I did the problems under the assumption that "pulling the lever" was an act, while doing nothing was not acting. Implied legal (and moral) liabilities made a difference in my choices.
Legally perhaps, but morally, I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference.
It's a binary decision with two outcomes, in my personal view it is irrelevant which of the outcomes is caused by physical action and which by inaction (at least, supposing that you have enough time to think about what to do - obviously, if you have to react in a split second, it's understandable to be biased towards inaction because you may need more time to make the right decision, but that's not the point of these problems in the way they are posed).
If you have enough time to think what to do, inaction is a conscious choice and if it does more harm than good, you are guilty of not choosing action.
You go from passively letting someone die to actively killing someone. Which is a major difference.
Now, you might think that it isn't given enough time, but it's easy to argue that you're currently letting kids die in Africa by your inaction (or Ukrainians or homeless people etc.). Being slightly at fault for someones death is basically a permanent state of affairs, whereas actively killing someone is something few people would be willing to do. It definitely makes a difference.
Consider this version: there is someone on the track and if I don't act, they will almost certainly die. Or I can act and almost certainly save them, but it sends the trolley somewhere unexpected.
If I were a professional rail operator, I could take action. I know how to operate the switch, I know where both of the lines go, I can contact the trolley operator to let them know what happened. As a bystander, I would not take action. Maybe it would save that person, but dooms all the passengers on the trolley. Maybe someone had it under control and I'm throwing a wrench in their plans. In general, we probably don't want random bystanders to be messing with the operation of heavy machinery.
Sometimes there is a duty to act: if I am babysitting a child and they are suffering in the cold, I better bring them somewhere warm. I may have some responsibility if I see someone suffering in the cold and I have an extra blanket that I could give them. But I am not responsible for buying blankets to give out every time it is cold, nor am I responsible for throwing railroad switches. In those cases, I am more culpable for my actions than my failure to act.
>Being slightly at fault for someones death is basically a permanent state of affairs, whereas actively killing someone is something few people would be willing to do. It definitely makes a difference
It only makes a difference in the eyes of the beholder, not for those actually dying
Not thinking too hard about reality because reality is nasty is something of a huge bug in the human cognition. Trying hard to not know anything is even desirable from that point of view: it's not neglect if you never bothered getting to a state where you are capable of being responsible for anything
> It only makes a difference in the eyes of the beholder, not for those actually dying
Unfortunately, that's the one (not) making the decision in this case.
> Not thinking too hard about reality because reality is nasty is something of a huge bug in the human cognition.
Is, though? I mean, in general we should strive to improve the world, but does getting overwhelmed by all the bad things that you should be doing something about really doesn't help.
Maybe if we were overwhelmed by all the bad things that we should be doing something about it would eventually lead us to a point where we would be doing something instead of just living our lives doing nothing (for the most part)?
If we are already talking about changing the human cognition, might as well add an ability to function while being aware of the issues
I have choice paralysis while buying pants. I'm 100% capable of grabbing a pair and swiping the plastic rectangle. But I just don't know a good solution. I'm afraid of picking wrong.
And that's just pants. Hell, even in math -- the most rigorous subject ever -- there are undecidable problems. Asking me to decide squishy issues of who lives and dies, who I should spent resources helping (including myself), etc...that's so many orders of magnitude more complex, so many immediate and cascading future consequences, of unimaginable import. It's crushing, and maybe without a correct (or even good) answer! It's pants ultra out there. If you make me internalize all the issues, then the only decision I'll make is which corner to lay by in the fetal position.
The only idyllic "human cognition" fix here is basically omniscience. And that kinda feels like cheating, y'know?
The trolley problem is set up in a specific way for a specific reason: the person standing next to the lever has no barriers to action, and comprehends the immediate consequences of their choice. This is not so for the kids in Africa example you give.
The trolley problem does not extend readily to systems involving incomplete information or some kind of inaccess to enacting a solution. That is why moral philosophers despise it as an illustrative example -- armchair ponderers apply it with gross negligence to the context and nuance present, so it ends up illustrating nothing much except ignorance for the details of the thought experiment.
> I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference.
By pulling the level, one is intentionally killing a person, to save five. In more general terms, a life is taken away for the greater good of society.
A foundation of societies (modern ones, and I guess, some more than others) is that taking a life away has highly specific restrictions, which are usually justified by the person doing harmful acts (representing a danger to other people). To put it in another way, any citizen has the guarantee that, unless they do something harmful, they're safe. It's a contract between the citizen and the society.
By pulling the lever to save one, the contract is broken. To be consistent with the societal principle, it should be the person on the alternate track to decide whether the lever should be pulled, not an observer.
(The above reasoning is based on a very generic vision of the law. If anybody has some details, they're very welcome :))
Yes, it was broken, but by someone else, not me. I am not at (moral) fault for someone else breaking the contract.
But if I pull the lever (or pushed a fat man onto the track that would halt the train), I am the one who is responsible for the resulting death, which makes me the one who broke the contract.
That's the major dilemma here, because pulling the lever is the utilitarian-correct choice that saved more lives, but whoever pulled the lever went from being innocent to being a murderer.
Interestingly the website poll indicates two thirds of people would not pull the lever to have the train run over themselves to save five people. So if you ask the guy on the other track, he seems unlikely to assent to pull the lever in time to save the other people.
No, but I almost never pulled the lever anyway and it cost 80 souls to "solve philosophy". It was almost more but I didn't quite save the sentient robots because I didn't believe they were really sentient.
You probably use a consequentialist meta-ethical framework. This is great -- I do too -- but in a deontological or virtue-based system it may or may not work out this way. We've already got an example of such a deontological system here: if one takes the (somewhat unusual but not unheard of) view that legality implies morality, then there's a moral difference because there's a legal difference.
The trolley problem is meant precisely to highlight these differences, and I think it's one of the best arguments for consequentialism. In my less charitable moments, I like to refer to the concept of privileging inaction as an informal fallacy. It's not really, though; it's just that folks have different philosophical starting points.
Then again there are also deontological aka categorical morality frameworks that see pulling the lever as acceptable, that it is not “killing” but the life of the man in the other line is lost as a secondary effect, which must be gravely considered. There are yet other versions of the trolley problem that have you push a man in the way of the trolley to stop it and save the five. Sometimes people pose that variant as though it must be accepted as morally equivalent, but I find the importance lies in why we find the situation different.
In the deontological view, both pulling the lever and inaction may be perfectly permissible.
Consider: Who knows what happens? It's perfectly possible the problem description lied, and the opposite thing happens. Either way real life doesn't come with problem descriptions. Since "what happens" is profoundly inaccessible, the more important question is what you wanted and why.
So, it's permissible to redirect the train away from one and towards many, if directing it away from the one was what you wanted. It's equally permissible to redirect the train away from the many and towards the one, if directing it away from the many was what you wanted. It's easy to imagine a world where you got what you wanted, but the bad thing that looked like would happen as a side effect didn't happen. Maybe that's the one we live in.
However, if you really wanted a specific person on the track to die, then you should pull it away from them. Not for their sake, but for yours. What happens is still uncertain, but the important thing is that you did not act on this bad desire.
(By the way, virtue ethics is just a stupid "third way" branding exercise. To say goodness isn't derived from outcomes is fine. To say it is, is at least a coherent position. But thinking you can dodge that problem by talking about "virtues" instead is just nonsense.)
There's a version of the problem that tries to highlight this:
A runaway trolley is heading down the tracks toward five workers who will all be killed if the trolley proceeds on its present course. Next to you is a stranger who happens to be very large. The only way to save the lives of the five workers is to push this stranger onto the tracks where his large body will stop the trolley. The stranger will die if you do this, but the five workers will be saved.
Does the act of physically pushing a person onto the tracks make it different than pulling a lever?
To me, that version just highlights how far-fetched it is to actually find yourself in this situation with all the provided knowledge about the situation and confidence that you're not mistaken about or missing any important details.
It's so far-fetched that it's intended to be a thought experiment rather than a role play, which I think people miss. The <i>entire point</i> is to factor out all those innumerable details which complicate every real-life situation to see if there are underlying principles that can be illuminated. It's not about whether it's a trolley switch or a gun or a baby-grinding machine, it's about if there's an answer to how many babies you're willing to grind up and for what.
But it’s reasonable to question the usefulness of any supposed insights gained from thinking through one’s answers to the trolley problem. It’s quite conceivable that no insights can be extended at all to any scenario in the real world.
Inaction is overwhelming if you think about it. by inaction you are guilty of every sufering person around you. And you can expand that pool by saying that your inaction to find out more sufering people is also part of your guilt. of course provided you are already not doing your max right now to help tham. but hey, youre on HN, so i assume you still got free time to spare ;)
just wanted to add that inability to help EVERYONE, should not deter you from helping anyone. you should not feel guilty that you are helping one person but leaving everyone else in trouble. One is better than zero.
> I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference.
One reason could be because your presence at this railroad switch is exceptional or at least unusual in some way. Maybe its worth considering what would happen if you weren't there at all.
When working in a new codebase, it's generally better to assume that something odd is the way it is for a reason, rather than changing it to something that seems right (easier to understand) to you. This is because in the real world, there is so much you don't / can't yet know about a situation that you're thrown in to.
I guess this is kind of reflected in the switch example where its 5 people that tied themselves to the railroad vs. one who didn't, and something like 85% "choose" the 5. How do you know how they got there? That implies so much prior knowledge and background that isn't really considered in the oversimplified "choices" in the website. Maybe they were forced to tie themselves to the railroad at gunpoint, or maybe it's a weird death-by-train suicide cult.
> How do you know how they got there? That implies so much prior knowledge and background that isn't really considered in the oversimplified "choices" in the website. Maybe they were forced to tie themselves to the railroad at gunpoint, or maybe it's a weird death-by-train suicide cult.
This kind of reasoning really defeats the point of the thought experiment, which is to construct a scenario where those considerations aren't a factor so we can reason about ethics and moral intuitions without the greater complexity of real-world situations.
I think you have it backwards. This kind of reasoning is actually why people do thought experiments. If you don't consider anything else, then the answer to the original problem is an easy math problem - one person getting killed is better than five people getting killed. It's only when you start making considerations that the thought experiment starts to gain value as a tool. Do I have more responsibility for acting rather than not acting? Who are these people anyway? Why are they there? You start asking yourself these questions and thinking about how your answer to the problem changes with them and it helps you to understand how you (and others) actually make ethical choices in the real world, which is the whole point, in my opinion.
I disagree - I think that "reasoning about moral intuitions" is completely useless if you're attempting to reason about them in utter isolation and with the assumption that the subject is omniscient.
It's like economists assuming perfectly reasonable actors in markets, or physicists assuming a perfectly spherical object that ignores wind resistance.
They're toy problems that don't match reality at all, and the value is dubious at best as anything other than a very gentle intro to the subject.
Here's a thought experiment - How many people do you think would actually make the choice they state they will make if you present them the trolley scenario in real life with no warning? People who say they will pull the lever are fooling themselves.
1. They won't know how to read tracks
2. They won't know how the lever works
3. They don't know for sure that anyone will die: those five people might be able to move off the tracks just fine themselves
4. If they do pull the lever they're almost certainly going to get arrested or troubled by the legal system, because they fucked with shit and someone died afterwards (the courts won't give a shit that "they thought five other people might have died!").
5. For all they know the trolley operator can stop just fine, why would anyone be about get hurt?
6.... on and on.
Basically - you're setting up an impossible framework, the results (even if you get them) are useless because they're only valid in that impossible framework.
If the results of the real world never match the results of the framework you've set up, what is the value of that framework? It's just a shitty model with bad reproducibility. We have lots of those.
So what's your alternative, throw your hands up and proclaim ethical reasoning to be impossible, nothing is true, everything is permitted, and it doesn't matter what you do?
All models are wrong but that doesn't make them useless.
I much prefer: "All models are wrong but some models are useful". For example - Flat earth is a model that is both wrong and useless.
My claim is that the trolley problem is useless. It asks people to make a guess about how they would behave, but that guess is predicated on a set of initial conditions that are impossible to fulfill (omniscience is a bitch to get in real life).
How does gathering all that incorrect data help you? What ethical reasoning are you trying to tease out here?
Here's one you might love - "if the earth is flat and you reach the edge, would you jump?"
Now lets just categorize everyones answer to the that question.... and: Hold the phone! The earth isn't flat? It doesn't matter? It turns out this question has basically no relevance to anything!
I think the alternate is to not try to be a railroad operator in an emergency when you might make the emergency worse or take on huge liability.
If you are a professional trolley network controller then you have the judgement and the duty to operate/not operate the lever. I think that few people would question the ethics of a professional operator flipping the switch to save the most people.
The value is in training your ethical understanding so you can make better choices in real world scenarios. If you can't answer trolley problems and other thought experiments in a way that is ethically consistent, how can you hope to make ethical choices in the real world with all its complexity?
It's really very similar to the reason physicists use simplified models, and the value of physics, even when it assumes a perfectly spherical cow, shouldn't need to be stated.
I always took it that the point of the Trolly Problem was to demonstrate that moral problems can be difficult, or perhaps even inscrutable, in a way that confounds things like ethical clarity and consistency.
> When working in a new codebase, it's generally better to assume that something odd is the way it is for a reason, rather than changing it to something that seems right (easier to understand) to you.
But isn't that's just because when you find yourself in a new codebase it's generally because you will be in a long-term relationship with the other contributors to that codebase, and thus it makes sense to be cooperative? If you were dropped into a new codebase in a hypothetical scenario like the trolley problem where you only need to make a single choice without any expectation of ongoing interaction with the relevant parties, then you might very well just do the quickest and dirtiest change to the codebase to accomplish your immediate goal.
Because the real world is more complex than a lever, and there are many unknowns in how either physical or human manifestations respond to actions, and doing nothing removes your intent from the mix.
A very clear example of this is medicine with the "do no harm" principle - that the actions of the physician should be chosen to minimize the scenarios of harming the patient under any circumstance - under chance, under lack of patient compliance, etc.
Furthermore, the actions in the real world have also different experiences and meanings. Its easy to think about pulling a lever to kill 1 instead of 5, but not easy to think of killing one to harvest their organs and save other 5, though they are, with a lot of abstraction, "equivalent moral actions".
The trolley problem is usually phrased with a "bystander" making the decision, but is simplified to the point of ignoring most of what is important about being a bystander, in ways that makes people's moral intuitions look unnecessarily silly precisely because it's an artificially simplified scenario. In particular, typically bystanders in the real world are both numerous and uninformed. As a result, assuming that each bystander has a randomly biased estimate of the truth, if everyone followed the simple logic of pulling the lever iff they believe doing so will net save lives, the lever is likely to be pulled far more often than it should be, because the person with the most extreme belief will conclude that doing so is worth it. In the real world, it's typically the case that "action" is much more difficult to reverse than "inaction".
There are other thought experiments that elucidate this more clearly, like a soldier deciding whether now is the right time to fire the first shot to start a battle.
People's moral intuitions have heuristics that attempt to deal with this ("bystander effect") although they definitely can be poorly-calibrated in the real world, and are almost always badly calibrated in artificial thought experiments because that's not the environment they were designed for.
Personally I agree with you and it seems obvious to me to pull the lever. Here is my take on why there are people that believe it’s obviously the other way around:
There is a fundamental branching point of ethical systems between consequentialism (eg utilitarianism, which says the outcome is what matters) and deontology (which says basically that some set of rules exist, and ethical behavior equates to following those rules, no matter the consequence).
If you are a deontologist, “the ends don’t justify the means” and it’s rarely ok to just kill someone to save someone else. If you are a consequentialist then the choice to live in the better world is obvious.
Western morality, being heavily influenced by Judeo-Christian systems with Ten Commandments and books of God’s Rules, has a lot of deontological assumptions baked in (as does the legal code). So even with time to ponder the problem, “thou shalt not kill” will weigh heavy on many.
It seems overly simple to me to reduce it to "more is better". What if the five people are 100 year old dementia patients moaning in agony and the one person is an infant? Do you still pull the lever because "more people alive is better"? What if the five people are infants and the one person is an elderly convicted murderer, does that change how easy it is to pull the lever? In "more is better" neither shouldn't change your view, but they feel different.
> "(eg utilitarianism, which says the outcome is what matters)"
Speaking of the outcome - before you are involved, the person who tied six people to the tracks is attempting murder; if society finds the person it will punish them. After you pull the lever, should society try you for murder? For aiding and abetting a crime? Celebrate your rescue? A society where any individual can kill any other individual, if they think it is for the greater good, feels like it would be unable to hold together. The outcome of more people being alive but the destruction of society seems like it could be bad enough to outweigh the loss of five people.
It’s a thought experiment for studying ethics. You can modify all of the variables as you choose, but in general you want to pick the simplest form that suffices to demonstrate the point.
In this case making the people different would make the experiment needlessly complex. The problem as-stated (assuming identical individuals) already illustrates the consequentialist/deontologist conflict.
I think you are perhaps engaging on a different level than intended; “what are the legal consequences of this action” is downstream of the problem. In other words, we should make our legal system conform to our ethical system, not take the legal system as some fact that must guide our ethical principles.
This is not intended as some legal case study to test law students’ understanding of culpability in homicide. (Although that might well be an interesting discussion in its own context).
> It seems overly simple to me to reduce it to "more is better".
No consequentialist would claim this, and to be clear that’s not what I claimed either.
You said "If you are a deontologist, “the ends don’t justify the means” and it’s rarely ok to just kill someone to save someone else. If you are a consequentialist then the choice to live in the better world is obvious." and I took that to mean that killing someone to save five people was what you consider the consequentialist 'obvious choice'. From there you now clarify that the people are all the same so all we have to go on is quantity of living people, it seems. If "more people alive" is not what you mean by "the better world", then what do you mean by it?
You said “reducing it to more is better”, which is itself an oversimplification. That is not the principle at work here.
There are various utility functions that utilitarians might choose, for example hedonic (Mills) or eudaimonic. And various other assumptions you must make, such as “is the average life net-positive in utility or net-negative?”. Then you put your values into your utility function and assess the possible worlds and their likelihood of occurring. (For simplicity I’m leaving out the utility of having rules as heuristics, but worth mentioning as two-level utilitarianism seems appealing to me).
All else being equal, as in this thought experiment, saving more lives is better than saving fewer in my and most utilitarians’ opinion. But “more lives is better” is not the underlying principle at work in making the evaluation/decision. It’s merely the result of the calculation. One can easily construct thought experiments where more lives in existence would reduce utility and not increase it, in which case utilitarians would advocate for not saving those lives. For example if we modify the trolley problem to say pulling the lever will also cause the five survivors to be imprisoned and tortured for the rest of their lives.
(Look up “the repugnant conclusion” if you want to see a thought experiment where common intuitive morality breaks down under most systems).
There are metasocial reasons for this that are probably best illustrated by one of the classic variants on the trolley problem. Imagine you're a surgeon in a hospital. You have a healthy patient who is under for knee surgery or something. At the same time, five people come into the trauma ward from a trolley accident down the street, all of whom will die without an organ transplant. All of them are compatible with your patient.
What should you do? If you're going to take the view that failing to save a person you could have saved is morally equivalent to killing, then clearly you should kill your one patient to save the other five.
But think of the longer-scale effect this would have. Would anybody ever go to a hospital and get elective surgery knowing they might be killed to harvest their organs? A more general form of trolley problem doesn't necessarily present that exact dilemma with such clear consequences, but at any scale, think of the consequences of being concerned with what happens because of your inaction. Do you donate blood once a week or whatever the max frequency is at which your body can regenerate the red cells? Do you still have both kidneys? Do you ever spend money on anything except bare minimum shelter, enough grain to stay alive, and every other cent going to the AMF or whatever the maximum QALYs saved/dollar donated charity is? How many people have died in your time on Earth that could have lived if you'd done something different? If we all seriously made that a primary concern in our daily decision-making, virtually all productive action would be paralyzed. Everybody would be trying to become a hedge fund manager living like a pauper and giving all their money to the AMF, but the AMF would no longer be able to do anything, because everyone would be a hedge fund manager and there would be no one left to manufacture mosquito nets.
I guess because there's more wiggle-room with a non-action. If you don't pull a lever, you could argue there wasn't time to pull the lever, or that you were frozen with fear or whatever.
I think non-actions are judged less harshly than actions, so people are more inhibited in making them..
Clearly not. The vast majority of people responding to this problem usually want to pull the lever, murdering an innocent who would otherwise have lived through the day - an utilitarian perspective that holds that by default it's best to maximize the amount of lives saved. It's difficult for those of us that would argue that every life is valuable, and that, not being god, the bystander does not have the right to make this call. The bystander did not place the runaway trolley there, nor are they responsible for the people who are tied to the tracks.
I would ask the person who is (in most of these scenarios) on the diverted tracks what they want me to do. They have the right to make this decision, since they are masters of their own life.
I’ve always presumed you don’t have time to ask those sorts of questions in these problems. You have to decide that you’d let 5 people die so your action doesn’t kill one, or kill the one not knowing how they feel about dying to save five.
What I find…not surprising I guess, but sad is that while a large percent of people would pull the lever only a small percent of people would pull the lever if they were the one on the other track. People not being at least as likely to pull the lever when they are at stake breaks all basic moral principles.
I did notice that. I'd pull the lever if I was the one on the tracks, since in that case I am not robbing someone else of their life through my decision - my life is my own to sacrifice. At that point it's best to save five.
Then again, a sizeable minority wouldn't sacrifice their life savings for lives either, which means this portion of the respondents does not think the lives of strangers have value at all, or at least that they are not in any case responsible for lives other than their own. Which is interesting!
Right now, non-hypothetically, would you be willing to donate your internal organs to those who will die without them, even if it meant you will not survive yourself?
There's more perceived wiggle-room with rationalizations, not actual wiggle-room.
The only moment in the scenario that matters is when you've made your choice and as others have said: it's binary. You pull the lever or you don't. The moral act is in making the choice, not what comes after. In that moment of choice you've expressed a hierarchy of your values.
Now, you might value most highly your own mental well-being, and making the most of that by rationalizing to yourself that you didn't actually make the choice that you just made. You might value your social standing or legal disposition the highest and make the choice accordingly. etc.
Of course, the scenario itself is a bit silly and not the kind of everyday living guidance that one will most likely have thought deeply about in anything than abstract moralistic terms. It's pretty rare to face that sort of scenario with that kind of consequence.
In real life scenarios there is a built in uncertainty with doing an action.
Imagine a scenario where you redirect the trolley to kill someone but the people you wanted to save would have survived anyway.
You could, but uncertainty always exists in the real world, so if it doesn't exist in the trolley problem then your choice in the trolley problem doesn't map to the real world and is not useful.
For one thing, in the real world if the trolley is close and moving fast then you have little time to think and observe and high uncertainty, but if the trolley is distant and slow then you have lots of time to try calling other bystanders, untie or rescue people from the track instead. So the more your choice is constrained down to just moving the lever or not, the higher uncertainty and less clear the situation is.
And in the real world it's more likely that a group of young people would tie some shop mannekins to a track for a laugh, or a film studio would tie props to a track, than that a moustache-twirling villain would tie some real people to a track. There is uncertainty in simply believing what you see; seeing five people tied to train tracks and about to die and being convinced they are real people, would have me thinking I must be dreaming.
Not my circus, not my monkeys. I don't think I can be held morally responsible for inaction in any circumstance. We didn't start the fire etc.
I answered "no pull" to every one except the one where the express goal was pranking the trolley driver (and no implied harm from pulling). This is apparently an unpopular opinion, but the only one I can reconcile with my own concept of responsibility.
I used to think like you until I learned about how ethical frameworks are different when you are being extorted. This trolley problem is a class of extortion because your choices are very limited and out of your control.
For example, it wouldn’t be wrong if someone forced you to steal a package of bubblegum or else they would kill your family and you decided to steal the bubblegum instead of inaction. In this case, it’s better to think of it as the act of saving your family and the extortionist caused the gum to be stolen.
Every day people go through this type of extortion-limited choice when, for example, a couple experiences an ectopic pregnancy where inaction would result in the death of the mother. You aren’t primarily choosing to kill your child, you are choosing to save your wife.
Your point is taken, but I want to point out that an ectopic pregnancy will never become a child (fetal death is guaranteed) and almost always fatal to the mother if not removed.
There have been rare, well-publicized cases where an ectopic pregnancy has been brought to term, but the 1/1000000 chance or whatever it is means it’s often not worth trying. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually humanity has the tech to save these with artificial means.
Cool, now tell this to conservative politicians and evangelicals that still consider the removal of an ectopic pregnancy to be abortion and morally wrong.
It’s true it’s context dependent. E.g. the mother may only have 1 day of life remaining for other reasons, in which case saving the child might be preferred.
To pick an extreme but well-known thought experiment. You are walking past a pond, and see a child drowning in it. You glance around and there is nobody else nearby. You could easily jump in and save the child. It will certainly die if you do not.
If you choose to do nothing and ignore the drowning child, are you really not morally responsible in any way for the child's death?
If you are morally responsible for the child's death, you are morally responsible for basically every evil in the world right now, since you didn't do everything in your power to prevent all of them.
You may say that that is the case, but if you're responsible for everything, you may as well be responsible for nothing.
> If you are morally responsible for the child's death, you are morally responsible for basically every evil in the world right now
No, you are morally responsible for every evil happening right in front of you that you could immediately change with little risk to yourself.
For instance if you can't swim and the child is in the middle of the pond, I'd argue you aren't responsible because the risk is too great to yourself.
In fact due to the danger of drowning people pulling you under, I'd argue unless the child is in water shallow enough for you to stand in it's not your moral responsibility to save them.
Though in the situation, I'd probably feel compelled to save them anyway.
> No, you are morally responsible for every evil happening right in front of you that you could immediately change with little risk to yourself.
The problem with this is that you snuck a quantitative difference there and made it sound qualitative. How much risk is "little risk"? What if you could spend all your money and save N people from starvation? There's no risk to you, so are you responsible for their deaths if you don't do it?
What if the child is a bit less likely to pull you under? What if even less than that? Where do you draw the line?
You're never completely free of responsibility, there are just varying degrees.
I disagree. There are practical limits to what we are responsible for. And there are current obligations and responsibilities we have for ourselves. Just because we know of something does not make us responsible for it. Proximity and risk also play a role.
I am obligated to my family and to myself. To provide for them as an example. But I would also be able to fly across the world and feed a starving child, in theory. But my obligation to my own family, and myself outweighs that. There would also be risks to the journey. Consequences with those actions as well.
Is this true? I think most of us would say proximity to a situation (and ability to handle it) changes our moral Imperetive. That’s what makes the Trolley problem so… imperfect? It’s hard to say what it extrapolates to every day life, since it’s a situation that would probably never happen.
If you say that proximity does not imply morality, where are you drawing the line? Would family friends and job duties encompass it? Certainly you can’t say that helping your child implies you are responsible for the whole world.
> If you are morally responsible for the child's death, you are morally responsible for basically every evil in the world right now, since you didn't do everything in your power to prevent all of them.
That is my personal take on it. We are all living in sin, in reality we are all full of shit and have only a veneer of ethics.
Interesting! Do you disagree with the legal traditions that penalize doctors for failure to render aid, even when not at work? Or perhaps that isvlike saying you are actually the (or at least a) trolley switch operator, you just aren't in duty, in which case maybe your position obligates action when it is warranted?
Precisely. I am generally against compelled action of any kind, as it violates mutual consent, a fundamental principle I hold.
A trolley switch operator has explicitly opted in to the responsibility, and consents to same. A bystander has not.
This is why the famous internet video of the trolley problem acted out in the real world was required to offer post-experiment psychological counseling to the test subjects. They had not consented to being placed in a position of responsibility for life safety.
> compelled action of any kind, as it violates mutual consent.
So many of these questions are artificial, and it’s interesting how the legal system gets involved, but to a certain extent I think these questions are meant to describe a persons moral position outside of societies judgement of them. In many of these situations, it’s life and randomness that is putting these people into those situation, not producers of internet videos. I guess if you don’t feel bad your not morally responsible, but if someone was in distress I would feel _compelled_ to act.
I assume by compelled you mean by human forces but I can’t help but compare it to the notion that chance and ‘destiny’ often violate our consent, and compell us to action.
Is it conceivable for you to be placed in a situation where there is no "privileged default"? In other words, a situation where you must choose between two options and there is no option that you can somehow point to as the "no, I refuse to choose" option?
The main difference between action and inaction is that with inaction it's much less likely the other monkeys will conclude you are dangerous and should be killed (because they're not any worse off by your inaction, almost by definition).
> Legally perhaps, but morally, I've never gotten why so many people think that the physical act of pulling or not pulling makes so much difference.
As Henry David Thoreau said:
It is not man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.
It's not your duty to fix the world. It's not even your duty to optimize the outcomes of the world as best as you could. The world is not in your hands. There was one trolly problem on this page where everything was blurred, but in the real world you don't remotely get clean problem statements at all, let alone clean outcomes. Not only are the outcomes profoundly unknowable, but the world is full of other people pulling their own levers!
To illustrate it, maybe he should have added one trolley problem where you were given the classic #1 description, but regardless of what you picked, the opposite happened. Or you got a random pick from one of the other people on the site. Or one where a third, entirely unexpected thing happened.
> It is not man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.
Classic appeal to authority. The above quotation contains grand declarations with no supporting logic or evidence. Just because Henry David Thoreau said it doesn't make it true.
> in the real world you don't remotely get clean problem statements at all, let alone clean outcomes. Not only are the outcomes profoundly unknowable, but the world is full of other people pulling their own levers!
The outcomes of inaction are equally as "profoundly unknowable" as the outcomes of taking action. From an "unintended consequences" perspective, it's a wash. So we might as well focus on the first order known consequences, which are pretty clear.
If we're going down the road of appealing to authority, I'm partial to "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing"
I explained at length why I agree with the Thoreau quote.
> The outcomes of inaction are equally as "profoundly unknowable" as the outcomes of taking action.
Absolutely.
> From an "unintended consequences" perspective, it's a wash.
Indeed. That's exactly what I said.
> So we might as well focus on the first order known consequences
Sure. Or we might not. Either is permissible because...
> which are pretty clear.
That's where you've been lied to. And the site author absolutely should have added an example where the description didn't match up with what happened at all.
The trolley problem is specifically about a situation that is ongoing regardless of your presence.
You're not running the train, nor own the railway, you didn't bind the people on the rails. You just happen to be there, and can perhaps improve the outcome.
In case the worst outcome happens because of your inaction, the biggest moral fault lies on those who created the situation in the first place.
(If you're looking at a bank robbery and don't push the alarm button, you have some moral responsibility, but the robbers are the villains.)
When you take action, you become part of the situation and take full responsibility of the outcome.
So, no, I don't think the choice are morally symetrical. Taking action is morally a high risk high return strategy, while inaction is low risk mild returns (best case is you did nothing and that was the right choice, so you could have been absent, it wouldn't have made a difference)
>> if it does more harm than good, you are guilty of not choosing action.
True. Yet some large subset of people seem to highly value plausible deniability in their own head - they fear more having to think about the one person they kill by pulling the lever vs. just feeling like they can ignore the 5 dead because they did nothing, expecting that they can say that they had nothing to do with it.
Also seems like they can't recognize the inherent limitations of the situation -someone's already dead,you're just trying to make a least-worst choice,and I've seen many who fail to recognize such situations and just think that a good option must be available when it isn't, and that delusion ends up causing the worst outcome.
Morally is different but it's also the gist of the problem. Inaction makes you exempt because you didn't took part.
People choose inaction all the time. When we see a bully abusing a colleague... A homeless person on the street... A car aciddent. This is the metaphor.
Morality is an evolutionary adaptation to improve group cohesion. It is much easier to attribute blame/praise to active behaviors rather than passive ones, since it's plausible the passive person isn't there's a problem in the first place.
That said, if you do actually care about consistency and the consequences, and don't care about what others think of you, then active/passive makes no difference.
What does having enough time actually mean? I am almost certain that I would freeze if I encountered such a situation in real life, or panic and be unable to figure out how to flip the switch ...
... which brings up the real problem with these scenarios. In real life, the person at the switch would be trained. While that training is unlikely to include hypothetical scenarios created by philosophers, they would be expected to assess the safety of the act. This would put them into a position where the physical act of pulling or not pulling the switch would not, as you say, make much of a difference. They would have to answer for their actions down the line, even if their only answer was that it put them into an ethical conundum where they had insufficient information to assess the value of that one life verses five. A court may, or may not, accept that argument. It could be based upon the numbers (e.g. five lives are more valuable than one). It could be based upon the psychological impact of the decision upon the switch operator (e.g. a calculated sacrifice of one life may be frowned upon relative to an emotionally crippling indecision that led to the loss of five lives).
In turn, that brings up another issue with these artificial scenarios: they virtually always include follow-ups that are intended to raise doubt in decisions made. What if that one person was a child with their entire life ahead of them, and the five lives elderly people who have less to look forward to? What if that five included a "Hitler" plus four regular people, and the one was a "Gandhi" (i.e. the one slaughtered many orders of magnitude more people, and the one was revered for their regard of life)? Those are the sorts of things that are usually raised to justify indecision, even though they are highly unlikely.
I'm not convinced that's wrong, it's just that we need to accept we can't always act 100% in the best way for humanity. Rather than try to convince ourselves that our actions are somehow moral I think we need to accept we act out of selfishness sometimes and deal with that internally, otherwise we end up crafting philosophies saying that the hoarding of massive wealth is somehow moral just to try and stop the cognitive dissonance.
+1, and "Implied legal (and moral) liabilities" is just one of the issues if you're viewing the Trolley Problem as a real-world, real-consequences situation. (Vs. something from the land of make-believe, which is cool / interesting / empowering to sit around & talk about.)
For starters, real-world railroad (RR) switches are more complex than what you would understand from model RR sets, cartoons, old movies, and philosophy books. They are not binary, are often less than well-maintained, and may required upper-body strength that you don't have to successfully throw. The trolley may be going too fast for the track that you divert it onto, resulting in a derailment that kills everybody you were looking at - plus some more inside the trolley. Plus extra bystanders. Your well-intentioned passerby's understanding of which way the switch is actually pointing may be wrong. RR history has some famous (& deadly) accidents where an experienced RR employee misunderstood the situation, and threw a switch the wrong way.
Real-world, I certainly would not be touching the switch.
That's interesting. I didn't consider any legal liabilities at all, and would easily break the law in order to sacrifice one person in trade for five people. I also didn't consider doing "nothing", not pulling the lever was also an act, and I didn't "see" any options doing nothing.
Fun to see how differently people approach these ones :)
Actual law strongly discerns between action and inaction. For example the Polish penal code says you can only be criminally liable for a result of inaction only if you had a specific legal obligation to prevent it.
Would you kill your child to save two politicians you hate the most, one annoying youtuber, a neighbour who goes on your nerves for ages and two complete strangers?
> [I] would easily break the law in order to sacrifice one person in trade for five people.
This is a quite disturbing statement. So many psychopathic examples; If you were a doctor would you randomly kill healthy people with compatible organs to multiple patients? Or a researcher inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people to save millions later...
In fact we could simplify your statement further; The ends always justify the means., and so endorsing all terrorism and war, even genocide; whenever the ends is enough peace to make a net positive.
> If you were a doctor would you randomly kill healthy people
No.
> researcher inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people to save millions later
If it was guaranteed to save millions later, I'd think about it, if we remove the "gruesome" and "healthy people" parts. But "inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people" for the mere possibility of saving millions later? No.
It all depends on the context obvious, as life is never between two binary choices or black VS white.
I don't think it's so disturbing to wanting to help a bigger part. I (and many others) already do this constantly by protesting and striking. Strikes generally impacts people who don't actually have anything to do with what you're striking against (example: when doctors strike, it hurts sick people), but in order for you and your colleagues to make a wage you can actually survive on, it does sometimes justify the means.
> If you were a doctor would you randomly kill healthy people with compatible organs to multiple patients?
> > No.
Why not? It's clearly a different approach than your original to turn the lever to kill a person in order to save 5 other people. So what changed?
> researcher inflicting gruesome deaths to thousands of innocent healthy people to save millions later
> > If it was guaranteed to save millions later, I'd think about it, if we remove the "gruesome" and "healthy people" parts.
So you're willing to turn the lever to save 5 people because it's seemingly obvious those 5 people will therefore be saved (reasonable to me) and you see no problem killing 1 person, to reference your previous post, not only you would do that, you would easily break the law to do that! However, when it comes to killing thousands, in order to save millions, so the "net gain" is now not 4 but millions, and it's no longer the same order of magnitude, but it's a difference of 3 orders of magnitude, even if we remove the "gruesome" and "healthy people" parts, you will only "think about it"???? :D
> It all depends on the context
It seems to me you don't care about the context when it comes to killing one person, but once the stakes are higher and involve thousands, you hesitate. So I too find it disturbing, not just that you don't want to treat people individually and just consider the outcome of the trolley dilemma as +4 gain, rather than killing to save, but also the automatic disregard to individual rights creates a portrait of a person very dangerous to the society.
What about the standard but missing question. If there is no lever but someone you can push into the tracks to divert the trolley, would you? If there is no one to push, would you jump in the tracks yourself?
This is not the opposite here. The opposite is to not save lives of some people at the expense of taking life of another, i.e. the ends do not justify the means. It is a moral dilemma and whether you break or not break a law does not matter nor should it exclusively influence a decision here (I mean to do harm, just because you abide orders - that's immoral).
I was responding to someone who was generalizing, its not in any way pedantic to put a generalization to the test.
I'm also quite surprised that someone could imply overthinking as a negative on HN. Gaining a deeper understanding of something, even modern philosophy, is intellectually useful. You should not under-think things, it does you a disservice to skip over the flaws and paradoxes in the world.
I overthink a lot, I’m not against the concept. But I do need people to counterbalance that impulse of mine sometimes. So I’m just representing that side here.
Also, I think there’s a tendency in philosophy to end up in places you just don’t need to go. Zeno says it’s impossible to walk to a destination; Diogenes counters by walking to a destination.
Sometimes a trolley problem is just a trolley problem, not a side effect from some universal theory of everything.
A law that says “don’t pull this lever” or whatever is different than “don’t kill a healthy person and harvest his organs”.
>In fact we could simplify your statement further; The ends always justify the means., and so endorsing all terrorism and war, even genocide; whenever the ends is enough peace to make a net positive
On the other hand, you seem to be arguing that the means justify the end. So you'd let all the terrorism and war, even genocide, go ahead if it took not having to stain your hands to stop it
On the killing 1 person to save 5 lives example, it seems like your answer is "I wouldn't do it", which for the people actually being killed is equivalent to killing 5 people to save 1 person ( but what really matters is that you weren't the one personally killing the 5 people )
It can help to understand why some people think inaction is an action by abstracting the problem such that you can model it in a computer using standard decision problem algorithms. When you do that you have an initial state and you have two edges and they lead to terminal outcome nodes. The choice of which edge to take is an action. This isn't (usually) controversial. People generally call the do nothing action an action in these circumstances: game theory extensive form will call it that, as will Q learning, and often you'll see the same framing even in things like the expecti minimax algorithm though sometimes they'll prefer to call it a move.
In my estimation, inaction only seems to not be an action, because people are afraid of the idea that they are causally connected with outcomes in which things are killed - they want to avoid tit for tat game theoretic follow on concerns that aren't part of the game definition but might be implied by it. I think for myself, I discount this concern, because I assume policies of mercy are preferred to policies of judgement - the world is so complex and hard and some err isn't just reasonable, but inevitable. Not allowing for mercy in response to harm from decisions seems more likely to trap in tit for tat. So intent ends up mattering to me much more than the outcome when I consider the follow-on games that are implied.
I can either pull the lever or I can not pull the lever. Choosing to not pulling the lever when I know I can save others, would be me making the choice to not saving others.
> Implied legal (and moral) liabilities made a difference in my choices.
This is always my problem with the trolley problem. Are we supposed to take second order effects into account?
For example, if I destroy the trolley that is killing 5 people over 30 years with CO2, does another trolley get built to replace it?
Or ‘kill 5 people now or send the trolley into the future 100 years and kill 5 people then’. Is it 100% guaranteed the trolley kills them then? Or can I assume there is a tiny chance they figure out time travel and can make preparations?
Or the ‘stuck on an eternal loop’. Does this mean true eternity and are the people in the trolley immortal? Or just for 70 years?
I think the trolley problem is not about simply getting the right answer. The problem is about figuring correct answers for various circumstances, defining those circumstances, discussing them and improving one's and others understanding of morality.
Ideally, the problem would require two possible actions, and not allow inaction. Two possible avenues for such a formulation are
1) The lever is in an intermediate state, that will cause the trolley to set into effect some global catastrophe, and therefore must be pulled in one of two directions. This may be a rather unconvincing scenario.
2) Have two trollies, each running down their own track, and the operator has a choice which of two levers---only one of which can be reached in time---to pull to detour a trolley to a harmless side track.
I had to put the "legal repercussions" concept aside for this; because otherwise I'd never take an action that would involve someone being killed. No matter what the "if I did nothing" option was, you'd be in for a world of hurt in the courts if you took action that wound up killing someone; even if it was them or 1,000 other people dying. Someone would take you to court.
I take exception to the idea that the legal choice implies it being the moral one. Legality seems to me to be more of the bare minimum expectations and actively avoiding doing the wrong thing (don't kill people) rather than doing the right thing.
If legality is supposed to be based on morals (not sure how many people agree with this?) then wouldn't basing morals on the law be a circular reference?
It's a binary decision with two outcomes, in my personal view it is irrelevant which of the outcomes is caused by physical action and which by inaction (at least, supposing that you have enough time to think about what to do - obviously, if you have to react in a split second, it's understandable to be biased towards inaction because you may need more time to make the right decision, but that's not the point of these problems in the way they are posed).
If you have enough time to think what to do, inaction is a conscious choice and if it does more harm than good, you are guilty of not choosing action.