For this week’s post, I want to delve into a set of thought experiments that offer compelling lenses through which to view one of the most essential fields in the entire discipline of philosophy: ethics. For as long as people have interacted with one another, their behavior has implicated questions of right and wrong. These questions have formed the basis of the vast majority of legal codes, social norms, and religions.
The first thought experiment that I want to explore is called the trolley problem. There are many versions of the trolley problem that have been used to explore different dimensions of ethics, but I will explain the original as it was proposed by Philippa Foot in 1967. In Foot’s though experiment, there is a runaway trolley careening down a track towards a junction. You are placed near the junction holding a lever. If you do not pull the lever, the trolley will remain on the current track and hit five workmen working on that section of the track. If you do pull the lever, the trolley will be diverted to another section of track on which there is only one workman. It is assumed that all the people working on whichever portion of the track the reader chooses (either 5 workmen or 1 workman) will be killed. For reference, there is a sketch below that shows this visually (although in the sketch the people are tied to the track).
The question Foot poses is whether the reader should pull the lever and divert the train toward the track with fewer people. Essentially, it is a question of whether human lives are fundamentally interchangeable (and therefore 5 is greater than 1) or each should be treated as an individual moral agent deserving the respect of others. Some philosophers have attempted to tease out a middle ground; usually by changing the numbers on each side, assigning specific attributes to the people involved (for example, the one person is your daughter or the President of the United States, or the five people are prisoners or terrorists), or changing the role the individual plays (pushing a man onto the tracks to stop the trolley rather than pulling a lever). At its core, the question is about determining the worth of people and deciding if it is morally acceptable to make decisions about how to act based on one’s perception of a person’s worth.
Since most people tend to read Foot’s experiment and instinctively accept that the person should divert the trolley to kill the individual person, one philosopher offered a particularly powerful counter-experiment that often elicits the opposite response. In this experiment, proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson in a 1985 paper, you are a brilliant surgeon with five patients of the same blood type in need of five different vital organs. This surgeon also has a sixth patient who is perfectly healthy but who’s organs are compatible with the other five patients. Thompson asks whether the surgeon would be morally justified in taking the five vital organs from the healthy person in order to save the five other people who need the organs.
Like with the first experiment, this one lends itself to a number of variations. A few notable ones include different numbers of patients in need of organs, the possibility that some of the organ transplants will not be successful, and assigning roles the the characters in play (the five people are children or the one person is the president, etc.) Because there are a number of ethical issues at play in each of these variations and this post is already fairly long, I will use the next two weeks’ posts to explore these issues in great detail.
Thanks Kyle! That is a great experiment (and that is the derivative I was referring to with the “pushing a man onto the tracks” thing, I’m glad you were interested enough to go looking for it!) The distinction you drew at the end is very astute, and I will make sure I discuss it in Part 2. I intend to devote a considerable portion of that post to the distinction you frame as an “either or” vs. “trade off” situation. Enjoy your break!
Very nice post Bernicker, I have been missing you in class as of late and I hope that you are having a good time at model UN. To spring-board off of this experiment, I wanted to pose a similar question to you, about the same general topic, which I will admit is mostly ripped straight from wikipedia. Similar to the train incident, where, inevitably, at least one person will die, imagine that there is a circular track that has the five people laying on it. There is a switch that changes the course of the train that would divert the train away from the path of the five, but this path would eventually loop back to the original track and kill the five anyway. However, there is a fat man who is lying down on the side track, and if he is hit, his mass will stop the train and prevent it from eventually killing the five people. Rather than an either or, this problem presents a case similar to the surgeon where it is a trade off, where instead of being able to being frustrated with the pointless slaughter, it changes the general theme to trading a life for five.
Thought that it was an interesting perspective to test in response to this problem.
Mitch I’m glad you reacted that way, that’s how most people intuitively feel but, as you noted, its more a feeling than something supported by argument. The surgeon being more directly responsible is one way of looking at it, but in either case one person would be safe without intervention, five people would die, and the actor can save the five by allowing one who would be fine to survive. When I analyze these next week I will go into more detail about this and try to explain a few of the different viewpoints.
I think thought experiments like this allow for interesting perspective’s into how humans feel about the worth of the lives of either. As far as I’m concerned, theoretically, 5 lives would be worth saving at the cost of one; but, of course, there are many real life things that would complicate a situation such as this, like who the people are. The surgeon situation, also, for some reason, just feels different – I think it’s because it feels that the surgeon is more directly killing the one person than in the train track situation. In both cases, either one person will die or five will (assuming the transplants will all work) but it just feels as though the surgeon is more at fault for killing.