The Trolley Non-Problem?

By On August 18, 2012 · 70 Comments · In Academic Philosophy

Over at Philosophy etc, Bradley Gabbard argues that a widespread intuition about the trolley problem can justify compulsory aid to the global poor. Here is the trolley problem:

  • A runaway trolley is on course to kill five innocent people. I can switch the trolley to another track, saving the five but killing one (let’s call this guy Bob.)

According to Gabbard, about 90% of us have the intuition that it is morally permissible to divert the trolley in this case, killing Bob.  From that premise, it’s off to the races. If I can kill Bob to save five then Bob could similarly kill me. If Bob could kill me then Bob could also permissibly destroy my stuff. If Bob can destroy my stuff he can take it and redistribute it. If Bob can take and redistribute my stuff to save the five on the track then he can do it to save five people who would otherwise die in poverty. Therefore, compulsory aid to the global poor is permissible.

Hold on. The fact that 90% of us supposedly have this intuition in trolley cases doesn’t make it the right call. In Judith Thomson’s famous Fat Man case (where Bob is a fat man you must push in front of the trolley to save the five) our intuitions go the other way. And of course, almost no one believes you can run around murdering people to redistribute their organs to five sick patients, thus killing one to save five. Even in the trolley case, I doubt that so many of us would divert the trolley to kill an innocent person if we vividly imagined ourselves in that situation. I should hope that would be extremely psychologically traumatic to anyone who did turn the trolley to kill one. It’s not an easy premise to swallow.

One of my favorite articles on this topic is Thomson’s Turning the Trolley. There, she argues that we are not entitled to turn the trolley, push the fat man, or kill for organs—they’re all wrong. While I cannot do her brilliant argument justice in this post, here is the central case. In Bystander’s Three Options, I can:

  • (i)  do nothing, letting five die, or
  • (ii)  turn the switch to the right, killing Bob, or
  • (iii) turn the switch to the left, killing myself.

Thomson writes that in this case (ii) would clearly be wrong. Say I think it would be a good deed to turn the switch. Still, I am surely not entitled to impose the cost of my good deed on Bob when I could bear the cost myself. By analogy, Thomson writes,

Compare the following possibility. I am asked for a donation to Oxfam. I want to send them some money. I am able to send money of my own, but I don’t feel like it. So I steal some from someone else and send that money to Oxfam. That is pretty bad. But if the bystander proceeds to turn the trolley onto the one on the right-hand track in Bystander’s Three Options, then what he does is markedly worse, because the cost in Bystander’s Three Options isn’t money, it is life.

So when we face three options, (ii) is wrong. And while altruistic suicide (iii) is permissible, morality cannot require me to kill myself to save the five, even if we all agreed that it would be a good deed. Even if altruistic suicide is the only permissible way to save the five, it isn’t required.

In a fascinating aside, Thomson also suggests that choosing (iii), while permissible, may be kinda messed up anyhow:

I stop to mention my impression that altruism that rises to this level is not morally attractive. Quite to the contrary. A willingness to give up one’s life simply on learning that five others will live if and only if one dies is a sign of a serious moral defect in a person.

Hardcore libertarian commenters (you know who you are) take note. Even if you disagree, it still wouldn’t follow from the fact that you would be willing to die to save five that you can permissibly kill someone else (Bob, the Fat Man, or the unwilling organ donor) to save five.

Thomson’s argument concludes with another genius move. Say I am examining the switch, and I then find that (iii) is actually not an option—altruistic suicide is off the table. Now we are back to the original Trolley problem but the impermissibility of (ii) remains. It is still impermissible for me to turn the trolley and kill Bob, making him pay the cost of my ‘good deed.’

So let’s take stock. If I am not required to kill myself to save the five (iii) then it is permissible to do nothing (i).  Killing Bob (ii) is not permissible, regardless of whether (iii) is an option. So in the original trolley case we ought to do nothing (i). Point is, don’t kill Bob.

I love Thomson’s argument, and I think it’s a great illustration of how weighty negative duties are. Still, I’m not sure that the trolley problem is, as she suggests, a non-problem after all. On this case I agree with Thomson’s judgment, but my intuitions remain frustratingly unclear about the weight of negative and positive duties more generally. Yes, negative duties are especially weighty. But this is not to say that they have absolute weight over positive duties or that positive duties don’t exist.

What if there were 500 people on the track and Bob’s life on the other one? Even then I am hesitant to say we can kill Bob. This case just looks too close to those ticking bomb cases, or the assassin case, and I think Jeremy Waldron’s response to the ticking bomb argument for torture is compelling:

Law and morality and religion requires that in no circumstances is torture to be used. The law is unambiguous, it’s a total prohibition. And for some of us, our morality dictates the same. We [should] take responsibility for the consequences of the bomb’s explosion, for the consequences of our morality.

As with torture, the same goes for killing. Still, if the numbers get high enough—I just don’t know what to do with those cases.

On the other hand, there are troubling counter examples to thinking that all negative duties have absolute priority. While I couldn’t permissibly kill Bob, could I injure him or destroy his property? Say I cannot bear the costs myself. It seems like I could divert the track in a way that ran over Bob’s toe, or his iPod, in order to save the five. Probably I should too. After all, if there were nothing on the other track then it would be really awful (and intuitively wrong) if I didn’t turn the trolley. How do we make sense of this? At what point does it become wrong to make Bob pay the price of my ‘good deed’?

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  • Steve02476

    Very thought-provoking. I usually find those trolley problems but these are some interesting ways to think about them. Thanks.

  • Fritz

    Choosing (ii) is wrong because it implies a utilitarian judgment about the relative worth of different persons’ lives. It may not be morally imperative to choose (iii), but choosing (iii) is not wrong because a person is entitled to make a judgment about the worth of his own life relative to the life of another. (A third party’s evaluation of that judgment is irrelevant because the third party places himself in the position of choosing (ii).) The moral choice is therefore between (i) and (iii). Choosing to do nothing is the same as choosing (i). But, as I have just argued, (iii) is a possible moral choice. It is irrelevant to the issue of moral choice to say that (iii) is impossible because a mechanical problem precludes self-sacrifice.

  • Sean II

    Is there an “option IV” where you derail the trolley so that it crashes into all six people, thus ensuring an outcome where everyone but you is harmed?

    Because that would be the correct analogy for what happens when you steal from the poor people of rich countries and give to the rich people of poor countries, in such a way as to prop up the latter’s murderous (but hilariously costumed!) dictators.

    • UncleG123

      An excellent observation. Everyone loses, lol. It’s happening everywhere.

  • Stillwater

    At what point does it become wrong to make Bob pay the price of my ‘good deed’?

    To what extent is the dilemma your experiencing due to personifying one of the people on the tracks? Could it be that our judgments are biased in favor the uniquely determined individual rather than a large collection?

    Suppose that Bob was one of the 500 and we uniquely identify him as one of that crowd, while it’s just “some guy” on the other track. Do your intuitions map onto that scenario any differently?

    • http://www.facebook.com/les.nearhood Les Kyle Nearhood

      I would go further, Suppose Bob is an old guy who has lived most of his natural life and the five are children? What is your morality condemns the children through inaction and when Bob discovers that his old life was chosen over that of five children he is so anguished he kills himself? You might think Bob’s feelings are not germane to the discussion but they are. We can make the assumption that MOST adults would not want to be picked over the lives of five kids.

  • UncleG123

    If the son of the man at the switch is on the track with the other five, he would kill Bob. Therefore, of we consider that we are separated by only 7 degrees/migrations, then it is much more likely we have a relative among the five. Switching to kill Bob is a genetic, moral right/obligation, and is highly likely to occur in nature without much random interference.

  • UncleG123

    “Therefore, if” – I should edit before entering.

  • Joseph R. Stromberg

    Option iii, altruistic suicide (if that word is right), doesn’t go very far unless the five people in danger include your spouse, children, grandchildren, etc., or close friends [perhaps your thesis director (joke)]. Then your motive is one of rescuing them and a double-effect argument that your intention is saving concrete persons whom you have reason to protect (as opposed to getting yourself killed ['suicide']) might actually work. (I say ‘might work,’ because double effect has suffered a lot of abuse at the hands of Cold War Thomists.) Your getting killed is a complication, but not your reason. Your reasons involve love and various obligations (and not ‘selfish genes’ all by their microscopic selves).

    There may be an analogy with self-defense and even wars of pure defense, where (at some risk) you repel actual attackers without taking it on yourself to invade and devastate the attackers’ territorial home. Despite its possible merits, only William Godwin, Robert Lewis Dabney, Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin (implicitly), Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, and Jeff Hummel seem to have taken such a position. (The list is not meant to be exhaustive; these are the ones I’ve found so far.)

    And, yes, you can’t kill Bob. He didn’t do anything. In the case given, you can only attack the runaway trolley, if you have the means. Or so it seems to me.

  • UncleG123

    I am letting nature take its course. Personification is merely the stuff of genetics. Why worry about what you do, if you do it out of natural, genetic inclination? Would you cry for Bob, or rejoice for you relative? What would serve whole of nature more respectively.

  • UncleG123

    What would Jesus do? :) (Sorry, couldn’t resist)

    • http://twitter.com/tykewriter Stephen Howlett

      Stop the trolley.

      • UncleG123

        Pure genious! Thank you!

  • UncleG123

    When a mosquito bites me, I swat it. Swat and kill are interchangeable words here. Bob must die. Someone has to swat him.

  • UncleG123

    And I like the fact you say “you can’t kill Bob.” No one is killing him…..we all are.

  • Joseph R. Stromberg

    “… couldn’t resist.”

    Try harder.

    • UncleG123

      Good advice, but pleasure in the results outweighs the criticism. Thanks for responding:)

  • good_in_theory

    Why accept Thompson’s fourth principle?

    “Fourth Principle: A may let five die if the only permissible means he has of saving them is killing himself.”

    Suicide has a lot of trouble being a rational requirement, sure. (Though if we could find rational suicides easily, it would sure make solving all these ‘sacrifice one for the sake of everyone’ problems easier. “Hold off on the auto-asphyxiation, we’ve got a runaway trolley for you.”)

    Quoting:
    “Altruism is by hypothesis not morally required of us.”
    Nice axiom. Why accept it? In fact, isn’t this question begging? Assumption: “major altruism” (read: suicide) is not required. Conclusion: suicide is not required. And then, if you can’t require suicide, you can’t very well require murder, so voila. (Of course, that’s a dubious leap. The ordinal ranking (suicide less odious than killing) is contingent. Surely it’s more odious to make a death row inmate take his own life than an executioner? In any case the ranking depends both upon the contingent psychological effects produced by the killing and the moral status of who is subjected to those effects.)

    I mean, really:”here’s a problem about whether or not you are required to be altruistic.” “Assume you are not required to be altruistic” “Therefore, you are not required to be altruistic.”

    Why can’t suicide be a moral requirement?

    She relaxes her position by saying that whether it is a requirement depends upon our knowledge of whether or not someone is a major altruist. So whether we can require someone’s being killed depends upon whether they would require being killed of themselves.

    Or, to put it otherwise, suicide can be a moral requirement only if it is also a rational requirement (is rationally motivating, whatever jargon) for an individual. But that caveat is irrelevant if suicide (“major altruism”) can be morally required.

    Moral requirements need not be rational requirements, right? (Hume v. Kant, I guess?)

  • Bryan Mills

    In the bystander’s three option variant, it’s not at all clear to me why option (ii) is any less permissible than (iii). If you have no knowledge about the other potential victims, it seems to me that the best choice is a randomized one: for example, you could flip a coin and use it to choose between (ii) and (iii); or roll a weighted die to decide among (i), (ii), and (iii) based on some assumed distribution of the expected social benefit of saving randomly-selected strangers.

    If you do have knowledge – as we usually do in analogous situations, there are even more factors to take into account. Suppose that you are a 25-year-old with a dependent spouse and a child on the way, and you know that Bob is a 96-year-old who lived a full life, has his estate in order, and would encourage you to sacrifice him if he could communicate with you. Is it still better for you to choose option (iii)? I would argue that it is pretty clearly not.

    The trolley problem is too abstract to admit an unambiguous solution. We could argue about concrete instances of the trolley problem – just as we can argue about concrete instances of aid to the poor – but trying to draw absolute inferences from such an abstract problem is meaningless.

    • Richard Chappell

      It’s probably most helpful to suppose that Bob is relevantly similar to yourself. The thought experiment then allows us to clarify our thoughts about the moral significance of the mere fact that one of the people possibly affected is oneself — “all else equal”, as they say. (But I do agree with you in finding it not at all obvious that, given two otherwise equal candidates to shoulder a moral burden, the mere fact that one of the two is me means that I must not choose that the other receives the burden, or even flip a coin.)

  • prasad

    I don’t understand the argument / intuition grounding Thomson’s “fascinating aside.” What exactly is the ‘serious moral defect’ in being willing to sacrifice oneself for the sake of five lives?

  • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

    Jessica,
    Nice post. Let me make a suggestion which, for all I know, is already discussed in the literature. I think the 5 vs. 1 trolley case is tricky for our intuitions because it is structured in such a way as to superficially resemble the Taurek numbers-style cases, i.e. in a big storm the Coast Guard captain can rescue only one of two boats, one with a single person on board and the other with five. Although even this is controversial, most philosophers say rescue the five.

    The trolley case looks like this because both parties are already in danger from the same threat, and when we switch the trolley we are not so obviously kiling Bob, as (in a way) simply rescuing the five. On the other hand, when we take the fat man and throw him on to the track, we more obviously kill him, i.e. we take him from a place of safety and put him where he will certainly be killed. So, we rebel against killing the fat man, but are not so sure about switching the trolley. I don’t think we can switch the trolley, but I too am conflicted about it. Do you think this might be why?

  • Richard Chappell

    “Now we are back to the original Trolley problem but the impermissibility of (ii) remains.”

    Why? (ii) seemed impermissible only because (iii) was [allegedly] a superior option. But once that best option is off the table, what independent grounds are there for thinking that (i) is a superior option to (ii)?

    “morality cannot require me to kill myself to save the five”

    This isn’t so obvious — morality sometimes requires us to die if our life-saving actions would impose greater costs to others, after all. But I guess you’re going to lean heavily on some kind of deontic asymmetry here. (E.g. positive acts are easier to prohibit than to require.)

    Perhaps more pressingly: this fits really awkwardly with the previous step of Thomson’s argument. First we’re told that we can’t impose burdens on others when we could take them ourselves (a very anti-egoistic stance), and now we have this egoistic premise that we can privilege our own interests over others. Of course, the details of the view are logically consistent. But there’s some definite ideological tension there, so I find it a little weird for someone to accept both premises at once. (From a purely impartial standpoint, we should reject both, of course. Each is “partial”, but in opposite directions.)

    Finally I find the language of “mak[ing] Bob pay the price of my ‘good deed’” to be misleading. Obviously the moral end here would be saving five innocent lives, not myself doing a good deed. It’s much more plausible to think that burdens may be placed on Bob for the sake of the former end than for the latter!

    • Jessica Flanigan

      I liked the point about a seeming anti-egoistic/egoistic
      tension. Still, I don’t think this is any more inconsistent than any other
      deontological prohibitions on harming others– we are not entitled to harm
      others without their consent but we can consent to harm ourselves, or not. I
      think that these things look like they are in tension only if you are
      focused on how to weigh interests, but I am not focused on interests; I’m
      focused on rights. True, if you assume that interests (e.g. well being/consequences) are the only things that
      matter morally in this problem then there is something going wrong here, why do
      Bob’s interest trump mine but my interests trump the Fives? The answer is that
      they don’t, but Bob and I have rights to not be killed without our consent and
      these rights are especially weighty.

      If you think the question at the end of the post scores an
      unearned rhetorical point, try this. At what point does it become wrong to harm
      Bob for the sake of others? I think it can’t just be whenever others’ interests
      in harming Bob outweigh Bob’s interest in avoiding harm. This suggests that
      focusing on the weighing of interests is (at best) only part of the story.

  • Marja Erwin

    What if Bob is shouting at you to turn the trolley?

    The explanation, as stated, seems to beg the question. I would like a proof that self-sacrifice can never be morally necessary, but this starts by assuming self-sacrifice can never be morally necessary.

    • Jessica Flanigan

      If Bob is shouting at you to turn the trolley on himself, then I think that it’s fine to do it. Killing is wrong because it violates Bob’s right not to be killed, but if Bob waives that right then it’s permissible. Still, I don’t think it’s morally required even in that case to kill Bob. Thomson gives the example of a surgeon who is asked to kill someone so that his organs can save five. As she notes, no surgeon would do such a procedure, and it would be permissible for a surgeon to refrain even if the suicidal patient consents to the deadly operation.

  • Tracy Coyle

    Sorry, the only choice is i, do nothing. In either ii or iii, you are killing someone.

    • good_in_theory

      Doing nothing is doing something.

    • Marja Erwin

      In i, you are kill five people. How is that better?

      • Marja Erwin

        are killing. headache.

  • Guest

    At what point does it become wrong to make Bob pay the price of my ‘good deed’?
    When if we can reasonably impute consent to Bob, i.e. if we have a reasonable belief that Bob would be willing to sacrifice himself?

    A belief in consent is a valid defence in law against certain criminal charges (e.g. a subjective belief in consent for damages, a reasonable belief for rape). Although it cannot be an excuse for any kind of killing in law, imputed consent seems able to capture at least in part our moral intuition about right and wrong.

    • good_in_theory

      Edit: replied to the named version

  • http://twitter.com/TychosIsland Andrea Marchesetti

    At what point does it become wrong to make Bob pay the price of my ‘good deed’?
    One view is that it would be wrong to impose a burden on Bob if we cannot reasonably impute consent, while it is ok as long as we have a reasonable belief that Bob would be willing to sacrifice himself.

    A belief in consent is a valid defence in law against certain criminal charges (e.g. a subjective belief in consent for damages, a reasonable belief for rape). Although it cannot be an excuse for any kind of killing in law, imputed consent seems able to capture at least in part our moral intuition about right and wrong.

    • good_in_theory

      She addresses this in the paper, saying that it could conceivably be permissible to kill “major altruists” = those who would willingly sacrifice themselves for others.

  • http://www.facebook.com/bradley.gabbard.1 Bradley Gabbard

    I would like to thank Jessica Flanigan for taking the time to respond to the precis I offered over on philosophyetc.net. This argument is part of a larger paper where I argue that self-ownership libertarians cannot endorse the Trolley Intuition (Otsuka and Pincione have had similar concerns and Flanigan recognizes the tension in the above response) and further that the Trolley Intuition creates a strong moral obligation for each of us to aid. Let me take a moment to offer two thoughts about this response and the structure of my argument.

    First, as many commentators above note, there are a number of worries about Thomson’s rejection of the Trolley Intuition that a number of commentators have already noted. Why does the moral choice in the three option case bind the moral choice in the two option case? The two cases are different. If no one is responsible for the three option case unfolding then it is not obvious to me that I must pay the price to save the five rather than someone else. And so on.

    But, more importantly in regards to my argument, I do not think that the Trolley Intuition is as easily to jettison as Thomson believes. In the precis, I simply take the ubiquity of the Trolley Intuition as justification of the moral rightness of diverting the trolley. This is of course implausible on its face; intuition does not create moral rightness. In the extended version of this paper I argue that no plausible moral theory can reject some version of the Trolley Intuition. So, if any plausible theory must embrace some version of the Trolley Intuition then my argument follows.

    The problem with simply rejecting the Trolley Intuition is that the Trolley Case was never the real problem. Foot offered the Trolley problem in the context of considering the Doctrine of Double Effect. Whatever you think of DDE, DDE attempts to justify the killing of innocents in a number of cases: tactical bombing, euthanasia, self-defense killing, abortion in cases of threat to a mother’s health, etc. The Trolley Case is a side effect of attempts to justify a number of other types of killings.

    My own view is that any plausible moral theory needs to have room for these types of killings. Further, if there is room for these types of killings then some version of the Trolley Intuition must also be endorsed (I cannot offer a detailed argument here but, a simple thought is if tactical bombing is justified to save X number of lives then some version of the Trolley Case will also be justified).

    So, if my argument works, rejecting all versions of the Trolley Case is a non-starter for a plausible moral theory. So, for any plausible moral theory, some version of my argument will go through unless one of my other premises is rejected.

    • Jessica Flanigan

      I am also skeptical about DDE in its traditional form, but I think that it is true that intentions and rights will bear on questions of permissibility. Still, it is plausible that the killing of innocents is permissible in some cases (like the innocent threat case where the crazy truck driver is innocent, or maybe in some abortion cases as well) but that in general innocents have rights against being killed unless they are threats.

      The intuition behind this is that innocents have rights against being killed but that those rights are outweighed if the innocents are themselves violating or threatening to violate someone else’s rights against being killed. Just like you have rights against being physicially restrained unless your involuntary bodily spasms pose threats to pedestrians, and so on.

      This is why I doubt the claim that we need to accept the trolley intuition to make sense of these cases, Bob isn’t an innocent threat and there are other resources for making sense of the other cases where killing innocents is permissible. I also think the trolley intuition is independently implausible, and I bet that most people wouldn’t kill Bob in that case whatever they say.

      I also don’t think that tactical bombing is justified to save X number of lives, for what that’s worth. Even if X is extraordinarily high, we should acknowledge that this kind of killing is still wrong. Killing doesn’t become permissible just because a bunch of other people will benefit.

      I wonder, what do you say about Fat Man, or the organ case? I say that all these cases stand and fall together, if you don’t think we can push the Fat Man, why not? If you do think we can push the Fat man, then it looks like you are committed to a very controversial intuition too so why rely on the intuitiveness of the trolley case but reject it for Fat Man? If Fat Man is not permissible, then is the thought just that you can do some things to people for the greater good (turning a trolley, taking some money) but not others (pushing a fat man, taking the organs?)

      • http://www.facebook.com/bradley.gabbard.1 Bradley Gabbard

        A lot going on here. Let’s try point by point:

        1. Must an innocent be the actual threat to justify killing him? I just don’t have this intuition. Consider classic cave cases; the man trapped in the mouth of the cave is not the threat but it seems to me permissible to kill him to facilitate the escape of everyone else. Do you not share this intuition?

        2. There are certainly resources to justify different types of these actions but I wonder why a piecemeal explanation is a) attractive or b) needed. Why do we need a different explanation for tactical bombing, killing in self-defense, the cave case and active euthanasia? They have the same underlying structure: we are killing an innocent in order to achieve some other end. The ends are different in each case, but it is seems right to put them under the same basic rubric. DDE tries to do so, various forms of consequentialism try to do so; why do we need a piecemeal explanation of the justification of the different killings rather than a discussion of the types of goods that can be traded off to achieve the various ends. This is not meant to be a convincing argument, but if things can be put under the same heading then we need a compelling reason to not do so I would think. I am not convinced of my reasoning here so I am open to comments, but something like this thought seems right to me.

        3. It is strange to think that the trolley intuition is implausible; 90% of us at least say that it would be morally permissible to divert. Whether we actually do it were we faced with the choice is beside the point. What is fascinating about the Trolley Case is that the intuition comes so easily; it is only upon reflection of the implications do we start questioning the intuition. Consider the history of the literature. Thomson, Kamm, Foot, etc. have not until recently thought that the Trolley Intuition was wrong; it was data to be accounted for in their moral theory. Thomson gives up on the Trolley Intuition because she cannot find the difference between Trolley and Fat Man. If someone constructed a plausible theory tomorrow to explain the distinction I wonder what her position would be.

        4. I personally cannot imagine a plausible moral theory where tactical bombing is morally impermissible. But, tactical bombing gives rise to the same kind of cases you bring up at the end of the original piece, doesn’t it? So you can either draw the line and say tactical bombing is never justified (which seems to me fetishistic) or it is sometimes justified. If it is sometimes justified then some version of the Trolley Problem will be back in.

        5. I agree that I think Trolley / Fat Man / Transplant stand and fall together and you and I likely just have different intuitions about the set. I think that there are different things that can be said about evaluating the character of the different actors in the three situations but the moral permissibility of the acts will be the same in my view. That said, my argument does not require their equivalence. If someone could construct a theory that can plausibly justify a moral distinction amongst the set then my argument is fine so long as the Trolley Intuition is still morally legitimate.

        Thank you for your thoughts; it is truly appreciated.

        • Jessica Flanigan

          I am curious about the kinds of moral theories you can imagine:
          a) tactical bombing stands and falls with Trolley (4)
          b) Trolley/Fat Man/Transplant all stand and fall together (5)
          c) I cannot imagine a plausible moral theory where tactical bombing is morally impermissible (4)
          d) Therefore Trolley is permissible

          If so, then so too is Fat Man/Transplant right? You cannot imagine a plausible moral theory where it is morally impermissible to murder people and take their organs?

          Another question:
          You say, “It is strange to think that the trolley intuition is implausible; 90% of us at least say that it would be morally permissible to divert.”
          Why can’t I say, ” It is strange to think that the Fat Man intuition is implausible; 90%
          of us at least say that it would be morally wrong to push him.”

          The point is, if you rely on the intuitive pull of Trolley then you will need to account for why our intuitions in Fat Man are wrong. Either way you need a revisionary theory. I actually think that this is fine, that philosophy often forces us to revise our intuitions, but if so, then I wonder about the wisdom of appealing to widely held intuitions in justifying your initial premise, when as you would agree (in the case of people’s intuitions about Fat Man, or compulsory aid) intuitions can be crazy wrong, and they often are.

          • http://www.facebook.com/bradley.gabbard.1 Bradley Gabbard

            1. My preferred moral theory is committed a, b, c & d. But, I don’t think any plausible moral theory must endorse a or b. I do think any plausible moral theory should be committed to the permissibility of tactical bombing and Trolley (unless someone can explain a relevant moral difference between the two). So, my position is not that any plausible moral theory is committed to Fat Man and Transplant (I agree with your worry here, I better not be committed to that!). Thank you for forcing me to be clearer here.

            2. I agree that the argument cannot rely merely on the intuition to establish moral rightness and I am certainly revisionist about moral intuition. I think my argument and response above are pulling in two different directions.

            The initial argument can be read as subjectivist in nature: “If you have the Trolley Intuition here is something that you didn’t realize follows on some minimally controversial assumptions.” Given that a large number of people are either intuitively or theoretically committed to the Trolley Intuition anyway (e.g. consequentialists, Thomson (once upon a time), Foot, Kamm, proponents of DDE, etc.) then I catch a lot of people of a lot of different stripes in the argument’s net. If you aren’t committed to the Trolley Intuition then the argument does not speak to you. So, I can get the conclusion without needing an independent justification of the Trolley Intuition. This is all the precis need be committed to I think.

            The response above makes a stronger claim: any plausible moral theory should be committed to the Trolley Intuition. If I can justify that then I get that everyone ought to be committed to my conclusion (assuming the argument works of course). I am admittedly less confident in this argument. I, of course, think it is roughly right, but what I have said here is a far cry from proving it. Maybe this claim is just too strong for me to prove. But if you reject the absolutist position that the killing of an innocent in the service of some other good/s is always wrong then my argument is in play I think. Thank you again for your time and thoughts.

          • Jessica Flanigan

            This is a good reply. I like talking about this topic so I hope you don’t mind if I go on about it a bit more. I really do struggle with this negative/positive duties stuff, it’s a hard question I for one am happy that people are still taking it up because I think that Trolley problems do matter and they can help us get clearer on our theories, whatever they are. So take these comments as friendly and of course, no need to reply, but here is my thought about your response.

            I think we have gotten ourselves to this point:
            Here’s you: If Trolley then Aid, Trolley, Therefore Aid
            and Me: If Trolley then Push Fat Man, Don’t push fat man, therefore not Trolley.

            Why should we take Trolley as our intuitive fixed point and not Fat Man? I have suggested, via Thomson, that Trolley has problems of its own without even getting Fat Man into it. In any case, even if the argument is just conditional it is still an objection to your argument if the antecedent not only implies compulsory aid, but pushing fat men!
            Much easier i think is to just deny Trolley. Note that this doesn’t threaten your conclusion. I don’t deny compulsory aid with this argument, Trolley isn’t needed to get compulsory aid but if you do use Trolley you are stuck with the Fat Man.

        • http://www.facebook.com/les.nearhood Les Kyle Nearhood

          Cannot agree at all, every such case is different and every single one must be considered freshly in it’s own right. A sweeping viewpoint which would guide a person on all of these would not be sufficient and would border upon becoming a sort of ideology.

      • http://independent.academia.edu/DannyFrederick Danny Frederick

        A couple of quick points.

        Thomson rejects DDE because she says that whether or not an action is permissible cannot depend upon the intention with which it is done. I am sure she says this in ‘The Realm of Rights,’ though I cannot at the moment find the reference. But she says in a number of articles.

        In ‘The Trolley Problem’ (1985, Yale Law Journal) Thomson says it is permissible to switch the trolley on to Bob to save five but impermissible to throw the fat man under the trolley to save five. The difference, she says there, is that switching the trolley is not itself a violation of anyone’s rights (though it has a rights-violation as a consequence), whereas throwing the fat man off the bridge is itself a rights-violation.

        • Jessica Flanigan

          Just to clarify, I wasn’t saying that Thomson thinks that intention matters for permissibility, I was saying that in some cases I think that even though I don’t sign on to all of DDE.

          Or in any case, I think that the view that intention can matter, though it is unpopular, has a lot going for it, but that was just me saying my own view of DDE, not meant to attribute anything to Thomson.

          It’s true that Thomson once thought what you said, but in this article she is sketching the arguments that gave her second thoughts. She writes “if those arugments succeed then… [the] letting five die vs. killing one principle: A must let five die if saving them requires killing B, is safe against the objection I made to it in drawing attention to Bystanders Two Options” (the original trolley problem.)

  • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

    I’ve never been a big fan of trolley problems. The idea that we should take our intuitions in bizzarre cases as giving us good grounds to revise our judgments about a host of other more ordinary cases has always seemed to me to be precisely backwards.

    But I’ll play along anyway. I feel the pull of the intuition that in the three option case, option 2 is wrong. I’m not sure that this would be my final considered judgment, but I do feel the pull.

    What if we reduce the option-set down to 2 again in a somewhat different way though, leaving only options 2 and 3 (i.e. the trolley hits Bob or the trolley hits you)? There are two different ways to run this. In the first case, the trolley is aiming at Bob and you have the option of pulling the switch to divert it to yourself. In the second, it’s aiming at you and you can divert it to Bob.

    I suspect Thomson, and you, and pretty much everybody, would agree that if the trolley is aiming at Bob, it is permissible but not obligatory to divert it to yourself. But what about the other case? My intuition here is that you’re permitted to divert the trolley as an exercise of self-defense. If a cannonball is heading at you, you’re allowed to duck, even if that means the person behind you will be hit.

    If you agree that the kill-Bob option is permissible in this version of the two-option case, does this tell us anything interesting about what’s permissible in the three-option case?

    • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

      Matt,
      Re: your first sentence. Can deontologists then dismiss arguments that rights aren’t absolute on this same basis, i.e. we shouldn’t revise this view because we would admittedly torture an innocent person to death to save a million lives? Can we just say that rights are absolute in the ordinary run of cases? If so, I would be hapyt to hear it, but I’m not sure this is consistent with the classical liberal perspective..

      • http://www.sandiego.edu/~mzwolinski Matt Zwolinski

        Can deontologists then dismiss arguments that rights aren’t absolute on this same basis?

        I think it would take a bit more than what I said to justify this conclusion. My claim was that bizzarre cases don’t give us good grounds for revising our moral intuitions in non-bizzarre cases. So, from the fact that killing is permissible in the trolley case, we shouldn’t conclude it’s permissible in most other cases. That seems to me importantly different from concluding that the prohibition against killing is absolute.

        You also say that you’re not sure how the view you think I might have is consistent with the classical liberal perspective. But I don’t see why. I suppose you’re thinking that my comment suggests that Trolley Car problems aren’t a good reason for thinking that rights are not absolute, and that classical liberalism requires that we think of rights as non-absolute. But even if all that is true, the fact that one particular argument for the non-absolute nature of rights fails doesn’t mean that there are no good arguments for the non-absolute nature of rights. From ~(P->Q) we can’t infer ~Q.

        • MARK_D_FRIEDMAN

          You correctly inferred my point. And, I agree with your second paragraph. But I also think that one of the major, most commonly heard arguments offered against the absolute nature of rights is the one I cited. I am sure there are other arguments, but they may not be persuasive.

    • good_in_theory

      What if both myself and Bob had the power to divert the death trolley, but the game was such that if we both suicided, we both died, and if we both ducked, we both died. This is a sort of prisoner’s dilemma.

      One way to think about this is that no one has a moral right to ownership over the decision of who survives in these cases. Whoever does have the right in the dilemma is being given a rent arbitrarily. (Of course, this raises the interesting question of when the property right over the decision is or isn’t legitimately held.)

      Perhaps the moral way to solve any of these dilemmas is to think about assigning the costs via a collective decision procedure. Some options: Sortition. Third party judgment. Rational consensus. Ranked preference voting. An auction. Let’s make it a Dutch auction to save time… (note how here, material inequalities will obviously shape outcomes. Paging Sandel?)

      Perhaps morality “requires” taking one of these third person or “I/thou” perspectives, and disavowing your arbitrary property right in making a decision about the outcome of the tragic situation. You have no right to decide who lives or dies. Rather, “society” does. What’s morally required is a particular decision procedure or method of allocating the decision making power, not a particular decision.

      Thinking of auctioning the right to decide these problems (in an auction open to both the directly affected and the indirectly affected) strikes me as an interesting thought experiment which highlights some perverse things. (He who is rich or has rich friends, survives. But he who is “most valuable” (to society’s most wealthy) will survive. Paging Dr. Sandel again.)

    • Jessica Flanigan

      This is a great case. The first case is easy, and I agree, no obligation to take the trolley for poor old Bob. The second case, wehre the trolley is aiming at me and I divert it to Bob, I’m not sure that self-defense entitles us to kill other people when they themselves do not pose threats to us.

      I do think that you can permissibly kill even innocent threats (like Thomson’s case of the truck driver who is innocent but has been drugged, causing him to steer his truck towards me, then I can shoot him to save myself from the truck). I also think that you can permissibly remove yourself from danger even if doing so exposes others to risk or harm (as in the cannonball case)

      But exposing non-threatening innocents to danger and harm? There my intuition parts ways with yours. I don’t think that you could, for example, redirect the cannonball or throw someone else in front of it, just because you could duck it if someone was behind you. You couldn’t throw someone in front of the crazy truck driver to protect yourself, and you cannot permissibly murder someone and take his heart just because you need a transplant. In all these cases, you are exposed to danger and you do not merely remove yourself from danger, you kill someone else to do so. That seems like murder right?

      So um.. yeah, I guess I disagree that the kill-Bob option is permissible in second case of the two-option version. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be excused if you did it, maybe you could, but it would definitely be wrong to do so.

  • Joseph R. Stromberg

    I second Zwolinski’s motion that lifeboat situations tend to be misleading with respect to situations likely to occur. Arguing ‘trespass’ theory with an overzealous follower of W. Block while clinging to the edge of a fifth-floor condo patio is not a happy prospect. (Eddie Izzard’s

    ‘Cake or Death?’ is easier.)

    One hardly expects that torturing someone will often (or ever) save five million others. A concrete case that comes to mind is this: to save 200,000 Japanese civilians would it have been okay for someone to torture Harry Truman in early August 1945? Appealing as it may be, there are some practical problems even here (e.g., if Truman changed his mind, there were other officials who would not have and thus the operation goes through).

    Prisoner’s Dilemmas are almost as potentially misleading as lifeboat races, since it is never explained who imprisoned these ciphers, on what right, etc. At best we get some idea of a *strategy* (or set of strategies) prisoners might adopt. Good, one supposes, as far as it goes. But like Les Barker’s snails, our moral conclusions have not yet arrived.

    • Damien S.

      Disagree on the last paragraph. I don’t know what you mean by ‘ciphers’, they have nothing to do with the PD, and the setup is quite spelled out: the prison guard, cop, or prosecutor offers the choices, for clear reasons. And the core message of the PD is that sometimes individual optimization leads to bad outcomes; the prisoners would be better off cooperating (with each other) yet their individual incentives make it rational for each to defect. That’s a very powerful and general fact.

  • Jodpur

    There are 2 problematic assumptions here.
    1) One is that inaction is not a form of action. When you let the trolley kill the 5, you are acting. Why should those five people pay for your ‘good deed’ of respecting Bob’s autonomy?
    2) The question ‘why should Bob pay for my good deed’ is confused. Thompson appears to be treating the decision as a kind of moral transaction–I do a good deed and get the psychological bonus points thereof, therefore I can fairly make this choice if I willingly pay the costs, I can’t force an unwilling 3rd party to pay the costs. This is the wrong way of thinking about the original dilemma, which simply forced you to choose a direction for the trolley.
    (PS: The torture problem is the best example of why these simplistic trolley problems can be dangerous–many people were led to make cases for torture, which subsequently influenced public policy. All the while, the ideal-scenerio that made the philosophical problem work (either you torture or the city is blown up) never exists in real life–indeed, torture usually is counterproductive.)

  • saraeanderson

    There’s better and worse, not just okay and not-okay. Maybe I’m not absolute enough about this, but I look at it as which choice would be best. None of the choices are all that great. That’s where most of us are making our choices.

  • Joseph R. Stromberg

    “I also don’t think that tactical bombing is justified to save X number of lives…”

    Second the motion. Recent big moral adventures in the Middle East, for example, would seem to suggest that the consequentialist math is seldom very accurate. (Not that we should decide these things on the math, anyway.)

    • Sean II

      You’ve hit an important point. To have anything to do with anything that has anything to do with any plausible scenario that might ever arise, this question should be structured in some such messy way as this.

      Option 1 – 15% chance of killing no one, 85% of killing five.

      Option 2 – 5% chance of killing no one, 95% of killing only Bob.

      Option 3 – X% of killing no one, Y% of killing only you, 5% of killing everyone.

      I’ll bet if you ask 1,000 people this way you get some very different “intuitions”.

    • good_in_theory

      Since when has ‘consequentialist math’ guided middle east policy?

  • Anonymous Monkey

    See two flaws in the way the post is argued:

    1) Action and Inaction are treated separately. The underlying premise of the post’s argument is that inaction can not be immoral. Such a contention is likely necessary for any form of libertarian philosophical argument. I don’t see the point of the debating the finer points of the scenario when it’s clear the problem is decided on whether morality or immorality can be assigned to inaction.

    2) Assuming that you know who everyone is in the scenario colors the outcome. It’s a better construction to say there are seven actors, call them them Person 1 through Person 7. Persons 1-5 are one set of tracks. Person 6 is on the other. Person 7 is at the switch. Now ask yourself if you have a an equal likelihood of being an of the 7 people, what’s the moral action? One choice is that you have a 5 in 7 chance of dying and one you have 1 in 7 chance of dying. What do you chose? Which one does Bob chose that that Bob doesn’t know which actor he is. This is a Rawslian construction of the problem but it seems the most appropriate to me.

    Additionally, giving Bob a name and letter the other 5 people remain nameless is rhetorical slight of hand to get people to focus on the one person rather than the 5. It exploits cognitive biases in the human mind but it not the basis of a serious argument.

  • http://marjaerwin.livejournal.com/ Marja Erwin

    I for one take issue with the preference for inaction. In the real world, people are facing pervasive, often systemic, violence. I want to do something about that. And when intersecting oppressions make it hard or impossible to act perfectly, sometimes we just ought to do the best we can, short of adding new violence.

  • Joseph R. Stromberg

    “Since when has ‘consequentialist math’ guided middle east policy?”

    It was a central theme of a loud and ongoing propaganda campaign from late 2001 down to March 2003. It was *said* to be a big moral concern of the administration and its allies in what we might call the War Party. Whether it actually ‘guided’ them, I can’t say.

    • good_in_theory

      Doesn’t everyone claim the benefits outweigh the costs of whatever they’d like us to do?

  • Ugewis

    This is not a non-problem. And how can a counterargument be brilliant if it deliberately changes the premises (adding a third track leading to yourself)???

    For me this boils down to the common problem of philosophical arguments being so simplified that it does not reflect the real world. There are very few occasions where the kill one vs five people is so clear cut. Because if it is so clear cut as here, it is hopeless to argue that you should not divert the trolley to Bob. (For me it is also a bit false, since the premise is that you do nothing if you do not divert the trolley, but that is also an action too, which libertarians are otherwise swift to point out – “not making a choice is also a choice”.)

    The important thing is what real world connotations actions will have!

    It IS actually, to most people, morally correct to kill someone if it could save (more than 1) people with (say an imaginary but deadly) sickness. BUT: it would deeply affect the quality of life of most people in the society. In a society where anyone could be chosen to die for others, everyone would fear to be picked, probably even if the risk to be picked would be lower than dying from the sickness. In the same way, most peoplke argue against nuclear power or for spiked tyres in an irrational way – the single nuclear mishap is more feared than the constant cancer deaths from coal and oil emissions; single car accidents are more frightening than more frequent deaths from road emissions from spikes, etc etc.

  • Ugewis

    Sorry, of course I meant to say that for me the trolley problem is a non-problem, but with very few implications for real world actions.

  • Robert Steel

    Jessica,

    I’m curious to press you a bit about what you say in the last paragraph about the numbers getting large; ever since Trolley cases were first presented to me in undergrad I had the following worry. Namely:

    1) For some arbitrarily large N on the other tracks, it is morally required to re-direct the train toward (and kill) Bob in order to save them.

    2) If there is some number N such that if they are on the other tracks it would become mandatory to re-direct toward (and kill) Bob, the only number which possibly makes sense is 2.

    I take point 1 to be difficult to seriously contest (imagine the multitudes of the world all stretched out on that one track, and then that Bob guy over on the other), but if it is allowed then a lexical ordering of Bob’s right not to be killed over everyone else’s right to survive seems right out. But once a lexical ordering is out, then that means we have to be dealing with quantities on the same scale. If that’s so, then it seems that any weighting of their interests other than impersonal equality looks bizarre, and hence 2 seems plausible. Thoughts?

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  • Matt Pierce

    The distinctions between our possibly divergent reactions to the trolley problem, the fat man problem, and the transplant problem are founded in principles of agency. We live our lives in society, I think, fundamentally on the presumption that persons will not intentionally do things which cause us harm without our consent. That presumption is crucial to the exercise of agency within society, and thus crucial for the efficient functioning of society as a whole; therefore, the preservation of that presumption is an important moral guide. This is why action vs. inaction is a relevant distinction: inaction preserves agency by allowing persons to suffer only those consequences for which they have willingly accepted the foreseeable risks, whereas action will intentionally cause someone harm without their consent to the risk of that harm. This is borne out in each of the above-noted examples:
    (i) trolley: the five people aboard the trolley have exercised their agency such that they have accepted the foreseeable risk that the trolley could be in an accident that would cost them their lives. As such, refusing to divert the trolley would be moral because it is consistent with respecting the agency of those persons who will suffer the consequences. Conversely, Bob may have been standing on the other track precisely because he knew the trolley was not on that track (thus making a diversion of the track a violation of Bob’s agency).
    (ii) fat man: the agency of the passengers is the same as the above example. In this case, though, pushing a man onto the track is an even more clear violation of the fat man’s agency than in case (i), since a person does not by standing at the terminal accept the risk that he will be pushed.
    (iii) surgeon: similarly, a person submitting to surgery does not accept the risk that they will be murdered for their organs (they accept the risk of dying accidentally through surgery; but that is a different risk).
    From this perspective, inaction is moral in cases (ii) and (iii) because the efficient functioning of society depends on inaction in those cases: otherwise people would lose the ability to reliably stand at a trolley station, or reliably attend for surgical procedures. Respect for agency will not solve every such dilemma (as shown in example (i), where there may be competing exercises of agency), and the identification of what risks have been accepted will be difficult in some cases; but it at least illuminates the basis for our intuition in not simply treating each of these dilemmas as morally equivalent.

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  • martinbrock

    The dilemma is incredibly contrived, and the whole discussion seems sophomoric to me, but I’ll add my dubious wisdom to the mix.

    First, the dilemma has no “correct” resolution for every libertarian throughout space-time. We cannot solve this sort of ethical problem conclusively with mathematical precision through a deductive process beginning with unassailable first principles. Applying mathematical rigor to this sort of problem involves an incredible category error. Rigorous reasoning persuades me that the square root of two is irrational, but we aren’t discussing an abstraction like the Real Numbers here.

    Does Bill or anyone else have a right not to be struck by a runaway trolley? No. This “right” is nonsensical. Bill has no more right to this expectation than any of the five. A runaway trolley is not a sentient being responsible for the moral consequences of its trajectory. By presumption, someone must be struck by this trolley. The destruction is an act of God. An act of God does not meaningfully “violate rights”. The rights we’re discussing govern interactions between men, not interactions between man and God.

    Having very limited control over the trolley’s trajectory, so that a person may guide it toward Bill rather than the five, does not make the person responsible for the inevitable destruction. This control only confronts the person with a very unenviable dilemma. He must play God a bit to exercise the control, but the inevitable destruction is nonetheless an act of God, not an act of the man confronting the dilemma.

    The question is not whether a man at the switch may rightfully redirect the trolley toward Bill. The question is whether one may rightfully prosecute this man for murder if he does so, and I have no trouble answering this question. We may argue endlessly about what the man should do, but if I sat on his jury, knowing only the circumstances described here, you could never persuade me to convict this man of murder. Rightful acts are not always so cut and dried.

    I won’t avoid the question of what I would do myself. I’d change the trolley’s trajectory, not because I have logically deduced the correct resolution from a few axiomatic principles handed down by Murray Rothbard on stone tablets but because on the horns of this unfortunate dilemma, changing the trajectory seems the right decision to me in my gut.

    If you generalize from this decision, concluding that I would also drain all of the blood of a man with a rare blood type to save five others requiring transfusions, you reason illogically in the wrong direction. Generalizations imply specifications, not the other way around. I do not accept the general conclusion to which you leap with this wayward step, and I do not violate any principle of logic by refusing to accept it.

    On the contrary, a man violate principles of logic by insisting that I accept such a generalization. My gut feelings may reflect general principles implying the former decision without implying the latter. Perhaps I would not drain the man’s blood, because the circumstances do not compel me to act on anyone else’s behalf to avoid their death. The other five may join forces to drain the unfortunate man’s blood themselves, so my intervention is not required. I do not confront the dilemma myself. Would I convict the five of murder? Maybe I would, but I wouldn’t reach the conclusion with a slide rule.

    But I don’t pretend to know these general principles consciously, and I’ll never know all of the principles guiding my behavior, just as Murray Rothbard can never know all of the ethical principles that ought to guide everyone’s behavior. The hubris involved in deriving human ethics from a few, simple, axiomatic principles is incredible.

  • UncleG123

    Let’s move beyond the sophmoric and into the crux of the matter. I would like to change two of the variables to better discuss this problem in a way the affects society today. Regarding those on the track: The five are standing on the tracks with signs that say, ” I can’t feed my children without a welfare check,” and “Yes! I’m having babies to get a check.” The one guy on the other track is a tax paying conservative libertarian. And then, to make it more sticky, The five guys on the track are taxpaying, conservative libertarians without signs, and as a matter of fact you can’t even see them on the track, and the one person on the track is the guy with the signs. What now???? I still say – STOP THE TRAIN.

  • martinbrock

    Suppose we don’t distinguish Bob from the other five. Suppose Bob is in the path of the trolley along with them. I have a rope strong enough to lift only five to safety. When I toss down the rope, all six grab it.

    The six have no time to choose a sacrificial lamb among themselves, by agreeing to draw lots or something. Knowing that the rope will break if I try to pull everyone out, I pull out my pistol and shoot one of the six. Maybe I shoot Bob, maybe someone else.

    My only other option is to let them all die. Essentially, I impose a lottery and draw the lots for them by choosing my target. I don’t know any of these people, so my choice can only be essentially random.

    The point here is that the unfortunate one is any one of the six, one of whom must die to save the other five, as opposed to a specific person dying to save five other specified persons.

    Does this formulation of the dilemma make a difference?

  • ben

    “It seems like I could divert the track in a way that ran over Bob’s toe,
    or his iPod, in order to save the five. Probably I should too.”

    Yes, you should.
    But Bob should be able to sue you for compensation afterwards.

    What’s moral or immoral, and what should be legal or illegal, are not the same question – even if some people (especially on the left) like to pretend they are.