often a misconstrued sense of justice, not guilt per se. Thoughts along the lines of “it’s unfair that one person should die just because there aren’t more people with them” might be the form in which this is presented. Is it not unfair that four extra people should die because they were tied to a different track? Or unfair on the four people because Peter Singer was not behind the lever? Yes, it is undeniably unfair to the one innocent person who is hit by a trolley if you pull the lever. But, it’s the same amount of unfair, multiplied by five if you don’t pull the lever.
Consider that there is a camera setup to watch the lever. It will see the decision you make and you know that it will likely be taken to court. Do you think the court will hold you responsible? Or the bastard who tied the people to the tracks in the first place? Could the court hold you responsible for not saving four lives, for negligence of moral duty?
The above aside, should guilt even affect your decision? Should you put the lives of four people (the delta) before your own feelings? Yes. Unless you think feeling guilt free is worth more than four human lives.
I Don’t Want to Interfere With Fate
“I don’t want to pull the lever because that is the path it was on.” Before you order a pizza do you say “I don’t want to order this pizza because that is not the path the pizza was on”? No. You do want to interfere with fate.
How are you to know that part of “fate” consists of you pulling the lever? After all, you were presented with the opportunity. By stating you won’t pull the lever because it was already en route to the five people, is the equivalent to “I will remain inactive in every situation because every situation I encounter was already happening that way, and anything I do, would change that.”
You do want to interfere with fate. You just don’t want to now. Lives are at stake, you’re scared. I don’t blame you.
The concept discussed here is called causal determinism.
Pulling the Lever vs Pushing the Fat Man
The “fat man” trolley problem variant consists of only one track, with a trolley charging towards five people. You are standing on a bridge above the track with a fat man. This man is so fat, he can stop a trolley. You can push the fat man (he’s right on the edge and only just balancing) onto the track, killing him and saving the five people tied do the track.
The problem shouldn’t change if you’re pushing someone or pulling the lever. Your human instincts make it more difficult though. In the same way the cause-effect relationship of pulling the lever was more vivid than just observing, pushing a fat man off a bridge is more vivid again. As a species we want to survive. Normally, killing someone isn’t a good means in advancing this goal. Pushing someone to their death was possible through our evolutionary history. Pulling a lever to kill someone wasn’t. Thus we have a greater emotional response to pushing the fat man off the bridge than we do pulling the lever to change the direction of a trolley. Of course, when it comes to rational decision making, we don’t care for emotions. So, you should still push that fatty off.
What would you actually do?
You probably wouldn’t be charged for “negligence of moral duty” if that’s even a thing, if you were actually in a trolley problem-esque scenario. It would be traumatic. It’s tough to think rationally while under that sort of stress. I also hope you’re not eager to pull levers to kill a person, or push people off bridges. There’s a reason pulling the lever and pushing people off bridges is a hard (though right in this case) decision. Most of the time these are not good decisions.
I, personally, would “drive” a car that would throw itself off a cliff to save 5 other people. I am five times more likely to be one of the people next to the barrier.
Meme credits
Credit to Trolley Problem Memes, the greatest meme page to ever exist.
