Runaway Trolleys

I have used Snopes.com many times in the past and happened to be under the impression that it tends to be a generally reliable source of information.  Yet my judgment may have been a bit premature.  At the very least, I'm going to have to restrict the attribution of reliability to their debunking of urban legends through tracking down sources.  This is Snopes' primary mission, but they sometimes go well beyond it, as evidenced by the passage I found after a discussion of trolley car problems led to the story of a man who opted to sacrifice his son to save the lives of several hundred passengers on a train racing towards an open lift bridge:

Another version involves one child playing on one set of tracks while ten children play on another set the train is headed for and asks if it is right to throw the switch, resulting in one death instead of ten. In that form of the question, the children are not known to the switchman, which removes from the equation the emotional factor of choosing between beloved family members and strangers.

(If you're a philosophy student trying to ace an exam and can explain the reasons for your response, the "correct" answer is to leave the switch alone. By moving it you would be murdering those now about to die. If the switch is left in its original position, no murder will be committed even though deaths occur as a result of inaction. Those who believe in a higher power have a further philosophical reason for leaving the switch untouched; by changing the course of the train, they are usurping God's prerogative in deciding who is to live and who is to die.) - link

This unwarranted digression is due to Barbara Mikkelson, who had taken it upon herself to provide undergraduate philosophy students everywhere with the "correct answer" to a classic trolley car problem.  Now if my memory serves me, it is the general consensus among ethicists that the alleged distinction between killing and letting die met with a grisly death sometime in the early 70's after briefly exploding in the philosophical literature.  Whatever one thinks of that distinction, Mikkelson's analysis is suspicious.  If you aren't getting the flip-the-switch intuition here, just replace the ten men on track one with six point five billion.  Here it looks as if the good to be brought about by flipping the switch is much greater than the evil produced.  Consequentialist intuitions get off the ground best in cases like this where goods and evils are clearly incommensurate.   I don't think I've completely lost my ability to have commonsense intuitions.  Wouldn't almost everyone agree that saving nearly the entire world would be worth causing the death of one person?   (By the way, I'm  not taking sides.)

Matters get even more bizarre when Mikkelson invokes god and his "prerogative in deciding who is to live and who is to die".  I don't recall reading about runaway trolleys in any holy text.  Surely Mikkelson did not personally consult god about trolley cases?   And why isn't it a consequence of her position that we should never do anything to try to save anybody's life, since this would be tantamount to playing god?  All of the above remarks are cursory, but it's not my intent to provide a serious philosophical analysis of trolley problems on my blog.  I'm just wondering why Snopes, an otherwise relatively objective resource, is getting into the business of giving students answers to philosophical problems.

Suppose you've decided that you should flip the switch in one or both of the above cases.  Now let's have some fun.  Other trolley problems are more difficult.  What if the only way to prevent a runaway trolley from smashing into a lot of people was to push a nearby fat man onto the tracks (your build is too slight to jump yourself)?  Is this the same as flipping the switch?   For some minimal discussion of the fat man case, see Crooked Timber.  For related philosophical humor, go here.

Comments

[Tom]

Yeah, I wonder why she mentioned it, too. I'm tempted to send an email or something.

The distinction between killing and letting die is, I think, still somewhat alive, but it certainly doesn't deliver the result Mikkelson wants. I think ethicists today would say that by flipping the switch, (1) no one is being used merely as a means to an end, (2) the death of the one is foreseen but not intended, and (3) the one person is already closely involved with the "threat situation." These three facts all secure the result, I think, that coincides with the muggles' intuitions: it is morally permissible if not supererogatory if not obligatory to flip the switch.

It's strange that Mikkelson would endorse the answer that's generally rejected. She may mean by "correct" that she is led to that result, but she certainly should have clarified.

[Clayton]

Some form of the killing/letting die distinction is likely alive in some quarters, but find me the legal scholar that would call the flip of the switch a murder and I'll buy Mikkelson an ice cream.

[erin]

we are currently discussing these questions in my ethics class. my initial gut instinct is to leave the switch alone. at first i wasn't sure why this was but now that i've thought about it my reasoning is this;

if knowing the identity of the child you would be sacrificing (say it is your own) in any way could sway your decision, then it would be wrong to flip the switch. the only true difference between the value of the life a of a strangers child and that of your own is purely in your own mind. basically, if you wouldn't kill your own child, you have no business killing someone else's.

the other thing i think is important here is the notion that whereas the five children are already in harm's way, you personally did not place them there. if you choose to flip the switch, however, you are knowingly putting the lone child into harm's way and incurring some culpability in the process.