The Problem With the Trolley Problem

You've probably heard of the trolley problem, especially if you're at all interested in philosophy or ethics. Lately, it's been a subject of discussion when discussing autonomous cars and was referenced explicitly in the show The Good Place. Some people think it's a fun moral thought experiment to discuss in a group; others feel it's a good ethical workout to prepare for real-world ethical dilemmas.

But what if the trolley problem has a problem of its own? Well, before diving into the problem with the trolley problem, we've got one crucial thing to do: drive the trolley. The trolley problem goes like this: you're driving a trolley along a track when, all of a sudden, the brakes just stop working. If you stay on the track in front of you, you'll run over a group of five people standing on the track. But you have the option of pulling a switch and directing the trolley onto another track with just a single person standing on the track.

You have to choose between killing five people or one person. What is the morally correct thing to do? Do you flip the switch to save five people and kill one, or do you leave the switch alone, kill five, and leave one unharmed? The trolley problem is a widely used moral thought experiment, especially in beginner philosophy classes. The problem is often used to illustrate two branches of ethics: consequentialism and deontology.

Consequentialists focus on the consequences of an action, while deontologists emphasize a sense of moral duty. Utilitarianism is a prime example of consequentialism. Philosophers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham considered the moral value of an action based on the outcome and whether it contributed to the greater good. If you were to consider the trolley problem from the consequentialist perspective, you'd quickly pull that switch to take just one life instead of the group of five. When more people get to live, that benefits the greater good.

On the other hand, a manual's duty ethics challenges you to universalize a principle or maxim to see if it works regardless of circumstance. His classic example is lying. Can you imagine universalized lying as a maxim? If everyone lied all the time, you couldn't trust anything anyone said. Kant would suggest that lying is therefore immoral.

From Kant's duty perspective, the trolley problem is more challenging. Could you universalize your principle of killing someone to save others? Imagine one person had five kidneys that could save the lives of five people; however, the kidney owner would have to be killed against their will to attain the organs. Killing the kidney owner instinctually feels wrong compared to flipping the switch in the trolley problem. It doesn't seem like you could universalize this principle of killing one to save five others.

The trolley problem is an excellent way to learn about these two systems of ethics, but does the thought experiment actually help with moral decisions? Do any imagined circumstances help with real-world moral decisions? This isn't to say that thought experiments don't have their place—shaping perspectives is still beneficial, especially when we're trying to find out the importance of something. For example, consider this thought experiment: imagine a world without art—buildings without structure, no visual communication, no paintings to marvel at. Doesn't that feel sad?

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The doctrine of double effect was first introduced by the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, and he argued that killing someone trying to kill you is justified as long as you didn't intend to kill them. Trying to stop an assailant, accidentally killing them, isn't considered morally wrong according to the doctrine of double effect. The concept was later expanded to something like this: it's normally permissible if something bad happens as a side effect of pursuing a good end, even if you knew that a bad side effect was possible. It's still morally okay, provided it wasn't intended and any harm done was limited as possible.

In her paper, Philippa Foot used the doctrine of double effect to distinguish between actions that intentionally cause harm for the sake of a good end and actions that indirectly cause harm for the sake of a good end. She came up with a couple of thought experiments to demonstrate the difference; one of them was the trolley problem. The other was a situation where a judge intentionally caused harm to achieve a better outcome. In the latter example, the judge frames an innocent man, executing him to save five innocent lives.

She uses the doctrine of double effect to explain why the judge is wrong—because he intentionally caused harm for good. While in the case of the trolley, the driver indirectly causes harm by saving the five in favor of the one. The main difference is that the driver doesn't intend to kill, even though they foresee it happening. But the judge would kill the innocent man if given another opportunity because it's part of his plan.

One criticism of the doctrine of double effect is how close a regretful side effect is to a means. If harm is done as a means to an end, it's not considered permitted by the doctrine of double effect. The harm has to be a side effect of the action taken. The problem is that the line between the side effect and a means to an end is blurry. Think of the trolley problem: is flipping the switch to hit the one person a means to save the other five, or is the death of one person an unfortunate side effect? They're awfully similar.

Foot acknowledged that the doctrine of double effect might not survive criticism, so she used a duty-based approach to explain the possibility of harm. Further, she pointed to the difference between positive and negative duties to explain why we react the way we do to the trolley problem. To define negative duties as a moral obligation not to harm or injure others, and on the other hand, positive duties are an ethical obligation to help others in need. Positive duties can include anything from preventing someone from falling to death to giving a hungry family food.

According to Foot, negative duties are more important than positive duties. When faced with the choice between the two, the negative duties should take precedence. Let's take the sense of duty and apply it to the trolley problem. We end up choosing between a negative duty not to kill five versus a negative duty not to kill one. We shouldn't kill the five because it's a larger negative duty.

Suppose we apply positive and negative duties to the judge's example. In that case, framing and executing the one person is violating a negative duty, while protecting the five is a positive duty to help the people in need. Since the negative duty outweighs the positive, the judge's decision to frame a man can be justified as immoral. The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson found holes in Foot's duty explanation in her essays on the trolley problem.

She used a variation of the thought experiment where the driver faints, but a bystander can flip the switch to change the trolley's path. In this case, the bystander is violating a negative duty not to kill a person if they flip the switch. If they leave the switch alone, they're not violating a negative duty; they're just failing a positive duty to help. Letting the five die would be acceptable according to Foot's duty approach to ethics.

In her attempt to resolve the trolley problem, Thomson looked for similarities between the variations of the problem that were assumed to be moral and those examples that were assumed to be immoral. She found that in the cases we thought were wrong, the person killed had more of a claim to living than the others. In the judge's case, the framed man has a claim to live due to his innocence, but in the trolley problem, the single person has no special case for living over a group of five.

Thomson's exploration of the trolley problem made it very popular in philosophy circles. It quickly took off among psychologists, legal scholars, and even the general public. Ultimately, Philippa Foot didn't come to a firm conclusion about the trolley problem herself. She was uninterested in proving universal rules with moral thought experiments while still maintaining that there's something to get right in ethical considerations.

But rather than looking to universal rules or consequences, she looked to human nature and our sense of purpose. Foot was a big part of the resurgence of virtue ethics, drawing on Aristotle to suggest that right action is a matter of being virtuous and avoiding vice instead of finding universalizable rights and wrongs. Virtue ethics points to the problem with the trolley problem as a moral thought experiment. While it's fine to use it to learn about consequentialist and deontological ethics, thought experiments are at best an imperfect method for determining the right action in a real-life dilemma.

Every set of circumstances that create a real-life ethical dilemma will always differ widely from any possible thought experiment. Seeking conclusions made from a thought experiment might actually cause more harm than good. Could policy based on a thought experiment actually work in different societies or cultures? Or would the many differences lead to people misjudging a circumstance and causing harm?

Could these thought experiments provide principles that are specific enough to be useful? Anything resembling the trolley thought experiment in real life would be brimming with details that change our moral considerations. Imagine the lone person on the one track—it seems like they might be able to get off the track in time, or the trolley is going at such a speed that the group of five could potentially survive a collision.

It'd probably be better not to draw on a conclusion from a thought experiment when facing a real-life ethical dilemma. We could analyze the circumstances without trying to make it conform to the conclusions of our thought experiment. As implied by the trolley problem, we never have perfect knowledge of a situation. Only with an all-knowing perspective could we accurately judge the outcome to determine its moral value. Even trying to make duty-based judgments, we wouldn't have enough information at hand.

In recent debates about autonomous cars, the trolley problem has been brought up with new enthusiasm. Some people have even suggested solving the trolley problem before these cars can be unleashed on society. But imagine, for a moment, all the inputs being considered by an autonomous car at any given time—all the complexity being interpreted by the car's algorithms. Would there ever be a circumstance when the machine had to make a choice as evenly conceived as the trolley? Every inch the car drives would further change the variables as it tries to avoid catastrophe.

Anything resembling a clear choice between killing one over many would likely never occur. But then again, ethical dilemmas do happen—especially in healthcare—and we have choices to make. Without ethical deliberation, we're left at the mercy of our gut or what we like to call common sense. But common sense isn't free from societal prejudice or bias, and we humans often confuse our emotions for good rationale.

So we're left with these imperfect exercises to inform policy. But in moments of challenging dilemmas with our policies in hand, hopefully, we can let all the details of the moment speak to us. When thought experiments don't suffice, or as Philippa Foot did, we could encourage virtuous behavior and flourish like the acorns becoming trees, making good decisions the way plants direct themselves towards the sun.

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