Morons on the tracks.
I’m catching up on reading my issues of Free Inquiry and I’m up to Volume 23 #1. Unfortunately, the article I just read, “How Reliable Are Our Moral Intuitions” (Peter Singer, p. 19) isn’t available online, but I’ll quote it as necessary. I’m not writing to promote it, but rather begin collecting my thoughts for a letter to the author/magazine/original researcher.
Singer presents the recent research of a Philosophy Ph.D. student, Joshua Greene, at Princeton University revolving around a set of dilemmas known as “trolley problems.” Now, maybe the author, the student, and probably plenty of other people who are much more educated are seeing something in these that I’m not, but I have a problem with them. First, here are the dilemmas:
In the standard trolley problem, you are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley with no one aboard is rolling down the track, heading for a group of five people. They will all be killed if the trolley continues on its present track. The only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley onto a side track, where it will kill only one person. When asked what they should do in these circumstances, most people say that the tolley should be diverted onto the side track, thus saving four lives.
In another version of the problem, the trolley, as before, is about to kill five people. This time, however, you are not standing near the track, but on a footbridge above the track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the imperiled people, but you realize that you are far too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you, however, is a very large stranger. The only way you can stop the trolley from killing five people is to push this large stranger off the footbridge, infront of the trolley. If you push the stranger off, he will be killed, but you will save the other five. When asked what they should do in these circumstances, most people say that it would be wrong to push the stranger off the bridge.
After measuring the emotional response in the brain using MRI’s, they’ve concluded that people are more resistant to pushing someone off a bridge to save lives because it’s more akin to up close and personal situations our species would have encounted during evolutional stages. Whereas throwing a switch is a choice we wouldn’t have been able to make until more recently in our evotutional history, so we haven’t developed a response to it as strong.
By this reasoning they are reasoning that the moral intuition doctors base their stand on voluntary euthanasia on may not be as trustworthy as we thought. A doctor who likens voluntary euthanasia to killing but at the same time is willing to remove life support to a terminally ill patient seems to have moral intuitions in line with those found in the trolley problems.
But my problem with the whole argument is the trolley problems themselves. I know these scenarios are designed specifically for debating these issues, I’m not supposed to read too much into them, blah blah, blah. I’ve been told that before when I wrote an essay for a final exam that attacked the logic of the question instead of answering the damn question. The problem is, I feel the test isn’t valid because it’s not really comparing the same situation.
In the first dilemma, you have to decided between two parties that are already in danger. Five people who chose the wrong track, and one person who didn’t. Both were stupid enough to walk on tracks that could be in use, but the lone person may have been smart enough to figure out which one the train would be travelling. Why kill the smart guy and save the stupid people just because there is more of them?? Even without that dimension to the problem, you still have to consider the other scenario it’s being compared to.
In the second dilemma, if you choose to push the stranger off the bridge to save those five people, then you’re killing someone who was (again) smart enough to not be in the path of the train to save five stupid people. In the first problem, if you remove the element of prior knowledge of which way the track is switched, then you have two parties who are equally in danger. However, in this second problem, you have to choose to sacrifice someone who is not in danger and is not yourself to save five people who took the risk. We don’t have to get into the size difference that would make it necessary for you to even consider the stranger standing next to you or whether or not you even push someone that massive soon enough. If you choose to sacrifice yourself to save people who put themselves at risk, then why didn’t you walk with them in the first place? If you think it’s right to sacrifice that unfortunately overweight person next to you, then I hope he/she puts a reversal on you.