(This is the third and final installment of my series of posts comparing two ethics thought experiments. If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 and Part 2.)
In these thought experiments we don’t know anything about the victims, which forces us to consider whether the victims’ identities matter. Ethical subjectivists would say that it is impossible to make a judgment in these cases without additional information, such as identities or identifying information, but this has a significant implication: if the ethical decision changes based on the victims’ identities, then we are accepting that some individuals’ lives are more valuable than others.
This is of course not a completely invalid assumption. While equality seems like a positive virtue, there are a lot of senses in which it is negative. First, to say simply that two people are “equal” is to accept that they are, morally, interchangeable. If what you mean is that they are equal in certain respects, such as entitlement to respect or inherent dignity, then they are interchangeable in questions concerning these aspects (ostensibly like our trolley problem and surgeon experiment). In summary, if people are truly equal (either in all respects or only in those respects that relate to human dignity), then you should save five people at the cost of one life (whether through surgery or pulling the trolley lever). I do not want to devote any more time to the drawbacks of equality here, but Henry Frankfurt’s On Inequality offers an interesting perspective on the subject.
Whether we accept the subjectivist critique or not, it is the same in either experiment: If we need identities for one, then we need identities for the other. If the potential victims are the same in each, my argument from this post is unchanged. If the victims are different, then the cases (as per the argument from last week) are reversible; if its ethical to sacrifice a given person to save one set of 5 victims by pulling the lever, it would be ethical to make the exchange between these same people via surgery.
In conclusion the fundamental value at stake is whether or not people are essentially equal in the respects that determine the value of individuals’ lives and the respect they ought to be afforded by others. If you believe this to be true, then it is fair to kill the one person, but you have to make this decision in every case. If you do not believe that this is true, then it is ok to decide whether or not to make the trade-off based on the circumstances and identities (though you would still have to make the same decision in either thought experiment).
As a final thought, people often present a version of this experiment in which the one person is your son/daughter. In this case, the outcome is the same to neutral observer (who is not the parent of the person) as in the original experiment. As a result, those who embrace consequentialism/utilitarianism cannot give preferential treatment to their child. To those who believe in virtue ethics or duty ethics, saving the child can be considered either the virtue of loyalty/friendship or the duty of a parent to protect his/her child. If you are inclined towards assuming that saving five lives is worth killing one person in the trolley problem simply because of the numbers, bear in mind that the extension of this logic requires making the same trade-off both in the surgery case and if you have an emotional attachment to the one person.